Meet Brett Bostick, Founder and Chief Problem Solver
I've owned the business. Now I help you simplify yours.
In grade 7, I started my first company: typing up classmates' reports for a dollar a page. It went under fast, because what people really wanted was for me to do their homework. That was my first business lesson: find out what people actually need.
I grew up in Minto, New Brunswick, a village of about a thousand people. At 13, I was pulling things out of spring cleanup piles and selling them online. I still feel bad about selling my aunt a computer I found in the garbage for $75. In my defence, it was a good deal for her.
Building things with my own hands
Over the years I've started and sold several businesses in Regina. In 2014 I started one of the city's original vape shops, and sold my shares in 2019. I came up with Sweet Tooth Rolled Ice Cream while travelling in Indonesia, then turned a truck into a big pink ice cream shop myself. I cut out the windows, pulled the seats, built the counters and did all the plumbing. Yes, it leaked sometimes.
The night the work did itself
Later I moved into banking at one of Canada's big five banks, working on business and then agricultural loans with small business owners and farmers. That's where I started experimenting with AI. I wrote a simple program that analyzed my whole portfolio overnight. Work that took everyone else the entire year was done by morning.
That's when it hit me: we spend huge parts of our lives doing work that doesn't need to be done at all.
Why Straightline exists
I'm not a software developer. I'm a problem solver who maps out how a business really runs and makes it simpler. After owning businesses and sitting across the desk from thousands of owners, I know the pressure you're under, because I've felt it too.
Helping people matters more to me now than flipping garbage-pile computers. Beyond Straightline, I'm building Gather, a nonprofit that will connect people with on-demand work and put much of its profit toward supporting people experiencing homelessness and lowering the cost of food and basic needs.