How Ideally's Co-Founder Secured an E-2 to Launch in New York

We didn't have to do anything, which was the greatest part. My brain is full at the best of times.

Josh Nu'u-Steele

Co-founder & CRO @ Ideally

Overview

In 2023, Ideally was six people around a boardroom table with a simple pitch: let brands test early-stage products and creative overnight, and have the results waiting the next morning. Josh Nu'u-Steele was part of that founding team, and today he's Ideally's co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer.

The idea landed fast. Within its first year, Ideally raised more than NZ$6 million in a round led by Icehouse Ventures and signed brands and agencies including Asahi, Afterpay, Revlon, DDB and Ogilvy. Then a pattern started to show up in the data: more and more of Ideally's Australian customers were running their tests in the US.

The next market was obvious. Getting there was the hard part. Josh needed to be on the ground in New York, with a visa built for a founder taking his own company across the Pacific.

Challenge

Scaling two markets at once

Josh was laying the groundwork for Ideally's US launch while the business kept growing across Australia and New Zealand. There was no spare capacity for visa paperwork. “We don't have the capacity to try and think about the visa process and the documentation,” he says. Every hour spent on immigration admin was an hour away from customers.

Building the investment case

The E-2 Treaty Investor visa asks a lot of founders. Josh needed a full business plan for Ideally's US operation, plus evidence that real capital had been committed to it, which meant moving money into a US bank account. The plan, the funds and the paperwork all had to tell the same story.

Walking into the interview prepared

The E-2 process ends with a consular interview, and it's not a moment anyone wants to walk into blind. Josh wanted to know what would be asked, what to bring and what the officer would be looking for. For a founder used to preparing for every pitch, going in unprepared wasn't an option.

The landing loop

Approval isn't the finish line. Once you land, you need a Social Security number. To get one, you need an address. To get an address, you need a bank. “It's just a very convoluted way to get set up in a new market,” Josh says. Each step depends on the one before it.

Ideally partnered with Concord to manage the move, and Josh noticed the difference straight away. “From day one, we knew exactly what was happening,” he says.

Concord mapped out the full process up front: the business plan, the investment, the documents and the timeline for each one. Before the consular interview, the team walked Josh through what would come up, so nothing caught him off guard. “We knew what was going to be asked of us, what we needed to prepare for,” he says. “And the timelines were super clear.”

The bigger shift was who carried the load. Concord took on the documentation and the follow-up, while Josh kept his focus on selling and building the US business. The guidance didn't stop at the approval either. The team set out the steps for landing too, so the bank, the address and the Social Security number came in the right order instead of as a puzzle to solve on arrival.

“Having that taken away from us was such a big burden lifted. The communication was the main thing that made us feel really settled.”

With his E-2 approved, Josh moved to New York to lead Ideally's US expansion. Brands there can now test a product idea or a piece of creative overnight, with a co-founder on the ground to work with them.

The relationship didn't end with one visa. Ideally has since come back to Concord as an employer, bringing more of its team to the US on E-2 and E-3 visas. For one new hire, the process even shaped their first impression of Ideally: organized and polished, not the chaotic startup they might have expected.

For Josh, the biggest win was headspace. Scaling a company from Australia and New Zealand into the US takes everything a founding team has, and the visa no longer had to be part of that. “We always knew what we needed to be back for, what we needed to prepare for, and the actual timelines,” he says. “It was really easy.”