Earlier this year, the team at Dibz was preparing for the pilot launch of their online ticketing app, designed to help event-goers get better seats. According to Dibz founder Brennon D’Souza, everything was set for success—until it wasn’t. 

The two-year-old London, Ont.-based company was being vetted for acceptance at Comcast NBCUniversal Lift Labs, a U.S. accelerator. The money would help Dibz build the first iteration of its technology and test it at a few Ontario venues. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and the province shut down all sports and entertainment events. 

“In every way that we could be hit, we were hit,” D’Souza told The Logic. “We’re really not sure how to work now. You spend all this time preparing for your business but what you don’t plan for is there being no market for what you’ve spent the last couple of years building.”

Dibz is one of the many Canadian startups whose founders are worried the pandemic has upended the plans and projections they made for a world that no longer exists. Instead, they are hunkered down, many in their home offices, looking for ways to survive—and to make themselves indispensable when the economy reopens. 

Now in month three of the pandemic, D’Souza continues to grapple with many unknowns about the post-pandemic world. When venues reopen, what restrictions will there be on seating? How will people feel about attending events that draw crowds? Assuming sports and entertainment comes back within the year, D’Souza wonders if his tech can still add value. 

“Really, all we can do is make the case that this technology is the tool [venues] want in [their] arsenal when all the fans come back,” he said. “But, it’s hard to think about scaling up at all right now… How do you get investment for something that we assume will exist afterwards, but we don’t know in what way, shape or form?”

The short answer, according to Pierre-Olivier Charlebois, is you don’t. 

The CEO and founder of Ottawa-based reDock, an AI-driven search engine for corporate data that raised $1 million in 2018, said he had a term sheet on the table and a big contract with a large U.S. telecom company that was being vetted by lawyers when the pandemic hit. Almost immediately, the investors decided not to go forward with the deal, while the telecom halted new procurement for the rest of the year. 

“We were left in no-man’s land,” Charlebois said.

Charlebois’ first response was to recast the seven-member company’s projections, factoring in a loss of all the big contracts and funding the startup was hoping to secure this year. The company still needs to raise, he said, “but less.” Rather than chase the maximum amount of funds needed to scale, he is now asking, “how much do we really need?”

“I want to grow, don’t get me wrong, but I want to create a sustainable company,” he said. “We’re thinking a lot about growth but not growth at all costs. Its growth through micro-experimentation and careful steps.”

Several startup founders said they are adopting a similar mindset, shifting to focus on making themselves sustainable as they wait and see what the future of their sector looks like. 

Cailan Libby, CEO of Happipad, a three-year-old Kelowna, B.C.-based home-sharing startup that connects residents with roommates, is hopeful his company will thrive in the post-pandemic world. With social isolation on the rise because of lockdowns, Libby sees his service providing a long-term solution for companionship and housing affordability.

Libby was in talks with six post-secondary institutions and retirement homes across the country to sign contracts in April; they all backed out because of the pandemic. “Once COVID-19 happened, we were forced into complete survival mode,” he said.

Like Charlebois, survival mode for Libby has entailed “being very methodical and analyzing where we’re spending our money.” It has also meant trying to sustain any activity on their website, which started to increase in May. 

“I’ve been extremely stressed and depressed at the beginning of this uncertainty,” Libby said “When you invest your life savings into something, it hurts to see it vanish overnight…but there is an opportunity here for startups that are solving problems.” 

Like Libby, Erin Bury, CEO and co-founder of Willful, a Toronto-based startup that helps create wills online, saw business for existing and new partners grind “to a halt.” The company’s planned webinars, campaigns and other educational programming were cancelled and it rethought its planned marketing, including one campaign with the line, “Roses are red, violets are blue, statistically speaking I’ll outlive you.”

“How do you go to social media and say, ‘You need a will!’ when there is a pandemic going on,” Bury said. “As soon as it hit, everything felt so tone-deaf.” 

Willful did see traffic increase dramatically—almost 600 per cent in early April—pushing Bury to think about how to serve new customers. “We hated that we saw this influx in traffic over fear,” she said. “But you can’t control the things you can’t control. For the things you can control, how do you build a strategy around that, knowing that there’s always going to be unpredictability in your business?”