SaaS founder · @rickwise
Rick Wise
Founder background
Engineer and solo founder near Toronto. Building CloudWise (catches costly AWS mistakes) and SR&ED Lab (SR&ED claims for Canadian software companies, written from your commits).
Expertise
- Engineering
- AI
Achievements
- Filed my own company's first SR&ED claim; the CRA assessed it as filed
- Built CloudWise solo: AWS waste detection across 40+ services
Public profiles
Products
SR&ED Lab
SR&ED Claims, written by an engineer
CloudWise
Safe AWS Cost Remediation
Recent posts
My SR&ED claim was easier to write from git history than…
Last year I prepared my own company's SR&ED claim for CloudWise. The hard part wasn't the tax form. It was answering "what did you try, what failed, and when?" months after the fact. What worked: I rebuilt the record from dated commits, pull requests and tickets. Every experiment had a date, a hypothesis in the ticket, and a result in a commit message or a revert. The narrative almost wrote itself, and the CRA assessed the claim as filed. Three habits I'd start on day one, even if you never claim: 1. Write the uncertainty in the ticket before you start ("we don't know if X can do Y under Z"). 2. Keep failed attempts. A revert with a one-line reason is evidence. 3. Note roughly who worked on it each week. They cost minutes, and they make a claim possible later.
Hi Buildside 👋 I'm Rick, an engineer near Toronto building…
This week's lesson from SR&ED Lab: my first warm-up emails from a brand-new domain landed in Hotmail spam, while Gmail was fine. So the cold email start moves a week while the domain earns trust. If you're a Canadian founder wondering whether your product work counts as R&D, ask here and I'll answer in public.