TELL US A LITTLE ABOUT YOURSELF AND HOW BAKEGENIE CAME ABOUT? I’ m a wife and mum of three, living in regional Queensland. Before kids, I had a corporate career in business management and spent a few years in Hong Kong. I moved from one of the biggest cities in the world, surrounded by incredible food, to a small country town, where access to those things disappeared. So I learnt how to bake and cook. Cake decorating started as a creative outlet around seven years ago and eventually became my business, Annabel Bakes, whilst raising children. I love how a baking business can give you real flexibility, you can take on as many or as few orders as you like and block out days or even whole weeks when life calls for it. In the early days I ran everything from a physical diary with very little organisation, and like many bakers, I learnt the hard way what it feels like to have no proper system behind you. In mid-2025 a favourite and widely-used baking software announced their sudden closure due to personal reasons. Very quickly, many bakers were left without a system and something in me lit up. I’ d worked with a lot of different systems throughout my corporate career and always had a genuine interest in how good software can make work easier. When this opportunity appeared, it felt like the perfect alignment of timing, experience and passion. Very quickly I made the decision to create BakeGenie. With little sleep, and an incredible team of developers behind me, we built and launched the first version of BakeGenie in just eight weeks. From day one I wanted BakeGenie to be simple, intuitive and easy to use, especially for bakers who don’ t consider themselves tech-savvy. Software should reduce overwhelm, not add to it. Since launching, we haven’ t slowed down much. We continue adding new features every week, shaped by feedback from the BakeGenie community.