In the latest episode of What the Tech from Boast, we sat down with Marc Gingras, co-founder and CEO of Bloks, a company on a mission to eliminate the tedious busy work that plagues traditional CRMs and investment workflows.

We first connected with Marc at SaaS North in Ottawa (November 2025) as part of our activation with TechTO, where he took the stage to explain the game-changing innovation behind Bloks: A platform helping venture capital, private equity partners, wealth advisors, and professional services firms rethink how they manage relationships.

Marc has been a leading entrepreneur in Ottawa for more than a decade, and his journey through the tech ecosystem offers valuable lessons about finding product-market fit, building for efficiency, and knowing when the world is ready for a fundamental rethink of legacy tools.

The Ultimate Hack: A Career Built on Productivity

Marc’s entrepreneurial journey started with a simple philosophy that traces back to high school: “I was just trying to find hacks through everything I didn’t want to study. So I would try to find ways to get good grades without having to spend the time.”

That ethos—finding ways to get results without wasting time—became the throughline of his entire career. His first startup, Tungle, built scheduling software (think Calendly before Calendly existed). In fact, Marc’s name is on the patent for that scheduling link concept. He grew Tungle to half a million users and sold it to BlackBerry in 2011.

His second venture focused on retail operations, helping companies like Nike, Whole Foods, CVS, and LVMH brands communicate with and task their distributed store locations. After a bidding war in 2021, the company was acquired by Workforce Software (part of ADP).

“What has led me to entrepreneurship was really about finding hacks and ways to get quicker to different places,” Marc explains. After two decades building productivity apps used by over 100 million people (including his time at BlackBerry overseeing all their productivity applications), he arrived at a counterintuitive conclusion.

The Insight: Productivity Isn’t About Speed

“It’s not by building an app that allows you to go through your email faster that you’re gonna achieve better results. It’s actually by helping people build stronger relationships, better relationships, more relationships. So basically scale what cannot be scaled, which is the number of relationships that you have that are real relationships.”

This realization led to Bloks. But when Marc looked at the tool supposedly designed to help people manage relationships—the CRM—he found major problems:

Nobody loves their CRM. Why? Because keeping it updated is painful. You spend hours inputting data, primarily so senior management can generate reports. Does it help you in your day-to-day work? Not really.

Data exists but isn’t accessible when you need it. Information might be in the system, but you have to dig through multiple systems to find it before a meeting. The tool meant to help you manage relationships becomes an administrative burden instead.

CRMs are built for transactions, not relationships. The “C” stands for “Customer,” but you don’t just deal with customers. You have investors, partners, colleagues, former coworkers; all valuable professional relationships that CRMs don’t accommodate well.

Bloks: Professional Relationship Management

With these problems in mind and AI capabilities emerging, Marc saw an opportunity to build something fundamentally different.

Bloks was designed for people who want to build long-term relationships—not short-term transactional sales cycles. The initial focus was venture capital and private equity (a market Marc knew well and could test quickly), but it’s since expanded to:

  • Wealth advisors trying to maintain clients for life
  • Insurance brokers building decades-long relationships
  • Professional services (consultants, lawyers, accountants)
  • Marketing and media agencies nurturing long-term clients

The core innovations:

No data entry. Everything is captured, summarized, and organized automatically. Why waste time manually updating systems when technology can do it for you?

Proactive intelligence. Information surfaces when you need it, not when you remember to look for it. You’re better prepared for every interaction without doing prep work.

All professional relationships matter. Track customers, investors, partners, colleagues, and past connections in one place. It’s not customer relationship management—it’s professional relationship management.

The AI Advantage (Without the Hype)

Bloks uses AI extensively, but Marc’s team maintains a refreshingly grounded approach. The development team of four leverages tools like Cursor’s AI Codex to do the work that would previously require 20+ developers. Senior engineers orchestrate AI to handle tasks in parallel while they focus on higher-level architecture.

But when it comes to customer relationships? “We’re still very old school… We do want to be one-on-one. I think it’s so essential at the stage where we’re at to get that direct feedback and we don’t wanna let a robot kind of do it for us.”

This philosophy mirrors what we see at Boast—use AI to enhance efficiency and give your team superpowers, but don’t remove humans from scenarios where judgment, empathy, and expertise matter most.

The Results Speak for Themselves

The feedback from Bloks users tells the story:

  • Immediate impact: “Within an hour I’m seeing impact on my work”
  • Material time savings: Users report saving 6-7 hours every single week, essentially gaining back an entire workday

As Marc puts it: “That’s a full day every single week being saved. That’s gain. That’s huge gain.”

What’s Next: The CRM Overhaul

While Bloks is currently addressing specific CRM pain points, Marc’s vision is bigger: “There’s an overhaul of the CRM that’s needed and we’re moving in that direction.”

Given his track record of identifying productivity bottlenecks and building solutions that millions adopt, it’s worth paying attention to where Bloks goes next.

Key Takeaways

Productivity isn’t always about speed: Sometimes the real unlock is helping people build better, more scalable relationships rather than just doing tasks faster.

CRMs are broken for relationship-focused work: Traditional CRMs optimize for transactions and reporting, not for building long-term professional relationships.

AI should enhance, not replace: Use AI to eliminate busy work and give skilled people superpowers, but maintain human judgment where it matters.

Build for yourself first: Marc follows the Steve Jobs philosophy: “I build products for me. If I can use it, then hopefully it’s useful for other people.”

Listen to the Full Episode

Want to hear more about Marc’s journey from scheduling software to retail operations to reinventing the CRM, plus insights on building lean teams with AI?

Listen to the full episode of What the Tech from Boast.

About What the Tech from Boast

What the Tech features conversations with brilliant minds behind new and exciting tech initiatives, exploring what it takes to tackle technological uncertainty and change the world. Hosted by Paul Davenport, Boast’s resident tech journalist and Head of Content.

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If you’re building productivity tools or AI-enhanced platforms like Bloks and want to maximize your R&D funding, Boast can help. Our platform and expert team make it easy to claim Canadian SR&ED tax credits (including Quebec’s CDAE-IA program) and US R&D tax credits.

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