Provincial cash seeds IT incubator
It’s ultimately going to produce a great tech sector here in Saskatchewan that employs a lot of high-end wage earners.
The story of Athlete Era began when Andrew Leslie and Corey Edington were travelling from school to school, offering their expertise to gym teachers and their classes.
“We quickly realized that a faceto-face approach to supporting physical education wasn’t really feasible based on the limited budget and how much it actually cost us to go to every single school and do this,” Edington said. “So that’s where we realized that a technologyor a software-based platform would be a much better approach ... because it’s infinitely scalable, which brings the cost down a lot.”
They brought on Ken Walters to be their software development lead and came up with a Webbased application to help teach quality physical education lessons.
“You go on our platform, you enter what you want to plan a lesson for, and we basically plan it for you, give you all the content you need to teach the lesson, and then support everything with video resources,” Edington said. “You can actually watch video descriptions of how to do games and activities in the classroom, how to teach different movement skills, and then do a variety of assessments.”
Based on positive feedback from a beta test with 10 Saskatchewan teachers, they aim to reach the market in September.
The journey would have been more challenging without the support of Co.Labs, a tech incubator set up at Innovation Place in Saskatoon this year with $250,000 in provincial funding. Applications opened in September, and 13 startups were selected to start.
“In the early stages it has been helping connect us with people that can talk about how to explain our business to early stage investors,” Edington said. “That was a major thing, because it’s obviously a little bit different pitching your business to a customer versus pitching your business to an investor.”
The number of Saskatchewan jobs in the professional, scientific and technical services category increased by 35 per cent over the past decade, according to the provincial government.
Jeff Dyck, vice-president of technical operations at Solido and one of the Co.Labs’s mentors, said the incubator will improve startups’ chances of success. Such support “would have been gold” for Solido in its early years, he said.
“The kind of help we would have wanted is things like how to build a sales team — we weren’t very good at that, it took us a few tries. How to do marketing — we’re good technologists, but we’re not great at sales, we’re not great at marketing, and having an organization like Co.Labs that we could turn to to help guide us through this process would have helped a lot.”
Co.Labs will help companies grow faster and need less investment, hopefully turning Saskatoon into a “mini Waterloo” tech hub, he said.
“It’s ultimately going to produce a great tech sector here in Saskatchewan that employs a lot of high-end wage earners, really good jobs, lots of export dollars, and it’s going to diversify our economy.”