Alex Popa - Co-founder of BOAST.ai

I'm excited today to be joined by another one of my business partners and good friend Alex Popa, co founder and CEO of Boast AI. We're going to talk about bootstrapping a startup to over eight figures in revenues and then deciding, hey, why don't we scale even further with a series A round and bringing in $23 million of funding and then on top of that bringing in another $100 million in debt financing so that they could set up their own debt fund that they could service their own clients with. 3, 2, 1. Hey, what's up everyone? We are live again today with another episode of Founder Journey. Actually, I say live, but we're not live, it's prerecorded. Today we've got one of my business partners, good friend Alex Popa. Alex is the co founder of Boast AI and I'll let him kind of go into what Boast does, but it's an amazing company, amazing service. I've been fortunate enough to see them build this company from the very, very early stages. They are. Boast AI is a co founder of our Traction Conference. So Alex and I have worked together quite closely on a lot of projects, especially around Traction Conference. Don't mistake Alex Popa for Alex Schwang, my other co founder. So two Alexes on the team is fun, but this Alex is very thoughtful, methodical. He's built an amazing business. They recently announced a raise that they put together for their company. We'll dive into that in a bit. But Alex, welcome to Founder Journey. Please tell our audience a little bit about yourself and Boast AI.

Thanks, Ray. Yeah, Alex is a popular name. So hard to keep track, but yeah. So at Boast AI, we help companies identify and claim R and D tax credits to automate the complicated process of applying and defending research and development tax credits in the US and Canada. That's our mission and that's what we've done really well for the past eight years or so.

Yeah, it started as just an idea. You guys bootstrapped this company for quite a long time. And one of the journeys that you took, you started off as a service based business and you end up productizing that service and now you're building a platform.

Yeah. So I knew the R and D tax space really well, was in that space for a few years and managed some large teams across Canada providing that consulting service. And I knew there was a better way to do this. And you know, there's a way to automate it and really save clients time. It's a very onerous task on the clients, even if they do use external consultants. And I thought there was a better way to automate it and really provide a higher quality deliverable. So through the process of starting this business, we decided, Lloyd and I decided that we should build a nice consulting team and trying to find the optimal processes in terms of deliverables and, you know, meeting our objectives, which is to save our clients time and provide, you know, maximize clean value and create defensible R and D claims. And once we've done that, we decided to start building the technology and the platform that we currently have. And it's been a journey that has taken quite a while. But the one thing that was really important for us is to stay bootstrapped, as you mentioned, and we'll dive a little bit more into that. But we didn't want the external funding, we wanted to stay bootstrapped. So that meant that we had to be profitable from day one. Our fuel to grow was the net income of the business. So even though the business always did really well and was profitable year over year, it doesn't mean that we took the money out and had nice lifestyles. It was quite the opposite. Right. It just meant that we had more fuel to throw on the fire and keep on growing. So we've been growing at roughly about 100% every year. And you know, now we're in the eight figure range or well over that. Well over the low eight figure range, I guess now in revenue. And we're still continuing to do that profitably. But recently we decided to change things up a little bit with some external investment. So. Yeah, I mean, what do you want to know about that?

Yeah, so that's a big shift. I definitely want to talk to you about your journey and the path that you took and the decision that you had to make. But before we get into that for our audience, if you're not in the tech space, the R and D tax credits are a major, major source of non dilutive funding and they become instrumental for a lot of companies. A lot of the big companies that you look at, they really rely on these tax credits in those early years to help fuel their growth and R and D development, and especially with boast. So we're not just talking about boast in this context. You have also had a front row seat for the clients that you've been helping. And so you work directly with a lot of CEOs. You've seen the journey that they've taken, the decisions that they've made. A lot of times bootstrapping is probably something that they should have done, but they took money. But when you're not in the tech industry, you really don't have a lot of other alternatives. But to bootstrap and to be very methodical of how do you bring in revenue, it's kind of more prevalent in the tech industry where you're able to get venture backers and angel backers to finance and development of your product before you're able to sell. But in traditional businesses, you've had to rely on your ability to sell and generate revenues. And that's the path that both took. But what is it that you've seen the most that you kind of cringe at or you don't agree with with companies and the path that they've taken? You don't name any clients, but you've got a lot of clients and a lot of really high profile clients. And what is that you've seen that are lessons learned?

Yeah. So from the beginning, just working with hundreds of clients and company owners, CEOs, seeing them through the journey of raising capital or bootstrapping less often, but still happens once in a while, there are a ton of lessons learned. And the one thing is every entrepreneur makes different mistakes, which is great. That's fine. It would be terrible to see the same, every entrepreneur make the same mistake over and over again.

That's where you come in and automate, right?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So there are some common themes though. Raising money at valuations that you can meet expectations on. You know, you're raising, raising, raising money with certain multiples, you know, guaranteed multiples to those investors. You better make sure you can surpass that valuation in the next 18 months or whatever your bandwidth is if you've gone down the venture capital route. Otherwise that's sort of the biggest problem we see, or raising. You know, the other big one is, especially in Canada, in some of the Canadian markets is raising capital with just weird terms where it ends up being sort of angel investors or high net worth individuals that provide capital with just strange terms like convertible debt that expected to hit some ridiculous valuation within the next couple of years or something. And that basically makes you uninvestable. At some point, unless you really smoke it and hit it out of the park, it's going to be tough to raise future rounds of funding that you need.

And that's the thing that a lot of first time entrepreneurs especially don't realize or don't recognize is the fact that the decisions that you make early on can really hamper future investment rounds. It's tough as an entrepreneur, it's hard to see over the next three months when you're running out of money and you've got somebody that's excited to put some money into you and you get excited and you accept the terms, but you realize, well, this is not actually a sophisticated investor or like, I take that back. A lot of the angel investors are successful in their own right, in their own industries, but a lot of times when they start diving into tech, they're bringing in concepts or procedures that are typical in their own industry, mining or whatever, but don't translate into tech. But that's how they're used to investing. And they're the ones that are writing the check. So they kind of control the terms. But you as the entrepreneur need to do your homework. And a lot of times we've seen this, they've taken that big check. But when it comes to that VC round, the VC is going to say, that's excited as we are. There's too much baggage here or there's challenges. You have to do all this restructuring and then the angel gets upset and they want to do restructuring and it just kills your deal.

Yeah, that's right. We see that a lot. And it's usually, like you said, investors from other industries that have put together funds that say, now I'm a tech investor. But they do bring in that mentality from the previous industry that they're experienced with. And that just doesn't work in tech. Right. Where your run rate is supposed to be 16 months, 18 months, whatever it is, and then raise again. So, you know, those are the big challenges that I think kill a lot of companies that we see quite often. And, you know, the second biggest challenge is obviously, you know, the founding team and how they work together and how they navigate that sort of changing relationship. Right. It's the same with any relationship that changes over time and how you navigate that change and you know, that give and take on, on every side is really important. So it really does take a team to make everything work and happen. And every relationship that you build in your company is really important. And some of them can make or break the company. Right. Especially the founder relationships. So those are the two main themes that we constantly see with entrepreneurs as they, they seem successful and all of a sudden overnight they kind of, you know, you see this company just sort of go away. Right. It's usually one of those two things that kill them. It's less, less, less often or it's pretty rare to have, you know, companies that do well and Also, revenue dries up, right? You know, that's more of a Covid type of situation, I guess. And even then they external factors or.

Other third party issues that contribute to that, as opposed to success metrics that you have internally.

Right? Those are rare, right? The external factors are rare. So the factors that you can control as an entrepreneur are probably the most common reason why companies fail in general. If you found your market, you eliminate all those important variables early on. The companies end up failing because of interesting investments or venture investments or just partners, not, you know, not getting along.

Right.

I'm sure in your experience you've probably seen the same thing.

Definitely. So I'll get back to talking about boast and the industry in a sec. A successful entrepreneur, and I've known you for a while and success isn't just measured by, hey, I've been able to raise money like you guys have helped a lot of companies and made a good business doing so in that journey. And I know you're uncomfortable talking about yourself. You're a lot more passionate talking about other people, but I'm gonna make you uncomfortable and I want to talk about you. So you're bridging from Romania.

Thanks for that.

You originally from Romania, you relocated to Canada with your family. And tell us about that culture shock and coming to Canada. And I believe you guys first moved to Toronto, or was it Montreal?

Yeah, Toronto. So I moved to Toronto when I was 13 years old. Didn't speak a word of English, nothing. And I remember the second day once, second day in Canada, I had to go to school. So, you know, my dad dropped me and my brother off at school and said, you know, have a nice day.

How about it?

Yeah, good luck. That's our word. Within. Within a couple of months we had friends, we spoke enough English to sort of get along and build relationships. And it's. We adapt it. Right? Is that so that resilience, I guess. And it's not unique to us. It's just that's what happens to, I guess, every kid, right. When you put them in your situation. So, you know, and most of my time I spend in Toronto, you know, until that's where I met Lloyd as well. So met Lloyd right after high school, went to Humber College, Engineering technology program. And then we went to university in Thunder Bay, where my brother actually still lives now he lives in Thunder Bay. So we had quite an experience and even the culture experience of moving to Thunder Bay. So the culture differences there, right from Toronto, it's a massive difference and it's something I really enjoyed, I like change. So you know, I think in the past 15 years my wife and I constantly talk, you know, joke around how. Joke about the fact that we moved around once a year on average for the past 15 years. Which you know, it's, it's unusual, right. And we moved to, you know, lots of, lots of Canadian cities. So Montreal, you know, Waterloo, Guelph, Calgary, Vancouver, sort of being all over Canada, I guess.

So before we get into the journey to Calgary, you at Humberg, you took computer science and you're an engineer and you can code.

Software engineering.

Yeah, yeah, but you can code, but you didn't go down the engineering path. You went to one of the big four accounting firms, right?

Yeah, so I've been a coder since I can remember. Basically within I think a year or two of moving to Canada. So I was maybe like grade nine when I started coding and I took taking college courses to learn how to code in C and C and you know, so I've been coding forever. I really enjoy it. That's sort of the passion, right? But after university, yeah, I went down the path of IT leadership. Took a job in an IT leadership development program at Johnson Johnson. And that's like a two year rotational program where every ten months or so they move you to a different operating company within Johnson Johnson and you get high profile projects to execute within that 10 month period and you get a whole bunch of mentorship and coaching and public speaking coaching which probably doesn't come across at all. But I forget a lot selective memory there. But it's supposed to make you a well rounded, I guess, sort of leader within their organization, within Johnson Johnson organization. So that's what I did. Which was much more focused on project management and sort of management in general than, than hands on coding. Right. And then you know, after, after two and a half years or three years at Johnson Johnson I decided that I needed to start, start another company and I went off and started a company called Work Envy and that was location based job search back at the, in the times when literally mobile was just coming out. And you know, we got some great, great customers. You know, like it was about 30 multinational clients. Clients like Winners Care Group, McDonald's and so on. The problem was monetizing it. So you know, like about eight months, nine months into the business we had the platform all done so I was the only developer. So I got that all pushed out but soon realized that, you know, we had users, we had, you know, job applicants, we had jobs, thousands of jobs and no way to make money off of it.

Just take a step back. So this was on mobile, but back then you're talking about Nokia, BlackBerry, Sony Ericsson. This is not iPhone, it's not touchscreen.

That's right. So iPhone was just coming out at the time, and timing was pretty good. It worked out okay. Usability was great and we set a ton of desktop users. Of course, that was still the main driver. And mobile was kind of slowly creeping in. The problem really wasn't on the. It wasn't the technology, wasn't the platform. All that stuff worked well. It was great. It wasn't even the sales, you know, sales work. We had clients. The problem was there was no business model where you could actually monetize, you know, nobody. This company's, you know, hire en masse. They hire thousands of employees like every month. And they also have huge turnovers. That's the reason they hire so much. And they just don't want to pay a lot of money for each job applicant. The scale that we would have had to be at to actually turn a profit was fairly ridiculous. And for us to get there, we would have required a ton of venture backing. And I decided that just wasn't something I wanted to do. And that's when I basically folded that business. So coming out of that, I said, I can't believe I missed the business model part. You know, like having a sound business model, like that's.

That's hindsight. You're like that. Oh, that was stupid. But, but, but in that time. Right.

Yeah, it sounds easy. Sounds like, you know, sounds so easy. So basic. The problem is I still run into entrepreneurs today that are super smart and totally missed out. Right. Or. Or they think the market will catch up in some way or, you know, they'll figure it out later. Right. Everybody thinks that. Facebook. Right. So, you know, coming out of that, I need to know more about the finance world and decide to go study accounting to get my foot in the door there. And that's how I got into R D tax. It's called the cross between accounting and engineering and software engineering. So that's when I started. Started doing R and D tax work and started as a consultant. And, you know, this became the national practice leader for one of the. One of a company that used to be our competitors. We don't see them as often anymore. But yeah, that was my entry into that world.

And I want to talk about boast again a little bit, but I think a lot of people view you as a competitor. I'm talking about some of the accounting firms and whatnot. But you don't see them as a competitor because they're totally swimming in a different lane. They don't understand what you guys are doing. But before I get there, what, before we talk about that, what are your thoughts on learning to code and the ability to code for not just entrepreneurs, but just anybody in general? You did this very early on. You were comp sci engineer, but then you went into business accounting. Is the need to learn how to code essential moving forward or are there alternatives? Like what are your thoughts on this?

I'm not going to go against the grain on this one. Absolutely. Essentially, you know, various levels. Right. You're not going to become a full stack engineer and truly understand assembly language and all that fun stuff. Right. That's just not the need that most people have. Right. That's a very valuable skill, but that's not the need that most people have. But learning how to, how to code, how to interact with, you know, with slightly more sophisticated, you know, applications and platforms that do expose some of that functionality to you, even just basic SQL queries and things like that, there's some level of understanding everybody should have. It's just basic knowledge nowadays. You need to have it. It's creeping up into everything we do now. Even end user applications and platforms, they're supposed to make life easier, always have a sort of backup, exposing a little bit more sophisticated application or technology that you probably need to have some level of coding understanding.

Yeah, you and I obviously were business partners, so we have very similar line of thinking. One of the ways I like to put it out to people is if you're English speaking and you're going to go build a company and launch products in Spain, do you think you can effectively do that without knowing Spanish? No. And you don't have to be extremely fluent in Spanish, but you do need to know how to properly communicate with people or what people are saying to you so that you don't get ripped off. So learning just, just the basics of what is code, what is Java, what is Rails.

But I equate those basics more to understanding the culture. Like, you know, to use your analogy, going to Spain, how can you go into a country without speaking the language? You can probably get around that, you know, by hiring somebody that does, but you cannot as a tourist.

Yeah, but to run a business, right.

But you know, to, to, to formulate, you know, strategy and have a sound approach to doing it, you need to understand the culture, you need to understand the buying habits of your customer and so on. And that's, that's, that's, you know, it's the same with basic, basic coding. Right. Just, it's a way to you for you to understand how everything's built and a way for you to start troubleshooting when you do run into problems. Right.

And speaking about problems, what, what was the big problem that you saw in the market when you created both? What sparked you say, screw it, I'm going to go solve this problem by myself or with my partner?

Well, I saw there was a clear problem. So the consulting model is broken. It's very cumbersome and it's relying on the clients to basically spoon feed this consultant. So a lot of efforts put on the client to prepare this R and D claims. That was a very evident problem that everybody was trying to solve. And everybody was trying to solve it by just throwing more bodies at the problem rather than technology. And the companies that attempt to throw technology at it just didn't have the DNA. They weren't software companies, they were traditional, either accounting firms or consulting firms that thought of technology as an afterthought and didn't really have any technology, the leadership within their own organizations to be able to pull it off. So we saw that problem and we really decided that we can do it. Our background is soft engineering. We're thinking in terms of what problems can technology solve next in our own lives. And this is just a very obvious one. So that's what got us into starting Boast and I spent about a year and a half planning for this. That's interesting. Before we actually hit the ground running, I spent a year and a half planning for it, trying to recruit, you know, Lloyd and other business partners that had complementary skills to me that I knew I could work with. And I was wrong on some of them, but that's okay. And you know, I was looking for somebody that could be the face of the company that could be out there, you know, doing this, you know, doing all the public speaking and really the social media outreach, you know, it's, it's a really important part of it. Part of, part of the business, of course, being visible, it's super important. But how you get that visibility, I think in my opinion is less important. Right. It doesn't necessarily have to be, you know, the rockstar CEO that gets that visibility. It can be, you know, spread within the organization as well.

Yeah, that's a key part, is complimentary skill sets and finding people that can fill those gaps that you either don't have or you don't have. The Desire to do.

Right.

Like you said, you do have some public speaking education and experience, but it's not something that you relish in. And so if you can find partners that are really excited about the limelight like Lloyd is, then that's a good thing.

But not everybody's lucky to find somebody like Lloyd that really excels at that stuff.

Right.

So that's. But the idea is, even if you have partners that don't necessarily excel at the public speaking or putting your company out there, splitting it up across multiple team members can be much more fruitful and you'll get much better results, I think, than struggling through if you're just not very good at it.

And that also takes some discipline and being able to delegate. A lot of entrepreneurs, especially in the early days, have to do everything on their own. But when it comes to time to scale and grow their business, just being able to delegate and let go of some of that control is challenging.

That's a constant struggle.

Yeah, that's something you had to struggle with recently. But before we get into that, I want to get back to the start of a boat. So you get started in Calgary. Like, why Calgary? And what did you recognize in that market?

Yeah, so that one year and a half of planning that I did was part of that, was really identifying the right market that, you know, had a significant number of potential clients and also had the least number of competitors or at least have competitors that they were at the right scale for us to go up against. So Calgary, Alberta in general, was the one place that was oil and gas, majority oil and gas driven. All the focus from every consulting firm, every technology firm was really on the oil and gas sector and everything else was ignored. So technology was ignored and the tech sector and tech space was really starting to come along and become more significant. And we thought that we could go and service that and have a relatively low barrier to entry there. And. And that's what it was. Yeah, so we were right about it, which is good.

So it shows you that anyway, listening. You don't have to be in a major market to get something off the ground and find success. You don't have to be in San Francisco, you don't have to be in Vancouver. You can be in smaller markets like Calgary, but you do have to come to a certain point where you are the big fish in the small pond and realize that and move to a bigger pond so that you can grow. And so how was that jump to Vancouver? Like, what. What prompted that?

Yeah, we always knew we were going to come Back to into Vancouver, that's the market that I knew. So when I moved to Calgary from after living in Vancouver for three and a half years, so I knew the Vancouver market well. So we always knew we're going to come back into Vancouver as a first market to go to after Calgary. And the push was just, it was financial, it was just opportunistic. So as soon as we had the resources and found a partner on the ground in Vancouver, that's what we did. It was within the year. And that was the logical step. The less logical step or the harder decision was going to Toronto. So tackling the Toronto market, massive market, obviously requires a lot more resources, more competitive and that was a harder decision. And Lloyd, for a long time he, you know, he pushed to go into the market. He always wanted to go in much earlier than I did. And you know, the decision was really based around resources. So as soon as we had enough resources to do it that we, you know, it was a market definitely worth going after. But we knew it just required a lot of resources to go into the.

And even though before you went into Toronto, Lloyd being based in San Francisco, you were already looking at the US market as well. So kind of really focusing on the west coast and then making a shift to the east coast.

For sure. We went after the US market before we went after Toronto market. So we had a really west coast focus for quite a long time. It was just the easier concentration of resources. We didn't have to, we still had low hanging fruit on the west coast and there was just no reason to expand out east and really dilute the resource pool, marketing resources, sales resources and so on.

And just for the audience's knowledge, for you that are not in Canada, the Canadian R and D tax program is a lot more robust and offers a lot more rebate. I think it's like 15% in the US, 65% in Canada, 65% cash back in Canada.

So if you're a startup, you get a check, you know, spend 100,000 on R& B, you'll get a check back for 65,000. That can enable you to grow at two, three times the pace that you would in a place like the US where it's around 10 to 15% depending on the state you're in. And it's not cash back, it stores payroll offsets. So you have to be a much larger company to really take advantage.

See, always be selling. I was just trying to give a high level overview. You just dove right into, hey, what's the sale? Why you want to be in Canada, Why you want to take a. The cash tax rate. But that's why breaking into the Toronto market was so important for you, because as a major Canadian city, the size of the contracts that you win and the work that you're going to do on an ongoing basis is that much larger than trying to go from San Francisco to say, New York, because it's a totally different ballgame. And talking about growth. You guys built this bootstrap company, you've got this platform coming out, but you had to make a decision of do you continue to bootstrap or you do bring in external funding. And this was probably a little bit harder decision given that you've seen so many horror stories or challenges or issues with the companies that you worked with, giving up equity too early and bringing in third party investors, especially ones that didn't understand your industry and how they totally derail the company. And so walk us through that dialogue in your head that you went through trying to make those decisions. Is this the right step for me and my company? Is this the right timing for this as well?

I'll take you back a little bit. So the decision is, it's actually the reason we didn't really ever consider external capital until now was, was, was because of focus. So, you know, we were a premier offering, you know, so on the, on position, on the higher end of market, high quality, you know, high deliverables and so on. So for us to really stick to that business model was always a challenge through the years, you know, even within, within our own team, you know, from sales and everything else. It's hard for sales guys to sort of give away what they perceive to be good business just because it doesn't meet certain criteria for us, you know, in terms of growth, size and so on. And that was always a challenge to, to make sure we stay focused and keep our strategy intact and deliver on that and sort of see it through. And I always thought that external funding will totally distract from that. I mean, you know, if you look at traditional vc, it's all about growth at all costs. And that's exactly what we didn't want to do. It wasn't growth at all cost, it was quality growth. That meant a lot to us. That's what allowed us to go towards the higher end of the market and so go up market, of course, enterprise and so on. And that being a struggle even within the team over the years constantly. I always thought that external venture funding would just add to that struggling that. Hey. And the one thing that really changed was obviously Covid. We're a company that does really well through downturns. Everybody's looking for extra capital, external sources of financing and grants and tax credits and so on. So we do well and we do well in good times as well. So we're pretty fortunate that way. We're very grateful and we try to try to help anybody along in these times. But that also enabled us to really hit our revenue targets and position ourselves in a way where if we found the right partner ever, not that we were looking, we were able to pull the trigger and get external funding and add some fuel to the fire, grow much faster, easier, fill gaps on the executive team and so on, like CTO and other areas that we've been lacking a little bit and so struggling along with. And we, you know, serendipitously met radiant capital. So, you know, Chris Livingston and Jordan Bettman there. And we're so aligned. You know, the basic, the philosophy is keep on doing what you're doing and everybody's gonna win. And we agree. That was literally the, you know, as soon as I heard, keep on doing what you're doing and we're gonna win. I'm thinking, what? Yeah, okay, so it's just an execution risk, right? It's, you know, do things better. Of course, always do things better. But the alignment was there in terms of, you know, market, you know, market segment, you know, business model doesn't have to be put on its head and changed in any significant way. And we just need to keep on capitalizing on opportunities that come along. Of course. But there's just no major on routing of the business model, which was my big concern. Right. It's just so easy for anybody from the outside to look at our business and say, you know, you could be like two, three times the number of clients or it's like size, revenue wise, why aren't you? Right? Like, why would you turn it down? And the short answer there is because we will be 2, 3 times with 0 profit or negative profit. We would be burning through cash for customer acquisition. So. And it's just, you know, there's just no path to profitability when you do that in our business. Our business is not a market. It's not a winner take all market. So it's not, it's not a massive land grab type of environment where, you know, we want to be the dominant players and the only player in the market. We are already the dominant player in the market. And I'm sure we'll never be the only player in the Market, we'll be the best player in the market. I know that. But we can maintain our margins and ability to grow and further invest in technology and really serve our clients. Right. As soon as we roll those margins away, we basically shoot ourselves in the foot. We can't innovate, we can't serve our clients.

And finding a investment partner that understands that is critical. And I think you kind of glossed over. You said that. They said, keep doing what you're doing, and that's all that you need to hear. That's not all that you need to hear. I know you, and I know how much due diligence you did on the back end of the company and the type of investment. Did you get a chance to talk to some of their other portfolio companies? I think that's a step that a lot of companies don't take, is listening to some of the other people that they've invested in and how they were to work with and what their philosophies are.

So we've built great relationship with some of those other portfolio companies through the process. That's how much we talk to them. And so went through every level, you know, cto, cfo, CEO. Right. Anybody that basically interacted with the board just to hear the pressures and the interactions and what kind of relationships were built and value, what kind of value was added. And we spoke to additional prior portfolio companies, if investors were at different firms. And there was overwhelmingly positive feedback. And the interesting part and the approach I liked about Radiant is they literally gave us a list of all of their investments, plus a bunch of investments that they've done with other firms a long time ago. And they said, pick and choose whoever you want to talk to or talk to all of them. They didn't curate the list and they didn't eliminate anybody off and cherry pick.

And say, oh, just talk to this person.

It's so easy to do that. Right. And that's what most investors will do, of course. And for interest of, for simplicity's sake, I guess a lot of them would do that. And I appreciated the fact that they were just really open and honest and even open with some of the struggles. Like if they had a struggle in the past and investment, they didn't sort of go as planned or whatever it may be, which is not many, of course, but they were very honest about it. They opened up, they talked about it, they allowed us access to those. They made introductions to those CEOs, and we're able to really make an informed decision, make an informed decision and really Validate our gut feeling. It always goes back to a gut feeling. You meet somebody and you know if you're aligned or not. I mean, you can have a conversation and what you need to do is just validate that feeling. Right. If you feel really good about them and you think you can work with them, that you're aligned on your principles and the way that you like to approach the challenges ahead, then just validate it. Validate it. Go through that due diligence process to validate. But if you meet somebody and you're not sure and you're on the fence and you're kind of neutral on it, the process is not going to make you love them. So maybe move on. If you're in a position where you can.

Again, great segue there. Being in a position that you can, because you bootstrap, because you built your company to a profitable state where you didn't need to take the money, but you saw the advantages of being able to take the money and what you could do with it. You were also put yourself in a position where you guys raised 30 million, but all from one investor. Typical $30 million rounds are from multiple investors and you've got multiple people that want to sit on your board. You were in the power seat and you were able to kind of dictate some terms and ultimately just raise the money with one investor. That's a huge, huge accomplishment.

Yeah. So thank you. But yes, again, it goes back to that same fear I had before. The more people at the table, the more likely you are to be distracted and dilute down your business model, your theory, and having the opportunity to do it from one. I'll do it from one. It's that simple. Right. I know some, you know, there's some entrepreneurs that see the value in multiple investors. And you know, there's a thought there that makes sense. You know, having more people advocating for you and really helping you out. And you know, there's value in doing that as well. But there are other ways to get that value. Rather than having an investor that ultimately does have a lot of influence. Right. You know, as a shareholder, you have to treat them just like you treat yourself as a shareholder. Right. If you step back out of the executive position, you actually hold it too. Right. So you have to sort of do the right thing. So, you know, having. Limiting the number of shareholders is really important. And it also helps if you are planning to do future rounds of financing. You know, the fewer the better. Right. In my opinion, you can get investors, you can. Sorry, you can get Advisors or you can get independent board members and and other guys that will be advocates on your behalf the same way as an investor would. If they believe in your vision, high quality guys will have to buy and believe in your vision and believe in what you're doing. And if they do that, then they'll advocate for you.

Right? No, definitely. This has been a great conversation. Alex, I appreciate you taking the time to do this. I know you don't like talking as a public face of I want to kind of wrap this up with two questions and this is kind of common with all of our founder journeys is what are some apps or tools that you found instrumental to your growth as an entrepreneur? Can be anything but something that our audience may not know of or underutilize themselves that you think they should take.

Another look at apps and tools, you know.

Now you guys don't use Slack, we don't use Slack. Upset about that because I use Slack and communicating you guys not through Slack is a bit of a challenge. But maybe on that front like what do you guys use internally? How do you guys communicate?

Yeah, we use Workplace. So we use Workplace Chat and just the Workplace platform which is basically Facebook rebranded for enterprise. And it works really well. Zero learning curve. Everybody is familiar with the Facebook UX and usability and we can use as internal wiki and as well as messenger and everything else that we need all in one place, which works extremely well for us. But you know, honestly over the years the we did a lot of good things on the tool side and technology side. We basically went with tools that were highly customizable and flexible for us to grow, grow with that were also fairly cheap and didn't require a whole lot of maintenance overhead. So we use things like, you know, Zoho CRM and you know, Zoho analytics and you know, QuickBooks and a bunch of very common tools. But that's also kind of our keyless heel now, right? Because we're going through a process where we are standardizing all that into more enterprise level tools. And it's just a bigger process and obviously very costly thing to do. But the one thing that enabled us to grow and scale and stay agile was the fact that we had very flexible tools, very flexible and detailed reporting and tools that we could adapt to whatever our needs were. Right. So a good example is we also offer financing. So that's maybe something I didn't mention, but we do R and D financing. So we provide like an R and D line of credits to our clients as they incur R and D spend through the year. They don't have to wait for a tax filing and the CRA to approve the return for them to get the cash so we can provide ahead of time. And for us to be able to add a service like that on it was really simple. It was just identifying the right processes and really building the technology around. It was easy because a lot of the technology we have is third party tools that help us on the reporting side like analytics, data warehousing and our proprietary tool. Obviously that's that one, it's ours. So it's very flexible as long as we want to put in the effort. I'm trying to think, to answer your question.

Well, I think Workplace is a great example, especially if you're bootstrapped or if you're a smaller organization. Slack, most Slack is easy to use as well, but Workplace was one that I know a lot of people kind of didn't think about integrating Facebook into their corporate culture and whatnot. But Workplace did it and now a lot of people are using teams, which is kind of built off the same fundamental principles.

Yeah, you know, when we went through a selection process, I tried all the tools. Right. You know, we tried Slack, we tried some of the Slack competitors. They're very, very much like Slack tried. Looked at teams, looked at Workplace and we just found that Workplace had the, you know, it just suited our needs at the time.

Right. And so it's going to wrap up here. If you were to give advice to an entrepreneur, and I know you talk to lots of entrepreneurs, what would you give as advice for somebody that's starting a new business today? In today's world? And keep in mind, our audience are first time entrepreneurs, but also seasoned entrepreneurs. Knowing what you know about the world today, what would you be? What's the one piece of advice that you want to give to entrepreneurs?

Yeah, honestly, focus, stay focused and don't be distracted. And I hear this over and over from very successful entrepreneurs that build unicorns, multi billion dollar companies. And the one advice that they give me after knowing my business well has always been stay focused. So you know, you talk about all this, this added sort of features or value to your clients, you know, like financing and data insights and other things. But, but just don't forget that focus, right. Like you have a, you have a purpose. Become the R and D system of record for your clients. You know, offer, offer that the best you can and everything else you do is secondary. Right. So they always stay focused. Right. They said, you know, one of the, the biggest problems with A lot of companies is, they're growing fast is staying focused. Right. So maintain that focus and just be diligent about it. You know, make sure you remind yourself what your business model is and, and why it is. You know, keep on revalidating it every year but, but maintain that focus. If it's still true, maintain it. Right?

Yeah, It's a lot easier said than done. Everybody says, oh, yeah, I'll stay focused. But you get so much content coming in, whether it's from customers or other people saying, oh, you should do this. Oh, it'd be great if this feature was there, or this button should go over here and you get distracted.

It's hard to turn down money. Right. So we've had partners and clients offering us good revenues or good margins to provide them value that is not core to our business. And you know, saying no to that is tough. Right. It could be somebody else's business for sure. But for the interest of resource allocation and, you know, really, really fulfilling your vision, you need to stay focused. Right.

Especially when you bootstrap, like every dollar counts. But that. And even if you're not able to say no. Yeah.

And even if you're not.

Right.

I mean, you know, you'll burn your, even if you are venture backed, you'll go through your run rate really quick and you won't meet your metrics. You'll kind of be dead in the water at that point. So staying focused is really important.

Sweet. This is a great conversation. I want to wrap it up with a chance for you to have a call to action. What can our audience do for you? You've given them some insights and feedback and a peek into your world. What can they do for you?

Yeah. Encourage community events, encourage community engagement in general. I think that's the number one, the number one piece and it's something that I try to do and we try to do as an organization in general and really try to support that. Any type of community engagement and giving back, you know, it's fantastic. Like you said, I don't like the public speaking side, but I love the one on ones and really providing, you know, if I, if I have some insight to provide, I would love to share it with anybody. As long as it's, you know, it's going to be beneficial to them in their communities. It's awesome.

Right.

So just, just be engaging and encourage diversity as well. Right. You know, we try to make sure that we encourage diversity whether it's, you know, you know, women in engineering or, you know, anything else that you know, encouraging minorities participation in tech as well. And everything that we do is super important as you know, you encourage it the same way and you're just as vocal. You're not an advocate, right?

Yeah, I think definitely the in person stuff, as we are recovering from COVID our economies are coming back. Those live in person events like having worked out of your home for the last year and now trying to make your way back into the workforce or real world in person events are critical. We're trying to do our part with our Traction events, our CXO events, but I think there is a little bit of challenge to get back to where it was a year ago or two years ago now. Absolutely.

Yeah. But you know, there's hope there's light at the end of this tunnel.

Awesome. Alex, this has been a great conversation. Thanks for joining our Founder Journey event, our series and I look forward to seeing you at some some events. Thanks.

I appreciate it, really enjoyed it.

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