Check out the Lunch & Learn with CEO and Co-Founder of Noibu, Robert Boukine
On February 16, 2024 the Innovation Hub hosted an exciting Lunch and Learn with Robert Boukine, CEO and Co-Founder of Noibu, an eCommerce error monitoring platform powering the world’s best eCommerce experiences. Last year, Noibu had a 954% growth rate according to Ottawa Business Journal and placed #8 out of 425 companies on the list of Canada’s Top Growing Companies by The Globe and Mail. Having tremendous growth and success, the Hub was eager to give Carleton students the opportunity to hear from Robert himself about his experience of being a CEO for the past 6 years and Noibu’s journey of charting new territory while continuing to grow rapidly.
The Lunch and Learn session took place inside the Innovation Hub and the discussion was facilitated by the Hub’s very own Launch program facilitator Julie Cho. The session was filled with valuable insights and the two major themes were problem solving and resiliency.
Regarding problem-solving, Robert shared his discovery to check the legitimacy of a problem before coming up with a solution. He realized that customers didn’t have a process to find bugs on their website, so he built a product to do that work. Noibu alerts people when there is a bug on their e-commerce site and sends them a weekly report with the steps to reproduce it. Noibu transformed from a service to an automated software and is now a product that works for everyone.
In case you missed it, some key takeaways from Robert Boukine are:
- Personal determination from him and his cofounders made their company work
- He recognizes the risk and privilege of bootstrapping and is glad he began his company that way. Noibu received no outside investments until they had consistent revenue.
- Robert emphasizes that you must “pick who you’re going to sell to”
- His advice for positions of leadership is to hold your team accountable to deliver things. He does this through consistent meetings and clear deliverables.
On the theme of resiliency, Robert talked about the challenges he had between each step of scaling his company. In sales, he struggled with how to best reach out to potential clients and get them in meetings. His tried-and-true advice is to build a sales funnel and track numbers at each stage to determine the most effective messaging.
If you don’t want to miss out on another Lunch and Learn, make sure you check out our Events & Community Networking page and follow us on Instagram @innovate_cu to stay up-to-date on everything happening at the Hub!
