If you’ve been following Poparide, you may have read how Covid-19 flattened our revenue curve by 95% in just six weeks after stay-at-home orders were introduced in Canada.
Had you asked me a year ago to predict where Poparide would be today, I would likely have said that we’d had to shut down given that we lost nearly all of our revenue and we only had a runway of a few months.
Against all odds, I’m happy to say that Poparide is still alive and well, and that while we had to make a few changes during these difficult times, we managed to get through the storm and are now starting to see the light at the end of the Covid-19 tunnel.
Here’s how we survived the first year of the pandemic.
We recognized a crisis was coming and prepared for the worst
As early as January 2020, we started seeing signs from abroad that if Covid-19 entered Canada, we would likely be confined to staying at home and travel would immediately cease.
We started thinking early on about how we’d deal with a crisis, and what steps we’d need to take if worse came to worst and we had to shut down the service. By being mentally and emotionally prepared, it helped us execute calmly when the time came.
We communicated transparently with all stakeholders
Once the official stay-at-home orders came into effect on March 13, 2020, we immediately acknowledged both internally and externally that we were in a crisis, and we quickly sent communications to our members advising them to stop using our service until further notice.
During this period, we also communicated openly and regularly with our team and our investors, and informed them of the actions we were taking to keep our members safe and how we were working to ensure the business would survive, which brings me to the next point…
