Brew Ninja is a brewery management that provides an efficient workflow for sales, production, accounting, and communications.
Tell us about yourself?
I have an engineering background. Although I originally went to the University of Saskatchewan as an English major, I did a 180 and switched to mechanical engineering. I started writing software programs for my HP-48 calculator that would help with my homework assignments and ended up falling in love with programming. So, I switched to the software program.
After graduating, I went to work as a software engineer in a number of industries: seismic data processing, video games, military simulations, and finance.
If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?
Remember to take time to celebrate the wins. It is so easy to fixate on what you want to accomplish and the fact that you haven’t yet. It can be a breath of fresh air to turn around and look back at what you did accomplish in the last six months… one year. Sometimes, I reflect back and think, “I can’t believe that is where we were a year ago. That feels like years ago!”
What problem does your business solve?
The problem we set out to solve was managing inventory for breweries. This led to managing sales, production, compliance, and accounting for the brewery. The funny thing is that most of our customers state that the thing they like most about our product is that we solve their communication issues due to the fact that Brew Ninja is a central source of information about the brewery.
What is the inspiration behind your business?
I never meant to launch a “startup”. In fact, I am not even sure I knew what the term meant when I first started thinking about Brew Ninja. I had an ex-colleague start a brewery, and I was interested in craft. I started dropping in to see how things were going, and I realized that some of the problems he was having, I had solved in other industries. So, I built a prototype and showed it to him. After working through the kinks, I decided to turn it into a product and start selling Brew Ninja.
What is your magic sauce?
While, for the most part, we have feature parity with our competition, what sets us apart is two things:
- We focus on helping breweries run their businesses. Yes, we help with production and quality control, but our focus is on streamlining the business processes around running a brewery so that you can focus on making great beer.
- Our customer support is always one of the first things mentioned in the customer satisfaction surveys we do. Customers are always surprised at how responsive we are.
What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?
Our goal is to be a remarkable software product. That means that our customers will go out of their way to compliment our software among their peers. I want Brew Ninja to be recognized as one of the best places to work in Canada and a place where top talent wants to be and stay. The side benefit of these goals is that we are the dominant player in the beverage manufacturing industry.
What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?
I think one of our biggest challenges arose when we forgot what made us special as a company. We became so focused on adding new features that we neglected the refinements being requested for some of our core features. We took a step back and realized that listening to our users is what helped our company take off, so let’s make sure we don’t forget that. We now have a renewed focus on refining existing features based on customer feedback, and we attempt to deliver one of these refinements every development cycle.
How can people get involved?
You can contact us through our website: www.get.brewninja.net or by telephone: 1-855-382-0834.