brydon

I run the shared office space ThreeFortyNine in Guelph, founded the hockey startup 20Skaters, Ontario Startup Train and more. Hit up brydon.me for more...

Vanity Celebrations

[Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Brydon Gilliss  founded the shared office space ThreeFortyNine in Guelph where he plays with Startupify.Me, Ontario Startup Train and 20 Skaters. A serial entrepreneur and fervent community builder, he’s also busy organizing a train-full of founders for this summer’s International Startup Festival.]

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 a even a small, local business—if they choose. Of course, any of them can still try and swing for the fences, but they have all options in front of them.

“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

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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?

Respect the Game, Love the Grind!

You have David saying we can’t all be founders, you have Jevon being honest about why he’s a founder, and then you have me ranting about vomiting on your footwear and then there’s Debbie Landa‘s “club of crazy“. Start reading the comment sections on those posts and things get even muddier…..You have to love problems or not, know your role, find your motivation? If you’re considering being an entrepreneur and starting your own business, how do you decide whether to make the leap?

There is a game to this entrepreneur deal. It’s a thing, you can point at, and you have to respect that game. In my opinion, it is the greatest game out there, period.

Creating something from nothing is the most difficult thing you can do. In business, I have the utmost respect for anyone who is able to create a viable business out of nothing. A few stories to add some colour….

In a previous life I rock climbed. It’s likely the coolest sport I’ve ever participated in. Few other sports require the mix of physical requirements, mental fortitude, training, preparation, and ability to deal with plain old fear. I know lot’s of folks who consider themselves climbers. They bought nice gear at MEC and hit the indoor gym every week.

Those people don’t love climbing, they love the idea of climbing. They love the way it looks in a magazine and on tv but that’s not climbing. There’s a filthy grind to climbing. It’s constant cardio work, training in the indoor gym, stretching. It’s packing up all your camping gear every Thursday night in order to leave town as early as you can Friday to get to the crag and setup camp before it gets dark. It’s getting up with the sun, climbing all day. It’s getting home late Sunday night, dropping your gear on the kitchen floor and crashing. Then Monday night you spend the evening cleaning ropes, gear and tents. And on and on.

Pick another sport, ice hockey. Yes we all dream about raising the cup, skating in front of massive crowds, making millions but that’s not hockey. Hockey’s being in the gym five days a week, 6 am practices, lost teeth, chipped elbows. Very few people have the raw skill but even less have the determination required to survive the grind.

What do NHL players say when they retire? Almost universally they say something along the lines of “I still love the game, I love coming to the rink, I love my team, my fans. But I realized I couldn’t put my body through another off season of preparing”.

Creating something from nothing isn’t about TechCrunch, billion dollar exits, multi-million dollar acquisitions and launch parties. Those may come and when they do, the best will enjoy the moment and then sneak away from the party, head back to the office to return to the grind. If you’re going to do this, remember to respect the game we play and love the grind!

Crazy train

On the trip home from a conference last year, it struck me how lonely it was. Yes I talked with people on the train. I had wifi and a phone but I didn’t have anyone who had shared the awesome conference experience I’d just been through, I wanted to keep it going. Returning to my city, I wanted to keep it the momentum rolling there as well.

I happened to have attended an amazing conference named BitNorth. In the case of the crap conferences, the travel back and forth is even more torturous. BitNorth is unique in that it really attempts to leverage what are typically considered the fringe elements of conferences.

All this left me wondering if we could make crappy conferences better and great conferences awesome by explicitly building up the fringes. We, at ThreeFortyNine, are taking our first shot at it this July. We’re cheating by starting with an amazing conference with The International Startup Festival in Montreal. We’re getting ourselves our own first class car on a Via train to travel to the conference and back from Toronto, Guelph, or Kitchener-Waterloo. We’re filling the car with founders, funders and startup junkies. For us this experience starts when we hop on the train and it doesn’t end when the conference ends. It won’t even end when we get off the train since you’ll be returning to your city with a group of friends who’ve shared this experience with you. We’ll conspire, plan, meet and keep the momentum going.

In the case of the best roadtrips of my youth, I can hardly recall what our destination was. It’s the getting there I remember. It’s the getting there that was the starting point of something bigger.

Join us this July as we bring the Ontario startup scene to Montreal and give them a peek at who we are and what we’re building. Clearly we have limited seats on our train car so when we sell out, we’re sold out for realz.