An Armidale software company built inside a family earthmoving business has been named the best small business app in the world, beating some of the biggest names in the global Xero ecosystem.
Gojee took out Global Small Business App of the Year at the Xero Global App Awards 2026, announced on Friday night and confirmed on national television via an ABC News segment. It is the first company from regional New South Wales to win one of Xero’s global awards.
The global award is the top tier of Xero’s awards program, open only to apps available across all three of Xero’s core regions of Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. Gojee was chosen from an ecosystem of more than 1,000 apps on the Xero App Store, ahead of a finalist field that included three of the largest and longest-established names in the sector.
Jack Ducat, Co-Founder and CEO of Gojee, said the win still had not quite sunk in.
“To be judged the best small-business app in the world, in an ecosystem of more than a thousand apps on the Xero App Store, still doesn’t feel real,” Mr Ducat said.
“We won this by staying obsessed with one problem: profit blindness. We show businesses whether every job is making money as the work happens, not weeks after it’s finished, and this award says that matters to small businesses everywhere.”
Gojee began life eight years ago as an internal project at Duckett Earthmoving, the family earthmoving and ready-mix concrete business Mr Ducat’s parents started in Armidale 40 years ago. Mr Ducat and his brothers took over the business when their parents retired, and struggled to get clear, real-time information on job profitability out of their accounting system.
They partnered with local Armidale technology firm Nucleo to build a prototype for their own operations. Word of its success spread among other regional business owners, and the brothers decided to take the product to market, partnering with Xero to reach small businesses more broadly.
Speaking to the New England Times this week, Mr Ducat said Gojee’s win came down to two things: the product and the people.
“We’re looking to provide an end-to-end solution,” he said. “Some of the challenges that small businesses have is that they might have Xero, and then they might have multiple individual apps to solve discrete problems.”
“It does create this problem where you’re trying to manage all of these systems, you need different logins, they don’t talk to each other. Our strategy from the very start was that we wanted to build the one solution end to end to manage the operations layer and do that in a way which complements Xero.”
He said the business had also invested heavily in customer support and onboarding, something he understood firsthand from bringing new systems into Duckett Earthmoving.
“We also understand, coming from being a small business owner and setting this up for ourselves and having that change management to get our employees to buy into it, it’s not a small thing,” Mr Ducat said. “So we really invest heavily into that.”
Mr Ducat has a background in aeronautical engineering, having studied at the University of Sydney before working for Boeing in Melbourne, and later completed an MBA at Melbourne Business School.
He said he was not a trained software developer, but had enough understanding of the technology, combined with a deep knowledge of the operational problems small businesses face, to find the right partner and build something that worked.
He believes the regional, self-reliant mindset behind Duckett Earthmoving shaped Gojee just as much as any technical decision.
“Myself and my two brothers, we went about the challenge of solving it all ourselves,” he said. “Coming from that smaller country town, I definitely think that plays into it. You just got to take it on yourself.”
Gojee now serves customers across Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, South Africa and the United States. According to Gojee, one customer recovered $165,000 in margin after gaining live visibility of job profitability, while a civil construction contractor cut administration time by around half.
Mr Ducat said the company was now focused on integrating artificial intelligence into the platform, with a strong emphasis on keeping people in control of the process.
“It’s making sure that there’s sort of a human in the loop in regards to the AI,” he said. “It’s also identifying the key workflows that are going to create value, so for us, it’s about how we can create a bigger ROI for our customers.”
Gojee is also looking to raise capital to fund further global growth.
“We are looking to raise some capital and undertake that venture and really resource ourselves properly off the back of this momentum, so that we can compete on a more global stage against some of these bigger players that we’re sort of in the same category with now, which is great,” Mr Ducat said.
His advice for other regional business owners sitting on an idea is to back themselves.
“There’s proof that there is an opportunity to commercialise a product from the bush,” he said. “If you feel like you’ve got a valuable product, you’ve probably already solved a problem for yourself, then you’ve probably already solved a problem for a lot of other people. Go after it, back yourself, and see if you build it up organically and take it to market. And give it a go, I guess.”
He said the recognition had come after a long journey, not an overnight one.
“These successes don’t come overnight,” Mr Ducat said. “It’s a lot of hard work. We’re getting a lot of recognition now off the back of these awards, but it has been a long journey for us. You’ve got to stick it out and work hard, and hopefully the fruits will come.”
More information, photos and the official winner badge are available at gojeeapp.com.au
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