To Build A Blueprint: Bidmii in 2021

20 months ago, Bidmii was a concept. 

It was a notion that arrived in the middle of a pandemic. COVID-19 cases were skyrocketing everywhere, seemingly uncontrollably. Vaccines had not yet been announced. Life as we’d known it — a daily cycle of pajamas and office wear, commutes and paychecks — had been obliterated. 

For those of us lucky enough not to fall ill, or otherwise to have our lives ruined by the virus, there arose a certain imperative to do better. Use this otherwise terrible moment as a clean slate. Pare away what wasn’t working; cultivate something that mattered.

My life wasn’t destroyed, but it did change irrevocably. I’d been working for a Canadian restaurant company, helping them expand internationally. But when the pandemic made it impossible for people to congregate indoors, layoffs came, and I was one.

My friend Philip, now Bidmii’s CTO, and I got together, batted around a few ideas for how to move forward, and landed on a scalable RFP platform for residential renovations — Bidmii. My brother James, now our COO, figured heavily in these early conversations, most of which took place in my driveway, at a six-foot distance.

Leave it to a global crisis to put things in perspective.

For most of the world, 2021 meant wondering whether life would ever be the same, could ever be the same, and if so, whether we wanted it to be the same. For Bidmii, 2021 was a full-on sprint. We had a clear idea of one small way that we wanted the world to change: easily connecting homeowners with contractors, and getting stuff done. 

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It’s a simple idea. But as every entrepreneur knows, simple ideas are easy. Execution is hard.

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January: A Plan. Bidmii consists of eight full-time people who find themselves in the middle of a crazy sprint. We’d started a bottom-up rebrand over the Christmas break, which included rebuilding our digital platform in preparation for a beta launch. The rebrand takes everything we have — every ounce of labor energy from every one of our team members. None of this would’ve been possible without the help of Vanderbrand and some hardcore encouragement from advisory board member Mark Landry. Kudos to both for pushing us to do better.

February: Good bones. The rebrand is complete, and Bdmii’s beta platform has launched. To develop the full platform, we engage four co-op students from the University of Waterloo. All programmers, all reporting to our CTO, thereby tripling the size of his team. Initially, there’s friction. Onboarding goes slowly, remote people management presents challenges, and the platform needs more attention than we can give it. 

Co-op students (like most people) tend to learn on the job. That’s kind of the point. Unlike legacy companies, whose supervisors nurture core competencies, evaluate progress, and systematically shape minds, the measure of success at a startup is often whether or not you crash and burn. You always know the disaster scenario is possible. Every day, you summon everything in your repertoire, every shred of wit and strength, to keep the concept alive, to deliver it from theory to practice.

Between February and June, we learned about that gestation process. Our CTO became a bona fide manager. We developed workflows that allowed our four co-op students to give us the best of their programming powers. As the full Bidmii platform took shape, we witnessed the concept conceived in mid-2020 grow into a living, breathing reality.

June 1: Open house. We launch our full platform. Scott McGillivray, TV’s Home Improvement Expert, signs on as Bidmii’s celebrity spokesperson. We ink two other partnerships — one with property rental platform Rent Panda, the other with digital homebuying platform RELNKS — to fortify our offerings. The outside world has begun to use Bidmii, believe in Bidmii, want to be a part of Bidmii. 

June 1–December 1: Let's do this. Now with a 12-person full-time team, Bidmii launches in seven different cities all over Ontario. We see our user base grow from a few hundred to more than 2,000 users. Projects get posted and completed on a daily basis. Happy homeowners, happy contractors. On December 1, Bidmii closes its second funding round, securing $1 million to see us through our next stage of build-out and evolution.

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You can — and I do — compare building a startup to many other phenomena. 

It’s a little bit like raising a child. There’s a moment of conception, after which you devote your life to its life, seeing it through growing pains, illnesses, frustrations, successes. 

It’s a little bit like exploring. You’re venturing into uncharted territory with the hope that what you find will be worth the expense of traveling. You pick your destination based on research and analysis, but it’s still a leap of faith.

It’s like skating to the part of the lake where no one has been yet, but with experience, the right tools, and a lot of help you can determine how thick the ice is. If you do the right things — bring in the right people, nurture them properly, achieve total buy-in — you strengthen the ice beneath your feet. If you don’t, you risk plunging into that abyss. Everyone who participates in the birth of a startup knows that emotion. Whether it’s career risk or general self-doubt, there are moments of suspension, where we face dissenting voices on the other side of that glassy divide. Those are the ones that define us. As the year draws to a close, the ice which we are skating over, is thicker than ever.

I owe such a debt of gratitude to all of the people who are on this journey with us. Every full-timer and freelancer who labors with us; every homeowner and contractor who trusts us; every investor, partner, and champion who gives Bidmii a steadier foundation. Our advisory board, who provide so much more than governance — they’re hands-on, sleeves-up, group of industry titans who have done more for us than I could ever repay (though I’ll try). It takes a robust ecosystem of believers to turn a concept into a reality. For believing in us, and for returning the faith we have in you, thank you.

2021 was a gauntlet of foundation-building. As December peers over the threshold at January, not only are we experiencing organic growth, but our platform is running smoothly, we’ve completed a successful round of funding, and we’re expanding (looking at you, Toronto). We’ve got some very exciting announcements coming soon. Stay tuned.

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Thank you for helping us turn Bidmii from an idea to a reality, from a blueprint into a home.

Sincerely, 

Jon Christensen, CEO