About Us

Brandy Old and Craig Elias

We help founders slingshot past $1,000,000 in revenue.

We’re Brandy Old and Craig Elias. For almost 10 years, we’ve worked together to help startups and scaleups become more investable by derisking their businesses and capturing new customers faster.

For over 2 years, we’ve been perfecting the Traction Canvas™, a simple yet robust customer traction framework that helps founders, startups and scaleups build, test and act on high-performing customer acquisition strategies.

Here’s what we’ve learned: every founder under $1,000,000 in revenue is stuck on one of the Traction Canvas’s 10 boxes, and usually doesn’t know which one. The Traction Canvas shows you where you’re stuck and what to do next, so you avoid the Traction Trap of scaling before you’re ready.

This spring, we started building the free Traction Readiness Diagnostic so founders don’t have to guess where they’re stuck. In a few minutes, it scores your business on all 10 boxes of the Traction Canvas, across Learn, Earn and Scale, and gives you a Traction Readiness Level out of 100. It also flags the Traction Trap: when a company is scaling faster than it has learned or earned. You’ll know exactly which box to work on next.

Where it started

As two of North America’s most active ecosystem builders, we’ve guided hundreds of aspiring and early-stage entrepreneurs through the messy early stages of building a business, helping them avoid the costly mistakes that sink most startups before they ever find traction.

Much of that work happened through Help A Startup Out, our free public education initiative. Our free resources, including a financial projections spreadsheet downloaded nearly 6,000 times by entrepreneurs worldwide, are free at HelpAStartupOut.com.

We’ve run online startup camps and hosted training sessions like “Will That Idea Fly,” which regularly attract hundreds of registrants. You’ll often find us pitch coaching and sharing actionable tactics at accelerators, colleges, incubators, pitch competitions, polytechnics, universities and startup events across Canada, the US, Australia, Europe and Asia.

Where to start

Brandy & Craig