Durable Brand Guidelines: A Vancouver AI Builder for Solo Service Businesses Since 2021

A Vancouver start built around the solo business.

Durable is a Vancouver company. Techcouver, the British Columbia technology news site, reported on 24 October 2022 that the startup was “the brainchild” of three Vancouverites: Ross Howard-Jones, James Clift and Helio Bentes. It described Howard-Jones as a longtime designer who had worked at Bench and Shopify, and Clift as an entrepreneur since high school. BetaKit, the Canadian startup news site, which interviewed Clift in December 2022, calls him Durable’s founder and chief executive.

By BetaKit’s account the company was about a year old at that point, which places its start in late 2021. The same report dates its first, pre-seed financing to December 2021 and a seed round led by Altman Capital to March 2022, and names Torch Capital, Dash Fund, Infinity Ventures and South Park Commons among its other early backers. The team then numbered seven people.

Clift came to Durable from earlier software businesses. BetaKit reported that he had grown VisualCV, an online résumé and portfolio maker, to about four million users before leaving it in 2020, and that a later tool of his, Holopod, which posted automatic status updates in the workplace chat app Slack, had been bought by Pulse in 2022.

Asked about their aims in 2022, the founders told Techcouver that they saw business owners as “resilient, hard-working, and long-lasting,” and that they were building the company “to last” and wanted to help their customers do the same. Clift put the problem more bluntly to BetaKit: it was, he said, “still way too hard to start a business, specifically a service-based company.”

A website in about 30 seconds.

Durable’s first product was a website builder that writes the site for its owner. Techcouver reported in October 2022 that the startup claimed it could launch a business online in less than a minute, using artificial intelligence to supply the copy and images that owners would otherwise have to find or write themselves; alongside the website builder it listed invoicing and a customer-relationship manager. In December 2022 BetaKit described the free builder as making a company website “in three clicks and 30 seconds,” and said it had been soft-launched about a month earlier.

The audience was narrow by design. Clift told BetaKit in 2022 that Durable did not do e-commerce, bricks-and-mortar or retail, and was “totally focused on service-based companies” — people selling their time by the hour or by the project. A year later the same publication gave personal trainers, landscapers and freelancers as examples: an owner types in some facts about the business, and in under 30 seconds Durable produces a site with a banner, a list of services and a short pitch, which the owner can then sign up to edit.

Growth was fast by the company’s own count. In December 2022 Clift said more than 26,000 websites had been built. On 12 December 2023 BetaKit and Techcouver reported a Series A round, closed the month before and led by Spark Capital, with earlier backers and Soma Capital taking part; by then Clift put the number of sites built in the first year at six million. BetaKit noted that the builder could be used without signing up, so those sites did not represent six million customers. The team had grown to 15 people, and a “brand builder” in beta was producing logos, business cards and signage with AI.

How website builders present themselves.

Website and portfolio builders present themselves first through their templates. Ucraft’s home page offers more than 120 “designer-made” templates sorted into categories such as business, photography, restaurants and art, and credits each one to a designer on its team; Readymag’s templates, Website Planet reported in May 2026, are grouped into company websites, landing pages, presentations, portfolios, editorials and online stores, and include designs submitted by users.

The editor is the second part of the pitch, and the products differ. Ucraft’s editor works with blocks and elements that snap into a page grid, according to reviews in TechRadar in 2021 and PCMag in 2026, with a separate page of typography, button and layout settings that the company calls Designer Tools. Readymag’s editor is freeform, with elements placed without a rigid grid and detailed type controls such as ligatures, stylistic sets and variable fonts, according to English Wikipedia; Website Planet describes it as layer-based.

Showcase sites made by users do much of the brand’s work. Ucraft keeps a gallery called “Made with U,” and Readymag runs an annual Website of the Year award for projects built on its platform, judged by a jury of designers and art directors, according to English Wikipedia. Plan and feature names follow a similar logic, pairing plain tiers with branded tools: TechRadar listed Ucraft’s paid plans in 2021 as Pro Website, Pro Shop and Unlimited, alongside features such as a logo maker.

Corporate pages on founders and owners vary widely. Ucraft’s about page gives a dated timeline and names its investor, SoftConstruct, but not its founders, while Readymag’s founders and chief executive are named in English Wikipedia and in design-press interviews. This guide sets out what each company says about itself, and what independent dated sources add.

From website builder to business builder.

The company has since widened its pitch from websites to the whole business. On 17 March 2026 it relaunched as what its blog calls “the complete AI business builder for independent entrepreneurs.” The company says the new version goes from idea to live site in under 30 seconds, with AI generating pages, layouts, copy and business-specific images rather than asking owners to fill in a template; an editor lets owners choose fonts and colours while the system keeps the site visually consistent, and new pages can be added simply by describing them. Every site publishes first to a free durable.site subdomain.

Around the site, the relaunch bundled a customer-relationship manager, invoicing built on Stripe, an AI Studio for logos, social posts and posters, an “AI Business Partner” chat assistant, and tools for being found in search engines and in AI chat apps, which the company groups as SEO and GEO. Its about page now says more than three million people have started a business on Durable, and describes a globally distributed team “with a home base in Vancouver, Canada”; the site names the operating company as Durable Technologies Inc. The company’s own line is that Durable “makes owning a business easier than having a job.” Its web address has moved too: durable.co now forwards to durable.com.

For a design guide, Durable shows a builder that frames its whole pitch around one kind of customer, the solo service business, and around speed. Compare 10Web, another builder that writes sites with AI, and Wix. For this guide we use a deep forest green, a warm cream and a clay orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Durable’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.