Making Auto Easy wins Vancouver pitch competition on Startup Canada Tour

Startup Canada, a national non-profit supporting Canadian entrepreneurs, recently stopped in Vancouver as part of its 2023 Startup Canada Tour. The day included live workshops and keynote speakers from innovators in the Vancouver ecosystem, as well as a pop-up pitch competition where 60 small businesses pitched to a panel of judges for a grand prize of $3,000.

The judges selected a final trio of Ben Liegey, founder of food and beverage management startup Bettertable.ca; Alice Grey, founder of health food venture Mindful Monk; and Vivian Liu, founder of car purchasing platform Making Auto Easy (MAE). After a final pitch, Liu took home the grand prize, including a spot in the pitch competition finale in Brampton, Ontario to compete for $70,000 against the pop-up pitch winners from the other tour stops.

Making Auto Easy

Through MAE, Liu aims to create a guided and unbiased car shopping experience — built for women, by women. Liu, who climbed the corporate ladder of the local auto industry for seven years, saw a significant gap in the market when it came to supporting women buyers.

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“Women are twice as likely to be undecided about which car to buy at the beginning of their journey,” said Liu. “Two thirds of women stated that they don't know where to start when it comes to buying one.”

The platform isn’t exclusively for women, and Liu encourages men to use it as well — really, anyone who wants to purchase a car. A typical user of MAE starts off with a survey and then goes through a round of car speed dating — picture a Bumble profile, but for cars. Ultimately, MAE’s recommendation engine highlights six vehicles optimized to the user’s preferences and budget.

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“One of our very first customers said that she knew more than salespeople,” said Liu. “To be in that position negotiating for a car is wildly different than going into a store unannounced, unsure, and just simply curious. Because it's not an environment where they're necessarily supportive of that type of shopping behaviour.”

Liu almost didn’t make it to her pitch. The founder was teaching a virtual Zoom class to American high school students about how to purchase a car and was running two hours late as a result.

“I literally have an email in my drafts right now in my inbox, that says to Isabel, who's the organizer, ‘If there's a spot that's available, if someone else is waiting for my spot because I'm running late, just give it to them.’ And I had this gut feeling not to send it,” said Liu.

“It was such a great reminder for me that when I'm unsure whether I should do something [...] you’ve got to take that opportunity, that chance, because you never know what it's going to bring.”

Celebrating the local startup ecosystem

“Today is really about recognizing and celebrating British Columbia’s incredible business landscape, and also about the founders supporting the system,” said Kayla Isabelle, CEO of Startup Canada.

According to Isabelle, B.C. has more small businesses per capita, employs a larger share of the workforce, and has the highest rate of self-employment than any other area in Canada.

Vancouver is home to a fair share of B.C.’s innovation, particularly when it comes to tech unicorns and scale-up stories.

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Keynote speaker Tara Bosch, founder of low-sugar candy brand SmartSweets, started her company in Vancouver and sold her product out of her 2009 Honda Fit Hatchback while a student at UBC. She dropped out and became a Thiel fellow in 2017 to scale SmartSweets. By 2020, she grew the company to $125 million annual recurring revenue and was acquired by private equity firm TPG for $360 million.

“When I was a girl, recipe-testing in my kitchen — and to the outside world, I looked like a girl recipe-testing in my kitchen — in my mind, SmartSweets was already a global company five years, 10 years down the road,” said Bosch. “I was just reverse-executing from that end vision that already existed in the world.”

Prior to Vancouver, the Startup Canada Tour gathered early-stage entrepreneurs in Whitehorse and Halifax. The non-profit will continue its tour to Calgary and make its final stop in Brampton, Ontario.

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