Founder Friday with Brianna Blaney of Pocketed
Vancouver-based Pocketed was co-founded by Brianna Blaney and Dr. Aria Hahn to eliminate financial barriers for business owners. Pocketed helps companies across North America access billions of dollars in grants, tax credits, and incentives with their intelligent matching platform and funding solutions. Since launching in 2021, more than 13,000 businesses have used Pocketed to access over $100M in government funding. Money to fund new hires, export internationally, invest in innovation, and fuel their growth.
We caught up with Brianna to hear what’s new for Pocketed, what’s coming up next, insights into what’s happening in the industry, and advice she would give to her past self and up-and-coming women founders.
What’s New
2023 was a huge year for Brianna and the Pocketed team as they experienced significant growth, achieving close to a five-fold increase in revenue.
Part of that skyrocketing success, they deployed a new product, Pocketed Enterprise. Following launch, they welcomed numerous clients on board, including two of the big four accounting firms, as they continually scaled across Canada.
With over 13,000 companies on their platform and facilitating funding of over $100 million, 2023 was truly an exceptional year for Brianna and the entire team. Pocketed concentrated on delivering value to customers and monetization so they could continue to scale in a sustainable way without always needing to rely on outside capital—and they did exactly that.
What’s Next
After nailing down the business model and how Pocketed would make money, Brianna and the Pocketed team are doubling down on repeatability and scalability in their sales and operations.
They have a lot of exciting product evolution in the pipeline around their enterprise tool, as well as their staple Pocketed product for individual businesses. Already live to some of their enterprise customers and queued up to go live across the board in 2024, they are introducing an AI tool, PocketedGPT, to further augment their product offerings.
Keep an eye out on their website and social media to follow how Brianna and the team plan for expansion throughout 2024.
What’s Going On in the Industry
We've all seen what's happening in the financial landscape: it's increasingly challenging for businesses, startups, and otherwise, to access capital. Debt is more expensive, grants are more competitive, and equity is harder to access because cheques are being deployed at a slower rate.
Those headwinds have been tough for many businesses, as these cutthroat conditions have led them to recognize that they need to differentiate and position themselves in a way they didn't have to in the last five years, particularly with the huge influx of COVID funding that was previously available.
But for Pocketed, this has resulted in positive tailwinds as they have seen a surge in demand for their services. In turn, the team has been finding new, better, and more effective ways of serving their customers.
By assisting businesses in securing funding through differentiated strategies, Pocketed has been able to navigate these challenges effectively while boosting their revenue as well. Brianna has seen companies Pocketed has worked with for full grant writing cycles return multiple times in a year—proving pretty substantial numbers for the programs they’ve won.
In terms of trends, Brianna highlighted key sectors attracting significant capital investment, such as manufacturing, agriculture, clean tech, and innovation, signaling ongoing opportunities for businesses seeking funding.
Government funding programs are still highly invested in backing these types of companies, with a continued emphasis on fundable activities, including hiring and creating jobs, exporting outside of Canada to boost GDP, market penetration, and especially toward innovation.
Advice to Your Past Self & Other Women Founders
“Ideas are cheap. Great ideas are ones that are executed exceptionally well,” Brianna says. “Doing the work and getting it done builds great businesses. There is simply no substitute for staying focused, working smart, and working hard. You just have to do it.”
When foraying into the startup world, it's easy to get caught up in the allure of a groundbreaking idea and stay quiet while in development. But you want to talk about your business and share it. That process of sharing, learning, doing, and discovering is so important.
Expanding on that, Brianna gravitates to these two buckets of advice for herself and emerging founders:
Build, deploy, and iterate
As she shared, great ideas require exceptional execution. Brianna underscores the importance of moving beyond just ideation. She suggests that while sharing and discussing your business idea is crucial for learning and customer discovery, it's equally important to transition from the planning phase to actual implementation. Building and deploying your product, focusing on the minimum viable product (MVP), and swiftly gathering feedback and validation from customers are key steps towards success. Ideas are cheap, execution is key, and speed and execution are critical.
Love your community hard
Founding a startup can be a tiring journey filled with challenges, but it doesn’t have to be (and shouldn’t be!) lonely. Surround yourself with a supportive community, including advisors, mentors, and fellow founders who understand the struggles and triumphs of entrepreneurship. Brianna personally advocates for a hype squad—AKA a network of founders building businesses at similar stages, with whom you can share stories, backchannel investors and board directors, discuss hardships, and celebrate wins and successes. These are the people who you can share a financial milestone with, knowing it will be purely celebrated without anyone looking for an opportunity to cut you down.
Being a founder is hard. Really hard. And as your business scales, you will face new challenges. The things that felt hard yesterday won't feel hard today, but you will have something else that feels hard tomorrow.
So, keep building. Build your idea well and in a strategic way, and build your community of people to grow with you every step of the way.
The51 is proud to partner with the National Angel Capital Organization (NACO) in telling founder stories to accelerate the representation of women within Canada’s innovation economy.