StartupNorth

These events are Chuck Norris Approved.

The best part about a health entrepreneurial ecosystem is the diversity of events. Toronto is rocking a variety of events, ranging from conversations to socials. But there are a lot of grassroots events where designers, developers, marketers, and technologists can get involved. There are lots of things going on beyond the usual social activities. My request, is that you refer a student or a colleague that you think might be interested. This is a great way for someone to start participating and get to the next level.

This one is aimed at marketers. It is happening November 7, 2012. It is not purely a startup marketing event, i.e., there is not an abundance of focusing on core core value proposition and user engagement. It is an event where there is distinct benefit to companies in the learning about Acquisition and Activation and Referral. There are a crazy number of marketers that have built and sold startups (see Jennifer Lum think Quattro Mobile) and those that are defining new techniques (see Kristina Halvorson think content strategy) and others that I think are doing a great job (see Hicham Ratnani think Frank And Oak).

“Canada has good engineering and technical talent but a shortage of sales and marketing talent.” Kunal Gupta, TechVibes

So, here’s a chance to gain access to world class marketing content. It’s relatively inexpensive, there are a few tickets left. And the after party is a fundraiser for our friend Michael O’Connor Clarke’s family.

The meshmarketing after-party on Nov. 7 is a fundraiser for the family of Michael O’Connor Clarke. http://t.co/NtlQ9vZN. All welcome!

November 6, 2012 1:00 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@meshcon

mesh conference

 StartupWeekend Toronto is happening November 9-11, 2012. It is an event where designers, developers, marketers can come together and explore. The idea is that the artificial time constraints create the right environment to experience and understand what working in a startup is like. It might or might not produce a fundable startup, but it will produce potential founders that have experience working with each other. It’s a great event. At last check, there were a few wait list spots for non-technical individuals to participate.

Get Your Bot On!

 Some rights reserved by STCroiss

Hardware is cool again. I love seeing a rise of hardware, manufacturing and physical bit based startups in Toronto. Did you know there are companies like Upverter? Panda Robotics? Pebble (alright Allerta was a Waterloo company but headed to greener pastures before their Kickstarter campaign)? Get Your Bot On! is a three day event where you can learn along side newbies, hobbyists, and pros to build a robot. Let me repeat, you can build a robot. That’s amazing. Read Leila’s blog post about it. They will provide everything you need to build a robot.

Friday Nov 23 – Sunday Nov 25, 2012. Register to attend.

Still looking for an opportunity to hang with Leila Boujnane, Dan Martell, Amber MacArthur, Jesse Rodgers and me. Then AngelHack is a great way to build something in a 24 hour window and have the chance to get feedback and be entered in the larger AngelHack contest. Winners will get 6 weeks of mentorship in Silicon Valley (and the prizes include travel). It’s a great way for young developers to either kickstart a company and start to build a network beyond their local community.

“All participants are expected to work on the honor code and respect the rules below. Overall, if you come with a great idea, build something on the spot, and present us a meaningful new hack that can improve peoples lives (even if only in a humorous way) then we are pretty impressed.”

David Crow

David Crow focused on product design, customer development and go-to-market implementation on $0. He is available as a consultant. He is a mentor at UW VeloCity, Jolt and FounderFuel. Follow him on Twitter @davidcrow or at DavidCrow.ca

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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!

brydon

I run the shared office space ThreeFortyNine in Guelph where we play with Startupify.Me, Ontario Startup Train and more. Hit up brydon.me for more...

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Editor’s note: This is a guest post by entrepreneur Aydin Mirzaee (LinkedIn, Follow @aydin), who is a cofounder and the Co-CEO of Chide.it creators of  FluidSurveys.com and ReviewRoom. 

 Some rights reserved by paul bica

When founding a startup, everyone involved gets used to being told “no”. They are told no for their ideas, no for funding and no for sales. There are two ways to react to no, either get discouraged and give up, or realize that eventually there will be a “yes” and continue working towards that end goal.

The successful startups are those that both persevere through discouragement and try something different

“You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over.” – Richard Branson

Stepping out of a comfort zone and doing things that others might not, is the thing that can lead to success.

This was the case when I founded FluidSurveys.com. FluidSurveys.com is an online survey and form building tool. Back in 2008 when we launched, there were already thousands of survey tools available on the market, including a well-known and well financed market leader, SurveyMonkey. It was the focus on selling to large organizations in the early days that has led to FluidSurveys.com becoming one of the top survey providers in Canada and it’s adoption by customers in large organization in over 50 countries including governments, educational institutions and Fortune 500 companies. These are my six tips on selling to large organizations.

1. Get Customer Testimonials Early On

Most of the time, large organizations are skeptical about buying from a startup for a number of reasons. Validation is the best way to get around this issue. Getting positive testimonials from beta customers who were involved in the product development phase and presenting it to large potential clients is an excellent way to validate the product and the company.

2. Try a Pilot Project

Pilot projects are popular with large organizations. FluidSurveys regularly performs pilot projects with large organization and has had successful sales as a result. “Get the targeted organization on a reduced rate pilot project and have them use your product for 6 months to a year. After that, why wouldn’t they buy from us instead of the competition? They are already familiar with us and our work at that point.”

Essentially you want to have the company use you on a smaller scale first, which is a small step towards the goal of establishing a strong relationship. From there, they are comfortable with the product and they will be able to move to using the product on a large scale, and the big steps will be much easier.

3. Understand the Buying Process

With large organizations, the product user will not necessarily be the purchaser. In Business-to-Business sales especially, there are almost always several people to consider in the buying process:  initiators, users, influencers, gatekeepers, and deciders.

When contacting a company, try to understand who your main contact is. While they may not be the decision maker, they could play an incredibly important role in whether or not your product is purchased.

Another important point to consider is the buying timeline your customer may be on. Consider if they will be more likely to purchase at a particular time of year and how long the process may take.

4. Pitch to as Many People as You Can

As a general rule, the product should not be pitched to just one person. Because there are a number of people involved in making decisions, if they can hear the pitch from you, you can be confident they received the right information

Tip: Avoid talking about price until the key purchasers are present. Rough numbers are fine but the final quote should be given after the full presentation.

I would often have to speak to not only the people within the company that make the buying decisions, but also the managers of the IT department. The reason for this is because large organizations are interested in central management: the ability to control the product themselves instead of having you come into the company. The IT department was an influencer in the buying decision since they had expertise with software products.

5. Consider Tiered Pricing

The way that the product is priced is another key component in landing sales with large organizations. The concern is always pricing too high vs. too low. If you’re priced too high, you might lose a bid to the competition. If you’re priced too low, prospects may not value the product. So what do you do?

Here the advice is to implement tiered pricing. Tiered pricing tends to work best for large organizations because their requirements may vary. For example, access for the first 100 users may cost $200/year and the next 100 users may cost $150/year. This is applicable to all sorts of products, not only software. You have to give the impression that you are not coming up with pricing on the spot and keep in mind that large organizations need all the numbers to plan for budgetary concerns. Prepare this information before you initiate a conversation with a potential client.

6. Address the Bankruptcy Concern

One last hurdle for startups to jump is the bankruptcy concern. Large organizations tend to worry about what would happen to their data in the event that the startup should go bankrupt, or has other financial issues. The best way to reassure these enterprises is to have good measures in place in the event that bankruptcy does happen, and be able to easily explain them to large organizations.

The most favorable way to alleviate these concerns from organizations is to give them the ability to download all of their data at any time or keep all of the data (and possibly the software itself) with a 3rd party (this is called escrow). The agreement and the conditions for the release of that data would then depend on the end situation.

In the end

The key is to be able to answer every question that big customers have. Better yet, covering their concerns before they even ask is a sales tactic that demonstrates your previous experience in working with other large organizations.

These sales tips for selling to large organizations have helped FluidSurveys.com more than double in staff, users and revenue in the past 6 months. Selling to large organizations is the key factor that I attribute to our current product and corporate success.

Aydin Mirzaee

Aydin is the cofounder and co-CEO of Chide.it a software company that empowers intelligent decisions.Using our FluidSurveys and ReviewRoom products, organizations are able to collect, organize and evaluate information in order to make business critical decisions. Chide.it was established in February 2008 and today our software is used in over 40 countries by people from all walks of life. Fortune 500 Companies, Global Non-Profits, Colleges & Universities, Government Institutions and even smaller grass-roots organizations and startups rely on Chide.it software to help them collect and analyze the data they need in order to succeed.

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