I moved to Regina knowing exactly no one.

The apartment I'd arranged before leaving didn't exist. The listing photos belonged to a unit three provinces away, and I only found that out once I had nowhere booked to sleep.

I ended up spending fifteen nights in a hotel while I looked for something real. The bill came to more than two months of the rent I was trying to avoid paying twice, and getting the room in the first place was its own fight: hotels don't take debit or cash for a security deposit, only a credit card, and mine wasn't active yet. Finding someone willing to put a stranger's hotel bill on their own card took almost as much work as finding someone willing to rent to me.

The immigration “consultant” a friend recommended had no license at all. I only found that out after I'd already paid him. Neither mistake cost me as much as it could have, more luck than planning, and I kept thinking about the people who wouldn't get that kind of luck.

ArrivEase started as a spreadsheet I kept for people who kept asking me the same questions I'd had to figure out myself, like which programs were worth the tuition, which landlords actually picked up the phone, which immigration consultants were legit. It became a business because the spreadsheet couldn't scale past the first dozen people, and the problem it was solving didn't stop at Regina's city limits.

We serve newcomers everywhere in Canada now, not just here, but the reason the company exists hasn't moved. The two things that hurt people most when they're starting over are bad information dressed up as good advice, and listings that were never real to begin with. Everything we've built since is meant to close off exactly those two problems.