I was 29 when Jason Billingsley and I won BDC’s Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award for British Columbia.
Elastic Path had grown into a $10 million company, and a $15,000 startup loan was the only outside financing we had taken.
People like that story, and I liked telling it. Today I think the part I was proudest of deserves a second look, because for a long time we did everything on our own and rarely asked anyone outside the company for help.
Internal numbers have a limit that is easy to forget. They show that sales, clicks, or margins changed, but they cannot show whether a competitor cut a price or launched a promotion that morning.
I now lead ShopVision, a market intelligence platform for brands and retailers. We started it in 2024 from a clean slate and built it around AI from the start, and this time I wanted to apply a lesson that took me a decade to learn.
Doing It All Yourself Has a Price
The loan came from the Canadian Youth Business Foundation, an organization that now operates as Futurpreneur Canada. I received it in 2000, straight out of university.
For the first five years Elastic Path was mostly a services firm that built websites, and it took no outside funding until 2013. That is more than ten years of growing on our own revenue.
Our goals changed along the way. In 2008 I said we had once expected to stop at $10 million in revenue and sell, and that we now wanted to keep building. By 2016 the company was cash-flow positive, and in 2018 it closed a $43 million Series B round.
I am proud of that record. I also think a company that pays for growth only from its own sales can go a long time before an outsider asks it a hard question, and I would have welcomed those questions sooner.
Outside Help Arrived Earlier at ShopVision
ShopVision began with founder money, help from friends and family, and research grants from the Industrial Research Assistance Program.
Five months after we launched publicly, we closed a US$4.1 million seed round in September 2025 led by Brightspark Ventures, with BDC Capital and Rhino Ventures taking part, and two of their partners joined our board. Elastic Path waited more than a decade for outside funding, while ShopVision took it within a year of launching publicly.
The product follows the same idea. Brands can see their own results, so we track what their competitors do: prices, promotions, product launches, and ads. Our software reads competitor websites in a way that resembles how a person reads a site, and it matches equivalent products across retailers even when they share no product code. Each match comes with a confidence score and the reasoning behind it, so your team can review it and approve or reject it.
Outside guidance also shows up in the numbers on young companies. Futurpreneur reports that 80% of the businesses it supports survive five years, which it says is 27% higher than the national average, and it provides its loans alongside mentorship.
That is Futurpreneur’s own figure for its own clients, and it does not prove that mentoring caused the difference. I still find it worth noticing.
Ask for Outside Help Sooner Than Feels Comfortable
Futurpreneur marked its 30th anniversary in Toronto last month and celebrated its Founders Hall of Fame inductees at the event. I joined its board in 2006, and I am grateful for the loan that started everything. My advice to founders is the advice I would give myself: ask for outside help sooner than feels comfortable.
The same applies to pricing, promotions, and assortment. Take the five biggest decisions your team made last quarter and write down where the outside view came from for each one. A blank line means the decision rested on internal numbers and instinct.
If you want to fill in those lines, ShopVision’s Market and Competitive Intelligence platform tracks competitor prices, promotions, assortment, and advertising in one place.
Harry Chemko is the co-founder and CEO of ShopVision, a Market and Competitive Intelligence platform headquartered in Vancouver, Canada. He has spent 25 years building commerce technology. Harry co-founded Elastic Path in 2000 with a $15,000 startup loan and remains a board member and Chief Strategy Officer. He also serves on the board of Futurpreneur Canada.
The post Bootstrapped for More Than a Decade: What One Founder Would Change About Going It Alone appeared first on Techcouver.com.
Bootstrapped for More Than a Decade: What One Founder Would Change About Going It Alone was first posted on November 5, 2026 at 10:00 am.
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