Forty-eight hours in a room with VanSquad

On August 3, six professional development teams sat down to draft the finalists of CodeLaunch Canada 2026. ImpulsTrip went third, to VanSquad, captained by Kazim Mir out of Improving Vancouver.

Two days ago that stopped being a line on a website and became a room.

CodeLaunch is in its 27th edition and its third year in Canada, run by Improving. The format is what separates it from every other competition on the circuit. Before anyone pitches anything, each finalist is paired with a real development team and the two of them build together for 48 hours. No equity changes hands. No fees are charged. The winner takes at least $50,000 in investment, a championship belt, and a seat at the World Championship in Dallas on November 11.

The belt is not a metaphor. It is an actual belt.

The hackathon ran September 13 and 14, nine in the morning to seven at night, both days. ImpulsTrip walked in with a list. The list was long. Two years of things that had been deferred, argued about, half-designed and left in a document because there was never a week to build them.

VanSquad's most useful contribution was refusing to build most of it.

The first day was less about adding than removing. Every item came with the same question attached, in one form or another. Does this make the app clearer, or does it just make it bigger? A lot of good ideas do not survive that question, and they should not. ImpulsTrip is built for people who will decide in about four seconds whether an app is worth their evening. Anything that makes that decision slower is a liability regardless of how clever it is.

Founders are the worst people in the world at cutting their own features. Two years of proximity does that. Having a team with no attachment to any of it, and enough experience to know which parts were load-bearing, turned out to be worth more than the extra hands.

By the end of day one the list was roughly half its original length and considerably better.

Day two was heads down. Three founders and a professional team in one room, building the shorter list properly instead of the longer one badly.

The specifics stay unreleased until Wednesday. Part of that is the format, and part of it is that describing something before it works is a good way to end up describing something that does not.

What can be said is that it is the biggest change to the product since launch, and it came out of the thing ImpulsTrip has never had before, which is engineering capacity that exceeded the founders' own hands.

CodeLaunch Canada 2026 is at El Mocambo in Toronto on Wednesday, September 16, from 5 to 10 PM ET. Rajiv Nathan hosts. Simba Wakatama of Flo100 and Emily Fleck of Sterling Brokers judge. The audience votes live, in the room, on the night.

Five other finalists present alongside ImpulsTrip. GoAway Travels, Menchi, Moovmynt, Treegress and aêtava. Every one of them has spent the same 48 hours doing the same thing, and the room is going to be worth being in regardless of how it lands.

But the intention is not to show up well. It is to take the belt to Barrie.

Two years ago this was two people in a garage on College Crescent, deciding on a name late enough that it was technically the next day. On Wednesday it is on a stage in Toronto with a professional development team behind it and six judges' worth of scrutiny in front of it.

Tickets are open to anyone. If you are in Toronto on Wednesday, come be loud.