A startup based out of Vancouver Island is taking on Silicon Valley social media titan Facebook—sort of.
Trailmix Technologies isn’t trying to build the next global powerhouse. Instead, the Parksville company is tailoring their product specifically to one market: Canada.
Every year, $10 billion in Canadian advertising revenue flows to American tech platforms, laments Trailmix founder Jessica Glowacki, a 20-year business veteran with engineering and product leadership experience from stints at Reddit and Lululemon. They also tend to store Canadian data on US-based servers.
“Canadians have spent years asking where their data goes, why their feeds feel manipulated, and why none of the money stays here,” she says. “We stopped asking and started building.”
Last year, Glowacki launched EH!, a social media app designed by and for Canadians.
“We didn’t build EH! to complement Facebook,” explains the B.C. entrepreneur. “We built it to make Facebook irrelevant to Canadians.”
EH! replaces Big Social’s algorithmic feeds with “what you actually asked for,” Glowacki posits, such as real community groups, local events, and small business information.
This week, TrailMix launched its web version of EH!, which delivers the full app experience, including integration with Canadian AI firm Cohere.
“The response has been incredible,” Glowacki says.
EH! stores all user data on Canadian soil that is “beyond the reach of foreign data requests,” according to the founder.
So far, the platform counts more than 22,000 users across nearly 1,600 cities, spanning from Vancouver Island to Atlantic Canada.
“Canadians aren’t just signing up,” says Glowacki. “They’re building communities, posting daily, inviting their neighbours.”
Meta may have “unlimited resources,” but the chief executive officer believes that Trailmix offers “something they can’t buy: a country full of people who want their own platform.”
“This is what happens when you give people a platform they actually trust,” Glowacki said.
In a similar vein, Vancouver entrepreneur Natalie Boll recently unveiled Tribela, a social app which aims to provide “a space between digital detox and doomscrolling.”
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