For Dundas Life, the Future of Insurance Is Personalized

The Origin Story of Insurtech Startup Dundas Life

Dundas Life logo.

Insurance is a gigantic industry in our modern world, often required in order to perform essential tasks such as driving or purchasing a home. Regrettably, there are a large number of individuals who are underinsured and slip through the cracks when it comes to banks and regular insurance brokers. 

Dundas Life is a digital insurance brokerage that helps these underinsured individuals shop for life insurance, disability insurance, health insurance, and insurance related to critical illness. All of this can be done from the comfort of their own homes, and Dundas Life has made it its mission to make the process as seamless and as easy as possible. 

Featuring an online calculator, prospective customers can compare life insurance quotes from industry-leading carriers in order to get full price transparency. If they require personalized support, they can reach out and engage with a personalized support agent or licensed advisor. 

Initially founded in 2019 by Gregory Rozdeba, Martin Ochwat, and Steven Sinclair in Toronto, Canada, Dundas Life has grown and flourished since its inception. 

Their goal is to make life insurance more readily available for all Canadians, and provide access to information, expertise, advice, and even receive personalized service on-demand. 

This origin story will dive deeper into Dundas Life, including how the idea for this company came about, what the founders did to develop and grow their startup, and what they have in the pipeline for the future.

Origin of the Startup Idea

Dundas Life came about when the founders began selling insurance on their own. They developed a process for making sales and eventually pivoted into concept validation and testing whether an insurance company with a technology differentiator was worth it. 

As time went on, the founders eventually agreed to start Dundas Life and funded their firm with money they earned from their own insurance sales. They wanted to disrupt the insurance industry and do things in a way that differentiated them from the competition. 

Some of the biggest initial focus points of the founders were to provide an amazing customer experience and consistently do revenue-generating tasks in order to continue growing their business further. 

They received no outside funding, and impressively, their company is completely bootstrapped and built from the ground up. Named after the Dundas neighborhood in Toronto, the founders saw it fitting to name their firm after their neighborhood street. 

What allowed the founders to succeed in building up Dundas Life into what it is today was a deep-rooted entrepreneurial drive and a willingness to make things happen. They all had an entrepreneurial background and found a way to merge their technological skills with insurance in a way that benefited the industry and customers.

Development of Startup

Building up Dundas Life as a bootstrapped firm was a challenging endeavor for the founders. 

In the insurance industry, when you sell a product to one of your customers, it can sometimes take up to several weeks for the revenue to arrive in your bank account. They had to be extremely careful with how they spent their money and consistently keep an eye on their business to avoid any cash flow problems. 

After they established their ideal target market as new homeowners, business owners, and new parents, they focused on seeking out and marketing to their ideal customers in order to grow their initial customer base and bring in the revenue they desperately needed for rapid growth. 

The marketing strategy for Dundas Life primarily focuses on online and offline advertising as well as strategic partnerships. 

As the founders like to say, their first 100 customers came from “smiling and dialing.” They would sit down, focus, and start dialing for mortgage insurance brokers. Even today, their CEO sits down and gets on the phone with clients in order to “keep himself sharp” and understand what their customers are thinking in order to better solve their problems. 

As Dundas Life continues to grow, they focus on several key performance indicators (KPIs), including revenue, customer lifetime value, and customer acquisition costs in order to keep its advertising expenses and revenue in check.

What’s Next for the Startup

Dundas Life has been able to grow into the company it is today due to its focus on making life insurance a reality for all Canadians. They have focused on the individual needs of clients and have always tried to empower the consumer and provide transparency with all that they do. 

As they continue to grow their business and take on more clients, they want to continue embracing technology in order to make their sales processes more efficient and keep thinking of how they can make insurance more accessible to all. 

With a large enough customer base and a large number of happy clients, Dundas Life will likely begin receiving more and more referrals from other happy customers. Word of mouth can be a powerful motivator for others, and when a company combines this with strategic advertising and retargeting, it can really light a fire under the growth it experiences. 

Dundas Life and its founders have the right goals in mind – to focus on the customer and never let the customer experience become that which the larger insurance firms are known for. By enhancing their customer experiences with personalization and showing their customers that they truly care about their well-being, Dundas Life will likely continue to take over the Canadian market and bring life insurance to the underinsured nationwide.

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