Software developer who loves tech • building mac, ios & web apps • ottawa 🇨🇦 • dad, coffee, curiosity
Ottawa, Ontario
Joined February 2019
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If you're starting a business in Canada, don't immediately pay a lawyer $1,500 to incorporate. First figure out what you actually need in month one.
Here's where most first-time founders waste their first two weeks:
1. Incorporating before they have a single paying customer, when a sole proprietorship would let them test the idea today.
2. Registering for GST/HST on day one before they're anywhere near the $30,000 threshold (unless they have big upfront expenses to claim).
3. Mixing personal and business spending on the same card, then paying an accountant later to untangle it.
4. Spending three weeks on a logo and website before they have a way to send an invoice and get paid.
What's the one setup step you wish someone had warned you about before you started?
A first-time founder in Canada shouldn't be paying $3,500 before making $1 in revenue.
Right now, the "standard" advice before you sell anything looks like this:
- $1,500 to a lawyer for a basic incorporation with template articles
- $1,200 to an agency for a 3-page website and a logo
- $300/month across 5 separate SaaS tools for invoicing, bookkeeping, payroll and payments
- 2 weeks chasing a CRA business number, GST/HST account and a business bank account
None of that is hard work anymore. It's form-filling and glue code that traditional firms and bloated software companies still bill like it's 2010.
Founders should be able to go from idea to incorporated, banked and sending their first invoice in one afternoon for a fraction of that cost.
Lawyers and accountants will say DIY setup is dangerous and costs more to fix later. Founders who bootstrapped will say paying $3,500 on day one is how ideas die before launch.
If you've started a business in Canada, what did your day-one setup actually cost you, and what was a total waste of money?
Everyone on X is dunking on smaller, cheaper models after the GPT-6.1 Terra drop.
They're looking at it like researchers, not founders.
When you're paying the API bill yourself, you don't need a frontier model to classify an email, parse an invoice or format a form. You need something fast that costs pennies and gets it right 99% of the time.
Big models win benchmarks. Cheap models keep your margins alive.
Are you defaulting to the biggest model, or routing tasks to the cheapest one that works?
Microsoft just offered buyouts to 60,000 employees across the US, Canada, India and the UK.
Not because the company is broke. Revenue is up. They're doing it while pouring billions into AI and data centers.
For anyone looking for a tech job, or trying to build something of your own, the market just got a lot harder. Tens of thousands of experienced people with Microsoft on their resume are about to enter the same pool, or start building the exact SaaS you were planning to build.
A "safe" big-tech job isn't safe anymore, and the bar for everyone else just went up.
If you're in tech right now, are you doubling down on a job or building your own thing?
Sandeep Singh Saini retweeted
How is the internet less private than in 2006, when the whole family shared one computer?
Back then, the internet was weird, personal, and all of ours.
So, we got your favorite meme legends back together to say it louder: What happened to the internet? 1/3
Building something new: Launch Polar (@LaunchPolar) — the simplest way to start selling in Canada 🇨🇦
If you want to support the launch and follow along as we build, give us a follow here:
xitter.cf/LaunchPolar
Everyone keeps saying "AI agents" this week. Here it is in simple words:
A chatbot answers you.
An agent does the thing for you.
You say "book a flight." The chatbot sends you links. The agent searches, compares, picks one, and asks you before it pays.
That last step is the whole fight right now: how much do we trust it to do without asking?
Would you let an agent spend money without checking with you first?
Developer Brain #1
Me at 9 AM: "Today I'm finally fixing that bug."
Me at 4 PM: rewrote the entire settings page, changed the font twice, and the bug is still there.
Took me months to finally get used to Arc.
Spaces for work. Spaces for side projects. Separate profiles. Pinned tabs that auto-archive. My whole brain, organized in one sidebar.
And right when it finally clicked, they decided to stop building it.
They didn't call it shutting down. They called it a "sunset."
That's the tax of falling in love with a beautiful tool from a startup. You put in the hours learning it, and one blog post later you're shopping for a new browser.
Worse thing to witness today
We've decided to sunset Arc on December 22, 2026.
That's not an easy sentence to write. We spent years building Arc and celebrating each and every release along the way: we have so much pride and love for what we made alongside the Arc community.
Our priority is to deliver best-in-class security for our members. Keeping a browser secure takes constant, dedicated work that is only increasing in the age of AI. Dia was built from the ground up to meet today’s security standards, so that's where our engineering and security teams will focus moving forward.
We've worked to make switching to @diabrowser as easy as possible for Arc members. Here's how:
· Your passwords, bookmarks, extensions and history come over to Dia seamlessly.
· Spaces, Folders, and Tab Groups are in Dia and import over with your data intact.
· Dia now surpasses Arc benchmarks in stability, speed, and security.
· The browser features you use in Arc are free in Dia, and the AI is optional.
Thank you for using Arc, for pushing us to make it better, and for building alongside us. The team that made Arc is the same team behind Dia, and some of our most ambitious work is just ahead. We'd love for you to be there with us when it lands.
Today I'm starting something new.
I'm stepping in as CEO and co-founder of a company with one mission: help Canadians launch their business fast, and give them every tool they need to run it.
I've watched too many great ideas die in the boring part. Registering the business, setting up payments, invoicing, a website, bookkeeping, taxes. Weeks of setup before you ever serve a single customer.
That's backwards. Founders should spend their time on the thing they're actually good at, not fighting ten different tools that don't talk to each other.
So we're building the place where a Canadian business gets started and keeps running, all in one spot, built here for how things work here.
It's day one. Lots to build, lots to learn, and I'm going to share the journey openly.
If you've started a business in Canada, what was the most painful part of getting off the ground?
One researcher at a 4-month-old startup just trained a coding model that competes with the big labs.
AI agents did almost all the work. Under $10M in compute. 3.5 months.
Two years ago this took hundreds of PhDs and billions of dollars. Now it takes one person who knows exactly what to ask for.
The moat used to be money and headcount. Now it looks like taste and speed.
So is this the start of 1,000 tiny labs, or will the giants just buy every one that works?
Anthropic just launched Claude Duet, an AI that messages you first.
It checks your apps, flags what matters, keeps working while you sleep, and asks before it sends, pays or signs anything.
The part that stuck with me is that Anthropic openly says it might misread a thread or get wrong what's urgent. So the pitch is "it handles your life," and the fine print is "please check its work."
And like most of these launches, it's U.S. only. Up here in Canada we get to watch.
Would you let an AI decide what's important enough to interrupt your day?