Meet Our Maple Member: Lee Benson, Blueprint Ventures (SaaS)

Every few months we welcome multiple international startups to Vancouver, as they begin Phase 3 of our Maple Program. In an ongoing Maple Member series, we interview our newest Canadians about their experience with Launch and Canada so far.

Although we aren’t able to physically welcome our newest Phase 3 companies to Canada, given the current travel restrictions caused by COVID-19, we are excited to introduce them to you as we continue to run this part of the program virtually.

Lee Benson has been an entrepreneur since he was young, and once he realized that he could be paid for the passion projects he took on, there was no going back.

Lee is a self-taught full-stack software engineer, and began his Internet career in 1998. He wrote a search engine marketing tool when he was 15 years old which did well, and he later went on to sell it, making his first exit when he was 17 years old.

Over the past 20 years, Lee Benson has worn many hats- from CEO to CTO, marketer, and product designer – specializing in B2B SaaS and e-commerce projects, for both his own projects and as a CTO for hire. Most recently though, Lee has been working on his company, Blueprint Ventures Inc. which he founded in 2019.

Blueprint’s first product is Turfmob, a domain name acquisition and leasing marketplace for start-ups. Lee’s goal with Turfmob is to make it really easy to acquire a name without negotiation or pushy sales tactics that work for a typical start-up budget. On the other side of things, the sellers would be charged the lowest fees in the market. 

Lee’s dream for Blueprint Ventures is to offer the very best tools to online sellers, across a range of platforms. With the majority of his customer base being North America, Lee realized that settling in Vancouver would allow him to work directly in the North American market, as well as access to local talent and the proximity to major tech centres would help make that dream a reality.

Lee has enjoyed his experience with Launch so far, and feels more prepared for his upcoming move after participating in the Maple Program.

If you are in the SaaS space and want to connect with Lee, you can add him on LinkedIn.