On the TechTO stage ×1
First seen on the TechTO stage in 2021. Every talk is searchable — ask the archive about Roger ↗
In their words
That EDI domain had not progressed at all. The same companies were selling the same software for the same price. There's no innovation at all — and that didn't really make sense, because it was clearly the bottleneck.
Our hit rate on cold emails was sometimes over 50 percent. People were very, very unhappy with what they currently had.
As relatively unconnected Canadians trying to go through the front door of technology, it was the right choice. The best kind of advice you can get in a place like that is negative advice — what not to do.
Around the web ×2
Quick answers
What is Roger Kirkness doing now?
Winding Convictional down. BetaKit reported on 12 August 2026 that the company will shut permanently on 27 August 2026 and return slightly less than half of the nearly US$49M it raised. He told BetaKit he plans to help the team find jobs and take a break from tech.
Why did Convictional shut down?
After divesting the original B2B trade business in early 2025 it tried to build an AI-era alternative to Slack. Kirkness told BetaKit: "What we wanted to build, people don't want, and what people want in this area, they are building themselves."
Where did the Convictional idea come from?
From using a legacy EDI competitor at GNC, where he found it was the bottleneck on connecting suppliers. He told TechTO the same software was still being sold unchanged seven years later when he was at Shopify, which is when he and co-founder Chris Grouchy left to build it.