Diversio

“If you can't survive through without making sales, like that'll give you a really good indication on whether the market is ready. Obviously it doesn't work if you're building, you know, medical technology or a lot of clean tech solutions, but in something like…”

“We were in the front page of pitch book for like a week straight, and that ended up generating a ton of leads, which created a ton of client relationships.”

“I think like one mistake I think a lot of companies make is not bootstrapping for longer. It forces you to be very focused on the problem you're solving. It forces you to work with clients, understand what they're willing to pay for and bake in that commercial…”

“One thing that was a learning for us is like, what are academics after? And they're after data. And publications. Like really, that's it. That's enough.”

“Called a few friends and said, look, I want to start this business. Here's the idea. Do you think I could raise capital and got really a hard no from everyone I spoke to? This is not scalable. It's not venture backable. It's really just a consulting company th…”

“I think as a rule, always overestimate your own I would say that that kind of is true in almost any partnership including personal, like always assume you're going to have to do more work than the other person. And if you want to get it done, especially if you…”

“One thing that we really like, though, is, like, with the Turing Institute, like, we never would have built the kind of technology that they had spent three years building, which is a plugin that sits on Slack and GitHub and identifies bias in real time.”

“We created a certification program and a dashboard for their VC partners, which is now Been incredibly successful, I think. And again, it was paid, so they, Supported the development of this dashboard. And so through them, we ended up getting clients like Bess…”

“We reached out to the G seven women's forum, which was being hosted in Toronto. And we said, look, we've partnered with this really cool organization YPO. We've got 25 companies who have raised their hand. What if we do a presentation, really a product launch …”

“If they're not willing to pay for it, don't bark at that tree. If you're not providing a service for them or a product for them that they're willing to pay for, it's not going to work. And I think, you know, sometimes we ignore that advice, whenever we ignore …”

“We built that into our customer contracts early on that like, look, we're going to anonymize all of your data, but we are absolutely going to share it with academic institutions so we can move everybody forward.”

“Again, I think bootstrapping is a forcing device. Like when you don't have resources, you have to get incredibly sharp and crisp on what is your mission? What is your value prop as an organization beyond money? That's going to attract talent and that getting c…”

“I think if you're bootstrapping, you don't have the luxury of trying to partner with Microsoft, frankly. We've explored a few partnerships like that and you're like, okay, it's like a year and a half long sales cycle. So unless you're going to make no money fo…”

“Went out and found about 25 companies who said, look, You know, we'll pitch in a little bit of money and in return, we'll get, you know, a consultative report. And most importantly, we'll get data and sure. We'll sign up.”

“I mean, sign number one is like, I think we've had one cancellation ever out of like now, like a 170 clients.”

“Getting a technical co-founder was the smartest thing that I never did. And it ended up being the best decision that I made.”