StartupNorth

Author: Jonas Brandon

  • You are a superhero

    Sunir Shah, who now works at Freshbooks has started a series of posts called “Entrepreneurs are superheroes“.

    Entrepreneurism is in my blood. My parents both came from Kenya, where they were children of retailers and industrialites. In fact, I come from from a long line of entrepreneurs escaping poverty in India.

    They worked hard, starting by laying the ties of the Kenyan railway at the turn of the 20th century to becoming one of the core commercial classes at the turn of the 21st. What was their motivation? Getting others like themselves out of poverty in India on towards a better life. Now, my generation is leaving Kenya for England, Australia, and in my case North America to start the cycle once again.

    Sunir is profiling Entrepreneurs. Something like this would be more at home on Startupnorth, but hey, what can ya do? Freshbooks did a smart thing in hiring Sunir to help do things like this.

    Thanks Freshbooks and Sunir. We are looking forward to seeing the profiles role in!

    So far, Sunir has 3 profiles:

  • Canadian Startups on Read/Write Web

    Heri Rakotomalala, of MontrealTechWatch wrote a fantastic post on Read/Write Web which profiles canadian web startups!

    MontrealTechWatch is quickly becoming my favorite canadian startup blog (besides Startupnorth of course!). I won’t recap the article here, head over to R/W Web and read it for yourself.

  • Yes, of course, we are on Facebook

    I took a few minutes to create a Facebook group for Startupnorth today.

    Join in and use the space to talk about Canadian Startups, running a company in Canada, and anything else related to startup life.

    Update: Wow, 90 members already. There is no doubt that there is a great community forming in the canadian startup scene. Keep it coming!

  • The TVG is dead, Long Live Ventures

    The rumors are true, The Toronto Venture Group is no more.

    The TVG, like the Toronto Angel Group (which is probably dead too, more on this soon), is one of the many often-flirted with, rarely treaded on groups that court Canadian Startups to get on stage, or to send their business plans around. The effect on the startup was feeling more like they were being asked to take their pants off in the waiting room before going in to the Doctor’s office. More often than not, it was some sort of witch doctor behind the door anyway, and you would have kept your pants on if only you had known.

    That leaves us with a slew of angel groups who are all still asking Startups to take their pants off well in advance of a typical show-all timeframe for a real relationship.

    Do these groups actually work? One telling aspect is that many of them claim to model themselves after Silicon Valley groups. The problem is, there is no evidence (and conversations tell me otherwise) that these groups actually do many deals themselves. The world of Angel, Venture or other investment is about relationships. When you, as a startup, start to meet Angels and VCs, your focus should be completely on building a relationship with them, the deal can flow from that.

    There are always exceptions to the rule, I know that b5media was funded out of a TVG event in Toronto pretty quickly. I don’t know of any others though.

    Like I do our friends in the Den, I tend to question the value of these groups, especially the ones that charge upwards of 3000$ to the entrepreneur for participation (like First Angel Network), but it’s also important to recognize that the members of these groups can been keen, hungry and able investors. The trick is to pick them out of the pack and focus on dealing with the individual directly. Your $250,000 deal doesn’t need 4 weeks worth of legals holding it up when a simple note and issuance of shares could do the trick.

    The obituary after the jump. Who wants to sing the requiem?

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  • myhood.ca – Toronto centric apartment aggregator

    myhood.ca is a Toronto focused apartment finder and review tool. Considering that the site was launched just 1 month ago, I find it amazing that there are over 900 reviews of various apartment buildings on the site already.

    The site is a Google Maps mashup that lets you find apartments based on location and marks the location of grocery stores, subway stops and shopping malls on the map. This model is even better in Toronto, where people tend to be particular about what neighborhood they want to move to.

    I already made use of myhood.ca by reading reviews of our new condo building on the site. I think that providing a service that allows condo owners to review their buildings would be useful, although there is a large disincentive to being critical of a building your currently own in. I turns out that the building manager is hard to deal with and that I should make-nice with Janice, the front desk lady. I did that today, bypassing the manager, and introduced myself to Janice. I was glad to know I didn’t need to waste time.

    I also know how painful it can be to find an apartment in Toronto having moved up here blind to both Toronto and large city living period. I can still remember the shock at the sticker price for a 2 bedroom 2 bathroom apartment, not knowing the ups and downs of one building or another just made it all that much more confusing.

    Right now, myhood.ca is trying to use a referral fee model for sending people back to the site where a particular listing originated. If they can make this work, and pay, with all the providers out there, then it could be a lucrative model. There will also be some banner advertising and allowing landlords to purchase “featured listings” that will be displayed more prominently.

    myhood.ca is self funded to date and they are thinking about looking for investment to help them take the site to (I presume) other markets.

    Jeff Hersh is the one-man show behind myhood.ca. It’s pretty evident that he is able to execute well on an idea. A large marketing firm teaming up with a web development shop would not have turned out anything close to myhood.ca for anything less than a 500k budget for the first phase. Jeff has done it solo and is off to a great start.

    myhood.ca was showcased on MapleLeaf2.0 already and The Torontoist has a great review of the site.

    Contact Jeff Hersh

  • easypost.ca – Quick and easy mailing in Canada

    Alright, here is one I am not sure what to think about. Easypost.ca is a dead-easy way to send letters anywhere in Canada. Type in an address, type in a letter and they print it and send it.

    Seems silly right?

    Well, there could be a lot more to this service, which is in a free-beta right now, that could make them more than just a letter sending website. Right now there are API‘s for everything you can imagine. When a programmer wants to add a service to their web-app, they use an API to tell another site to do the work for them. You might, for example, tell Google to draw you a fancy GoogleMap, or you might tell YouTube to tell you what the most popular 10 videos are.

    Freshbooks is one of the few sites doing ground-mailing services right now, but I can think of a few other places I would like to have the service. For example, I wouldn’t mind being able to upload an Word Document, Email or Powerpoint Doc and have it mailed on occasion.

    So, theoretically (and I haven’t asked them), easypost.ca could become a sort of API to connect websites to the real world and make ground mailing super easy.

    Even if they don’t go that route, I think there will be a suprising amount of people who would like a really, really, simple way of sending ground mail, without having to get up from their office chair.

    We will follow up with Easypost later on and see how things are coming along.

    Contact Andrew Kinnear.

  • Sunday Startup Roundup – May 20 2007

    clubpenguinlogo.pngIt was a good week for Canadian startups, especially Club Penguin, who are in talks with Sony for at least 500 million. Not bad for a company from Kelowna, B.C. and that is less than 2 years old. Making millions and living in Kelowna — I don’t want to hear these guys complaining about startup life.

    Ourfaves was also profiled on techcrunch. Ourfaves is sort of like a beefed up Pursudo and not quite Yelp. Google still seems to beat them all.

    It appears that Mesh is a sell out show again this year. Despite a slip up in my Startup’s Guide to Mesh post where I called it a “small time conference”, I am a Mesh-booster now.

    Sean Wise posts about why some deals don’t get done on the Dragon’s den. He cites the following as reasons that the Dragon’s don’t invest in one business or another:

    1. Valuing what you have too much.
    2. Not offering the Dragons a significant equity position.
    3. Asking for too much cash
    4. Not having sales
    5. Not wanting to run the business.

    Those reasons are on par with a “it’s not you, it’s me” during a highschool breakup phonecall. Rather than pretending there is some formula, and one startup fits the formula and one doesn’t, why not just admit it’s all their gut and remind ourselves She just ain’t that in to you.

    Oh, and we missed it a few weeks ago, but Communicopia won a Webby award for Nothing but Nets. That is cooool.

    I am sure I have missed a whole slew of things — so please send in or comment below with whatever you’ve got to share.

  • The Startup's Guide to Mesh

    So, you are going to make the trip to the Mesh Conference in Toronto? Well, let’s take a look at it from a web startup’s point of view and see what we should, and shouldn’t, be doing.

    First off, how far along are you? If you are just in the idea stage, I suggest you get some screenshots done at the very least. You’ll want to have a laptop with you that you can whip open and start pouring the kool-aid with about your amazing product X.

    For the sanity of everyone else there, don’t try to be coy about your startup. If someone asks you a question, you should answer it right away. Do not humm and haw. If you don’t like their question, tell them straight up that you don’t want to, or can’t, answer that question. It saves them from thinking “what’s going on here” and it saves you 10 seconds of a racing heartbeat.

    Are you looking for funding? If so, figure out how much and who you want it from. Don’t waste too much time in the actual sessions, there are always smart people around to talk to.

    Please, take as good as you give. If you burst in to a conversation, or start a conversation with a pitch, nobody is going to listen to you. You will be that guy.
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  • esy – local price comparison – early stage and ambitious

    picture-2.pngEsy Shopping is an early stage startup, based in Vancouver that is aiming to consolidate local shopping inventory information online.

    Esy plans to launch next month, and we haven’t been able to see any screenshots, so I will give them the benefit of the doubt on how they are going to build their database of locally available products. If they can get that right, they are going to do well.

    Esy will generate revenue through advertising alongside the local shopping search results. While they may get some national advertisers, this model may require them to sell ads on a local level. Selling localized ads for the internet has always been tough and my guess is that it still is today. I’m looking forward to seeing how they handle this at launch.

    Just as interesting as Esy itself is it’s 19 year old co-founder Theo Tonca. Theo founded his first company at age 15 and has been hacking away at the web startup thing ever since. Suffice to say, even if Esy doesn’t fly, Theo will be back and swinging for the fences again soon after.

    We will follow up with Esy after their launch to see how things are going.

  • No Better Time than Now

    mothermeasuring.gifEvery couple of weeks I get asked by someone if I think they should take the leap and really dedicate themselves to their idea. Is it a good time of year? Are they the right age? Do they have enough of a cushion?

    My advice is that there usually isn’t a good reason to quit a comfortable full time job to focus on a startup, and that you should be able to run a startup on the side until you know if it will fly or not.

    The bad thing about that advice is that I really don’t have a clue if it is good advice or not. I have been one of the lucky few who has always been working on a startup with my own great-to-good-to-mild-to-terrible levels of success.

    Statistically, most people take the leap and attempt a startup in their mid to late 30s. I’m not sure why that is, I suspect it is a big group of people who have been making nice salaries since their late 20s, have the house well on it’s way to being paid for, and have the college fund tucked away for the kids.

    When is the best time to attempt your first startup? I am going to take a leap and say that High School is actually the best time. There is absolutely zero risk, but there is generally absolutely zero capital as well. While you are in the teenage years induced haze you can be at your most creative, but you also have a low probability of completely executing on something, unless you are above average (which I expect you are).
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