I’m heading into Toronto Monday May 13th to speak at an evening event about books and startups. My plan is to head in for the day and meetup with anyone curious about our upcoming round of Startupify.Me.

If you’re an experienced software developer hungry to get into startups and small business, I’d like to buy you a coffee at The Dark Horse Monday afternoon. I can explain in more detail what we have planned and answer any questions you may have.

If you’re a company interested in injecting some startup talent into your company or a startup hunting for technical cofounders, I’d also like to chat. You may be want to join us as a project partner.

Please email me directly so we can coordinate timing or register here.

Very few people, projects, companies etc associate, or identify, themselves as entrepreneurs, myself included. In doing the rounds promoting our upcoming Startupify.Me program, I hear it everywhere….

“Well I’m a developer and startups seem exciting but I’m not an entrepreneur and I’m not sure I want to do my own startup”

“We’d like to have a project from our company in Startupify but we’re not a startup”

None of that matters. As Brad Feld clearly illustrates in his book Startup Communities, we’re all entrepreneurs now, or at least we all need to start acting like one.

For software developers considering Startupify, you do not have be committed to launching your own startup. It’d be great if you did and we’ll support you in that but our program will prepare you to be a player “in dynamic industries that require entrepreneurial skills”. Find me an industry that doesn’t require entrepreneurial skills today and I’d say let’s wait and check back tomorrow. You simply need to understand the massive value that increasing your entrepreneurial aptitude offers you.

For companies considering putting a project into this round of Startupify, you do not have to be a startup. Our program will inject some startup talent and culture into your organization along with offering you the chance to evaluate and potentially hire some of our cohort. Even books are trying to imagine themselves as startups. As I say to all companies we speak with, technology will eventually disrupt every industry, your business may as well do some of the disrupting!

The other night my son was about to do something he knew was wrong. He looked around, noticed I was the only person around so he asked me “Should I do this? No one will see if I do it now.”

First I told him it was his choice. Then I did my best to convey that how you act when no one’s watching is important. It’s character. Do you really want to only be who you are when someone’s watching? Do or don’t but it shouldn’t be based on the audience (nose picking, bathroom breaks excluded of course).

That night I was lucky enough to catch my buddy AJ’s band The Odd Years playing downtown. Watching them play, it struck me how some bands are able to make massive leaps forward in the time since I last saw them play live. When you see a band and wonder “what the hell have they been up to?”, because of how much better they are, you’re watching a band that’s working their asses off.

Great musicians surprise and inspire you every time you see them perform. It means they’re busy when you’re not watching. Athletes are the same. If you only work hard and get better when the coach and fans are watching then you will eventually get beat.

“Write a song. All your old ones don’t mean a thing if you don’t sing any new ones”, Hayden

Corporate life is all about what’s observable. There’s little point in doing anything unless it’s observed, documented and lands in a performance review somewhere. The only currency in the workplace is observed acts.

For small business owners and entrepreneurs, it’s almost the exact opposite. If you’ve never truly created something from nothing then this is part of the reason you think starting a business is easy. I’ve seen what that guy does, I can do that.

The bits you observe are the easy bits. All the real work, all the fighting, clawing and making it happen goes on in the dark when on one’s watching. No one’s there at 3 am when I’m pacing the room for the second hour in a row. That’s why it’s such an overwhelming feeling for an entrepreneur when a business starts to click and move forward. Yes it looks like an overnight success but there’s likely decades of work put in which no one witnessed.

The parts you see really are the simple ones. This is especially important for anyone considering moving from a corporate environment to their own thing. Everything will be flipped upside down. If you’re not prepared to work your ass off when no one’s watching then you’d best just work on that promotion.

My good friend’s Ben and Alistair recently co-wrote the book Lean Analytics sharing how you can use data to build startups faster. I bounce ideas of them often and recently we got into an email exchange about vanity metrics within the startup community that resulted in this post. This is cross-posted on the Lean Analytics Blog.

The moments we choose to celebrate say a lot about what we consider important. They’re a proxy for the metrics we value, because we’re signalling to others by their very celebration. And yet, I’ve always been of the belief that startups tend to celebrate the wrong things.

If that’s true, what signals are we sending? We celebrate product launches, government grant acceptance, fundraising, winning pitch contests, and so on. Too often, these are the vanity metrics of our startup ecosystem.

Of course, some of these events are worthy of celebration. A grant lets us live to fight another day; a winning pitch might drive sales or help us to hire a key employee. But they would be way down on my list, personally, if my goal was to build a real business. Let’s stop concentrating on celebrating events like taking on debt or winning what is often little more than a beauty contest—and focus instead on what we should celebrate but rarely do.

At ThreeFortyNine, we celebrate the achievements that matter to the business model. Consider, for example, the first time you sell something to a complete stranger. That’s worth celebrating because it’s the first sign your business might have legs of its own. In our Founder’s Club events, we celebrate selling our first train tickets to strangers; Foldigo celebrated its first-ever sale to a stranger. Our plan is to build up this list and move it into our monthly socials.

We’re building our Startupify.Me program around the concept that talented developers stepping into startup life need options. Incubators, accelerators and government grant programs funnel them into a single, traditional path thereby discouraging experimentation. We want our cohort to have the option to create a lifestyle business or even a small, local business—if they choose. Of course, any of them can still try and swing for the fences, but the key is that they have all of the options available to them when they start.

“We didn’t get to where we are today thanks to policy makers – but thanks to the appetite for risks and errors of a certain class of people we need to encourage, protect, and respect”, Nassim Taleb

Only in recent years have books like Lean Analytics begun to draw out the real risks of obsessing over feel-good data that does little for the business—so-called “vanity metrics”. There’s a very real danger if a young entrepreneur believes that success comes in the form of taking on debt, winning a pitch contest and launching a product. Those may be required for some businesses but they shouldn’t be misconstrued as success.

Part of the challenge here is the proliferation of what I call success turnstiles in our ecosystem. These are entities whose prime motivation is to funnel as many businesses as possible through their turnstile. It’s a pure numbers game for them as they chase their success metrics. These entities tend to be government funded and these success metrics are defined by bureaucrats and can be tracked up the organizational hierarchy to a speech-writer’s desk.

We need to lead real conversations about what success is because it comes in many shapes and forms. Advocates of this more mindful form of celebration include Jason Cohen imploring founders to get 150 customers instead of 1000 fans and Rob Walling helping startups to start, and stay, small.

Here’s an initial list of milestones and accomplishments worth celebrating to get you started.

• Performed 30 interviews with real potential users.
• First customer acquired.
• First customer acquired and you have no idea where they came from.
• Covering your monthly personal costs.
• Identifying the first product feature a potential customer will pay cash for.

Which vanity metrics need to stop being celebrated? What do we need to celebrate more?

In this series of posts we’re “grilling” the mentors of the Startupify program 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 sixth contestant: Brydon Gilliss

What qualifies you to be a Startupify mentor?

Primarily my mistakes and failures. I tend to believe that great coaches are mentors who typically aren’t the superstars. They tend to be people who had some level of success but had to grind it out more rather than rely on raw talent, and ultimately failed. That failure caused great reflection and introspection into why they failed. It’s that reflection on personal failure that often creates master coaches.

What hurdles/failures/lessons have you encountered along your professional journey that early stage entrepreneurs could learn from?

Well hopefully all of them! Individual failures play a massive role in improving ecosystems. Within startups, I don’t believe we talk about our failures in enough detail to really drive that sharing and learning across the ecosystem. Without getting into specific failures, my hope is that Startupify provides an intimate setting for myself and other mentors to share the painful details of our failures with our cohort.

To be more specific, I’ve been involved in projects that haven’t acquired enough customers, that met technical deal breaking hurdles, that haven’t found a first customer, and on and on. I hope that being able to share these details will help our cohort select which projects/ideas should be dealt a swift death. Knowing which ideas to not work on is almost more important of a skill than generating new ideas.

What excites you most about the Startupify program?

That’s tough as I’d like to say all of it. I’d say I’m most excited about the folks in our cohort. I used to be them. I followed the traditional Canadian path. Get a degree, get a good job, make your boss happy, get a promotion, get a raise, get more vacation, etc. No one ever told me there were other options. No one ever pointed to this other exit. I’m excited to see our cohort accelerate through that progression from begin gainfully employed to being a difference maker in an early stage startup business. I’m excited to be a part of creating this so others can move through the stages I went through faster and with more support.

Downstream, I’m excited to see our graduates making real differences in the startups in Ontario, Canada and beyond. Longer term, that will be our real measure of success.

What characteristics have you seen in the startups you’ve mentored in the past that you feel are indicators for success?

Drive. As we talk about in finding and selecting people for our cohort, we need individuals that will shove us over and rush past us if we get in their way. For some reason, something in their past is now driving them to succeed in this. Creating new businesses isn’t complicated but it’s hard, hard work. Without raw drive, your startup won’t last.

Skin in the game. Startups aren’t beauty pageants. I always say ideas don’t matter, tell me what you’re willing to risk for your idea, that matters. Where’s the commitment, what have you risked to be here?

Humility. Startups must have confidence but they can’t be arrogant. Success requires so much ongoing learning, support etc from the wider community that being humble and open to all of it is a requirement.

Hustle. Something in their background where they’ve hustled. Walls they’ve hit and knocked down, went around.

BONUS: Which Startupify mentor are you most excited to collaborate with and why?

Once again I’d like to say all but I’ll go with Michael Litt, mostly because I know Mike the least of our mentors. He spoke at our last DemoCampGuelph and his talk was awesome as it focused on his failures in a very authentic, honest way. As well, Mike’s a guy I’ve heard great things about over recent years from guys like Brett Shellhammer. Both Mike and Zak Homuth are so young, yet have multiple startup attempts already in their rear view mirror.