The InterviewPal Chapter
Founded and scaled an AI-powered interview-prep platform from 0 to 10,000+ users and 150+ job placements, owning the product end-to-end and securing pre-seed investment from AltaML as their youngest-ever funded founder.
watch the pitch
I used to record myself talking and play it back on loop, trying to fix my own communication and get over my fear of talking to people. At some point I thought: I'm probably not the only one dealing with this. There should be others. Let's build something.
So I went and did customer discovery interviews, over 500 of them across the time I ran InterviewPal.
University of Alberta's career center became my first customer before I even had a working product. I sent a cold email asking for a discovery interview, and two strangers wrote back believing in the vision.
What running it actually looked like
I did every job a startup needs at some point. Sales through HubSpot: funnels, closed deals, objections handled. GTM: figuring out how to actually reach universities, its own kind of sales problem. Product: discovery interviews, sprints, backlog, roadmap. Plus the founder stuff nobody puts on a job description, pitch decks, investor updates, telling the whole story myself.
Became known around Calgary as “the QR code guy”: a hoodie with a QR code stitched on the back, worn to every conference and university event I could find.
Also went to Collision, and spent a lot of that year on stage or in a hallway explaining the same pitch to whoever would listen. Organized 20+ events on job search advice to keep the university relationships warm between contract renewals.