StartupNorth

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We’ve been focusing a lot on exits recently. Some folks have asked “why celebrate”? So many are $30-$50mm exits, who cares? $30-$50mm exits = VCs dying = ecosystem dying… or so goes the logic.

Let me tell the story of Redknee. Redknee creates billing software for telecos. Started in the late 90s by 4 mid-20s, Waterloo grads who had worked at Telus & Nortel – Lucas Skoczkowski, Vishal Kothari, Dan Macdonald, and Rubens Rahim. Without taking any VC money, they IPO’d in 2007, raised something like $30-40mm out of the IPO, and now have a market cap of about $70mm. I.e. modest success, not great success.

Here is the list of who is where now from the early days at Redknee:

• Shailesh Lakhani – was director of operations, now VP at Sequoia India
• Shyam Sheth – product manager, then product manager at Google, now co-founder of Fixmo
• Tony Mak – was a sales engineer, moved on to VC side at OATV, now founder of Everpic (SF-based startup)
• Kristin McClement – was product management, now heads up product and super early employee at Payfone (hot New York startup)
• Bohdan Zabawskyj – was CTO, now CTO of a hot Toronto startup that I think I can’t name yet, and also advisor & investor to several other startups
• Jeff Zakrezewski – was a dev team lead, then was managing partner at 5-Mobile (acquired by Zynga), now Chief Architect Zynga Toronto
• Brian Glick – was a product manager, early guy and now lead product manager at YouTube
• Dalia Asterbadi – was marketing, now founder of RealSociable
• Jason Tham, Jason Yuen, Sean Kirby – product & development, now founding team at Nulogy
• Karthik Ramakrishnan – was a product manager & sales engineer, now heads up product at BluTrumpet and at HatchLabs/IAC/Xtreme

So let’s tally that up – 1 modestly successful startup equals roughly 6 new companies founded and 2 new startup investors and some other people in influential places. I am forgetting people as well.

Success begats success. Probably more than money begats success. And that is why we need to celebrate even the modest victories.

Dan Morel

twitter: @dpmorel, email dan dot morel at gmail Dan is CTO and co-founder of Peek (www.peek.ly). Previously, he ran around the Caribbean (from Haiti to Trinidad) launching new businesses & products for Digicel - living in Kingston, Jamaica. Before that was a very early employee at Redknee, headed product development on their path to IPO. I'm a hacker and generalist business guy with my roots from University of Waterloo, Computer Science. linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/danmorel

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Today IBM just announced the $387MM acquisition of Toronto-based Algorithmics. It begs a couple of open questions. Is Algorithmics after being sold to Fitch for $174MM in 2004 still a Canadian startup? Can a 30 year old company like MKS be considered a startup? Is Eloqua who’s HQ moved to Virginia still a Canadian company?

If you imagine that Algorithmics is the second Canadian software startup acquired for more than $300MM in the past 6 months. Then to answer Dan Morel’s question,  if this was “The One Billion Dollar Year” for Canadian startup acquisitions, yes it is.  Only if you consider Algorithmics still a Canadian startup and 30 year old MKS a startup, then combined with Radian6 the acquisitions total just over $1B, everything else is icing on the proverbial cake.

Congratulations to the Algorithmics team and alumni.

Adding to the TechVibes list of Canadian Acquisitions:

1/5/2011 – Victoria’s Flock acquired by Zynga

1/6/2011 - Edmonton’s Attassa acquired by YouSendIt

1/31/2011 - Toronto’s Adenyo acquired by Motricity for $100 Million

2/8/2011 - Toronto’s MyThum acquired by OLSON

3/3/2011 - Toronto’s CoverItLive acquired by Demand Media

3/11/2011 - Vancouver’s Sayvee acquired by Bandzoogle

3/26/2011 -  Waterloo’s Tiny Hippos acquired by RIM

3/30/2011 – New Brunswick’s Radian6 acquired by Salesforce for $326 Million

4/7/2011 - Waterloo’s MKS acquired by Parametric Technology for $292 Million

4/8/2011 – Toronto’s PushLife acquired by Google for $25 Million

4/27/2011 – Montreal’s Tungle acquired by RIM

4/28/2011 – Montreal’s Coradiant acquired by BMC

5/10/2011 - Toronto’s Conversition acquired by e-Rewards

6/3/2011 – Waterloo’s PostRank acquired by Google

6/7/2011 - Toronto’s DealFrenzy acquired by Intertainment Media

7/8/2011 – Toronto’s FiveMobile acquired by Zynga

8/30/2011 – Vancouver’s Zite acquired by CNN for an estimated $25MM

9/1/2011 – Toronto’s Algorithmics acquired by IBM for $387MM

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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Back in May, Nat Friedman wrote about the tools used in setting up Xamarin. They include a great set of basic tools for getting a startup off the ground with very little investment. We have seen a lot of startups using a similar set of tools and I thought that we’d compile a list of the tools that we’re actively using (and some of the others we evaluated). There are the tools and blogs listed by Steve Blank that include many

Landing Pages

We’re big fans of WordPress at StartupNorth. We’ve powered StartupNorth on WP since the beginning. The combination of WordPress, Premise, and the WordPress MU Domain Mapping plugin is a pretty powerful combination for creating mutliple sites and landing pages to test your landing pages. But we’ve also developed a sweet spot for Vancouver’s Unbounce, it took us less than 5 minutes to have 2 landing pages and a domain set up. We’re big believers that you can use Adwords and Facebook Ads to quickly create a landing page to test ideas before writing a single line of code.

• Premise
• Unbounce
• LaunchRock
• LaunchEffect

Analytics

We primarily use Google Analytics and WordPress Stats for StartupNorth. We’ve been working with startups and using a KISSmetrics and Mixpanel to measure activity on their web properties and applications. Make sure you read Ash Maurya’s 3 Rules to Actionable Metrics to understand how the analytics can be used in combination with split testing and/or cohort analysis to better track your optimization before product/market fit (What do you measure before product/market fit? – check out Ash’s conversion funnel and metrics).

• Google Analytics
• KISSmetrics
• Mixpanel
• GinzaMetrics
• ChartBeat
• RJMetrics

Mailing Lists

We haven’t been as proactive in building a mailing list for the StartupNorth community as we probably should have been. I’ve used have started using MailChimp because of the quick integration to GravityForms and WooFoo, but have had very positive experiences using both Campaign Monitor and Constant Contact.

• MailChimp
• Campaign Monitor
• Constant Contact
• MadMimi

Billing and Accounting

What is amazing is that both of these companies are local to Toronto. We use WaveAccounting integrated with our bank account and PayPal for tracking expenses, billing, and financial operations. And we use Freshbooks to bill for sponsorships. They are a must have in our back office. What we’re missing is a really easy to use and integrated payroll system (I hear that it might be coming).

• WaveAccounting
• FreshBooks

Human Resources

For full disclosure, I’m an advisor to TribeHR. It doesn’t change the fact that they rock. It is the easiest way to get an HR system in place. And there is no better way to get feedback and help employees improve than Rypple.

• TribeHR
• Rypple

Surveys and Feedback

We are actively using Survey.IO to gather feedback from users about the state of StartupNorth. It helps us figure out the state of our product market-fit, if there is such a thing for a blog about Canadian startups, fill it out and help us be better.

• SurveyMonkey
• Survey.io

Project Tracking

We use Pivotal Tracker. We like them so much, we actively recruited them as a sponsor for StartupNorth. There are lots of other tools from project tools to issue tracking. Curious at what others are using.

• Pivotal Tracker
• Jira
• Webcollaboration
• Asana
• Basecamp

Source Control

We use Github Bronze for our project hosting. Most of the code we work on is PHP against MySQL (see WordPress), though we have additional apps in development like the StartupNorth Index (which will be moving to startupnorth.ca/index shortly) but all are LAMP.

• Github
• Beanstalk
• BitBucket

Hosting

Full disclosure: VMFarms is a sponsor of StartupNorth. However, their hosted VMs that are backed up and hot mirrored coupled with the outrageous “white glove” makes them a dead simple choice. We also use Rackspace Startups and EC2 for access to easy Linux and Windows VMs for development and testing environments.

• VMFarms
• Rackspace Startups
• Amazon EC2
• Joyent
• Heroku
• Google App Engine

Customer Relationship Management

We don’t have any strong recommendations. There are platforms like Salesforce that are fantastic and sales teams are used to. There is Highrise which is broadly supported with a lot of 3rd party tools. But so far, neither of these has been the clear winner for us. There is a great Quora question about “What is the best CRM for startups” that lists SFDC, SugarCRM and Highrise. There are a lot of choices for CRM including Nimble, Insightly, Woosabi, Capsule, Solve360,AppPlane, Batchbook, PipelineDeals, TactileCRM, ZohoCRM and many others.

• Highrise
• Salesforce

Conferencing, Screen Sharing & Telecommunications

I’ve been using Calliflower for conference calling. It’s $5/call for up-to 5 callers, or for $30/month unlimited minutes and >70 participants, it’s a great solution. It is not a replacement for a office phone system.

Google Voice and Skype have been the least expensive way as a Canadian startup to get a US phone number. This is great for me as an individual. However, this does not scale to an enterprise or an organization. I’ve been looking at Grasshopper, RingCentral and Toktumi, but I have yet to settle on a solution.

• Skype
• Google Voice
• GoInstant
• Calliflower

SEO & SEM Tools

This part of the list is pretty much cribbed from Steve Blank’s list of tools for entrepreneurs. Go read it for a more comprehensive list of tools beyond the SEO/SEM listing included below.

• Google Keywords Tool
• SEOBook Tools – Free SEO tools
• AdGrok – Google adwords optimization tool
• SEO Digger – Find the top ten keywords ranking to your websites
• SEMRush – SEO and campaign management tool
• Clickable – Pay per click management
• Spyfu – tells you how much adwords cost
• Market Samurai – SEO Keyword Analysis Tool

What are we missing?

I’m going to cover in the next post: discounted travel, conferences, business cards, design services, and other tricks for being relentless resourceful as a founder.

There are a lot of online tools that startups are using to make or break their business. And there is a lot missing, monitoring like NewRelic, PagerDuty, Pingdom and Blame Stella for example. But I’m curious what are the indispensable tools being used at iStopOver.com, HighScoreHouse, CommunityLend, Idee/Tineye, Massive Damage, Empire Avenue, Indochino, Lymbix, Hootsuite, AdParlor, Locationary, Chango and others. What are you using? What gives you the edge in quickly and effectively gathering feedback to test your hypotheses?

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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