“I don’t know how much more I can take”
Matthew Suddaby (Digital Media and IT ’23) is smiling, but he also looks somewhat overwhelmed, a bit tired, and slightly shocked. For a week, everything has been moving so fast.
"I don’t know how much more I can take,” he says.
Suddaby is half of the team – with friend and business partner Will Boytinck – that created an app called Shop Canadian. It turns a smartphone into a barcode scanner, giving consumers access to information about product origins so they can make informed choices about buying local under the looming threat of tariffs.
When the pair released the app on Tuesday, Feb. 4 – building it the previous weekend – they hoped it would at least see use in the Edmonton area.
But soon after they posted about it on Reddit, CBC called for an interview. The next day, CTV reached out. As the story went national, downloads spiked – well exceeding the thousand or so Suddaby and Boytinck had hoped for.
A week later, roughly 100,000 users had the app, the first of its kind to be released for both Apple and Android devices after similar ones would follow, propelling it to the top spot for free apps on Google Play and the Apple App store (beating out the likes of ChatGPT and Temu).
Suddenly, Suddaby and Boytinck had new jobs.
Not only were they already employed as programmers in Edmonton, but an outpouring of patriotism from Canadian consumers had thrust them into the roles of independent app developers, dealing with reviews, updates, public relations and, given their success, the question of where it all may lead.
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A fun challenge
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Now 22, Suddaby has been programming since high school, which he attended in Sherwood Park with Boytinck.
After Suddaby chose NAIT for its hands-on approach to teaching and learning, he and Boytinck (who went to university) remained friends and continued to refine their skills through local hack-a-thon events and cybersecurity challenges.
Over the years, programming has become as much vocation as profession for Suddaby.
“I really enjoy building things,” he says. “I could look through my computer right now and I've got 200 or so projects that have never really seen the light of day. But I built them because I was like, ‘Hey, this would be cool – and fun to learn about.’”
That’s how he felt about Shop Canadian.
Boytinck initially raised the idea in response to the prospect of 25% added to all Canadian imports into the U.S. Suddaby was keen. “There's a really big buzz [around] keeping your money in Canada and buying locally,” he says. “We were like, ‘Maybe we can create an app to help support that.’”
The programming wasn’t a problem. Even the barcode scanner was relatively simple (for them, at least) thanks to machine learning tools and guides from Google. The trick would lie in gathering information that had yet to be aggregated in a database.
The answer, they decided, was to build that database themselves by crowdsourcing. Consumers scan a code and then rate the “Canadianness” of an item between one and five stars based on whether it is made here or just prepared or packaged. There are now almost 100,000 items in the Shop Canadian database, mostly groceries, with about half of them rated.
While Suddaby acknowledges that there are critics of the approach, he sees no real alternative – but also no real drawbacks. Wikipedia, he offers as example, evolved in just such a way, with the community that forms around it adding and correcting information. In theory, says Suddaby, it grows more accurate as it grows in users.
While working with an unknown dataset in that way was new to him, his time at NAIT gave him the skills he needed to leverage it, and to learn something new along the way. “That was a fun challenge,” says Suddaby.
A steeper learning curve
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Starting a business, which the pair have now registered, proved a steeper learning curve.
Not only are they updating the app as users identify issues, they’ve taken on customer service duties, personally responding to concerns. And, given that they’re earning revenue through ads on the app, they’re also figuring out things like taxes and expenses.
“Thankfully, we’re breaking even right now,” says Suddaby, and covering server hosting costs.
That is, though they’re motivated to come up with something new once the excitement around Shop Canadian finally subsides, they’re not about to give up their jobs as programmers at Ramp Interactive, an Edmonton-based company that provides software solutions for sports organizations.
(Besides, Ramp’s CEO has been mentoring them through the intricacies of startups.)
Still, as exhausting as it may be, the success has been satisfying for Suddaby. It pleases him to know that, in tumultuous times, he’s using his skills to empower people to make a positive contribution to their country and communities, barcode by barcode.
“This is what I love doing,” says Suddaby.
“So why not take what I love doing and apply it to actual needs?”