ClearFit founder Ben Baldwin always knew he wanted to be an entrepreneur, although he wasn’t always sure that this attitude was a good thing. “I’ve never really fit into the way other people think/act and I have a real problem with authority,” Baldwin said in interview. “I kinda thought that I was screwed professionally, until I started my own thing.“

ClearFit, a software product that helps businesses hire new employees based on cultural fit and experience, was created out of a passion to help entrepreneurs tackle their biggest challenge. “My background is in building software for Fortune 500 companies, to help them predict hiring success. I found myself working with companies like GlaxoSmithKline all across the U.S., Brazil, Russia,” said Baldwin, “But my true passion was in helping other entrepreneurs with their challenges -–and their biggest challenge (aside from cash-flow) is hiring.” This challenge was something he encountered in his larger clients, but was especially hard on small businesses. “Small businesses in North America spend $60 billion every year on job postings, recruiters, employee referral strategies, and recruiting software - but hiring is still broken: turnover and retention haven’t improved in over 30 years.”

While building ClearFit, Baldwin said his most important lesson was surrounding himself with the right people. “At first, it may feel like letting go, but then you realize that if you’ve done a good enough job hiring, you’re actually in far more control because they’re better than you at what they’re doing. They are the ultimate business driver and they’re also what frees you to focus on the stuff that you’re best at, and they’re best at.“ Hiring the right people has paid off, and Baldwin believes the biggest milestone for ClearFit was hitting 4,000 businesses using their product. “It shows how our message is resonating with our various customer groups: especially in verticals like construction, franchise, retail, restaurants, financial services, and tech/startups.“

There are no shortage of software products that help with the hiring process – RoundPegg and Taleo also help with applicant screening – but Baldwin is clear that his solution is not designed for the HR community. “ClearFit was built for business owners and hiring managers.  These are typically people who would prefer to delegate hiring because it’s a task that’s such a pain – but it’s absolutely mission-critical. We’re empowering our users to take back hiring!“

ClearFit has also distinguished itself by partnering with large companies in the small business space, including CareerBuilder and Adecco. Baldwin believes the key to building and maintaining strong partnerships is picking partners carefully, and making sure they get your full attention. “Once you know you’re on the same page, help partners sell their own product, not yours. That way, you’ll be invaluable to them. Pay them more than what they deserve – cannibalize their attention by becoming indispensable to them.”

As ClearFit has grown, they have expanded operations beyond their Toronto office to a second office in San Francisco. Baldwin described dividing the company as challenging, but believes keeping strategic people in one location is they key to multiple workspaces. “Dividing a company is always a challenge, so we try to minimize this risk by having out strategic people in the same office, rather than splitting them up into different ones,” he said, “When you have a remote sales office, it’s easier to pull off, but if you have strategic people in different locations, I think that’s much harder to get right – if not impossible.” Keeping strategic people close by is important for Baldwin, and his biggest piece of advice for entrepreneurs is not to go at it alone. “Get a co-founder, so you don’t go crazy.  Otherwise, you’ll grow a beard and end up like Tom Hanks in Castaway.”

ClearFit was named one of IDC’s Ten Canadian Cloud Companies to Watch, and Baldwin believes that commitment to their product was what helped land their first Fortune 500 customer. “We did one thing really well – better than the competition.  We demonstrated this in a pilot and they just kept buying more and more from us. We’re really good at making good on our promises. “

Baldwin is very optimistic for the future of ClearFit. “We’re on our way to building a billion dollar business. The $60 billion North American SMB hiring market is massive, so we’re focusing hard on our verticals,” he said. Baldwin also said that ClearFit has plans to build out their partnerships, including Monster.com, LinkedIn, and Craigslist.

Since the first issue of Sprouter Weekly, we’ve been hunting down the newest, most exciting startups each week, and serving up four of them straight to your inbox. The thing about startups is that usually launch day is only the beginning. Here’s a look at some of the Hot Startups we’ve profiled over the years, and where they are now.

The Acquisitions

 We introduced Rypple in the March 28 2010 edition of Sprouter Weekly, and knew this performance management system was big news. We profiled their founders in December of 2010, and founder Daniel Debow said 2011 was going to be their biggest year yet. Salesforce agreed, and in December 2011, Rypple was acquired by Salesforce for an undisclosed amount.

 In November 0f 2010, we thought Rapportive was big news. They had just raised a million dollars in funding, and they had integrations with LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. As it turns out, LinkedIn wanted to be more than just an integration partner, and in February 2012, Rapportive announced an acquisition by LinkedIn on their blog.

 In the same issue of Sprouter Weekly that we profiled Rypple, we also looked at scheduling application Tungle. Erin interviewed their founder Marc Gringas in 2009, and his goal was 600 million users world-wide. In 2011, Blackberry maker Research in Motion decided they liked what Tungle had going on, and Tungle announced on their blog that they had been acquired by RIM on April 27.

 September 22nd, 2010, we profiled Tony Conrad’s new startup, designed to give users one page that points to all of the things they do online. About.me was in public beta mode at the time, and when they launched publicly in in December of 2010, AOL snapped them up in only four days.

 In the Novemeber 10, 2010 issue of Sprouter Weekly, we loved this photo-sharing application, and talked about how Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger raised a $500,000 seed round earlier in 2010. Two years later, Facebook would close out Q1 with the announcement that they would be acquiring the social network for $1Billion.

The Trendsetters

 For the June 2nd, 2010 edition of Sprouter Weekly, we decided that social accommodations site Airbnb was on to something. Two years later, the phrase “We’re like Airbnb for X” is a common pitch opener, and Airbnb operates in over 190 countries, and 19,700 cities worldwide.

 In our very first issue of Sprouter Weekly, way back in March of 2010, we featured group buying site Groupon. Hundreds of startups would follow the group buying trend, and Groupon would go on to raise millions in funding, including an IPO on July 11th, 2011, to raise $750 million.

Record Breakers and Heavy Hitters

 In March 2010, we featured small business community Etsy as a Hot Startup, loving the ability to buy handmade and vintage goods. A year later, they reported one billion pageviews in January of 2011, and over $30 million in goods sold through the Etsy marketplace. Impressive numbers!

 For the June 1st, 2011 edition of Sprouter Weekly we thought Kickstarter was a great platform for people to fund creative ideas. Kickstarter rounded out 2011 with over $90 million pledged towards projects, and would usher in 2012 with its largest funded project ever – Pebble’s ePaper watch has brought in over $10 million.

 We featured Pinterest in August 2011, and described them as “a virtual pinboard. People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes.” They would go on to amass 10 million users in 9 months, and become the fastest growing site ever.

Since 2009, we’ve been interviewing different founders every week, and bringing their story to you. We wanted to take a walk down memory lane, and revisit some Founder Profiles from days past:

June 2010, Gary Vaynerchuk

When we interviewed Gary, his company VaynerMedia was only a year old, but he had already appeared on Ellen, The Today Show, and Late Night with Conan O’Brien. Gary had also just signed a  seven-figure, 10 book deal with HarperStudio, and Crush It! (his first) was a New York Times Bestseller.

August 2010, Aaron Patzer

Mint.com was 4 years old when we interviewed Aaron, but what a journey! From working alone in a room for 18 hours a day, and paying his first two employees from his savings, Aaron’s dedication would see Mint.com win the TechCrunch40, and secure a $170 million acquisition by Intuit.

September 2010, Chris Dixon

Chris had just founded Hunch with co-founder Caterina Fake when we talked to him about his entrepreneurship and investment work. Dixon also launched seed-stage venture capital fund Founder Collective to help fund new and emerging tech startups on the East Coast.

December 2010, Seth Godin

Seth had a pretty clear message in this interview - “Don’t wait to get picked. Start,” he said. “Don’t build a business that needs outside investment.” The Squidoo founder was already a marketing guru, author of 12 bestsellers, and was blogging his experience at Seth’s Blog.

January 2011, Steve Wozniak

The Woz has a pretty extraordinary entrepreneurship journey – from co-founding Apple Computers in 1976, to his current role at Fusion-io, Steve maintains that young entrepreneurs have more energy, but he shows no signs of slowing down.

February 2011, Ben Huh

We talked to Ben about the rise of lolcats, and how he took the Cheezburger Network from one blog to a network of 50 sites that has been profitable since day one. He also shared his experience raising $32.5 million in funding, and the importance of listening to your communities.

March 2011, Craig Newmark

Craigslist founder Craig Newmark had just started CraigConnects.org when we spoke to him, but he was (and is) committed to serving the Craigslist community. He still does customer support for Craigslist, and was named one of  Time Magazine’s 25 most influential people on the web in 2008 to boot.

May 2011, Caterina Fake

Catarina had a pretty amazing entrepreneurship journey when we talked to her – a huge exit from her startup Flickr after it was acquired by Yahoo, co-founding Hunch in 2009, and investing in companies Dailybooth, Etsy and others through Founder Collective. She’s now at the helm of her new startup Pinwheel, and we look forward to seeing more!

July 2011, Bruce Croxon

We interviewed Bruce shortly after he joined Canadian entrepreneur show Dragons’ Den, and the Lavalife founder said season one was gruelling, but fun. He was looking forward to meeting more entrepreneurs, and finding the next great digital business.

2012 is already shaping up to be a pretty amazing year for Sprouter Weekly founders – we’ve talked to DoubleClick founder Kevin O’Conner, G Adventures founder Bruce Poon Tip, TechStars founder David Cohen, and many others. We’re looking forward to featuring as many extraordinary entrepreneurs as we can, and here’s to 100 more issues of Sprouter Weekly, and 100 more Founder Profiles!

Twitpic founder Noah Everett is no stranger to start-ups. He founded his first startup in his late teens, a music site called Indiefy. “It was a way for independent artists to sell their music online.” Everett said in interview. “I built it, but I didn’t put a lot into getting it out there so it fizzled out.” His current startup, popular photo-sharing site Twitpic, was built out of his own personal need. “I wanted a way to share my own photos so I spent the weekend coding up the first version of Twitpic for me and my friends to use.”

Twitpic filled a niche that Twitter had not originally implemented – users could send 140 character messages to one another, and to the world, but there was no way to attach a photograph or media item to Tweets. Everett saw this gap in functionality, and created Twitpic in 2008 to solve it.

Aside from being used to share photos among friends, Twitpic has gone on to be a medium for some historical moments. Everett said the biggest highlights for him have been seeing Twitpic used in breaking news situations, like the January 15th, 2009 plane crash in the Hudson River. He believes the biggest milestone of Twitpic has been hitting 35 million users, and being revenue positive from day one, without taking on funding. Twitpic shares its space with other photo sharing tools like yFrog, which is owned by parent-company ImageShack. Twitter also announced in June of 2011 that it was adding photo-sharing to its native application.

His advice for entrepreneurs looking to bootstrap their company is two fold. “Get your core product out the door as quick as possible, your users will tell you where to go.” To cap it off, Everett believes in a “just do it” mentality for startups. Since starting Twitpic, Everett has raised no funding, and has relied on ad revenue to keep the service revenue positive. Everett has always been an advocate of keeping his business small, highlighting this on the Twitpic blog.

Twitpic ran as a one-person show for the first few months, but Everett found that eventually he simply couldn’t do it alone. “I couldn’t run it by myself anymore, my stress levels were through the roof and the company needed employees to grow.” Twitpic runs exclusively on user-submitted content, so making sure that this content is safe was a challenge. “It’s really amazing to see the cool things people upload…you get to see into their lives,” said Everett, adding that sometimes moderation is still necessary, “Users will upload anything…be prepared to remove bad content.”

Everett’s biggest piece of advice for entrepreneurs is simple: “Just do what you love and get out there and do something. There will be good days and there will be bad days.” Everett believes the key to success is to never lose sight of your vision, even amid criticism. “Keep your vision in front of you at all times…the noise will constantly try to distract you from it.”

Twitpic has expanded recently to the mobile space by releasing their own iPhone application, and an Android app is in the works as well. Everett maintains his commitment to putting users first, saying “we just released our mobile apps and we’re excited to see where that takes us, but as always we just want to build the best product possible for our users.” Also on the way from Twitpic is the release of Helpmint, a customer service system Everett wrote for Twitpic that he is opening to the public.

This week represents a pretty big milestone – 100 issues of Sprouter Weekly! From the very first issue back in March 2010, we’ve been sending you Hot Startups, insightful Founder Profiles, useful startup articles and great events every week, and we’re eternally grateful that you’ve been reading them for over two years.

Our first issue was a great success – on March 11th, 2010, we interviewed Canadian entrepreneur Dan Martell, featured startups Groupon and crowdSPRING, and looked at events all over the world. Since then, we’ve been doing our best to find the latest and greatest startups, and bring you Founder Profiles that are exciting, informative, and most of all, inspiring.

This week, we’re going to look back at Sprouter Weekly, and see what the most popular Founder Profiles were, which Hot Startups went on to make it big, and learn more from you on what you love about Sprouter Weekly.

Stay tuned for our walk down memory lane, and thanks again for joining us every week!

Update: We’ve picked our lucky commenter! Thanks to everyone who commented, and we’ll post the details once we’ve confirmed all the info!

With mesh12 just around the corner, we wanted to give you an opportunity to get in on the action! If you’ve never been before, here’s the skinny on the mesh conference:

mesh is a two-day conference held in Toronto that explores the different ways  the internet is changing how we live, work and play. mesh gathers together leading thinkers and talented innovators who have earned their stripes doing great digital work, and creates a platform for people to connect with others who are interested what’s next, share ideas and be inspired. mesh12 runs from May 23rd to the 24th.

mesh has some great speakers lined up this year, including author Clay A. Johnson, author Rebecca McKinnon, Harvard researcher David Weinberger, and NPR social media strategist Andy Carvin. Topics range from E-Learning to big data, and everything in between.

Sound like something that tickles your fancy? Great! We’ve got one free ticket to give away!

Just check out the mesh12 schedule here, and tell us in the comments which talk or panel looks the most interesting to you! We’ll pick someone from the comments, and send over details on how to get your free pass.

Jon will be there, taking in all of the digital talk, so if you see him, say hello!

BumpTop founder Anand Agarawala didn’t always want to be an entrepreneur. In fact, he initially felt that business and wealth would get in the way of raw creativity. But building a business with close friends changed all that. “After having a built a business with an awesome group of friends and having times we’ll never forget, I’ve changed,” he said in interview. “Business doesn’t have to be dirty, economics are a necessary part of the equation when you’re doing anything at scale that touches lots of people.”

Agarawala’s company BumpTop provides a desktop computer environment that simulates a real-world physical desk. Documents and items are represented as three-dimensional objects on a virtual desk, and users interact with them via stylus or touch-screen input. Agarawala originally got the idea for BumpTop as part of a Masters thesis at the University of Toronto.  “Tablet/pen computing was big at the time and current `Tablet PC’s’ by Microsoft used UIs designed for the mouse,” he said, “The thinking was `What if we rethought the entire user interface completely for touch?’  Also, we wanted to push the desktop metaphor to its logical conclusion in some sense, with ultra realistic simulation of physics.“ The desktop simulation was praised on technology blogs, including a 5-star rating on CNET and a positive review on Engadget

Agarawala believes he got lucky with the transition of BumpTop from Masters Thesis to successful startup. “I put a video of my thesis on YouTube and within the first day it blew up quickly, gaining millions of views.  I figured if I was ever going do a startup, might as well leverage all this momentum this idea had. “ After raising $1.65 million in funding from Austin Hill, Growth Works, Scott Pelton, and Extreme Venture Partners in 2008, the momentum paid off and BumpTop was acquired by Google in 2010.

While building BumpTop, Agarawala said the most important lesson he learned is to follow his intuition. “Succeeding in the startup world isn’t really about having a perfectly hatched plan at the outset.  You’re going to find yourself in all kinds of situations/opportunities where you’re not quite sure what to do.  I think I looked overly to others for advice and got into a bit of analysis paralysis mode instead of trusting my gut and just continuing to grind.” He also believes dwelling on choices too much doesn’t work well for startups. “Decide quickly. Some decisions you’ll have to make have a clear answer, but most don’t. So pick one and move on. Velocity is more important and gives you a chance to course correct.”

Agarawala also learned lessons about building a team, and believes motivation is more important than management. “Hire smart people, fire them up and empower them.  Don’t micromanage when you’re not getting the result you want, motivate.  Smart people won’t stand for it and you really don’t get the best from people when you do. “

BumpTop was available for both Windows and Mac platforms, but Agarawala cautions against working with Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) early on. “It’s extremely time consuming and demanding. I’d avoid it if possible. It also makes it very hard for you to pivot, which is critical in a startup.”

His final piece of advice for entrepreneurs is to make sure they’re starting a business for the right reasons. “Some people just kind of flow into it, or do it to seem cool. I’ve seen a bunch of Stanford CS folks kind of just do it because everybody else is, believe it or not. Being in a startup is an emotional rollercoaster, with lots of highs and lows so make sure you’re down to see it through.“ Agarawala’s emotional rollercoaster included an acquisition by Google, which he said was stressful, but exciting. “Our deal took six months or so and we had to live in secrecy with some of the most exciting news in our lives.”

Although BumpTop is no longer available to consumers, and no updates are currently planned, Agarawala is still working on user interface at Google. He’s a Project Manager on the Google+ Mobile team, and hopes to find a way to make BumpTop available again in the future.

Here’s the original YouTube video that Agarawala posted to YouTube of the Masters thesis that would become BumpTop:

As a follow-up to our coverage of the CTA@NYC startups from earlier this week, we wanted to share the pitch videos each entrepreneur recorded for the launch of the Canadian Technology Accelerator program.

Chris Ye – Uken Games

Cassandra Girard - Buyosphere

James Prudhomme – Recoset

William Mougayar – Engagio

Peter Evans – Speakerfile

Ian Collins always thought about ways to earn money as a kid. The thought of working for someone, and having a ‘normal’ job never occurred to him, especially since his father bought and fixed old houses when he was younger. After graduating from college with an engineering degree, he joined his dad and brother to build houses in his spare time, while working at a job at a big company he didn’t enjoy. After going back to school to get his MBA, Collins worked for another year at a larger company before deciding it was time to start working for himself.

After starting five businesses, including mobile content portal Web2Mobile, Ian founded Clickfree in 2005. Clickfree provides automatic backup software to the consumer PC market, and the idea was inspired by an interaction with Collins’ mother at Christmas. “I had gone to Costco to buy a digital camera for my Mom for Christmas and started to think through the experience,” said Collins in interview, “She would be fine with taking photos, and then uploading them to the computer, then viewing & sharing.  The whole experience would break down though when it came to protecting the photos, there weren’t any backup products that would suit her.“ He soon realized that there was likely a market for automatic backup devices that offered “plug and play” simplicity, and Clickfree was born.

Throughout the five companies that Collins has founded before, he’s learned a number of startup lessons that he has applied to Clickfree. “Never expect to raise financing, especially not on your schedule,” said Collins. “Expect everything to take at least twice as long as planned (usually a lot longer), stay super focused on exactly what problem you want to solve, and try not to get distracted by opportunities that will just pay the bills (but sometimes you have to give in on this rule since you have to be able to pay the bills).” Clickfree has also given Collins a unique opportunity to learn about international logistics. “One important lesson I learned that applies to anyone in the hardware business is to minimize SKUs. For every additional SKU, no matter how harmless it seems at the time, more money will leak out of your business to a million little things, and that will eat away at your margin. Fewer is always better.”

Clickfree has raised over $30 million of funding since launching in 2005, including $8 million in Series D funding from Intel Capital in 2011. Collins believes that entrepreneurs looking for funding can be divided into two categories – those who have startup experience, and those who don’t. “With a track record everything is easier, it’s easier to attract great talent and investors.  Raising money without a track record seems to be harder than ever.  Investors are still cautious (the ones I know anyway) and are looking for proven management.  So many startups think investors will flock to their idea, but investors want to see some kind of sign that the thing will work and that the team can make it happen.” In addition to raising Series D funding, Clickfree also passed one million units sold in 2011, which Ian considers the company’s biggest milestone.

Clickfree also holds 12 patents for the technology that drives their automatic backup platform, but Collins is cautious to recommend patents. “It’s great to own the IP surrounding your technology, but even a company the size of Clickfree probably wouldn’t get into a patent battle intentionally, “ he said, “Since it would take millions to fight a patent battle, patents generally aren’t of any practical use to a startup but investors and acquirers love to see them so you really need to file a few applications.”

His biggest piece of advice for entrepreneurs is to understand that progress is important before investors will take notice. “I’ve talked to so many people that thought they’d attract investors long before they really could,” said Collins’ “You need to hang on and build the company, find sources of cash flow wherever you can (while trying not to get distracted from your core mission) and show that your concept will work.”

When asked what’s next for Clickfree, Collins’ hopes that an acquisition is on the horizon. “Clickfree will eventually be bought by someone, then I’ll be off to build a new company.  I’ve always got a few ideas brewing so when the time comes I’ll choose whatever looks best and get it going.”

Welcome to Part 2 of our coverage of the exciting startups involved in the Canadian Technology Accelerator in New York City! You can read Part 1 here, but here’s a bit of info on the CTA:

Back in February, the Government of Canada announced that six Canadian digital media startups would be participating in the Canadian Technology Accelerator in New York City.  The CTA Program, launched by by the Consulate General of Canada in New York City, is run by the Canadian Trade Commissioner Service and modelled on similar initiatives in Silicon Valley.

Here’s a look at three more of the startups that joined BFB Fashion, Buyosphere, and Engage.io in New York City:

Recoset is a real time machine learning and predictive modelling platform designed to provide machine learning and predictive analytics on a platform as a service model. Their aim is to provide Real Time Advertising Technology, and connect advertiser’s data to real-time marketing transactions. They currently have two applications that are tested and deployed as part of partner programs. Recoset was founded by James Prudhomme in Montreal, Quebec.

Speakerfile lets speakers publish rich-media speaker and event profiles, and build their market profile. Event organizers and members of the media can access a directory of quality speakers on a variety of topics, and corporations & associations can create hubs for their employees, showcasing the expertise and opportunities for speaking engagements. Speakerfile was founded by Peter Evans in Toronto, Ontario.

Uken Games is a cross-platform game development studio that builds social games for the iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackberry and Facebook. Their titles include Forces Of War, Crime Inc., and Mighty Monsters, all of which have reached the top 25 in the Apple App Store and/or BlackBerry AppWorld. Uken Games was founded by Chris Ye in Toronto, Ontario.

Sarah had the chance to interview all six of the participating startups on their goals, challenges, and driving force. The final two videos created from these interviews can be seen here:

What Inspires You:

The Benefits of the NYC Community: