Grossumo

Luke Swanak started his entrepreneurial journey in 2014 working on a side project at his dad's place. Alongside co-founders Bryn Neal (a former member of Canada's national swim team) and Johns, he initially explored nonprofit volunteer management. But after talking to dozens of nonprofits, the team realized the market was too finicky—organizations were waiting for grant funding and couldn't commit to scalable infrastructure. The real insight came when they noticed they were selling *through* nonprofit consultants far more effectively than selling directly.

In early 2015, the team had a eureka moment. They built a basic landing page in 48 hours that would let companies post their partner program and accept applicants through Grossumo's platform. To get traffic, they did something audacious: they cold called. "We made 200 plus calls in the first 48 hours," Luke recalls. They had no logos and nobody cared—until they threw up fake logos from hot companies like Dropbox and Zenphys. Suddenly, 25-70 companies signed up. "People are like, oh shit, Dropbox is using you."

Within two months, they applied to Y Combinator for the third time (first time with this business idea) and got in. The team kept things capital-efficient and never took a salary initially—it was a slow boil, driven by validating the idea worked.

The early traction came through their network. Large enterprises like Intuit, Asana, and Buffer had ecosystems of integrating apps and resellers who wanted to sell through multiple channels. By positioning Grossumo as the infrastructure behind those distributed sales forces, the company hit a nerve. Companies like Intuit's partners immediately wanted in because they could manage all their integrations from a single dashboard. The word-of-mouth effect created natural network growth without heavy marketing spend.

Grossumo's pricing model proved brilliant: a base fee (covering onboarding and support costs) plus a performance fee tied to partner-generated revenue. While the base fee initially dominates revenue, the performance fee grows much faster. Luke notes: "We literally approved an invoice a couple of weeks ago that said, you know, you owe Grosimo $2,000 because you made $16,000." This creates extraordinary retention—churn is less than 2% per month. The payback period for their customers is 3.5 months, making the value proposition irresistible.

What didn't work: trying to serve early-stage nonprofits. The market was too constrained and too dependent on grant cycles.

By the time of this interview, Grossumo had ~200 customers, was growing 25-35% month-over-month, and had raised "north of a million bucks" from Y Combinator and Real Ventures—kept deliberately humble and unannounced. The team stayed lean at 20 people, all based in Toronto. Luke emphasized they weren't optimizing for immediate profitability; instead, they were building a network business and having "conversations with some of the biggest resellers in the world," including major banks looking to sell software solutions to their small business customers. The opportunity was massive and still in early innings.