MVP Development in Canada

About MVP Development

One core loop, built properly, in front of real users in four to eight weeks. Auth, payments and multi-tenant data are done right from the start, so you're not rebuilding at your first hundred customers. We ship our own products too, so we know which corners are safe to cut.

What the engagement includes

• A one-page scope that names the core loop and, just as important, what's left out of version one
• A stack chosen for the next two years, not the next demo: usually Next.js, a Node.js or Laravel API, and PostgreSQL
• Auth, roles and per-customer data isolation built in from the first commit
• Payments working end to end, including failed payments and refunds
• Analytics on the core loop, so you can see whether people actually use the thing
• Full code ownership in your GitHub from day one, and documentation a future hire can pick up
• The same senior engineers from scope to launch, not a sales team followed by juniors

Who owns the code, whether it is a medical device, and whether it moves money: three questions a Canadian MVP answers before launch

The first diligence question a Canadian seed investor asks about an MVP is who owns the code, and the Copyright Act answers it differently from the way most founders assume. Under subsection 13(1) the author is the first owner of copyright. Subsection 13(3) moves ownership to the employer only for work made in the course of employment under a contract of service or apprenticeship, so code written by an outside agency, a contractor on an hourly rate, or a co-founder before the company was incorporated belongs to whoever wrote it until it is assigned. Subsection 13(4) makes an assignment valid only if it is in writing and signed by the owner of the right, which rules out the email thread, the clickwrap on a freelance marketplace and the handshake with the friend who built the first prototype over a long weekend. Canada then adds a layer that templates written for the US market usually leave out. Section 14.1 gives the author moral rights, to the integrity of the work and to be associated with it by name or to remain anonymous, and those rights cannot be assigned, only waived in whole or in part, and an assignment of copyright does not by itself waive them. A startup whose MVP will be rewritten, merged and stripped for parts in its first two years wants that waiver in the same document as the assignment. On our side it is part of the contract rather than a negotiation: a signed assignment to your company, not to a founder personally, covering everything we deliver, a moral rights waiver from the people who wrote it, and a schedule naming the open source components that arrive under their own licences and are not ours to assign. The repository sits in your organisation from the first commit, so the history a reviewer reads matches the paperwork. If anyone wrote code before the company existed, a confirmatory assignment from them belongs in the same round. How to structure it for your cap table is for your own counsel.

A health MVP in Canada can become a regulated medical device before it has a paying customer. Health Canada's guidance on software as a medical device, in effect since 18 December 2019, says mobile apps that meet the definition are software as a medical device, and takes software out of scope only when it meets all four of its criteria: it is not intended to acquire, process or analyse a medical image, a signal from an in vitro diagnostic device or a pattern or signal from a signal acquisition system; it is intended to display, analyse or print medical information; it is only intended to support a health care professional, patient or caregiver in making decisions; and it is not intended to replace the clinical judgement of a health care professional. An app that tracks calorie intake so someone can manage their own weight is the guidance's example of something outside the rules. Most health roadmaps break one of the four criteria in version two, when someone proposes reading the heart signal from a wearable or turning a suggestion into an instruction. A free pilot is no way around it, because the Food and Drugs Act defines selling to include distributing to one or more persons whether or not for consideration. Under the Medical Devices Regulations a Class II, III or IV device may not be sold unless it is licensed, and selling one for investigational testing with human subjects needs an authorisation from the Minister plus records meeting section 81, with labels reading Investigational Device and Instrument de recherche. A Class I device can go to a qualified investigator with the records alone. That changes how we scope a health MVP. The intended use statement is written before the backlog, because it decides the class, and features that would raise the class, such as signal processing or an output worded as a diagnosis, stay behind a flag and out of the pilot build until the regulatory route is chosen. Classification and the licensing route are for your regulatory adviser.

The other MVP that meets a regulator before it meets the market is the one that moves other people's money, and in Canada the line is drawn by what the product does rather than by what it is called. FINTRAC's guidance says that a business which receives payment instructions and acts as an intermediary between a payer buying goods or services and a payee supplying them, where the payee has an agreement giving it access to the transfers, is remitting or transmitting funds, and is therefore a money services business if it has a place of business in Canada, which being incorporated here is enough to establish. The exception is narrow: a business that solely accepts payment for goods or services it supplied to its own customer. A single-vendor SaaS charging its own subscribers sits outside that, while a two-sided marketplace that collects from buyers and pays sellers may sit inside it. FINTRAC also lists crowdfunding platform services, meaning a website, app or other software that other people use to raise funds or virtual currency through donations, so a fundraising feature added to a community product can get there too. A money services business has to register with FINTRAC before it begins to operate, then run a compliance program with a designated compliance officer, written policies and procedures, a risk assessment and training, and FINTRAC says failure to register may lead to administrative monetary penalties or criminal charges. A foreign business that directs these services at people in Canada and serves clients here has to register as well. The shortcut that creates the problem is a common one at MVP stage: buyers pay into the founders' account and sellers are paid by manual transfer, because a processor's split-payment product looked like a month of extra work. We build the money flow on the processor's product from the first release, map exactly who instructs and who receives each transfer, and flag any feature that changes that map. Whether your design makes you a money services business is for your own counsel.

How we work with Canadian clients

Two things shape Canadian projects more than anything technical. The first is language: if you serve Quebec, French is a legal requirement rather than a nice addition, and the rules tightened considerably under Bill 96. The French version has to be available on equal terms with the English one, which is a design constraint from the first wireframe rather than a translation task at the end.

The second is anti-spam law. CASL is stricter than most teams expect, and the penalties are real. Consent has to be express or clearly implied, records of it have to be kept, and every commercial message needs a working unsubscribe and accurate sender identification. We build those into the product rather than leaving them to whoever configures the mailing tool later, because that is where the exposure usually sits.

Questions Canadian clients ask

MVP Development: common questions

Other markets we work in