Four Howick College students have turned a school enterprise project into a practical local-business tool, with their Magnify directory now reporting weekly traffic, signed-up businesses and a pipeline of new clients. The east Auckland group behind the project is made up of Vivan Kumar, Reon Oosthuizen, Zack van Voorst and Ishaan Singh, who founded Magnify as part of the Young Enterprise Scheme.
Their idea is straightforward: make small local businesses easier to discover. That sounds simple, but it points to a real gap for Auckland suburbs where many operators rely on word of mouth, social posts, scattered Google listings or expensive advertising to be noticed. Magnify is being pitched as a location-based directory that can help people find businesses nearby while giving those businesses another way to reach customers.
The students say the concept came from watching how hard it can be to find small businesses close to home. Their argument is that neighbourhood firms may be the backbone of local communities, but they are often disconnected from the very people who would support them if they knew they existed. For a city the size of Auckland, that is a practical problem as much as a marketing one.
Early traction gives the project a real-world edge. The group says the website has about 4,000 weekly visitors, six businesses signed up and 13 more clients being onboarded in the coming weeks. Those numbers are modest compared with national platforms, but they are meaningful for a student-led service still proving its market. They also suggest the team has moved beyond a classroom exercise into the harder work of building trust with actual operators.
The founder angle matters because Auckland's small-business ecosystem depends on new problem-solvers learning by doing. These students are not just writing a hypothetical business plan. They are pitching, testing, signing clients, learning from obstacles and trying to create a service that local shops, service providers and community businesses can use.
Young Enterprise gives them the framework, but the useful lesson is wider. Business support does not always begin with a grant, a big incubator or a formal office. Sometimes it starts with a clear local frustration and a group willing to build a simple tool around it. Magnify's next challenge will be keeping listings useful, bringing on enough businesses to make the platform worth visiting, and making sure customers can trust what they find there.
For east Auckland, the story is also a reminder that entrepreneurship is not confined to the central city or university labs. A group of Howick students has identified a community problem, tested a solution and started putting local firms in front of more people. Whether Magnify becomes a long-term company or a launchpad for its founders, it is already doing what good youth enterprise should do: turning local observation into action.
