Congratulations on trying! It is by far the most important step! You might be interested in the Canadian Youth Business Foundation http://www.cybf.ca. They offer 15k low interest loans to young entrepeneurs and a personal mentor. (Full disclosure: I’m a mentor with the organization and I’ve been fairly impressed overall.)

Best of luck on your journey!

Daniel

Applies to banks, angels, VCs, Mom & Dad, rich uncles and yes, even the government.

It sounds like you were well beyond the level that this program was designed for. There are other resources around that would be a better fit than picking this one because the closing deadline was coming soon.

My understanding is that they are simply trying to get students to try entrepreneurship as an option. For $3k, you can only expect so much. That first try might lead to a second or third try…

And it is probably not appropriate to paint all government programs with the same brush.

I would also bet that you have more chance of changing Ontario government policies and programs in this area than getting the banks and VCs in Ontario to change their policies.

Good luck with your venture.

It’s great to see Canadian entrepreneurs trying. There are a lot of other programs and support mechanisms in Toronto, not all of them are formalized. I know that Jevon – http://startupnorth.ca/, Leila – http://blog.ideeinc.com/, Stuart – http://tripharbour.ca/ and others (like me) have all provided mentoring for early stage software entrepreneurs.

There is a great community of entrepreneurs building on Rails. Including LearnHub, TSOT, and Unspace.

And I’m happy to buy you a coffee, beer or lunch. You’ll have to tolerate a MacBook Pro toting Microsoft Canada employee.

Why not come out to DemoCampToronto18 and meet some of these folks.