We have received a lot of feedback on the recent Entrevestor article, some positive, some negative.

First off let’s get one thing straight, there are many highly skilled and experienced developers in the region, and the sheer number of highly successful companies in Atlantic Canada proves it. And we are lucky and grateful to have been and continue to be immensely helped by many of these skilled and experienced people, without whom we would never have been able to get this far. Because let’s face it, you can only learn so much using Coursera, Stackoverflow and a bunch of random websites.

While it may have sounded like we breezed through the development in just five weeks, nothing could be farther from the truth. Just ask any developer who works out of Volta Labs how often we bugged them (and keep bugging them) with question after question after we “broke the cloud” (which happened quite frequently).

So with that straightened out let’s go back to the question we started with — Is it easy to find developers in Halifax? We dare to say no. Is it easier than in Boston or Toronto — most likely, is it easier than in SF — most definitely! For us finding the right person with a specific skill set and experience in Python, NLP, Machine Learning, Elasticsearch and the Microsoft Azure platform to join our founding team proved to be more challenging than we expected when we came up with our idea 10 months ago, especially while bootstrapping.

There truly is a reason why the term unicorn exists in the startup scene, and while they are rare, we and many others continue our search.