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About
Butterly is the current form of a company Ali and Alex de Bold started at their dining room table in 2006 as ChickAdvisor — the first product review site in Canada, built because there was nowhere to go and read reviews for everyday consumer products. The couple bootstrapped it after VCs and angels passed, and Ali has said it took roughly five years before the company could pay her. Over time the business moved from being a review destination to selling brands access to the community behind it: product sampling, ratings and reviews, ambassador programs, and surveys, with clients including Unilever, L'Oreal, and Johnson & Johnson. ChickAdvisor Inc. launched Butterly in March 2020 as a white-labelled, DIY version of that machinery — brands embed it in their own sites and own the resulting first-party data and user-generated content — partly to shed the women-only positioning the ChickAdvisor brand implied. The consumer-facing ChickAdvisor site still operates as one of Butterly's properties, and the old ChickAdvisor Product Review Club now runs under the Butterly name. Ali de Bold's more recent argument for the product is that AI recommendation systems are trained on customer content, so brands with thin or low-quality reviews get left out of what AI suggests.
Backers
None. Ali de Bold said on the TechTO stage in 2016 that they tried to raise, were turned down by multiple VCs and by angels who offered to back her husband but not her, and bootstrapped the company instead. No outside funding round has been found since.
Quick answers
What is the difference between Butterly and ChickAdvisor?
ChickAdvisor is the 2006 consumer review site; Butterly is the brand-facing software the same company launched in March 2020. Butterly is white-labelled — a brand embeds it in its own site and owns the data — where ChickAdvisor was a destination people visited. ChickAdvisor still runs as a Butterly property, and its Product Review Club now operates under the Butterly name.
Who founded ChickAdvisor?
Ali and Alex de Bold, who are married. Ali handles sales and community, Alex handles technology and operations — a split they said on stage was the reason co-founding as a couple worked at all. Ali describes herself as a third-generation entrepreneur; Alex started his first startup in 1996.
Did ChickAdvisor raise venture capital?
No. They pitched VCs in 2006 and, in Ali's words, 'got laughed out of a lot of meetings because who would ever want to review a lipstick.' Angels with a term sheet on the table said they'd fund Alex but not Ali. The company was bootstrapped and took about five years to reach the point of paying her.