Before I write a check to a fintech startup, the most important thing I want to know is also the most boring one: is it profitable? A lot of fintechs are being built every year, and a lot of them are being closed every year, so profitability is still the key question for me. The market in 2026 is chasing flashy AI features, and I think the potential is still in boring, sustainable profit.

And I mean real profit. What I look for before I write a check to a fintech startup is whether the profit a founder shows me is the real thing or just floated or bloated profit. If you can get that right, you can actually see the good potential of the fintech itself. Whatever product they’re going to build, or have built already, it matters that they can get some profit out of it, because that profit is what builds them a runway.

Key Takeaways

Why Do Investors Target Fintech Founders Solving Highly Specific Cultural Problems?

Fintech is very wide. You can bring it into every aspect of people’s lives, so I pay attention to founders who double down on one specific thing, especially a problem that belongs to one culture.

One fintech I admire helps Indonesian Hajj travelers. Most Indonesians are Muslim, and one of their goals is to go to Mecca, in Saudi Arabia, for the Hajj. When they go, they need to bring a big pile of cash for food, accommodation and everything else. Carrying that much cash can be very, very dangerous. It also raises suspicion, because cash transactions there are categorized as potential money laundering.

The founder built an application that connects them to the Saudi payment system, so they can use their funds there without the risk of carrying cash. It’s very specific and very simple: he just wanted Indonesian people to be able to spend in Saudi. He earned from there, and now he’s earning a lot of money from that one specific case.

How Do Investors Evaluate Active User Retention Versus Manufactured Growth in Fintech Startups?

When a founder shows me growth, one very, very important part is retention, and more and more I’m looking at how active the users are. You can have a lot of users to start with. What makes the real number is how many of them actively use your solution and contribute to your growth. You can get 1,000,000 users and maybe only 1,000 of them are really using your fintech application every day.

Hyper-growth in sign-ups is a red flag for me when the activity underneath it is manufactured, and faked activity is actually pretty easy to spot.

One very important aspect is time. Activity that’s been faked might not be sustainable in the long run, and it isn’t even a very long run, just six months to one year. Over that window you see how consistent the company is, and how consistent the information they share with us is when you check it against reality.

Why Is Regulatory Compliance and Anti-Money Laundering Critical for Fintech Startup Investments?

Quite a lot of fintechs lose funding over compliance, especially funding from investors in the United States, who care deeply about fraud, bribery and money laundering. I think those investors bring a good influence into countries like Indonesia, Singapore and the Philippines. What they look for is a fintech that complies with the regulators and with the specific practices that keep it still within the corridor.

I come at this from the anti-money laundering side. At Mulai we build anti-money laundering and fraud prevention tools for fintechs and banks in Southeast Asia, and before that I did business development at Tookitaki and Flagright, both in the same space. A lot of things can go wrong in fintech. Criminals can use a fintech to launder money, and in a way that fintech might look sexy, because it processes a lot of transactions, while some of those transactions are criminal.

Regulators put a price on that risk: recent anti-money laundering fines against fintechs in the US, UK and Netherlands range from about US$0.8 million to US$80 million.

One of the biggest fintechs in Indonesia was recently sued by a bank as well as an investor, and the news has covered it. It’s the company anybody who wants to build fintech in Indonesia looks at. They were hiding quite a lot of malicious transactions, not to mention potentially illegal gambling.

Gambling came up in my own investing too. Online gambling is illegal in Indonesia, and the money in it is huge: PPATK, the country’s financial intelligence agency, identified IDR359.81 trillion in online-gambling transactions in 2024, which is more than US$20 billion. There was one fintech I almost gave a small check to, and then I found out one of their executives was involved in online gambling. I backed out at the last minute because of that.

How Do Investors Test Fintech Founders on Handling Unreliable Payment API Confirmations?

When a founder tells me they offer international payments, I try to think like their customer. I share what my trouble is, and then I see how they react to it. Based on that response, you can see whether they really understand how international payments work in real life.

One use case I usually ask about comes from Indonesia. We have a fast transfer system called BI Fast, run by Bank Indonesia, and it is not very reliable. From what I see on the API side, the notification from the government side is usually only at around 70%. That notification is how you know whether a transfer went through, and for an API, 70% is totally not reliable. A lot of payments run on it, too: Bank Indonesia says BI Fast processed about 3.4 billion transactions in 2024.

Sometimes the founder in front of me is offering payments through BI Fast, so I ask how they make sure the transaction really goes through, or fails, without losing money. Quite a lot of fintechs lose money on that, and the way a founder answers shows me whether they really own the topic.

Why Does AI-Generated Fintech Code Require Foundational Programming Reasoning and Idempotency Guardrails?

Answering that well takes reasoning, and reasoning is the most important skill I see missing in this era. With AI, quite a lot of people leap straight into building something without the basic knowledge of the technology. Those of us who learned to program before these tools had the experience of building the logic ourselves, and that isn’t being shared with the next generation. The logic in building or programming challenges your brain to actually be better.

Now it’s as simple as writing a prompt, and behind the scenes it becomes a black box. They don’t understand what’s being built, why it’s being built, why the AI chose this way instead of that way, or this programming instead of that programming. That reasoning is being pulled away from the new generation. In fintech I think the ease of these tools is dangerous, because you need exactly that reasoning to handle financial edge cases.

There was a fintech I was about to invest in that built one of its features through AI, and they didn’t get the full picture of that system. The feature was a QR code payment. The customer scans a QR code, authenticates, and the money goes through to the merchant. With AI, you can build it like that. The problem comes up when people click twice.

You click twice, so what happens? Does it trigger the transaction two times, or is it okay? Is there any guardrail on it? If you know the logic, you already understand that you have to make sure none of these transactions create a duplicate. A duplicate transaction is a basic thing, and it can also become a malicious thing, because the system might see the duplicate and think, hey, maybe you’re a fraudster.

Payments have known guardrails for this. Stripe’s API, for example, uses idempotency keys so a request can be retried safely without creating a second object or repeating the operation. Someone still has to understand the flow well enough to put a guardrail like that in the right place, and that understanding is the difference I see between the current generation of programmers and the one before it.

How Do Investors Use Software Hackathons to Identify Dedicated Bootstrapped Fintech Founders?

I usually spot the quiet, bootstrapped winners through hackathons. I join a lot of them, and because I’m a programmer myself, talking with these future founders gives me an idea of which ones will really double down on what they’re doing and which ones are just having fun.

Sometimes a hackathon happens in teams, and you can spot the difference between people who are just attending, or just trying to prove their hypotheses, and people who really care about what they’re doing. I’m not an expert in this, but you get that feeling. The trait I see in the ones who care is that they’re open to sharing, because when you really care about a topic, it makes you happy to share something with people.

Why Is Multi-Year Consistency Required for Fintech Startups to Secure Bank Partnerships?

I know the grit it takes with big, slow banks from my own side, because I sell to them too, now at Mulai. It definitely takes time, and you have to be consistent, because banks like consistency. Maybe you don’t win in the first year. Sometimes a bank’s licensing cycle is three years, so three years later they come back and look, and you are still doing the same thing. That is great material for them when they look at a potential partner to work with.

So when I’m testing whether a technical founder has the grit to close hard deals with big banks, consistency is what I’m looking for. One founder worth checking out is Khaled from Dobin. His work is connecting people to their business banking, with multiple business banks in one application. It’s not easy to get data from banks, and he has been doing it very well.

Why Should Fintech Founders Disclose Previous Product Failures and Pivots to Investors?

Some founders have admitted failure to me, and I very, very much welcome it when people share that, because failure is a receipt for success.

So if you’re a founder heading into a raise this year, the product that didn’t work or the pivot that cost you a year belongs in the conversation with an investor like me, right next to your profit and your retention numbers, because I’d much rather hear it from you.

FAQs

About the Author

Tommy Hartono is an angel investor building Mulai, which makes anti-money laundering and fraud prevention tools for fintechs and banks in Southeast Asia. He was the founding APAC business development manager at Flagright (YC W22), an AML compliance and fraud detection startup. Before that, he worked in business development at Tookitaki, an end-to-end AML operating system. He’s a programmer by background and a certified Microsoft Professional, and he previously founded and led Scrapiro, a decentralized recycling platform.

The post What I Check Before Funding a Fintech Startup appeared first on BYVI.

Running out of money is almost never what kills a company. It is the last thing that happens, the visible end of a failure that set in months earlier, when no one was tracking the burn.

CB Insights read more than 400 startup post-mortems and found ‘ran out of capital’ in 70% of them – a figure most founders mistake for a cause when it only marks the time of death.

Your board’s fix for this is a full-time CFO, hired under deadline pressure for a job you cannot still describe. The collapse behind that number belongs to companies where everyone was still looking in the rearview mirror.

Key Takeaways

What Are the Risks of Reflexively Hiring a Full-Time CFO for Startups?

Start with what actually happens when you follow the standard advice.

You post the role. You interview a lot of candidates. Weeks turn into months. Even for nonexecutive roles, SHRM’s benchmarking puts the median time-to-fill at 39 calendar days. Executive searches run longer and cost more. All that time, the board is still waiting on the reporting that started the conversation.

Then you land someone, and the real commitment starts. In May 2025, U.S. financial managers earned a mean annual wage of $186,910. A true CFO sits well above that line. Benefits alone make up about 30% of total compensation costs. Then there’s bonus. Then equity, which you cannot take back.

Now the question I’d push you on. What kind of CFO do you actually need?

How Can Startups Match Fractional CFO Expertise to Specific Financial Problems?

Do you need an operational CFO who builds systems and controls? A strategic CFO already thinking about the next round? Someone with M&A experience? Due diligence? AI? Most founders six weeks after a raise can’t answer that with confidence. That’s normal. You’ve never been at this stage before.

And the honest answer keeps changing. The company that just closed and needs clean reporting is a different company from the one looking at an acquisition 18 months later. A full-time hire locks in one profile. A fractional CFO lets you adjust accordingly.

The turnaround is short. You could literally have someone start next week. The arrangement flexes with the workload. And you are not married to this individual. Worst case, you swap them for a fractional CFO with a different specialty. Best case, they know exactly what’s required to reach your next milestone, and they take you there.

What Core Value Does a Fractional CFO Provide to Tech Startups?

I like to break value into simple pieces. Founders don’t have time for abstractions.

What you are gaining is certainty, financial discipline, and direction.

Financial discipline is risk mitigation. That’s the defense side of things. Covenants tracked. Controls in place. Payroll, taxes, and the bank handled without drama.

Direction is the offense. Okay, what’s the game plan here? Where does the money go, and what does it need to produce by when?

This split also explains the gap between a bookkeeper and a CFO. Founders tend to misjudge that gap until it costs them. A bookkeeper manages your day-to-day transactions. A controller keeps the historical records tight. Both are looking in the rearview mirror. That’s the job, and you need it done well.

A CFO is looking ahead. They build a model on projections and forecasting. They give you a line of sight on burn versus runway. They show you the financial implications of the decisions you’re about to make, across every function in the business.

You need both views. But when a board member leans in with a question, they want to know where this is going and whether you can prove it.

What Are the Key Trigger Events for Hiring a Fractional CFO?

In my experience, founders realize they’ve outgrown their bookkeeper way too late. Almost every time, a specific event forces it. Here are the ones that should get your attention before the pain does.

Why Is a Priced Funding Round a Trigger for Hiring a Fractional CFO?

This one is non-negotiable in my view. Going into a priced round, you need a defensible model, clean unit economics, and a data room that holds up. Every assumption gets questioned. Margins. Hiring plan. The path to the next raise. A CFO has fielded those questions before and knows which ones a round turns on. A bookkeeper, through no fault of their own, has not.

How Does Market Uncertainty Trigger the Need for a Fractional CFO?

In stable markets, founders definitely have more leverage. Capital is easier to find, terms are friendlier, and mistakes get absorbed. In uncertain ones, you need solid financial instruments. Forecasting. Scenario planning. Real discipline around runway.

And be careful reading the headlines. U.S. startups raised more than $400 billion in the first half of 2026, more than any full year on record. But that money sits with a small number of companies and funds. Carta’s Q1 2026 data shows the gap. An AI foundational-model startup at Series A had a $300 million median valuation. A non-AI startup at the same stage came in at $55 million. So “strong market” depends heavily on which market you’re in. A CFO helps you build a plan around the one you actually compete in.

I spent over a decade at RBC before this work, including time in commercial markets. Lenders and investors run on numbers they can trust. When a company can’t produce them, the conversation gets harder fast.

How Do Board Reporting Requirements Trigger the Need for a Fractional CFO?

If you’ve raised money, the board expects reporting. And this is written into your documents. The NVCA’s model Investors’ Rights Agreement requires quarterly income statements, cash-flow statements, and balance sheets within 45 days of quarter-end. It also calls for an annual budget and business plan built month by month.

That second requirement is the one to notice. A monthly budget and forward plan is forecasting work. It’s exactly where a bookkeeper setup usually cracks, because you’re asking a historical function to answer forward-looking questions. If producing the package takes heroics the night before the meeting, that’s your signal.

Why Should Founder Bottlenecks Trigger the Hiring of a Fractional CFO?

A founder can carry a company to a certain milestone on instinct and hustle. After that point, your purpose should be to grow the company. Full stop.

If you’re the one rebuilding the model at midnight, reconciling numbers before a board call, and doing the runway math alone, you are the bottleneck. And that math matters. CB Insights studied more than 400 startup post-mortems and found “ran out of capital” in 70% of them. Their read, which matches what I see, is that running out of money is usually the last thing that happens. The real problem started earlier, when nobody had a clear line of sight on burn.

A fractional CFO becomes your sounding board. You make decisions collectively, as partners. I’ve been a founder myself, and I know how few people you can say the hard things to. Not your investors. Not your team. A financial partner who has seen this before, and who has no stake in you looking like you’re crushing it, is worth more than the reporting.

How Do Fractional CFOs Resolve Financial Control Crises in Startups?

Let me ground this in a real situation. Theory only matters if it holds under pressure.

We were introduced to an ad tech company because their CFO had left abruptly. Unfortunately, this happens more often than anyone likes to admit.

The departing CFO had not set up proper systems and controls. Access to financial information was restricted to that one person, so the team struggled to even see their own numbers. On top of that, the books were not up to date. There were discrepancies. The covenants were outdated. Tons of issues, all at once, with a bank relationship to manage.

We got a CFO in there within a couple of days.

What stuck with me was the tone. Calm prevailed. Cool heads. They looked at everything objectively and built a roadmap. Which deliverables were high priority? Which could wait? Then they worked the list. Books brought up to date. The bank brought back into the loop. Payroll and taxes confirmed. Every stakeholder who needed a call got one.

The beauty of a fractional CFO in a moment like that is the contributions are immediate. They’ve been there, done that. Onboarding is pretty much not applicable.

There’s a lesson in the controls piece too. ACFE’s 2024 fraud study found that 32% of cases involved a lack of internal controls, and another 19% involved someone overriding controls that existed. Nothing suggested fraud at that company. But when one person holds every key, you have a control gap, and control gaps are where problems hide. That’s the defense side. Discipline first. Then direction.

Under What Circumstances Should Startups Avoid Hiring a Fractional CFO?

I run a business that places fractional CFOs. You’d expect me to say everyone needs one. I don’t believe that. The model has a right time and a wrong time.

Why Should Early-Stage Startups Rely on Bookkeepers Instead of Fractional CFOs?

A bookkeeper manages your day-to-day transactions. That is the role. At a certain stage, that is the whole need. Say you’re very early. No raise on the horizon, no board reporting, and a burn rate you can see clearly on one spreadsheet. Don’t pay for forecasting horsepower you won’t use still.

Just keep the triggers in view. The mistake I see runs almost entirely in one direction. Founders wait until the priced round is already in motion or the board has lost patience. Then they’re hiring under pressure, and pressure makes for bad hires.

When Do Startups Outgrow a Fractional CFO and Need a Full-Time Hire?

This is the part people miss. Full-time CFOs are the right answer for plenty of companies. My issue is with hiring one hastily.

At The CFO Centre, what we recommend is building your finance function top-down. Put strategic leadership in first. Get the model and the discipline in place. Then build the layers underneath with a clear picture of what each one needs to do. A good fractional CFO knows what kind of full-time CFO your company will need next, and they help you get there. That’s part of the job.

So look for the real signals. The finance function has grown into a team. The complexity demands someone in the seat every day. Your fractional CFO is the one telling you it’s time. When you see those, hire full-time. You’ll be hiring for a role you can finally define. And you’ll have someone who understands it sitting beside you in the interviews.

Why Is Hiring a Fractional CFO Merely to Check a Board Box Ineffective?

Some founders hear “the board wants a CFO” and go looking for someone to produce a deck every quarter and otherwise stay out of the way. The fractional model can technically do that. You’ll get a fraction of the value.

The engagements that work are partnerships. The CFO has access to the information. They’re in the room for the big calls. You use them as a sounding board and decide together. If you’re not ready to open that door still, a CFO of any kind is going to disappoint you.

How Does a Fractional CFO Manage Post-Raise Startup Financial Obligations?

Here’s the reframe I’d offer any founder staring at a fresh cap table.

The headline says you won. What you actually signed up for is a new set of obligations. Covenants. Reporting deadlines. Milestones with dates attached. Capital that has to turn into something the board can measure.

That’s exactly when financial leadership matters most. But financial leadership and a full-time hire are two different decisions. You can have the first without committing to the second. You can hit your next milestone faster. And you can figure out what permanent role you truly need along the way.

Certainty, financial discipline, and direction. Defense and offense. Someone looking ahead while the bookkeeper looks in the rearview mirror.

Get that in place, and you’re free to do the one thing only you can do. Grow the company.

Planning For a Year Nobody Can Predict

Every founder I talk to right now has more on their mind than they did 2 years ago. AI is changing how teams get built, companies are rethinking how work gets done, and tariffs, trade deals, and geopolitics seem to shift every week. That’s probably how things will be for a while.

What I’ve seen work is pretty unglamorous: a few versions of the forecast, a clear sense of what you’d change if things go sideways, and a runway number you trust. The founders I work with who have that in place still feel the uncertainty, but they make decisions faster when things change. That’s a real edge right now, and it’s within reach for any founder willing to look ahead.

FAQs

About the Author

Randeep Purewal, MBA is the Regional Director for Toronto at The CFO Centre Canada – where she leads a team of experienced CFOs supporting growing and mid-market businesses through strategic financial leadership, M&A transactions, and innovative transformation while applying a variety of use cases and mandates. With a background spanning consulting, technology, banking and the future of work – Randeep is particularly interested in how emerging technologies such as AI are reshaping business models, job architecture, and the role of the modern finance function.

The post When Tech Founders Should Hire Fractional CFOs (and when not to) appeared first on BYVI.

One of the fall detectors at AGE-WELL this year was first built to find children left in hot cars.

Pontosense started in the automotive industry, where a top safety rating depends on a car detecting a child left alone in the back seat. Cameras can’t see through a car seat, and weight sensors can’t tell a child from a backpack, so the company built radar that can. CEO Alex Qi told AARP’s AgeTech Collaborative that partners in the car industry kept nudging the team toward AgeTech. Today the same sensor sits in the corner of a bedroom and picks up movements smaller than half a grain of salt.

The problem it’s chasing is serious. In 2022, 7,621 Canadians aged 65 and older died from falls, and falls caused 89% of injury-related hospitalizations in that age group, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada.

That’s the backdrop for the 2026 AGE-WELL Annual Conference, where researchers, founders, care providers, older adults and caregivers will spend 3 days on one question: how technology can help people age well wherever they live.

Below are the tech exhibitors I’d make time for, grouped by the problem they solve.

AgeTech startups catching falls before they turn into emergencies

Half of the companies on this list are working on the same problem from different angles: knowing the moment someone falls or gets up when they shouldn’t.

Pontosense: radar that spots a fall without a camera

Pontosense mounts a small radar sensor on the wall and turns what it detects into what Qi calls an anonymized “hologram” of the person in the room. A family member can open the app and see that dad is in the kitchen or mom just got out of bed, and they get an automatic call if someone falls.

There are no cameras, microphones or wearables, which matters most in bathrooms and bedrooms, the rooms where people least want to be watched. VHA Home HealthCare piloted the system for clients aging at home in Toronto, and the product won a 2025 Red Dot Design Award, where the company reported 99% fall detection accuracy.

The company’s release names the stakes: the “long lie,” when a senior stays on the floor undetected for hours, is often what leads to hospitalization. Pontosense is also a National Impact Challenge finalist, so you can watch it pitch on November 4.

Tochtech Technologies: a bed sensor for the night shift

Vancouver’s Tochtech makes Sleepsense, a non-contact sensor that sits under the foot of a bed and alerts staff when a resident gets up. Nighttime is when disorientation can send people living with dementia wandering, and care homes need to reach that resident without waking everyone else on the floor. The traction is real: Trellis Seniors chose Sleepsense for more than 430 long-term care beds across BC, and Fraser Health rolled it out in 3 long-term care homes with CAN Health Network. Tochtech also has deep AGE-WELL roots: it won the National Impact Challenge in 2020.

Toch Sleepsense trial in acute care setting overwhelmingly embraced by staff, clinicians and patients. Read how Sleepsense supported improved clinical decision making, improved staff efficiency and quality of life for patients https://t.co/l1Bhnyliac

— Tochtech Technologies (@Smarturns) April 16, 2025

Tenera Care: replacing the pull cord with a wearable

Tenera Care exists because Stewart Hardie’s stepmother fell 3 times in a single month in her long-term care home. She had early-onset dementia and couldn’t work the nurse call cord mounted on the bathroom wall. “You say it out loud and think you’re talking about 1960,” Hardie told Creative Destruction Lab. The Halifax-area company replaced the cord with a bracelet that tracks location to within about a foot and alerts staff when a resident gets out of bed.

Amptek Technologies: a smart cane people will actually use

Amptek has spent more than 20 years designing electronics for other companies in Richmond Hill, Ontario. Its own product is VICTOR, a 470-gram smart cane with GPS tracking, geofencing, AI fall detection, a panic button and a flashlight that switches on in the dark.

The cellular connection is free for the first year, then CAD $6 a month, and there’s no camera or microphone. The smart part is the form factor. Many older adults resist wearing an alert device, but a cane is something they already carry every time they walk, and Amptek’s own site notes that accepting a walking aid at all can be emotional.

Life Assist Advantage: a medical alert pendant designed by a paramedic

Tony Morelli spent 4 years as a primary care paramedic, including answering emergencies called in through other medical alert services. He founded Life Assist Advantage in Alberta in 2023 to fix what he saw on those calls. Each profile stores medical conditions, medications, allergies, mobility needs and home access details, so responders know them before they reach the door.

The pendant ($195) and smartwatch ($269) work anywhere with cell coverage, include fall detection at no extra cost, and offer safe zones for people living with dementia who may wander. Families pick family monitoring at $50 a month or 911 monitoring at $60, and all data stays on Canadian servers.

AgeTech for memory and brain health

These 2 companies focus on the brain, from daily routines with dementia to measuring how well the brain is holding up.

Idem: a smart clock and pill dispenser that help people with dementia stay on track

Montreal’s Eugeria launched Idem in 2024 to help people living with early dementia keep track of the time and day. The Idem Smart Clock speaks more than 10 languages and lets family members push medication reminders, appointments and digital sticky notes to the screen from anywhere. A lockable pill dispenser pairs with it and confirms each dose.

In a pilot with 50 seniors living with cognitive impairment in Quebec and Ontario, the clock helped people take their medication more consistently, and Idem is now being tested with home care teams through envisAGE. It’s a National Impact Challenge finalist too.

NERON AI: a vital sign for the brain

Toronto’s NERON AI runs a 10-minute tablet test that asks the brain to think and move at the same time, then turns the result into a Brain Score that can be tracked over time. The science comes from Lauren Sergio’s lab at York University, with 52 peer-reviewed papers behind it and more than 8,000 Brain Signatures collected so far.

“Early changes in brain performance can show up first in how people move,” Sergio said. That makes a quick, repeatable test useful for senior living communities that want to catch change early. NERON positions itself as a measurement tool with no diagnosis or labels, which the company says lets it deploy quickly across clinics, care homes and wellness programs.

AgeTech platforms that coordinate care at home

The third group builds the software layer: who shows up, when, and who knows what happened.

Tuktu Care: neighbours on demand

A milestone moment for Tuktu! Meet Kimberly, our first U.S. customer, sharing her fantastic experience with our on-demand care in San Diego. First experiences are always special, and we’re so grateful for hers! Thanks to Julie for leading the way! #TuktuUSA #InnovationInCare https://t.co/8p8pSz28ab

— Tuktu Care (@tuktu_care) December 10, 2024

“Think of it as Airbnb for care,” co-founder Komal Makkad told Castanet News. Tuktu matches families with vetted local helpers for rides, shopping, housekeeping, companionship and overnight care, using AI that weighs language, cultural background, personality and the task itself. Founder Rustam Sengupta built it after his own father was diagnosed with dementia.

By March, Tuktu had served more than 6,000 customers with over 300 providers in Canada, and more than 72% of users came back within the same month. Every provider passes a criminal background check and gives 2 local references. Tuktu launched in Vermont this year and is the third National Impact Challenge finalist on this list.

Thriving.ai: one app for the whole circle of care

Founder Shain Khoja built Thriving.ai around a simple idea she explained to the AgeTech Collaborative: “80% of our health is a result of social determinants of health.” The app brings doctors, nurses, family and paid caregivers into one place to share updates, check in on mood and track health data from wearables.

Caring for a parent often means updates scattered across family group chats, notes on the fridge and missed calls with the doctor’s office. When everyone works from the same record, a sibling in another city can see that mom skipped lunch, and the visiting nurse can learn about

ProveraCare: scheduling software for home care teams

ProveraCare builds for the agencies behind home care. Its platform suggests the best available caregiver for each open visit, verifies check-ins with location data, and gives personal support workers and nurses mobile tools for scheduling, chat and documentation, with HIPAA and PIPEDA compliance built in.

Home care runs on visits, and when one goes unfilled, someone at home waits. Software that fills shifts faster helps both the agency and the client. The company also lists a new product, Pearl, as pre-launch, so the booth is a good place to ask what’s coming.

Canada’s AgeTech companies are being built by people who sat in the ambulance, the care home hallway and the family waiting room. They know a product only works if older adults keep using it, and that focus is turning into real contracts with care homes, health authorities and families.

If you’re in Ottawa next week, stop by these booths and ask each founder what they learned from their first 10 customers. You’ll get a better education in this market than any report can give you.

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is the Editor in Chief at BYVI, founder-driven media that spotlights early-stage startups at the moment most press skips, when coverage can actually open doors. She’s also a content engineer who builds in-house growth engines and trains AI agents that help companies scale content and win brand visibility across traditional and AI search. Previously, she co-founded DeckLinks, which gave her firsthand experience building and scaling tech products.

The post 10 AgeTech Startups to Meet at the 2026 AGE-WELL Conference appeared first on BYVI.

One night, thieves stole a 40-foot shipping container of Belgian Boys pancakes. Sitting next to it was a container full of lobsters.

“They took the wrong one,” Anouck Gotlib told me, laughing. “Can you imagine?”

It’s funny now. At the time, the missing container held so much product and so much money that it almost destroyed the company. “How can a 40-foot container just disappear?” she said. “It did.”

Anouck, the CEO of Belgian Boys, has stopped counting moments like that. “The amount of near-death experiences we had as a company, I stopped counting,” she said. Running out of cash, supply chain problems, manufacturing problems: “You name it, we’ve gone through it.”

Belgian Boys is still here. Its mini pancakes, waffles and crêpes are sold in more than 12,000 stores, including Target, Walmart, Costco, Kroger, Publix and Wegmans. Its first seasonal flavor sold more than the team could supply this fall, and Anouck thinks its newest product is a bestseller.

I met Anouck at the 2026 NFRA Convention in National Harbor, Maryland, where frozen and refrigerated food brands meet the retailers who stock them.

I asked her what keeps a food brand alive past the 10-year mark, when so many don’t make it. She started with a line she admits might be a cliché: what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Then she explained how she and Greg actually survive the hard weeks, and it’s a playbook any founder can borrow.

How Belgian Boys started with a craving

Greg Galel went to college in the U.S., and he brought Belgium with him: waffles, pancakes and cookies, packed for himself. His dorm friends kept asking the same question. “Oh my God, Greg, this is so good. Where can I buy it?” Anouck recalled.

They couldn’t buy it anywhere. So Greg and his childhood friend Joel Davidovici (known to fans as “Chubby” and “Skinny”) created their own line of the Belgian treats they missed from home.

Anouck’s path in was less planned. She grew up in Belgium, studied fashion design and came to New York for a fashion internship, living what she described as a Devil Wears Prada life on 7th Avenue. On a flight from Brussels to New York, she met Greg. They got married and had 3 sons, the original “Belgian Boys.”

She started by designing the brand’s packaging as a side project, then became CEO in 2019. Greg still dreams up the products. Anouck runs the company.

Why Belgian Boys bet on the fridge over the freezer

One early decision shaped everything that followed. In Belgium, ready-made pancakes and crêpes are sold chilled, so Belgian Boys pushed U.S. retailers to stock its breakfast in the refrigerated aisle instead of the freezer. Buyers said no for years.

Then Costco agreed to test the mini pancakes in its refrigerated section, and sales moved 5 times faster.

At Target, stores that put Belgian Boys breakfast items in the fridge saw 300% to 500% higher sales velocity than stores that kept them frozen. Walmart started with fresh crêpes in just 65 stores, a rollout Anouck called a “logistical nightmare,” and Belgian Boys grew from there once it had worked out the supply chain.

The lesson for founders: the default placement in your category was set by someone else, often decades ago. If your customers behave differently, test small, collect the numbers and bring them back to the buyer who said no.

How Anouck Gotlib handles near-death moments

The container theft wasn’t the only crisis. When the pandemic hit, Belgian Boys lost clients while online orders spiked, and it had no warehouse to fill them. So Anouck and Greg rented a garage, bought an industrial freezer and shipped 10,000 orders over one summer with help from interns.

What changed most over the years is how Anouck reacts when something breaks. Early on, every problem felt final. “It was like, oh my God, the world’s gonna explode and we’re gonna die,” she said. “Everything’s gonna collapse. And you react in this stress.”

Now she slows down. “I’ve learned over the years to just take a step back, analyze the situation, think and then make a plan of action,” she told me. “Let’s go. We will figure this out, because at the end of the day, you will be okay. You will figure it out.”

Anouck describes 2 ways to handle a plan that falls apart.

“You can fight that wave and say, no, that’s how it should be, or just say, okay, let me ride the current wave that I just got.”

Anouck Gotlib, CEO at Belgian Boys

The second option often works out better, she said. “An unfortunate situation may result in you making adjustments and pivots to your business to actually strengthen it for the future.”

That takes pressure off, too. “There is a next step for everyone,” she said. “It might not be what you initially thought.”

She also leans on her co-founder. “We’re partners in business and partners in life,” she said, so their goals for the company and for their family are completely aligned. In the hard moments, they balance each other out and take turns being the rock.

How Pumpkin Spice turned a limited edition into new customers

This fall, Belgian Boys launched its first seasonal flavor: Pumpkin Spiced Bite-Sized Pancakes, 32 to a box for $6.99, on shelves from mid-August through October at retailers including Target, Aldi, H-E-B and Wegmans.

It went a little too well. “We oversold on the commitment,” Anouck said. Some customers sent purchase orders, and the team had to tell them the product was gone.

The bigger win is who’s buying. Anouck told me that about 80% of shoppers buying its seasonal launches were new to Belgian Boys. The company calls these limited editions “drops.” Before Pumpkin Spice, it ran Love Bites (heart-shaped pancakes for Valentine’s Day) and Game Day Crêpes, and both brought in a significant number of first-time buyers. A familiar seasonal flavor gives a shopper who’s never heard of you an easy reason to try you.

Starbucks proved how far this can go. The Pumpkin Spice Latte started in 2003 as a test in about 100 stores and became the company’s most successful seasonal drink, with hundreds of millions sold.

Why mom is the hero at Belgian Boys

Anouck knows her customer because she is her customer. She describes the morning rush most parents know: “Where’s the shoe? Where’s the homework?” With a hundred things to do, breakfast should be the easy part. It should be quick, convenient and delicious, ideally leaving a parent 5 minutes to sit down with a coffee while everyone eats. “That’s a successful morning,” she said.

Taste comes first:

“We always say mom’s the hero,” she added. Belgian Boys sees its job as helping her.

The newest product follows the same thinking. Belgian Boys launched bite-sized mini waffles this year, and the team took its time getting the size, look and taste exactly right. “They are the cutest thing and they are delicious,” Anouck said. After only a few weeks of data, she’s calling it. “12 years into our business, I feel like we just launched a bestseller.”

5 lessons from Belgian Boys for early-stage founders

Belgian Boys has spent more than a decade being knocked off course and finding a better route each time. And it’s already planning new products for 2027.

Every founder will face their own stolen container. The ones who last take a breath, find the next step and keep making something people can’t wait to have again.

About the Author

Assel Beglinova writes about ecommerce and DTC trends, growth strategy for consumer brands, and how sellers fund their expansion and manage cash flow as they scale. Her work covers the financing questions every consumer brand founder runs into, from revenue-based financing to inventory planning to keeping enough working capital on hand to act on growth opportunities. Assel is the CEO and co-founder of Paperstack, a platform that provides working capital for consumer brands.

The post Belgian Boys: From a Dorm Room Craving to 12,000 Stores appeared first on BYVI.

Tony Rabinovitch has worked in his family’s food business since he was a kid, so I asked him the obvious question: what’s it like spending 24 hours a day with your family?

“I say it wasn’t 24, it was 25, because I woke up an hour earlier.”

Tony Rabinovitch

The Rabinovitch family arrived in Toronto from Ukraine in 1993 and started making perogies 2 years later, for a single deli. Today Tony runs that business, Pelmen Foods, and it carries 3 brands: Pelmen in Canada, Holy Perogy! in the U.S. and Big Yum, which takes the family’s dumpling know-how into mainstream frozen snacks. Tony also gets 2 or 3 acquisition offers a week, and he deletes them.

“Fortunately or unfortunately, I don’t have any other experience,” he told me. “Everything that I know in this space, I learned on the job.”

How Pelmen Foods started with $300 and one deli

The business began as a favor to a friend. In January 1995, Tony’s father, Jeff, put down a $300 deposit on a pasta roller, a dough mixer and a small freezer chest. A family friend had been making perogies for a local deli and needed someone to cover the orders for a couple of months while she was away in Israel. She never came back for the business, Tony later told Canadian Packaging, so the family kept going, first with her recipes and then with their own.

Jeff was an electrical engineer who had spent years repairing bakery equipment, and he was between jobs. The first kitchen was a small apartment in Toronto’s north end, where Tony pinched dough next to his parents, his sister and his grandparents.

The family never wrote a business plan. They had one customer, a recipe and every reason to make it work.

“We joked about it the other day,” Tony said:

“The best business plan we ever had was not having a business plan, rather than actually just doing it, getting your hands dirty and actually doing the hard work.”

He started college because that’s what immigrant parents expect, switched to night school, then dropped out. “I said, I have a real business career that I can grow.”

That apprenticeship paid off when the company scaled. In his 2012 interview with Canadian Packaging, Tony walks through the new production line machine by machine, down to the freezer times. Few founders know their operations that well, and it makes every hiring and buying decision sharper.

Working with family: the 25-hour day

Those 25-hour days came with an upside: focus. “When you’re in it together as a family, there’s kind of no way out, and you have to make it work,” he said.

When I told him it sounded like having all your eggs in one basket, he agreed right away: “A hundred percent, as a team. There was no fallback if the business failed. Everyone’s savings sit in the same basket, so nobody drifts off to a side project.”

The hard part came when the company needed to grow. Tony took the lead on investing money the family had earned from the business, and that scared everyone, including him. He and his father disagreed about how things should be done. His advice to anyone building with family is this:

“If you feel that you’re at a breaking point where it’s either my way or the highway, the highway can be scary, because then you’re losing a family, not just a partner or a friend.”

The same weight also pushed him forward. “Your entire family, not just your staff and employees, but also your extended family, depends on you,” he said. “It doesn’t make it easy, but it definitely pushes you harder.”

Why Pelmen Foods left the deli shelf in 2010

For about 15 years, Pelmen sold mostly to Russian and Eastern European delis. In 2010, the family decided that shelf was too small. The company moved into a new 15,000-square-foot facility in Toronto’s west end, bought new equipment and went after national grocery chains, according to Canadian Packaging.

The boldest change was the bag. Frozen perogies traditionally came in clear plastic, and Tony wanted packaging that looked like a brand. Pelmen switched to a printed, resealable bag in 9 colors. Some long-time customers disliked the new look, and the company lost a few of them. Stores welcomed it, and Pelmen landed on the shelves of Pusateri’s Fine Foods, one of Toronto’s upscale grocers.

“It hurts to lose a few long-time customers,” Tony told Canadian Packaging in 2012. He made the trade anyway, and he priced for it. Pelmen’s perogies were 60% filling and 40% dough, which Tony said was the reverse of the industry average and supported a premium price.

How Holy Perogy! and Big Yum take one kitchen to new customers

Pelmen is the family’s Canadian legacy brand. For the U.S., Tony launched a separate brand with its own name and look: Holy Perogy!. The Nibble named it a Top Pick of the Week in 2022 and noted that the family chose the Ukrainian spelling, “perogy,” on purpose.

Next, Tony wanted to move beyond perogies, and that needed a brand of its own. He describes Big Yum as engineered from scratch. “It was meant to appeal to your typical all-American consumer,” he said.

Big Yum’s lineup includes Crispy Breakfast Bites (egg, cheddar and bacon in a crispy shell that goes into the air fryer for 8 to 10 minutes), Asian-inspired Mini Dumpling Bites and Crispy Pie Bites.

Tony described the dumplings to Frozen & Refrigerated Buyer as “ethnic for the masses, not the ethnic market.” The magazine noted that the 5 dumpling flavors, including Kimchi Pork and Sweet Miso Vegetable, don’t duplicate what’s already on shelves.

The plan is for Big Yum to keep growing as an umbrella brand. “At some point you might see Big Yum cookies,” Tony said, with more categories to follow.

He’s on a well-proven path. Hamdi Ulukaya grew up on a dairy farm in eastern Turkey and, in 2005, bought a 100-year-old yogurt factory in upstate New York with loans of less than $1 million. His goal, NBC News reported, was to bring the yogurt of his childhood to everyday shoppers. Chobani launched in 2007, and by Ulukaya’s count it was a $1 billion business 5 years later. Greek yogurt went from almost no U.S. sales to more than a third of the yogurt Americans eat.

Why immigrant founders are built for this

Tony never had a backup plan. “It was just kind of an unspoken rule in our family,” he said. “I saw what they had to go through to make a good living for themselves, for us as kids. It was second nature. You don’t think about it, you just do it.”

I’m an immigrant too, and I recognized that instinct right away. Moving countries teaches you to be resourceful and to make decisions with limited information, which describes most of a founder’s week.

Why Tony deletes 2 to 3 acquisition offers a week

When I asked which company Tony looks up to, he said he doesn’t have one, since every company has its own story. His goals are concrete: make good-quality food, take care of his employees and the community, and provide for his family, including his future grandkids and great-grandkids.

6 lessons from 3 decades of building Pelmen Foods

Most founders reading this start with more than the Rabinovitch family had in 1995: more money, more connections and a lot more software. What carried Pelmen was simpler: doing every job, making the hard calls together and reinvesting in the product.

Used equipment, a family that wouldn’t quit and 30 years of steady reinvestment add up to a company buyers email every week. Tony’s answer is to keep cooking.

About the Author

Assel Beglinova writes about ecommerce and DTC trends, growth strategy for consumer brands, and how sellers fund their expansion and manage cash flow as they scale. Her work covers the financing questions every consumer brand founder runs into, from revenue-based financing to inventory planning to keeping enough working capital on hand to act on growth opportunities. Assel is the CEO and co-founder of Paperstack, a platform that provides working capital for consumer brands.

The post The 25-Hour Day: How One Family Grew Pelmen Foods Into 3 Brands appeared first on BYVI.

Make a group chat. Add 3 bots. Name one of them Senior Product Engineer and leave the other 2 as normal junior engineers. Then give them something to build.

The senior bot actually starts ordering the juniors around. “No, that doesn’t look right. Correct that.” “There might be a bug over there, have a look.” The same back-and-forth you’d see on a real team, except nobody in the chat is a person.

That’s Grok Bot, and it’s why I think it’s going to win. There’s no config file and no terminal. You just message your agents like you’d message a friend, and from the very get-go you understand how it works. The whole app functions like a chat app.

Ottawa, Saturday night, bring your laptop

On Saturday, October 17, SpaceXAI is bringing the Grok Bot Meetup to Ottawa, and Builders Collective Ottawa is co-hosting it. We’ll be at the Impact Hub Ottawa from 6 to 10 PM. You’ll get a Grok Bot 101, live demos, a showcase of what local builders have made with it, and real time to meet people. Everyone gets free Grok Bot credits, and there’s food and drinks.

I love that mix. Racing engineers, AI people, CS students and business-tech students all hit the same problem with agents: setting them up eats the time you wanted to spend building. Saturday is about skipping that part. You don’t need any Grok Bot experience. Just bring your laptop.

Ottawa isn’t the first to do this. In September, SpaceXAI ran Grok Bot build nights at UC Davis and Iowa State. Now it’s our turn. Space is limited and hosts approve every registration, so request to join on Luma early.

The agent race got crowded fast

A few months ago, if you wanted an AI agent that actually did work for you, your options looked very different.

Grok Bot launched in beta on August 11. Each Bot is a teammate with a computer in the cloud. It signs into the tools you already use, works across your apps and inbox, and only comes back when something needs your approval. You can close your laptop and it keeps going.

Introducing Grok Bot, now in early beta. Bots are AI teammates that do real work for you. They sign in to your tools, use them just like you do, and come back with finished work. https://t.co/uyfA97yo98

— Grok Bot (@bot) August 11, 2026

Before that, the main option people around me used was Hermes Agent, the open-source agent from Nous Research. It’s powerful, and it’s free to run on your own server. But you’re configuring it yourself: installing from the terminal, picking your model provider with one command, setting up tools with another, then starting a separate messaging gateway before you can even text it on Telegram or Slack. If you love tinkering, great. For most people, it’s just not intuitive.

Then OpenAI came in with Dots, announced September 29. Dots are capable too: each one gets a cloud computer and can connect to over 4,000 apps. But right now you get 1 primary dot, and OpenAI says it envisions teams of dots “over time.”

So everyone has the cloud computer now. What actually separates these products is how fast a normal person goes from download to getting something done.

4 reasons I think Grok Bot wins

This is what I’ll be talking about on Saturday. Each one comes with a real team using it.

1. You can make way more bots.

With Dots, you get 1 agent today, and more are coming later. With Grok Bot, you build a roster of named Bots, each with its own job, and I haven’t seen a published cap on how many you can make. (The docs do say to start with the smallest team that gets the job done, which is fair.)

SpaceXAI’s own teams run a chief-of-staff Bot on top, with a specialist for each lane: inbox, expenses, recruiting, bug fixes. One of their engineering Bots reproduces a bug in the product, files the ticket and hands the fix to a separate debugging Bot.

2. It’s just a chat app, and this is the big one.

If I had to pick one reason Grok Bot wins, it’s how easy and intuitive it is. You message your Bot from your phone or laptop and say something like, “Hey, can you check this out?” Once your tools are connected, it handles it.

SpaceXAI’s launch post makes the same point: other tools make you build workflows first, while Grok Bot just takes the task. One person on their team said it was “just like bringing on a coworker.” Inside SpaceXAI, an ops Bot seats new hires and processes invoices that land in Gmail. That’s exactly the kind of job a founder ends up doing at midnight.

3. Your bots work off each other in group chats.

You can put 2 to 6 Bots in a group chat and they pass work between themselves. Tag a Bot with @ when it owns the task, or just write normally and let the group decide who answers.

That’s how the senior and junior engineer setup works: one Bot oversees and corrects, the others build. SpaceXAI uses the same idea at a much bigger scale. Its Engineering Team Bot steered hundreds of Cursor cloud agents and helped a 5-person team ship more than 100 pull requests a day.

4. Team Bots let your whole team share one.

On September 28, SpaceXAI launched Team Bots in public beta on Teams and Enterprise plans. Instead of everyone building their own, your team shares one Bot that already has the right files, apps, credentials and memory.

Introducing Team Bots, shared AI teammates that learn as your team works with them. Give your Team Bot the skills, plugins, and credentials it needs for its role, then work with it in Slack or Grok Bot. https://t.co/73RrG4xpaU

— Grok Bot (@bot) September 28, 2026

Everyone’s conversations with it stay private, and it gets its own Slack handle so you can drop it into a channel. Harper, an insurance company for small businesses, built a Team Bot in 24 hours to track down customers whose policies had lapsed and get them covered again, saving those customers over $120,000.

Connecting your tools (and the fine print)

The cleanest way to hook up your tools is through connectors, which you add as plugins from Connect apps. And if a tool doesn’t have one, or there’s no official way in like MCP, you can just tell the Bot to log in for you and it works in the browser. For startups running on random niche tools, that fallback is huge.

The login part is handled pretty well. When the Bot hits a password, a two-factor code or a CAPTCHA, it hands you control of its computer. You type it in yourself, and the session stays signed in so you’re not doing it every time. For supported connections there’s a secure field where your secret is masked and never shows up in the chat. So the Bot keeps working with your accounts, but your password doesn’t end up sitting in your chat history.

To be fair, OpenAI says dots can also use saved passwords without exposing them to the model. Keeping credentials safe is becoming the baseline, which is good for everyone.

Now the honest part. All the Bots on your account share one cloud computer, including its files and sign-ins, and xAI’s own FAQ says not to treat separate Bots as a security boundary. If one Bot shouldn’t have a login, don’t put it on that computer. Set “Ask first” rules for anything that sends, publishes, deletes or buys. It’s also still a beta, so you’ll hit rough edges. My advice: start with low-risk jobs and give your Bots more access as you start trusting them.

From internal prototype to your laptop on Saturday

Grok Bot started as an internal prototype at SpaceXAI. Teams across the company were using it for sales outreach, marketing campaigns, office operations and bug fixes before it ever launched. Nobody had to learn a new tool. It was a chat window, so people just started using it.

That’s the experience I want Ottawa to have on Saturday. If you’re in town, request your spot and come build with us. Bring your laptop and one task you hate doing every week. You’ll leave with free credits, a few Bots working on that task and a room full of people building the same way.

If you’re not in Ottawa, download Grok Bot and give one Bot one clear job this week. Then make a second one and put them in a group chat together. You’ll get where work is heading way faster than any article can explain it.

The builders who figure out how to run a team of bots this year are going to be the ones hiring their first humans next year. I want a lot of them to come from Ottawa.

About the Author

Qurb E Muhammad Syed is a fourth-year Software Engineering student at Carleton University, SpaceXAI Ambassador and co-founder of Builders Collective Ottawa. He builds and ships software, from AI agents to automation tools and products for Canadian university students. As co-founder and engineering lead of BCO, he runs the co-hacks and events that bring the city’s builders into the same room. He started BCO to give Ottawa a place where people who make things can find each other, work side by side, and ship together. Today that community is over 400 builders strong.

The post Why I Think Grok Bot Wins and Why We’re Bringing It to Ottawa appeared first on BYVI.

The most generous recommendation you ever gave is, right now, working against you. The place closed months ago, and your guide keeps sending strangers to a locked door, each one quietly deciding your taste can no longer be trusted.

Almost none of them will say a word. They just trust you a little less, and the one asset you can’t rebuild drains away at a rate no dashboard will ever show you.

What people actually buy from you is the belief that your judgment still holds – 64% of consumers engage most with reviews they trust as genuine. A guide frozen on the day you published it slowly makes a liar out of you.

Key Takeaways

Why Should Travel Creators Stop Doing Free Travel Agent Work in Direct Messages?

Look at where your saves and DMs cluster. “Where did you eat.” “Which route did you take.” “Is that hotel worth it.” That is demand. Real, proven demand. People are telling you exactly what they would pay for.

But answered one at a time in DMs, that demand disappears. Each reply is a tiny planning session paid for with your time. The follower gets a plan. You get a heart emoji. The recommendation lands in their camera roll, where it earns you nothing.

And this is real work with a real price tag. U.S. travel agents earned a median annual wage of $50,160 in 2025, much of it from commissions and service fees. You do the same job in your DMs. You just skipped the part where you get paid.

The timing makes it worse. A post went up, blew up, went viral, but died in a day. The DMs never end. American Express found that 54% of travelers plan major trips three to six months ahead. So the person asking about your hotel in month six is completely normal. And you are answering her for free, again.

Count it for one week. Every planning DM you answer, one tick mark. By Sunday you will know exactly how much unpaid travel agent work you are doing.

Why Must Travel Creators Run ROI Tests on Software Subscriptions and Digital Storefronts?

This one really gets me, because it is so backwards.

A creator with 20,000 followers is often paying $29 a month for Stan Store, plus Linktree, plus a stack of editing tools. During our Georgetown Ventures cohort this year, I sat down with a young travel creator. She was about to drop $200 on a landing page. It wouldn’t even do half of what she needed. All of this before she had made a single dollar.

I won’t tell you to cancel this tool or that one. Instead, ask one honest question about every line on your card statement. Is this tool actually making me money back? Or is it just keeping the lights on?

Most of what creators pay for are storefronts. They hold your stock, they don’t earn for you. Nobody discovers you through a link-in-bio page. It waits for traffic you have to bring yourself. And it bills you whether or not anyone shows up.

The numbers make this urgent. The median creator makes around $3,800 a year, usually from very limited channels, and the creators we’ve talked to are living exactly that reality. Linktree’s own report found that 68% of part-time creators made less than $1,000 a year from creator work. You cannot ask that person to pay a stack of subscriptions before she earns a penny. The math just doesn’t work.

Let me show you. Paid month to month, that Stan Store plan runs $348 a year. Against $3,800 in income, that is close to a tenth of everything you make, spent on a shelf. 

So here is the shift. Stop paying to own tools, and only pay for what actually pays you back. Hold that thought, because I am going to complicate it in Step 5.

Why Should Travel Creators Build Dynamic Digital Travel Guides Instead of Static PDFs?

Back to that creator from Georgetown Ventures. She had the right instinct. She built an entire travel guide in Notion and sold it for around $50 or $60 a copy. Her taste, packaged and priced.

Then she told me the thing that got me.

A restaurant on her guide had closed permanently. She had no way to tell the people who had already bought it. Some of them came back to her. Your Notion isn’t legit, it’s not updated, this is old information. She felt awful. Guilty. She had personally recommended that place. That is why they trusted her. They showed up, and it was gone.

Meanwhile her guide was still out there, still selling, slowly going wrong. She couldn’t fix it. And she was still answering “is this place still open, do you still recommend it” in her DMs. Months later. For free.

How Do Outdated Static Travel Guides Cause Travel Creators to Lose Audience Trust?

Everybody worries about the big public blowup. What I heard was quieter. Honestly, it stuck with me more. It’s a trust leaking out one bad recommendation at a time.

When a buyer shows up to a closed restaurant, most of them never complain. They just trust her a little less next time. And she has no idea it is happening. She can’t check every place every day on a PDF. She can’t push a fix into every copy she already sold.

I’ll be careful here. We are still digging into how common this is in our creator interviews, and I don’t want to overclaim. But we have heard it enough times that I stopped treating it as a fluke.

What Are the Benefits of Selling Dynamic Digital Travel Itineraries for Content Creators?

That is when it clicked for me. Taste was never the problem. She had the taste, the beautiful experiences, the audience, all of it. She just had no way to keep any of it alive.

So if you are going to sell your itineraries, and you should, sell something that lives. Put your guide at a link, connected to the posts that made people want it, with your places on a map. When a restaurant closes, you fix it once. Every buyer sees the fix. Your guide stays right. Your name stays trusted.

One more thing. It should stay visibly yours. Your words, your photos, your opinions. Let AI organize your recommendations and keep them current, but your voice is what people are paying for. Sprout Social found that 64% of consumers engage most with genuine, unbiased influencer reviews. The organizing can be automated. The taste has to be you.

How Can Travel Creators Earn Recurring Commission Income From Direct Itinerary Bookings?

This is the “get paid to travel” part, and it is simpler than people think.

Your followers are going to book that hotel anyway. They are going to book that tour anyway. The only question is whether your name is attached to the booking. For most creators, it isn’t. They watch your Reel, screenshot your DM, open a booking site, and the commission goes to nobody.

And the demand is bigger than most creators realize. Expedia’s 2025 Traveler Value Index found that 61% of travelers now find trip ideas on social media, up from 35% in 2022. And 73% say an influencer’s recommendation influenced a booking. Those travelers are already in your DMs. They just can’t book through you.

When your recommendations live on a map with booking built in, the flow changes. Your follower reads your guide. She taps the hotel you actually stayed at. She books it right there. You earn from that booking. Nothing changes for her. Everything changes for you, because you have stopped doing free travel agent work.

This is exactly why we built Nowy the way we did. It’s free for the creator. We only make money when she does, when a traveler books through her map with partners like Priceline and Viator. If she doesn’t earn, we don’t earn. The risk comes off her and onto us. And more than 20,000 travelers already use Nowy to plan trips. Your recommendations land in front of people deciding where to go.

Think about trips you have already taken. Every post in your back catalogue becomes inventory. A place on a map that can earn while you are at your day job. For a part-time creator, this is what getting paid to travel actually looks like. The last trip helps pay for the next one.

Why Should Travel Creators Invest in Tools That Build Audience Ownership and Data Control?

Now, an honest correction. Someone once pushed back on my “only pay for what pays you back” line, and they were right. I said it a little too absolutely.

Not every upfront cost is a waste. Some are exactly what you should be spending on, even before they pay off. For me, the real line is a different one. Does this expense make me more dependent on someone else’s platform? Or does it make me own more of my business? Those are two completely different things.

The best example is an email list. Absolutely invest in one, even before it pays off. On Instagram, a page your size reaches about 5.5% of its followers per post. Email open rates average just under 40%. Your own list reaches roughly seven times as many of your people. No algorithm can take it from you. That is owning your audience instead of renting it. Totally worth paying for, right? The math works.

Same idea with data. If a tool shows you what is converting and what your audience actually books, that is control over your own business. Worth every dollar.

That is also how I think about our own paid tier. Nowy is free to start. Anything you would ever pay us for should pass the same test. Does it make you own more, or see more? If it only keeps the lights on, don’t pay for it.

What Is the Complete Monetization Playbook for Travel Content Creators Using Nowy?

When I was a kid in Guangzhou, my father said the same three words before every trip. “Now we go.” That is where Nowy‘s name comes from. It is the feeling right before a trip, when everything is possible. Your followers feel that when they watch your Reels. That is what they are trying to buy from you.

So here is the whole playbook. Notice where you are doing free travel agent work. Run the ROI test on your tool stack and cut what only holds stock. Package your taste into a guide that lives and updates. Route the bookings back to you. Spend real money only where it makes you own more.

You already have the taste, the trips, and the audience. Keep it alive, and let the value come back to you.

Then go take the next trip.

FAQs

About the author

Branda Fan is the Founder and CEO of NOWY, an AI travel platform that turns the travel content people save on social media into personalized, bookable itineraries. NOWY is backed by TEDCO and part of the Google for Startups Cloud Program. As a seasoned technology entrepreneur, Branda is also the Principal of Data Pacific, a consulting firm specializing in data analytics and technology delivery for federally funded university research programs. Before founding her companies, she spent over a decade building technology for federal agencies, including as a Solutions Architect at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the General Services Administration. NOWY takes its name from her father’s three words before every trip: ‘Now we go.’

The post How to Get Paid to Travel and Monetize Your Itineraries appeared first on BYVI.

The fastest way to learn a new skill is to get in a room with people a few steps ahead and work through it together.

Ahrefs Evolve runs a full track of masterminds built for exactly that: small tables, capped at 9 people, one hour each of focused discussion. You bring a problem and get a straight answer from someone who’s already solved it. For a founder doing your own marketing, that’s the most productive time you’ll spend at the whole event.

I went through the agenda and picked the sessions you’ll act on the same week.

Copywriting Cardio: Learn to Write by Actually Writing with Harry Dry

Harry built Marketing Examples into one of the most widely read marketing newsletters by teaching copy in plain, concrete lessons instead of theory. This session is rounds of actual writing, not slides about writing.

At the early stage, you write all of it: the landing page, the homepage, the cold email. AI can draft, but it defaults to bland, and bland doesn’t convert. Learning to cut a paragraph to the one line that lands pays off everywhere: the same ad, email, and landing page convert better once the words are doing the work.

My favourite piece of writing advice. 2 minutes 54 seconds into the film “The French Dispatch” magazine editor, Arthur Howitzer Jr says to a staff writer: “Just try to make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose.” Most sentences are not written ‘on purpose’. They happen. They are what one ‘should’ write — which is, of course, what one should never ever write. “We’re excited to announce the future of photography” It sounds like writing, so let’s rewrite it. “The industry formerly known as ‘photography’ has ceased to exist.” If you ask Google how to write with purpose, you will be told platitudes like ‘define your goal’. My advice is a little less comforting. Be provocative. School taught me to not be provocative. Bill Bernbach taught me that in advertising, it is necessary. I start by writing down what everyone in said industry is doing or saying. Then I ask what piece can I break so it doesn’t sound like anything else. My reward is lots of bad ideas. But I’d rather bad ideas than boring ones. – ‘Refresh your thirst’ → ‘Murder your thirst’ (Liquid Death) – ‘Buy this jacket’ → ‘Don’t buy this jacket’ (Patagonia) – ‘Party game for friends’ → ‘… for horrible people’ (Cards Against Humanity) Any idiot can be provocative. We are looking for provocativeness that stems from the product. Like Bernbach said “You are NOT right if you stand a man on his head JUST to get attention. You ARE right if you have him on his head to show how your product keeps things from falling out of his pockets.” When he shrunk the Beetle to a thumbprint it’s because he wanted you to ‘think small’. When he wrote ‘ugly is only skin-deep’ it’s because he wanted to talk about the air-cooled engine. When he showed you only ¼ of the Beetle it’s because a ¼ of the money upfront is all you need. It ‘sounds like he wrote it that way on purpose.’ Because he did.

— Harry Dry (@harrydry) May 2, 2025

How to Break Through the Noise: Creating a Brand That Is Unforgettable with Alina Vandenberghe

Alina co-founded and bootstrapped Chili Piper into a category leader, growing it the lean way for years before raising. Her table is about building a brand that sticks without a big budget behind it.

AI is flooding every feed with competent, forgettable content. When everything sounds the same, a distinct brand becomes the moat. Founders who sound like themselves get remembered and repeated, and the rest dissolve into the model’s average. This is how you stay on the right side of that line.

How to Launch Your B2B Influencer Pilot with Brianna Doe

Brianna is founder and CEO of Verbatim and a top-50 LinkedIn creator worldwide, known for driving millions of impressions through B2B creator partnerships. Her session walks through launching a pilot you can actually measure.

Buyers trust people more than logos, and creators reach them where your ads can’t. You don’t need a huge budget to start, you need a pilot built so you can tell whether it worked.

The State of Reddit in the SERP & LLMs with Ross Simmonds

Ross is the founder of Foundation and Distribution.ai and the author of Create Once, Distribute Forever. This table digs into why Reddit keeps surfacing in both Google and LLM answers, and how to show up there on purpose.

AI answers lean hard on community sources, and Reddit sits near the top of that list. Earning a real presence in those threads, without getting flagged as spam, is becoming core distribution work. If you get it right, you will be inside the answer. But if you get it wrong, you will be invisible to the exact buyers asking about your category.

International SEO in an AI Search Era: What Has Changed and What Hasn’t with Aleyda Solis

Aleyda is the founder of Orainti and one of the most respected independent SEO consultants working today, known for shipping checklists rather than theory. This table covers what AI search changed for cross-border growth and what still holds.

If your customers span countries, AI search multiplies the complexity: different languages, different engines, even different answers in each market. If you know what actually moved, and what didn’t, it will save you from rebuilding a strategy that was working. Bring your top 2 markets and you’ll leave knowing what to fix now and what to leave alone.

Built for What’s Next: Hands-On AI Marketing Org Design with Tara Robertson

Tara Robertson, CMO at Bitly, runs this hour as a hands-on working session. She walks you through exercises to find real ways to embed AI across your team, map the new roles reshaping marketing, and pin down where AI unlocks both efficiency and growth.

Most marketing leaders know AI is reshaping their org, but few have sat down and done the work of figuring out what it means for their team. Here you do that work, then compare notes with peers on how AI-first orgs are being built right now and what’s actually unlocking results. You leave with real artifacts you can use and a clearer picture of what your own team needs to look like.

Off-Page SEO for AI Answers with Farzad Rashidi

Farzad runs Respona, an outreach platform for earning backlinks, and was Visme’s first marketing hire. This hands-on session is about engineering the off-site mentions and links that LLMs pull from when they answer.

AI answers cite sources, and those sources are mostly the sites that already get mentioned elsewhere. If your brand barely appears off your own domain, the model has nothing to quote. Learning to earn those mentions deliberately is the new link building, and it decides whether you exist in an answer at all.

Why I love attending masterminds

The keynotes will tell you where search is going. These masterminds are where you learn to do something about it. Everyone at Evolve is figuring out AI marketing, and the only difference is that some of them are a few months ahead and willing to show their work.

So show up ready. Bring the specific question you’re actually stuck on, the real one, not a super generic one, and bring a number or a screenshot from your own work so the person across the table has something real to work with. A vague “how do I do SEO for AI” gets you a vague answer. “Here’s my homepage and my last 3 months of traffic, what would you change first” gets you a plan.

The founders who will shape the next era of search are already in rooms like these, trading hard questions and working it out together.

That’s the quiet advantage of a small room: you leave with a next step you can take back to your team, and a reminder that you’re not figuring it out alone.

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is the Editor in Chief at BYVI, founder-driven media that spotlights early-stage startups at the moment most press skips, when coverage can actually open doors. She’s also a content engineer who builds in-house growth engines and trains AI agents that help companies scale content and win brand visibility across traditional and AI search. Previously, she co-founded DeckLinks, which gave her firsthand experience building and scaling tech products.

The post The Ahrefs Evolve Masterminds You’ll Act On the Same Week appeared first on BYVI.

Anthropic paused two perks in its Claude Startups program on October 9, 2026, three days after adding them. One was a free year of Claude Team with up to five Premium seats. The other was a one-time $1,000 Claude API credit. Its FAQ said the program had received hundreds of thousands of applications and was over capacity for those two offers. Anyone who already claimed an offer can keep using it. Anthropic also said it would re-review applications, which could change some applicants’ status.

Sarah Wolf, who handles startup marketing at Anthropic, said the acceptance criteria weren’t well calibrated and that companies that weren’t startups had been admitted.

We didn’t anticipate the demand for the Claude Startups program. In the first 48 hours of the program, we received 21x the number of applications compared to the last 5 months it’s been live. We let way too many people in this time, so we’ll need to pause on giving out the Team plan and API credits benefits. The other benefits (Startup Stack, Applied AI office hours/events) will remain. If you’ve already claimed the Claude offers, they’ll still remain in your account. We didn’t properly tune the acceptance criteria at the start, and many non-startups were accepted this time around. We’re fixing this now. We’re sending an email now to everybody who hasn’t claimed their benefits yet, and will re-verify those applications so we can keep Claude Startups for startups

— Sarah Wolf (@sarahzorah) October 9, 2026

Whether these offers come back or not, be very cautious with free credits from any big AI company. Read the fine print before you take them, especially what it says about your data and your experiments. The big companies aren’t giving away credits for nothing. They want something in return, and you need to figure out what their game is.

Why did Anthropic pause the Team plan and API credits

Anthropic’s posted Startup Program Official Terms, last updated on May 22, 2025, list possible factors for judging applications: business traction, investment and funding, and how a company integrates and uses Claude. So the criteria existed. A pile of hundreds of thousands of applications is the kind of data an AI company should be able to aggregate and filter. I don’t understand why they paused the offers over the volume. Isn’t filtering data exactly what AI is good for?

In my opinion, the non-startups Wolf mentioned were a bigger problem for Anthropic than the volume. Startups have the power of experimentation, and I believe big companies hand out free AI credits mainly to see what we’re experimenting with. A company that isn’t a startup doesn’t add much to that plan.

If these offers come back, I have a feeling the criteria will be much stricter. I expect them to favor tech startups that are disrupting something and building something innovative. Disruption is also how I tell a startup apart from a small business, which works in an existing market. I’d expect other AI companies to tighten their startup programs the same way.

How does the Anthropic Claude Startups program handle proprietary data

As tech founders, we have this mentality of experiments. That’s how we get through trial and error, and that’s how we learn from our failures faster than anyone else. So I would always look at the clause on how your data is going to be shared. What exactly from your experiments goes to the company? Can they use it to train their model? Watch out for this, as they could drop a feature down the road that will directly compete with your startup.

The competing-startup question is less far-fetched than it sounds. DeckLinks came out of BriefBid, the media marketplace I co-founded. Sellers there were looking for a feature to track their PDFs and proposals, so we built a platform for sharing and tracking PDFs. Your experiments show a provider what you need and what you’re building, the way our sellers showed us what they needed. So you need to really evaluate whether you’re willing to share your proprietary data, and what you’re testing inside your startup, in exchange for some credits.

Even the perk comes with something in return. The posted program terms let Anthropic identify the startups that receive it as customers, by name and logo. They also ask those startups to consider executive quotes or public co-marketing in good faith.

On the data side, Anthropic’s commercial terms say customers keep the rights to their inputs and own their outputs. They also say Anthropic may not train models on customer content. Training stays off unless your organization opts into the Development Partner Program, which covers Claude Code inputs and outputs sent through Anthropic’s first-party API. That’s also the only API the startup credits work on.

The setting applies to your whole organization, and shared data can be stored for up to two years. Leaving the program doesn’t pull what you already shared out of that window. With that setting on, maybe you shouldn’t run proprietary experiments through Claude Code at all.

Why paid Claude licenses protect your startup experiments

Many founders already skip free credits by paying for Anthropic or OpenAI licenses, keeping their shared data locked inside their own environment. There is an option for everyone else, too: open Settings and switch off Improve the model for everyone in ChatGPT (under Data controls) or Help improve Claude in Claude (under Privacy), and your new chats stay out of model training.

For anything you don’t want Anthropic picking up on, I’d stick with the paid license to protect your data and your experiments, and I’d double-check that the training settings are off. On Claude Team, Enterprise, and the API, they’re off by default.

Again, if you already claimed the perks, I’d check the terms before running your next experiment on them. Startups offered credits need to read the fine print too. Anthropic’s FAQ said VC-backed startups in its partner network may be eligible for up to $100,000 in additional API credits through their VC firm. That’s 100 times the paused $1,000 credit.

Anthropic’s FAQ said it aimed to review applications within one week and gave no date for bringing the two offers back. You might be waiting on that re-review, already using a Team year or getting credits through your VC. Whichever spot you’re in, this pause gives you time to check the fine print.

About the Author

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is the Editor in Chief at BYVI, founder-driven media that spotlights early-stage startups at the moment most press skips, when coverage can actually open doors. She’s also a content engineer who builds in-house growth engines and trains AI agents that help companies scale content and win brand visibility across traditional and AI search. Previously, she co-founded DeckLinks, which gave her firsthand experience building and scaling tech products.

The post Anthropic Pauses Claude Startup Credits: Free AI Has Strings appeared first on BYVI.

OpenAI is putting images into ChatGPT ads. On October 5, 2026, it announced a visual ad format that shows up while ChatGPT generates an image. But the targeting that would make those ads worth a bootstrapper’s money depends on a setting most advertisers never think about.

Until they reliably reach the right buyer, I’d put that budget into creating content that you own and that compounds over time.

OpenAI also expanded its measurement integrations, said it’s developing brand-suitability pilots with DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science, and shared early advertiser results.

Most of that is about formats, measurement and brand safety. I think OpenAI should fix targeting before it starts adding new ad formats. ChatGPT can already use past chats and memory to match an ad to the right buyer, but only for users who’ve switched on ad personalization, and advertisers have no way to know how many have. Until that changes, I’d tell bootstrapped founders, and anyone advising them, to wait before putting their limited budgets into ChatGPT ads.

How ChatGPT ads use your past chats and memory

Bootstrapped founders have very limited budgets, and they can’t waste them on ads that reach a broad audience waiting for their images to be generated. Every dollar has to get to their ICP: the person who fits and is ready to buy.

With its huge context window and memory, ChatGPT knows a lot about whoever it’s chatting with. Buyers explain their situation to it at length, the way they would to a salesperson on a call. It could personalize ads better than anyone right now.

OpenAI’s help page even says personalized ads can draw on past chats and memory, through a toggle called Past chats and memory.

If it’s on, past chats and memory can contribute to ad relevance. If it’s off, ads rely more on your current chat thread, and past chats and memory won’t be used to inform the ads you see.

The ChatGPT ad personalization toggle advertisers can’t control

When you buy a ChatGPT ad, you pick the copy, the landing page, the bid and your targeting. The one thing you can’t pick is whether the person seeing it has switched on ad personalization. That’s their call, made in Settings > Ad Controls, and it decides how much ChatGPT can use to match your ad to them.

ChatGPT only uses past chats, memory and ad history to pick ads when ads personalization is enabled. With it off, ChatGPT picks ads from the current chat thread plus basic context like general location and language. That’s plain contextual matching: one conversation, one guess.

It also changes by market. OpenAI says personalized ads aren’t initially available in the European Economic Area or Switzerland at all, and Help Net Security reported in August that OpenAI asks users for a choice before personalized ads begin.

Asking people for permission rarely goes well for advertisers, either. When Apple started asking iPhone users whether apps could track them, just 4% of US users opted in in the first 2 weeks, according to Flurry data. I’d bet most ChatGPT users have never even opened Ad Controls.

Digiday reported that advertisers keep raising the same complaints about ChatGPT ads: weak measurement, too few formats and not enough inventory. It quoted Zeno Group’s Shamsul Chowdhury, who said ChatGPT’s smaller prompt volume and single ad placement create a disconnect between supply and demand. The new format and measurement tools take aim at the first 2 complaints. With inventory that tight, I’d want every impression reaching the right buyer first, and right now nobody can promise that.

Do ChatGPT ads work? Early results aren’t a pattern yet

OpenAI backed the announcement with partner-measured results for WeightWatchers, Dose and Portland Leather. For Dose, WorkMagic reported a statistically significant lift, with 67% of incremental purchases coming from net-new customers.

If it works for Dose, it doesn’t mean it’s going to be the same percentage for everyone else, and a handful of results published by OpenAI itself isn’t a pattern yet. OpenAI also says its work on incrementality is still in its early stages.

And I want to see more under the hood, especially how ChatGPT actually decides whether to serve an ad to someone at all, and how many of the people who saw those ads had personalization on.

I judge new AI ad channels by what founders I know actually spend and what comes back. A friend of mine, an award-winning interior designer for residential and commercial projects, put quite a big budget into a ChatGPT ads test, and unfortunately, absolutely nothing came back.

That surprised me even more because ChatGPT now has its own interior design option in the Images tab, called “Redesign any room.” People thinking about a renovation are already showing ChatGPT exactly what kind of room they want, which should make it easier than ever to match them with a designer. Even with that, her ads brought nothing in.

How to get recommended by ChatGPT without paying for ads

Until ChatGPT gets there, I’d put a bootstrapper’s limited time and money into organic content. Content keeps working for you, while paid ads are rented visibility that keeps you in bidding wars. ChatGPT is no exception: when more than one ad is eligible, OpenAI says it ranks them on a mix of relevance and advertiser bids.

1. Write for one buyer’s problem at a time. OpenAI says ads don’t influence ChatGPT’s answers, so getting into those answers still takes organic content.
2. Double down on what already brings customers in. That same interior designer gets most of her customers from referrals, and nothing she’s tried on Facebook, Google or ChatGPT ads comes close to that organic reach.
3. Set your own signal for when to test. Switch on personalization and memory in your own Ad Controls and watch the ads you get. When they start matching your conversations and what ChatGPT knows about you, test with a small budget.

ChatGPT already uses memory to personalize its answers, down to refining a restaurant search with your location or dietary preferences. That’s exactly what I want it doing with its ads, for every user who sees them. When it gets there, ChatGPT could be the best-targeted ad channel bootstrappers have ever had.

And the founders who spent the wait building organic content will walk in with an audience that already trusts them, so when they finally pay for ads, they’ll be amplifying something that already works.

About the Author

Lidia Vijga

Lidia Vijga is the Editor in Chief at BYVI, founder-driven media that spotlights early-stage startups at the moment most press skips, when coverage can actually open doors. She’s also a content engineer who builds in-house growth engines and trains AI agents that help companies scale content and win brand visibility across traditional and AI search. Previously, she co-founded DeckLinks, which gave her firsthand experience building and scaling tech products.

The post ChatGPT Ads Got Images, but Targeting Depends on a Toggle appeared first on BYVI.