Ottawa designer Alistair Lane needed to buy a dehumidifier over the weekend, after the freeze and thaw of the last week flooded his basement. But as Canada deals with the fallout of a trade war with the U.S., he didn’t want to buy from an American company.
Enter Provincial Supply.
Lane, who currently works at fintech company Stripe, launched the AI-powered search platform last month, inspired by a dinner conversation with his wife and friends.
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“We were talking about what we could be doing to help Canadians, support Canadian businesses,” he told OBJ on Monday. “And I woke up the next morning and just had this snippet of an idea.”
The website, provincialsupply.ca, lets users input their favourite brands or products, then uses AI to search the web and its own database for Canadian alternatives.
While Lane said he’d experimented with AI before, this was his first proper project and his first time launching a product of his own.
“I knew I could query AI to get alternative results, but it probably went through three or four prototypes before I landed on this,” he said. “The hardest thing to get right was returning relevant results from the query that you search for — and Canadian results.”
Lane introduced AI answer engine Perplexity into the mix, which allowed the platform to perform live web searches and return more accurate results.
Now that his site is live, Lane said the results will continue to improve as people use it.
“If you search something, it will do that search live, then take those results and put them into a database for me to review manually. The next time you get those results back right away,” he said.
“But what also happens, which I think is kind of cool, is it puts them into a database. Once I’ve gone and audited the results and approved them as valid, for the next person that comes along, it will just pull them right from the database. So what we’re building, essentially as a community, is a database of Canadian businesses just by searching.”
He added that Canadian companies, including small local businesses, can input their information and tag their entry with relevant keywords so they’ll pop up in future searches.
And to bring the platform closer to home for users, Lane added a “find locally” button under each search result, which allows AI to search the web for local retailers which sell that product.
In the two weeks since the site went live, he said 1,000 Canadian businesses have been indexed in the database.
For his own purposes, it’s already been useful, allowing Lane to find Canadian alternatives to Nike shoes, crayons for his four-year-old, and a dehumidifier for his flooded basement.
“This is the first thing I’ve launched as a side project,” he said. “With projects, especially for designers, it’s very hard to get to that point where you say, ‘This is ready.’ My friends and my wife had been pushing me to launch Provincial Supply for probably a month before I actually did. The way I think about projects is to ship high quality and minimize scope. I tried to stay true to that with what I was building here.”
Lane came to Canada from England in 2013, earning his citizenship on the cusp of the pandemic, and it’s his Canadian pride and passion for supporting entrepreneurs that he said fuelled the project.
“I think people always want to support local and people have always wanted to support Canadians,” he said. “Yes, that is amplified right now, but I hope this has longevity. I went to the Ottawa Farmers’ Market yesterday and it was awesome. People want to go out and support local producers. So this is just another tool in your pocket that can help you do that.”
