Startup Stories: Featuring CertiCraft
Today, we are excited to be featuring Sami Majadla, Founder, CEO of CertiCraft, a software company that helps licensed craft cannabis growers stay on top of their compliance records and monthly reports, and keeps them audit ready.
Here’s a great introductory video to learn about them:
We first met Sami in 2020 when he won the Kootenay Pitch Competition, hosted by our partners at the Kootenay Association for Science & Technology (KAST)!
Without further ado, we are honoured to introduce you to Sami.
Hello, Sami! Let’s start with where we met.
You pitched virtually at the Kootenay Pitch Competition, hosted by KAST . Can you tell us more about your experience in the competition?
KAST is a non-profit that is focused on helping the tech industry thrive in the region. I’m super grateful for them because they have a few different programs that really helped us improve, specifically their mentorship-focused Venture Acceleration Program and the pitch competition.
The pitch competition was a great opportunity to share our story with a broader audience here in the Kootenays that cares about technology startups.
We got a lot of mentorship for that too thanks to Volition.
Paul Brassard gave a fantastic masterclass that really helped us put together the best pitch possible. He’s fantastic at what he does, and you can tell he has spent years helping entrepreneurs with their pitches. All the participants in the competition also received one-on-one conversations with Paul to further refine our pitches.
We’re glad to hear that it was a valuable experience for you. What are some recent company highlights or wins that we can share?
Winning the KAST Competition in 2020!
Since wrapping up our pilot project and officially launching last August, we’ve added over 50 customers to our platform.
So, what has been your greatest challenge as an entrepreneur?
One of the greatest challenges as an entrepreneur is definitely finding a good work-life balance.
When you are one of the founders, so many responsibilities fall on you. In the early stages of a business, you need to put a lot more time than you would in a regular job to give the startup a chance at success. However, it’s so easy to get overwhelmed and burn out. Setting boundaries around work has been my biggest challenge.
Given all of this, what is one piece of advice you would give to someone just beginning their startup journey?
Validate the heck out of what you’re doing before you spend too much time and money developing something.
I’ve been an entrepreneur for over a decade now, so I’ve got lots of experience and I’ve seen many projects both succeed and fail. What I’ve seen happen often is entrepreneurs getting really excited about an idea that they believe in, and then immediately spending a ton of time, energy and money trying to realize said idea. But after they’ve spent years and tens-to-hundreds of thousands of dollars, they realize there’s no market for what they’re trying to do.
It’s great to be excited about something. You need that passion to build a startup! But if your goal is to build a viable business, then you need to test your idea and all of your assumptions as early as possible to make sure that what you’re trying to achieve legitimately has the potential to sustain itself.
Great tips! As you may know, we define Volition as ‘the will to do what you want and to get it done’. What is your volition?
Knowing that we’re making a difference.
Today, there are a few hundred livelihoods that depend on our service. Knowing that we’ve made a huge difference for them and that we will make a huge difference for thousands more is quite the volition.
A big part of our mission, why we are doing this, is that we want to make the legal framework for cannabis production accessible for all the families and people who have spent decades fighting to get the plant acknowledged as real medicine. The regulations were unfortunately made with solely big corporations in mind, and small-scale producers (tens of thousands of them across Canada) have been forced out of the market.
There are countless families today that are living in fear of having their kids taken away from them. They want to transition into the new framework, but the regulatory burdens today make such a transition financially unrealistic. At CertiCraft, we are working hard to change that, by making day-to-day operations as a licensed small-scale producer accessible.
This is such a great answer! So–what is your ask today? How can the Volition community support your vision?
We are looking for two things: 1) we want to hire two talented senior developers that are interested in what we are doing, and 2) investors that want to support building a sustainable and profitable business.
Is there anything else that you would like to share before we sign off?
I’d like to share again how grateful I am for the opportunity I had to pitch at KAST and to work with Volition. We’ve had the pleasure to work with some incredible mentors who have helped us in various manners.
We’ve really appreciated the masterclass led by Paul Brassard and we wholeheartedly recommend Volition to any startups struggling with a particular aspect of their business. Someone at Volition will be able to help you with what you’re doing!
Thank you! We appreciate your support. So, how can people best connect with you?
https://www.facebook.com/CertiCraft/
https://linkedin.com/company/certicraft/
You can connect with us on any of the previous socials. 🙂
