Canadian fintech start-up Hardbacon closes down
Hardbacon, a Canadian personal finance fintech based in Montreal, has ceased operations, becoming the latest start-up to announce its closure this year.
Hardbacon closes down after seven years in business
Founded in 2017, Hardbacon provided Canadian investors with a mobile app offering investment tools and comparisons of financial services like bank accounts, crypto exchanges, online brokers, robo-advisors, credit cards, and mortgages. In July 2022, it secured $706,000 from over 500 investors via FrontFundr, before securing an additional $819,000 again through FrontFundr the following November.
Announced via a company blog post on 15 August, co-founder and CEO Julien Brault wrote: “It is with a heavy heart that I write this last post for Hardbacon. Indeed, all employees of Hardbacon (Bacon Financial Technologies Inc.) have been let go, and our operations are now suspended.
“The company will declare bankruptcy in the coming days, and it is possible that third parties may purchase some of our assets from the trustee.
“If that happens, Hardbacon might have a second life. At least, I hope so, because it would be a shame for our app, our thousands of articles, and our calculators (which have become impossible to find on the web) to become completely inaccessible.”
Brault says that he has been working to reduce the firm’s expenses since September 2023 “when a Google update [designed to downrank low-quality SEO-driven and AI-generated content] caused Hardbacon’s traffic to plummet”.
“I let go of our employees one by one until I had to let go of the last two employees at the beginning of the month,” Brault writes.
Brault adds that despite “extensive SEO and content optimisation work”, Hardbacon’s traffic continued to decline with each new Google update since September. He claims the company has lost 97% of its Google-driven traffic in total – “from 350,000 per month in September to around 50,000 per month at the time of writing”.
In a LinkedIn post made a week after his initial closure announcement, Brault disclosed that “about twenty credible buyers have expressed interest in acquiring the trustee’s assets”.
He also noted that a Google update made the day after the announcement led to a fourfold increase in Hardbacon’s traffic within four days, with traffic “doubling every day”.
Despite this surge, Brault says that given the company’s “financial situation, it’s probably too little, too late…”
