Convictional

We met at Shopify in 2016. We were both hired on to the early Shopify Plus team and our task was to help find early customers and product-market fit. We left in late-2017 and started building Convictional to help retailers and brand onboard their suppliers. Our mission is to connect the world’s trading partners. Over time, Convictional will enable transactions between suppliers and their trading partners for dropship, marketplace, and wholesale business models. We decided to become founders after working on an idea while at Shopify and finding compatibility in our interest in working in B2B trade/commerce, our values, and complementary skills. Roger built the first version of Convictional while Chris took it to market. About a year in to building Convictional, we applied to YC and joined the W19 batch.

We are both from Canada, so Silicon Valley was a bit of a mystery to us. We knew that to make Convictional a big company, we’d need to fundraise eventually but didn’t know how to do it. We applied after a couple of YC alumni encouraged us to go for it. In preparation for our interview, we completed mock interviews with 11 YC alumni (we reached out cold). Our interview experience was gruelling but thankfully, we were accepted! We remember our batch experience being intense and focused. Every other week, we would meet with other founders for Group Office Hours and share the progress we’d made since the previous Group Office Hours. Our goal was to grow revenue and usage week-over-week and the accountability loop of Group Office Hours was reinforcing. In meeting other founders in the batch, we found that our unique strength was sales, so we’d sit with different teams during the Tuesday dinners to help teams think through early sales challenges.

We remain in close contact with several of the founders in our batch. We’ve also participated in YC’s Series A program, the A to B program, and YC Growth. YC Continuity led our Series B which we’re grateful for. Ali Rowghani is on our Board and we’ve benefitted from his wisdom on leadership, operations, and growth. We really enjoy working with the entire team at YC!

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), a pre-internet data format for exchanging B2B transaction documents like purchase orders and invoices, is responsible for trillions of dollars worth of global trade between trading partners — spanning most sector of the economy. Yet, EDI is incredibly difficult to work with and not built for modern systems. For example, it typically takes a retailer 3 months to onboard and integrate with a new supplier. We decided to work on this problem to connect the world’s trading partners and give them better infrastructure that integrates universally with any business system.