A 15-year-old who creates a device that can track customer traffic is impressive, but it’s nothing compared with a 16-year-old who turns that device into a bona fide business.

Alex Gillis, the 16-year-old founder of Bitness, did just that. After a year of work, his customer traffic device found its first client, the Fickle Frog, a Halifax pub. This week, Be Your Own Bartender, a provider of kiosks that suggest drink recipes at liquor stores, will install Bitness into its four P.E.I. locations.

Bitness uses devices called beacons to track where, when and how long customers are in a store. This allows the store owner to understand the store’s peak hours, allowing for better staffing decisions. Bitness also times how long a customer is at a certain place, such as the cash register, suggesting a sale has taken place.

Store owners can place a beacon outside the store to see the times and locations of peak traffic. Alex said the Fickle Frog discovered there are many people outside the pub on Thursday nights, despite there being little traffic inside. Now the pub knows to put promotional materials on the street and hopefully bring in more business.

“We’re trying to help individual communities figure out how their individual economies can become so much more,” he said.

Alex and his partner, Aristides Milios, are developing Bitness even further in Propel ICT, the Atlantic Canadian accelerator. Last year, they went through Propel’s former accelerator, Launch36.

Alex and Aristides worked on Bitness many nights during Grade 11 at Sacred Heart School in Halifax. For Grade 12, the two convinced their principal they deserved credit for their work on Bitness. They’ve developed a program with the school to allow others to gain credits for hands-on learning.

“We talked about how the school can help us and we can help the school better understand entrepreneurship,” Alex said.

With his enthusiasm for entrepreneurship, Alex is starting a program called Hoist to encourage students. There have been two meetings, with about 20 people attending each. He’s reviving Hoist in September and hoping for a bigger attendance by promoting it through schools. He envisions in-school champions who will be called Hoisters.

Alex is also encouraging post-secondary students to become involved in entrepreneurship rather than working for someone else. Bitness took on Calvin Carr, a Nova Scotia Community College student, to do his work term with the company. He acts as the chief revenue officer at Bitness.

“He’s taken Bitness from being a simple, work-term summer job to his own project that he’s taken under his wing that he’s able to bring to the NSCC classroom,” Alex said. “His other classmates are doing work-term projects in junior roles at the firms.”

This has been helpful for Bitness because Alex and Aristides have little capital. However, Bitness has won several pitch competitions, allowing them to get an extra thousand dollars here and there.

Alex said he hopes to work with Halifax Regional Municipality, placing beacons downtown and by the waterfront to track tourism. He eventually wants to expand across the Maritimes and into metropolises like Toronto.

“Our motivational motto for Bitness is Halifax, then the world.”