It’s been a while but our 22nd version of DemoCampGuelph will be on October 30th. Hopefully I won’t be pelted with rotten eggs! Please make sure to register if you can attend.
If you’d like a demo spot, please apply now. I do NOT decide who gets to demo so bribing me won’t help but you never know! Submit to demo here.
Startup Train was a great catalyst for the team at Vantage Analytics. We used the Train to not only connect with the broader Startup community but also to launch the first demo of our platform: a predictive analytics and data platform that helps business managers to leverage their customer and transactional data.
Leading up to the Startup Train, we had been making steady progress but now the afterburners kicked in. What we accomplished in the final week was nothing short of incredible. We overcame power outages, flooding, and lack of sleep to bring it all together. By the time we boarded the train to Montreal we could honestly lay claim to our value proposition:
Vantage Analytics helps business managers compete on analytics without becoming analysts.
Brandon and I avoided the crazy heat and grabbed a @car2goToronto ride down to Union Station and joined the excited gang waiting to depart.
Startup Train and Startup Fest are simply great environments; an instant community of friends and supporters – everyone trading pitches, feedback, and ideas. Everyone wanted to hear your pitch and you got a ton of chances to practice and hone your hook sentence. On the Train, new friends @ZakHomuth @KatherineHague @Bashome did not let us off easy, and they gave a lot of great feedback… our thanks to them. (Though to be honest, I think they had fun!)
At the Fest @DaveMcClure played devil’s advocate to everyone and disarmed critics wearing a set of big fluffy rabbit ears and sprinkling his feedback with his trademark f-bombs.
@DavidCrow @AprilDunford and @KenSeto helped get the story out and man did that help! We owe them a huge thank you, because within hours of our official launching the company on StartupTrain, we had a lot of people saying “Oh yeah – I’ve HEARD about you!”.
We snagged our appointed timeslot in the demo tent and started into high gear pitch mode. One of us would draw people into the tent and the other would run through the demo. Just as our energy was starting to fade a little bit from the sheer volume of pitches, I felt Zak Homuth pat me on the back and whisper: “You’re killing it! Keep it up!” and we doubled down!
The guys from Fasken Martineau (@JMDennis and @_Kev) were everywhere and talked to everyone. An incredible duo that obviously knows what they’re talking about, they had a lot of great advice to offer. They encouraged all teams to pitch them for an incredible prize: free participation in their Startup Program!
The Fasken Martineau Startup Program is open to any startup at the incredible price of $2k and includes the following benefits:
• Incorporation and organization of a corporation or registration of a trade-mark
• Access to templates, such as intellectual property assignments and non-disclosure agreements
• Kick-off meeting to implement an IP strategy and Fasken Martineau’s unique IP management structure
• 2 hours of consultation per month
• Access to Fasken Martineau’s Startup Community
• 10% discount on hourly rates for other services
We knew that we were up against a lot of smart people with great projects, but we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to pitch Faskens and possibly win the chance to work with them. The pitch felt good, but their questions were bang-on, and they didn’t pull any punches. Thankfully we had considered the topics and we were prepared. It helped that we had received a fair amount of validation over the course of the Festival.
It was an incredible few days for us, and now starts the fun of following up and converting all of those introductions into business. It was great to launch surrounded by a wonderful group of eager entrepreneurs that were truly interested in what we are doing. This kind of a launch for @VantageAnalytic was ONLY possible because of the crazy hard work of @Brydon and @LisasPartridge to put on StartupTrain and get us to Startup Fest!
We spoke with everyone we could. It was amazing to engage with so many innovators and entrepreneurs, to ask what they were working on and to bounce around ideas. @Julien literally waved at me in a crowd and pointed at someone else and mouthed “Talk to him!” It was that kind of a supportive environment.
“Him” turned out to be @cgtheoret – and Claude was incredible. He sat us down and said “I like what you’re doing. We’re going to do business together.” Is there any better encouragement that a Startup company could get?
Sure there was – winning the Faskens contest!
And David Crow celebrating by partying it up in our company colours?!?!
In this series of posts we’re “grilling” the members of our ThreeFortyNine Co-working Space with the hope of discovering who is best able to answer a standardized set of questions. Points for accuracy and un-originality will be assigned. Actually we’re just trying to learn more about them .. the kind of stuff that doesn’t appear in boilerplate bios.
Let’s get going and welcome our first contestant: Matthew Sharpe, Designer
What do you work on while at ThreeFortyNine?
I presently enjoy a full-time position with the talented team at Infinity Quick — developers behind the messaging app Poptalk — where I work as a senior designer. I also operate a freelance web and graphic design firm Daring Boy Interactive here in Guelph, in addition to blogging sports art + design at Designing Sport.
What brought you to ThreeFortyNine?
I used to work out of the house which, while lovely for spending time with my wife and kids, isn’t so hot for productivity. I decided to take my design business to ThreeFortyNine, which has been an incredibly rewarding move.
What excites you most about ThreeFortyNine?
The people and the culture they foster. You’re constantly exposed to individuals across a wide array of disciplines in this space, which is incredibly conducive to: a) learning and, b) engaging in perspectives you wouldn’t normally consider. I’ve had countless design ideas created, vetoed, and shaped by others here.
Combine that with the fact that everyone genuinely wants to help one another and it’s a perfect example of what happens when talent and ambition converge into community.
If you had to cite one benefit to sell others on ThreeFortyNine, what would it be?
Did I mention Beer Club? 😉
After spending all week staring at a screen, I love sitting down in a boardroom with 6-10 others at the end of a Friday and sharing new brews.
Anything else you want to mention?
Yes, check out my design work!
(Sorry, I’m a shameless self-promoter.)
But seriously — ThreeFortyNine’s been one of the best decisions I’ve ever made from a productivity and development standpoint and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to others. 🙂
With it’s second year under our belts, our Startup Train is becoming a bit like fight club in that you just don’t quite understand it until you experience it. Inspired by conversations on our train, Mira from Profit wrote about the role ego plays in startups and how to protect startup ideas. Katherine from ShopLocket summed it up well….
“The Startup Train was an amazing experience for everyone on board. I couldn’t imagine a better way to make new friends and connect with people before the event in Montreal”
As this is a wrapup post of sorts, I wanted to thank everyone who came on the train this year. You all know that the train is all about the people on it, so thanks for making it awesome. As well, thanks to our sponsors for supporting the train in a variety of ways, including being on the train with us. A special thanks to our two premier sponsors VIA Rail Canada and Fasken Martineau. Our other sponsors this year included:
Through our sponsors, we also managed to hand out some serious prizes/swag that I wanted to share. VIA Rail Canada handed out a total of $2500 in travel vouchers. The top level $1500 voucher went to Lloyd Longfield.
Jeff and Kevin awarded two Fasken Martineau prizes to train folks. Their Fasken Martineau Startup Program prize, with an approximate value of $2000, was awarded to Aran Hamilton and Brandon Kane from Vantage Analytics. As well, their Keep On The Right Track prize was awarded to Andrew Konoff of Strings.fm.
Several BlackBerry Z10 devices were awarded and a special congratulations to Ivan Lukianchuk from Will Pwn 4 Food, who won the Onstage pitch competition at Startup Festival. As well, thanks to the crew from Ryerson DMZ went the extra mile and served up some mimosa’s to kick off the trip.
Plans for the 2014 edition are already well underway. Keep an eye out here in the coming months as we’ll be sharing more experiences from this year’s Startup Train.
It’s last call for this year’s Ontario Startup Train, we only have a few tickets left. Only two more sleeps until we hop on our own VIA Rail cars filled with Ontario startup founders and funders. We’ll travel to International Startup Festival in Montreal where we’ll join up with over a thousand more startup junkies.
We’re working to organize our people before we even board the train so check out the short videos our attendees are recording. The point of the videos? To be specific, I now know Mike wants to meet 3 socially concious companies who want to share their story through video. That’s allowed me to organize getting him to shoot some video on the train. I know Arni’s looking to speak with 15 web companies and can think of a few in Montreal I may be able to introduce him to.
On the train you’ll have an opportunity for one-on-one mentoring with people with deep funding experience like Brian Kobus and Jim Estill, as well as experience startup founders Ken Seto, Zak Homuth and more.
Beyond that, VIA Rail will be giving away a $1500 travel voucher and there are rumours of other startup focused treats on the train like BlackBerry devices!
Hopefully see you this Wednesday! If you don’t have it already, grab one of our last tickets now!
[This was cross-posted with our friends at StartupNorth]
First, a quick quiz…For this quiz, time is important as we want your gut instinct so you only have five seconds to answer before the submit button goes away. It’s multiple choice, there are only two options and you simply need to select one.
When you’re ready, go take the quiz and make sure to return here…..
This topic of free and freemium pricing models is a regular one in startup land. While I’m sure it comes up on occasion in more traditional businesses, I have a feeling it’s much less the case. I don’t recall Mark pondering the option of offering free drinks and meals for the first six months at OX Restaurant. Or Beth considering just giving sweatshop free clothes away for the first three months at Grey Rock Clothing.
“When something is FREE! we forget the downside….we just can’t resist the gravitational pull of FREE!”
Over in startup land, it’s almost universal that first time founders plan to launch their product initially for free. While the free excuse list is almost infinite, a few samples include….
A FREE image!
To be clear I’m not advocating against free or freemium models. In some cases they make great sense, however those cases are rare. What I am advocating is that you make that decision explicitly and can back up your reasoning. I have yet to speak with a new founder who plans on offering free initially AND has a good reason for it. Someone who’s explicitly thought it through and has clear, sound reasoning why they’re starting with free.
In new product development, what is much more important than free users are the hard no’s. What’s a hard no?
“Here’s a pink stuffed animal I made, do you like it?”
“Yes, it looks awesome, you’re a lovely human being, let me hug you…”
“Will you buy this pink stuffed animal from me? Will you please give me 20 of your hard earned dollars for this pink stuffed animal I made?”
“You want me to give you 20 bucks for this crappy stuffy you stitched together? Are you mad?”
There, that’s a hard no. It’s someone saying no, I don’t see enough value in this exchange for me. Hard no’s are money in the bank for startups, if you leverage them. You have to chase down every hard no and ask why, why, why? Why don’t you love me anymore? Why doesn’t my value proposition work for you? Would you pay $10? What if I included a lifetime warranty? What if it was $5 plus a lifetime warranty?
Starting with free removes your ability to get to those valuable hard no’s almost entirely. Now rewind the above conversation…..
“You want me to give you 20 bucks for this crappy stuffy you stitched together? Are you mad?”
“I’m just kidding, we’re giving them away for free as part of launching our new company, here it’s yours!”
“Thank you! I love you again, that was a close one”
See the difference? Few people can resist the power of free. You feel great about your pink stuffed animal, love is in the air, everybody happy, happy, happy.
What happens to the pink stuffed animal? The same thing that happens to most free software apps, it’s neglected and dies a slow quiet death in a dusty basement. Dad never says “hey, why aren’t you loving that pink stuffed animal? I paid $20 for that you know?!”
Here’s the thing you must realize, free is a reality distortion field of it’s own. We can’t control ourselves around free. Remember the quiz at the top of this post? I’m quite confident that greater than 75% of you chose the free option even though it’s not a rational choice. A $30 giftcard for $5 offers you $25 in value. A free $20 giftcard offers $20. That doesn’t matter since we go bonkers around free!
“Zero is not just another discount. Zero is a different place. The difference between two cents and one cent is small. But the difference between one cent and zero is huge!”
Clearly the rational choice is the $30 giftcard but free messes with our minds. In the book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, the author Dan Ariely digs into the details of how we tend to apply either market norms or social norms in these situations. Free confuses your customer into applying social norms instead of market norms. This will certainly increase your user count but if you’re building a business you need to iterate to a value proposition that works when customer’s apply market norms to them.
If it makes good sense, free it up! Just be aware how powerful free can be. Depending on how you use it, it can help or hinder you. Offering free prevents your customers from applying market norms to your offering. Having customers applying social norms can distort your offering in ways you may never recover from. Good luck selling those $20 pink stuffed animals six months from now!
Thanks to everyone who attended our Toronto pre Startup Train meetup last week. Thanks for our event sponsor VIA Rail who allowed us to give away a $500 travel voucher to someone in attendance that night.
This week we’re hosting another pre-train meetup at McCabe’s in Kitchener-Waterloo. Please make sure to register to allow us to track attendance. It’s not a requirement that you’ve already purchased your ticket on this year’s Startup Train but it helps…
For people already committed to coming on the train, this is a chance to meet your fellow passengers. If you’re considering coming on the train, come ask whatever questions you may have and meet some folks who’ll be on the trip.
We’re lining up an awesome list of folks for our one on one mentoring sessions on the train. People on the Startup Train will have a chance for focused time with the likes of Zak Homuth, Jim Estill, David Crow, Ken Seto, April Dunford and more.
Reminder our early bird pricing ends June 24th, see you Thursday night!
We’ve challenged our Startup Train passengers to record a 30 second video stating their success metric for taking our train to Startup Festival. As Alistair wrote, this is all about dodging the boondoggles. Our goal is to post as many of these videos as we can to our Vimeo page before we get on the train July 10th.
Why? Well we all want to help. If you can clearly articulate what your metric of success is, I can help. I can also check in with you while we’re at the conference in Montreal…
“Mike, how’s it going? Do you have your five video projects signed up?”
“I have three.”
“Nice, so two more. Ok, come with me. I met someone who would would be perfect, I’ll introduce you.”
In partnership with VIA Rail, we’ve sweetened the pot as we know it takes time to record these videos. Everyone who submits a video will be entered into a draw for a chance to win a $1500 travel voucher on VIA Rail.
It seems easy but it’s not so I wanted to add some tips here. Actually recording the video is simple, coming up with your metric can by tricky. One tip is to imagine that first night home after the conference. A friend asks you if the trip was worth it. You respond “I actually got a ton of value out of it because……”, what comes after that??
Don’t think of this as a pitch video either. You’re just talking to me, a person. The point of this is to engage me in your challenge and enable me to help you. I want to help, tell me how! You have a unique opportunity to have all of us people on the train hustling on your behalf, don’t squander this!
Good luck and if you’re really stuck, let me know and I’d be happy to hop on a quick call to discuss?
[Editor’s Note: For our Startup Train this year, we’re asking all our passengers to decide their metric for attending the conference and share that. As we contemplated how to explain that, we figured who better than our friend Alistair Croll who just co-wrote Lean Analytics with Ben Yoskovitz]
boon·dog·gle (ˈbo͞onˌdägəl) Noun: Work or activity that is wasteful or pointless but gives the appearance of having value.
If you’re running a lemonade stand, your business model is pretty clear. You need to sell lemonade for more than it costs to make, often enough that it beats the opportunity cost of doing something else.
If you’re a disciplined, precocious kid, you probably recognize that your business model has some unknowns: how much your parents will charge you for ingredients; what kind of foot traffic you can expect; what price you can charge to maximize revenues. That kind of kid will grow up to be a founder.
So why is it that when we go to an event or socialize around business, we throw caution—and metrics—to the wind?
Too often I see companies exhibiting at conferences without knowing why they’re doing so. At best, they count “total leads”, which is basically foot traffic to their booth. Instead, they should be tracking qualified prospects; public sentiment; web traffic generated from things they mention on stage; and so on.
The definition of boondoggle might as well be the definition of vanity metrics: it gives the appearance of having value, but it’s actually pointless. If I have one piece of advice for companies thinking of participating in an event, it’s this: Have a point.
The third annual Startupfest happens in Montreal in roughly six weeks’ time. Last year, 1,300 founders, analysts, and investors descended upon the city with high hopes. They came to learn, to hustle, to recruit, to invest, and to connect. But few of them came with specific goals; and fewer still measured themselves against those goals afterwards.
The event costs around $375 for startups, or $525 on the Startup Train, which is cheap by any measure. But there’s also accommodations, and the distraction of not working on your dream for a few days. So you’d better know why you’re coming. Ben and I talk a lot about this in Lean Analytics: Know what metric matters to your business, draw a line in the sand, and try to cross it.
Your goals should be things like:
- I’ve done a customer development interview with ten prospects
- I’ve pitched five investors willing to take follow-on meetings
- I’ve identified three competitors
- I’ve uncovered six new customer acquisition strategies I can implement within a month of returning from the event
- I’ve found three contacts outside North America willing to help me promote my service there
Write your goal down. Better yet, get a big black marker and scrawl it on your arm, tweet about it, and make T-shirts explaining it to passersby. Enlist others in your quest.
This is incredibly uncomfortable stuff. Most founders have a vision of the world as it should be—and that means ignoring the world as it is. What’s more, we like to build things, because that’s what makes us feel good and clever. Your job at a conference is the opposite: to understand the world as it is, and to learn instead of building.
That’s how you turn a boondoggle into deliberate learning. Of course, if you have a blast along the way, that’s great too.
Remember that Blue Jays game a few years back when, because of a team-wide illness, an equipment manager dressed for the game? He was meant to sit on the bench and look like a player. The back story is that he had played little baseball in his life, even as a kid. Everyone in attendance was blown away when, because of cleared benches and the resulting ejections, he stepped to the plate to face a major leaguer’s fastball. I recall the funniest part was watching him in the on-deck circle trying to figure out if he should bat left or right handed.
All of that was nothing compared to the amazement of watching him hit that first pitch he faced clear over the fence for a home run. Who would have thought?
Well no one because I just made that all up and I’m fairly certain that everyone knew that as it’s clearly absurd. Even supreme athletes like Michael Jordan had to train and practice to swing for the fences. Why is it that in startups and new business we continue to push our rookies to ‘swing for the fences’? It’s equally as absurd as my fictional story.
Even Jason Fried offers reasonable first steps of selling one thing online as a start. You have to make your first dollar before you can make your thousandth or millionth, that’s undeniable. You need your first customer before your tenth or hundredth.
Why aren’t we suggesting realistic goals? Make $100/month. Then make $500, $1K, $5K etc. Do that as fast as you can. For some people that’ll take a week, for others ten years. Where is this person who went from years of salaried employment to founding a billion dollar startup in less than a year? I want to meet her.
“The way to get started is by creating tasks that are of doable size”, The Lean Entrepreneur.
We accept that to run a marathon, we have to run 5k first, then 10k first so why is it different in business? Please, always swing for the fences, but do it at a pace that fits with you. It’s not an excuse to take your time or go slow, it’s accepting that every overnight sensation in music spent years playing their parent’s garage.
It’s not sexy, it won’t get us pageviews and land us on TechCrunch but it’s a principle we’re building Startupify.Me on. We’re betting we can take some individuals with some raw talent and the willingness to gamble on themselves and help them swing for whatever they define as their fence.
