StartupNorth

Author: Jonas Brandon

  • Dan McGrady: 7 Reasons Why My Social Music Site Never Took Off

    Dan McGrady has been on a roll with some great posts lately, and “7 Reasons Why My Social Music Site Never Took Off” really grabbed my attention yesterday.

    Dan started Contrastream last summer. I liked the site a lot, as I think music discovery is a huge problem that is being approached in the wrong way by the major music sites/stores. The site was well put together and full of potential, but it just didn’t take off.

    This is where, I believe, Dan is making the shift from being someone who cobbled together a website to being an entrepreneur. Instead of hiding the fact that Contrastream didn’t really take off, Dan is making a clean break, reflecting on what he learned and what he did wrong, and he is hitting the ground running with his next startup: IntegrateSales

    Dan’s reasons his site never took off? Read his blog for his full analysis

    • Design Perfection
    • Underestimated the ?Cold Start? problem
    • Market Size vs Business Model
    • Bad launch
    • Competition
    • Motivation
    • Co-founder
    • Derivative Idea

  • It's not you, it's me!

    We are working away on a few new things, I have been wrangling some new co-authors and have been generally thinking about the direction of StartupNorth. It feels a lot like what Heri has been thinking about lately.

    I’ll be back in action soon, swear.

    In the meantime, get your butt back to work. That software isn’t going to write itself, and those pitch decks are terrible, just so you know.

  • Follow a Canadian Startup Story

    Michael Parkatti and Michael Marrone, both from Calgary, have recently gone to Cambridge, Massachusetts to join the latest group of startups at YCombinator.

    They will be keeping a diary on globeandmail.com as they go through the journey of building their new company.

    We have also arranged with the guys to do a series of interviews with them here on StartupNorth. The first interview will be done by Austin Hill. Keep an eye out for it.

  • Lessons in Social Media, with MediaScrape

    We have covered MediaScrape a few times, and when I joked that they might be the next Capazoo, their CEO came through with a great reference to Cocain.

    Well, they are back. Since this post is not an opinion piece, I will just link you to a recent Montreal Gazette article and quote a few bits. In the interest of presenting the other side of the startup-ecosystem argument, I present the one… the only…

    He’d rather make deals with media conglomerates and Silicon Valley giants over fancy lunches than share ideas over blogs or hobnob with venture capitalists at technology happy hours.

    He doesn’t go to local networking events where entrepreneurs talk about their projects and share feedback:
    “Why would I go? There’s no money – there’s no content at those things. I’m busy. I’m making deals. And the times I did go I just heard a lot of whining that there’s no money in Montreal.”
    He doesn’t have a blog where he logs his company’s progress, details its challenges, and invites dialog from the tech community, in the hopes of increasing his Google cred:
    “I don’t need to be a destination site. For us to use social media gimmicks, to drive traffic to our site would put us as competitors with our clients.
    “We’re a behind-the-scenes enabler.”

    Yet this hardly seems to faze Cavell. He doesn’t feel he needs to satisfy doubting bloggers.
    “Screw them,” he said. “We’re a private company. I don’t have to tell them shit.
    “Blogs are great for open-source editorials, but they’re no substitute for researched journalism.”
    One could chalk up Cavell’s philosophy to his lineage. He’s the son of Charles Cavell, the former head of what is today Quebecor World Inc., when it was still a mighty printer, and former chairman of tabloid chain Sun Media Corp.

    An in case you are wondering, yes: Comments are turned on.

  • Founders and Funders Toronto Wrapup

    Founders and Funders Toronto took place this week and we had another sellout. We had just over 100 people who came out to hang out, pitch their startups and find fundable companies.

    A lot of food went cold however, as people could barely stay in their seats. The room was buzzing and so far the reviews have been great.

    Ali Asaria, from Well.ca, sent us a note that I think summed it up:

    “This was the first time we as a company were approached by investors, instead of us having to approach them. The atmosphere was relaxed, but at the same time there were always four simultaneous, deep discussions happening at our table on the subjects of investment, entrepreneurial stories, and industry trends.

    In one single night I was able to talk directly with five different VCs, and we had the time to talk about details of our business, without the “what’s your pitch?” awkwardness. I had the chance to sit next to some of Canada’s most successful entrepreneurs from whom I learned so many lessons. What a great event — it’s the next day now and I return to my desk energized!”

    A big thank you to our sponsors

     

    Founders and Funders Vancouver

    Boris has announced Founders and Funders Vancouver for June 17th. If you would like to attend the dinner, please fill out the following form and let us know who you are.

    As with the Montreal and Toronto dinners, Microsoft was gracious enough to sponsor Vancouver as well. These dinners really would not have been possible without them taking the lead and having a vision to help Canadian early-stage companies.

  • Third Tuesday NB: Venture Capital, Startups and Social Media

    I am heading to Moncton next week to hang out and give a quick talk on the state of Venture Capital in Canada and what that means for Startups. The meetup is on Tuesday, June 17, 2008 at 6:30 PM.

    I am looking forward to meeting as many startups as I can while I am in Moncton, so if you are going to be around, please drop me a line. I will be getting in early in the day on June 17th.

    I will have some new data in hand about what is going on with VC and Angel financing in Canada, where startups fit in to the picture and my argument for why Social Media is the savior of us all.

    See you in Moncton!

  • Mercury Rising: Watch a Startup reinvent itself

    The guys at MercuryGrove, who last year came out with a product called Web Groups are now reinventing themselves as a multiple product company. In the next few months they will be re-developing Web Groups and introducing a new set of products, including a CRM, an E-Mail Campaign Manager, and finally something called a “Customer Page“, that provides an easier way of working with customers.

    I have had the chance to get to know Scott Annan over the last few years, and he has been one of the guys behind StartupOttawa, so it is cool to see him show some of the inner workings of MercuryGrove.

    There is no doubt that this is partially just a PR stunt, but that is fine with me, because Scott has all the street cred he needs and I know that he does the right thing for the Ottawa community every chance he gets.

    I’ll be watching along, and we will post some updates here. Follow along on the blog.

  • Wanted: Startup Revolutionaries

    We have some really great stuff cooking and we want to get more people involved.

    Our goal with StartupNorth has been pretty simple: We want to write about great startups, help some get funded and also throw the occasional party.

    The truth is however that sitting here in Toronto, we have a tough time covering the great stuff that is happening East to West and North to South. I have written a bit about how much I love Canadian cities and how I think that each one is unique and ready to do great things.

    If you are like us and want to do something great for the startup community in your city, then please get in touch ASAP. I’d love to tell you what we are cooking up.

  • StartupCamp Waterloo 3 Recap

    This is a guest post by Mic Berman, one of the instigators of StartupCamp Waterloo. Thanks Mic!

    We had great turn out and interesting crowd, lots of new startups first time demonstrating in a public forum. The event was sponsored by TechCapital, WatStart, CommuniTech and SunStartup – thanks to those folks for supporting the community.

    We tried something different and hosted a panel at the start made up of Iain Klugman , Larry Borsato, Ali Asaria, Melanie Baker, Sandra MacDonald, and Gary Will. The basic question was “why, why do a startup?” The answers varied from why not to do one to a very philosophical approach by Ali that centred around passion and drive.

    The start ups that got to present (based on audience voting and time available) were:

    Semacode (on StartupIndex) – Simon showed off his technology for the first time. A fully integrated viral marketing based service integrated into FaceBook as a great way to manage events and conduct mobile marketing campaigns. The issues that came up in discussion were privacy (how does the user control information that is captured in their barcode/name tag), which target market they should go after (i.e., advertising/marketing/event type companies or the end user/enterprise running the event). Simon has partnered with SuitedMedia Inc to help them sell the service.

    Navarra run by Avery Pennarun was a somewhat controversial concept for outsourcing development of your founder ideas. The concept being they would charge a flat rate to develop against particular specifications provided by the “business founder”. Avery figures lots of business people/founders with great ideas need a good development shop to develop out their ideas. Issues that came up were: “are you mad?”, “that will never work”, and ” how will you ensure specifications are crystal?”. Maybe they are on to something (as is typically the case when faced with great controversy)?

    Clutterme presented by Mark Molckovsky & Alex Curelea was a totally fun demo of a cool technology that enables you as a user to instantly create a webpage that effectively becomes your “cork board” online. Great job to whomever did their brand and logo, as it so clearly defines what they’re up to. Their key questions of the audience were “what’s your business model?, how will you make money?”, usability issues, and how to get the word out there. They’ve asked for community support on testing their beta about to be released in 2 to 3 weeks. Check them out 🙂

    UbietyLab – Developed by local Waterloo professor, Todd Veldhuizen, demonstrated some very powerful visualization technology that quite frankly the audience was very impressed by with folks throwing out many many applications for its use. Hence the professor’s problem. What market with what offering, considering “I’m really doing this in my spare time and not really as a business person?”

    AdvertisingShowdown.com – I’m sorry guys, I missed this one because I was in conversation at the time (oops). The just is a powerful new online advertising metrics application. You can check out the recording of the presentation on www.spaetzel.com

    Let’sCube (which is currently a Firefox plug-in you can download) is an instant sharing technology for cool sites you want to share with your friends and for which you can receive results as the owner of the site that’s being shared. Differences between StunbleUpon, Digg, Twittr, etc and their service is they aggregate your interests into your own let’s cube page – so it pulls for you and filters by your friends. Does it go both ways? Can you share and pull? That was the biggest issue posed by the audience and yes, it does. Lots of other ideas about how to leverage the Firefox plug in to test additional features.

    IndigoFire presented by Karim Shaehata is solving the problem of website registration and sharing among friends real, business and otherwise. His product is not yet live (powerpoint presentation). Solving the problem of how you create differentiation among your usage across community sites like Facebook, Flickr, etc. for the people you want to share with and the public at large. Good questions and may be interesting technology yet to come 🙂 Kareem’s basic question was what are the potential business models for which the audience offered several alternatives e.g., server side, small user charge, middleware approach, etc. and would you use it?

    The audience participation rocked, thanks everyone who came and asked and offered great questions, suggestions and comments. You can check out a recording of the event on spaetzel.com

  • Mesh Conference – 15 Minutes of Fame

    One of the startup-focused parts of Mesh is the 15 Minutes of Fame they do evey year. Each day of the conference 3 companies are given 5 minutes each to pitch themselves or their product to the audience.

    What I love about it is that it really is completely open to whoever applies, and it is not an opportunity for the conference organizers to just give stage time to whoever will pay. (paying to do something like 15 minutes of fame is far more typical than you might realize)

    The lineup this year was solid, with some new companies and some more established startups.

    15 Minutes of Fame is a great way to get your startup in front of a new crowd in Canada, so think about doing it next year.

    • Carbonetworks, which has developed software that helps companies create effective carbon emissions strategies to reduce costs and capitalize on emerging global markets.
    • GigPark, a place to receive recommendations about a wide variety of services from friends and their friends.
    • AidesRSS, which has created technology to make reading RSS feeds more effective and valuable.
    • Well.ca, an online health and beauty store that ships across Canada.
    • OverlayTV, an interactive media company that provides a video commerce platform that lets Internet users, content owners and e-commerce sites to monetize and customize their video assets.
    • Enomalism, an open source consulting firm that focuses on solving the cost and complexity for enterprises that run large technical server infrastructures.