StartupNorth

Author: Jonas Brandon

  • Off to a great start, thanks!

    startupnorth.png StartupNorth has gotten off to a great start. We are only just over 2 weeks old but already up to 300 visitors a day and about 80 (give or take) RSS subscribers according to FeedBurner.

    While these numbers are still tiny in the grand scheme of things, they are a respectable amount of growth in 2 weeks and I think it shows that there is a need out there for a place to talk about being an entrepreneur in Canada.

    startupnorth2.pngWe are going to focus on getting more west-coast content. As one of the most active startup regions in the country, BC really needs some coverage. We have also started to hunt for great startups in Atlantic Canada and I think we’ll all be surprised at the quality of the ideas coming from the east.

    So, keep the startups coming in and don’t hesitate to ask about contributing to the site. As the site’s popularity grows, we will all benefit from having a healthy community and we will try to find ways to make things less one-to-many and more about helping people connect.

  • waka.ca – Real Estate Information Liberation

    logo2.pngWaka.ca is a Quebec City (Quebec City has to be one of the most underrated cities in the world) company that provides a real estate search engine. They have already launched for Quebec, and will be expanding significantly in the coming fall and have been making steady progress since their launch in 2006.

    Waka scrapes data from a slew of sources. From classified ads to real estate agent websites, it’s nice to see someone start to aggregate all this information. Anyone who is trying to buy or lease real estate is probably familiar with how frustrating systems like MLS.ca can be as they constantly try to hide information from you.

    With about 10,000 people coming to the site a week, waka is slogging up the typical curve and will have a lot of hard work to do in order to get wide acceptance, but they will be the first (and currently only) site in Canada that aggregates all of the available sources of real estate listing information. Being the first and best established resource in Canada is going to be a big deal in the next few years as more people start to research their housing purchase online.

    While they do not seem to be actively seeking investment, and are currently funded with friend/family money, my guess is that as their expansion plans get larger, and as some competition starts to move in, Waka may be on the lookout for friendly angel money.

    Waka plans to make money through advertising, which can be a painful process. They will have to focus on pulling in large amounts of visitors, which may take their focus away from more focused goals, such as creating a market or ensuring that their tool drives more off-mls sales.

    With two founders and 4 other employees working on the project, I am looking forward to watching Waka evolve quickly, and we will keep checking in with them.

    Contact Samuel Bouchard

  • Writing a Business Plan?

    bkstckpct.jpgI am currently writing a business plan because I have a very defined reason for needing it. A particular source of income absolutely needs to see one as part of their process. I am OK with that, but it has really made me think more about Business Plans, their usefulness and non-usefulness.

    Business Plans can be very useful in the right situation and for the right reason. If you have never started, run or ruined a business, a business plan can be a great way to run through scenarios in your head, especially if you don’t have a partner to stand in front of a whiteboard with to do dry runs of ideas.

    A business plan can also be a great way to get help from people who are far more experienced and/or smart than you are. When you hand them a business plan, you are telling them that you have put every important idea about your business on paper, and you can give them the freedom to make their own assumptions about what they are reading (rather than giving them less material and forcing them to wonder if they are making a good assumption or not).

    If someone is considering investing in your business, a business plan can be a great way for them to get confidence that you have thought about the future, even if you may not end up anywhere near the business plan you wrote. A lot of investors worry that entrepenurs aren’t thinking beyond getting funding, or getting those first 10 customers, etc.

    So while business plans can be good, they can also be dangerous.

    Writing a single, sensible and usable plan for 3 years in business is unequivocally impossible. Your business will change, your customers will change, your product with change, you will change, your circumstances will change. If there is one thing I have learned about the world it is that things keep on changing, and they don’t care what I have to say about them.

    You are not smart enough to understand the changes that might come. I hate to break it to you (and myself), but the very act of trying to start a business from nothing is a pretty stupid thing to bother doing. You could go get a job for a comfortable 150k a year, wouldn’t that just be smarter?

    So, if it is going to constantly change, isn’t there some sort of easier device to use to keep a running plan of how you are operating your business? I have been using a 10-page slide deck that I ignore for long periods of time and I come back to begrudgingly. In the past, as a business has grown, financials have been the complete domain of my accountant and I keep a little spreadsheet of my own projections.

    Sales projections remain one of the most creative, nonsensical, asked-for and confusing parts of futurism I have had to take part in. Are they bad? No. Are they going to make or break your business? No. Should you spend hours and days on them? No.

    So, I’m not going to tell you not to write a business plan. There are a lot of good reasons to write one, but what I am suggesting is that you cannot rely on your business plan. We need a much more evolved way of understanding how our business is changing each day, week, month and year. Constantly editing a business plan is going to suck your time dry. Updating a deck of 10 or 15 slides will be a lot easier. Blogging about the changes internally for all your company to see will be a far better way of seeing the future take shape. You’ll also learn a lot more about how your business has evovled. “Recent Changes” is far too hard a way to see the real progression of the conversation.

    If you need to sit down to write a business plan, there are some fantastic resources out there. There is the CBSP Small Business Planner which will guide you through almost the entire thing. It’s a great way to maintain some structure, but it also hides all the other pieces of the plan from you as you write it, which helps you keep a focus.

    PlanHQ is also shaping up to be a great tool. It is still young (and it shows), but it will only get better. It also uses a goal-based approach and helps you keep your plan updated on an ongoing basis. Very Nice.

    My best suggestion however is to keep a private blog. Write an entry for each of the main components of your business plan and use comments or new posts to update it regularly as it changes. You can also invite your advisors, friends and employees in to help out as well.

    What about you, what are your experiences with business plans? Good or bad, I want to hear it.

  • Why I won't be on The Dragon's Den

    The Dragon’s Den on CBC is taking applications for startups who want to get funded on national TV.

    It probably seems like an OK idea to begin with. You fill out an application, show up in front of some cameras and pitch your company to a bunch of high-end angel investors that you would never have a chance to pitch to otherwise.

    In fact, for the startup community as a whole, The Dragon’s Den should be a good thing. It draws attention to the idea of starting your own business, makes it a little sexy and the show is balanced enough to show the failures along with the successes.

    It really is good entertainment, I’ll be watching every episode this coming season. If they want to really up the entertainment value, they should make Sean Wise the host — he would be much better than Dianne Buckner. Not that I mind Dianne.

    Would I take my startup on The Dragon’s Den? Not a chance in hell, and for a few reasons.

    The first reason is that you are being lumped in with a swath of absolutely ridiculous businesses, why let yourself be tainted by the Bikini Weenie or that umpire guy.

    The second reason is that you are giving up all control of the portrayal of your business. I don’t know about you, but when I go in to a “dragon’s den” to do a presentation, I take some comfort in knowing that I have control over how my business idea is communicated. By pitching on national television, you are letting an editor decide how your business should look, sound and feel. No deal!

    The third, and biggest, reason I wouldn’t think of going on the Dragon’s Den is because there is absolutely no incentive for the “Dragon’s” to make a good deal with me or my startup. Why? Because they aren’t there to make good investments. Judging by the tiny size of their investments, my guess is that the CBC offers them indemnity from loss up to a certain amount (the investments can go bad, and the CBC will compensate them).

    That may not be the case, but it doesn’t matter much anyway, because the real investment that the four investors are making is in themselves. If they lose 400k on investments on the show, that is still 400k well invested in raising their own national profile. The payoffs of being a TV star can, at times, be lucrative. Especially as these four behave a bit like their are thinking semi-retirement.

    So, you won’t see me there, but I’ll be glued to the TV!

  • ConceptShare gets a lot of love on the ScobleShow

    Canada’s most loved, and arguably best, startup, Conceptshare has been doing the conference circuit lately, and this past week at Mix’07, Scoble did an interview and demo with Bernie Aho.

    The lesson for startups? When you can afford it, it really is a good idea to get out there and pound the pavement to get some exposure.

    A review, and hopefully interview, with the ConceptShare guys will be coming soon enough.

    ConceptShare is based in Sudbury, Ontario.

  • The state of Candian Venture Capital

    Suzie on the state of Canadian Venture Capital

    While there’s been a VC famine here for several quarters, public discussion of the issue has been tepid at best. Thank goodness, some of our most prominent players are finally speaking out. In the last few weeks, Terry Matthews and Pat DiPietro have become the Bono and Angelina Jolie of the venture capital scene, using their celebrity to sound the alarm.

    What’s the nature of the crisis? Here’s a sketch of what’s being said:

    Venture capital is fed by the limited partners (“LPs”) who invest in VC funds. Historically, the pool of Canadian LPs who are attracted to high risk capital has been discrete. To bolster the industry(and the startup community), the Canadian government therefore has from time to time created vehicles such as labour sponsored funds to attract additional capital.

    When there is an irrational market (1998-2000), the usual pool of LPs expands to include new players such as US LPs and institutional equity funds. The number of VCs and the amount of venture capital available to Canadian entrepreneurs skyrockets. When the market cools, those LPS retreat to later stage investing, leaving too many funds competing for fewer LPs. A consolidation of the numebr of venture capital investors results, until the next irrational market heats up the investing cycle all over again.

  • Jeremy Wright – Startup Lessons

    Jeremy Wright, fellow Canadian and startup CEO, wrote a great post about his experience starting b5media over at the Chitika blog bash.

    I remember in early 2005 when the first email that kicked b5media off was written. It was something like ?hey, we?re all making decent money, let?s pool together and sell our blogs as a package!”

    Read it all

  • fortuito.us – getting started online

    fortuitous is written by Matthew Haughey. Matt plans to chronicle is experience in starting his own blogging business online. If you have been thinking about getting more serious about your own blog, or about blogging about your own business, this looks like a great place to start.

    I’m going to be sharing the things I’ve picked up along the way here, with a new essay posted every Monday about some aspect of doing business online. If you’re a freelancer hoping to someday ditch your clients, just starting out with a web business, or already have an established blogging empire.

    Visit

  • Sunday Startup Roundup

    Sundays seem like as good a time as any to round up what’s been happening in the Canadian startup scene in the last week.

    We blogged about Eqo.com getting funded and the sale of R|Mail to NBC Universal. On top of all that, iUpload has decided to move it’s executive and sales operation to the US.

    Mark McQueen interviewed Rick Segal to get his thoughts on Friends and Family rounds, Angels, strong teams and more. While that was going on, Suzie at Venture Law Line broke the iUpload news and has been looking back on funds that have come and gone in Canada’s VC scene.

    To top it all off, Sean Wise has just published his new book WISE WORDS which is described as

    Collecting the best columns from his first years at the Globe, this book cover topics relevant to: founders, funders and those that service the entrepreneuiral ecosystem.

    Including: How to create an Elevator Pitch; How to pick a partner; The Art of Business Jui Jitsou; Networking to Survive and 14 questions every investor asks on the first date This tome provides the inside track on funding and growing your business.

    Jui Jitsou!? Sounds serious. The last time I took Jui Jitsou, I think I was swinging by a rope and trying to kick a guy holding a big bag or something.

    If anyone picks up this book, and wants to write a review, let us know! We’ll be happy to link to it or post it. You can get a preview here.

    I am sure there are a lot of things we missed, but we need your help to keep track of all this stuff, so I am attaching a contact form so you can give us the dirt on what you have been hearing. New venture firm in town?, have you met a new startup, or are you starting a new company? Let us know.
    (more…)

  • clearRoot.com – Florist Solutions

    clearRoot is a Toronto based startup that is building a back-end system for flower shops that allows thousands of independent stores to place orders with each-other as easily as it is for them to fill an order themselves.

    clearRoot manages all of the complexities associated with a large Business-to-Business network, and they provide very user friendly front-end software to the flower shops who participate. ClearRoot first started to take shape in May of 2004, but has been growing quickly since April 2006. With over 100 paying customers already (and that’s BEFORE they have even released the software), clearRoot is clearly making sense to their customers.

    The clearRoot business model is based on a pay-per-use fee on each order sent through the system. This is similar to Interac, and if it is priced right, this will drive a lot of growth for clearRoot. Because clearRoot was born out of a team with experience running an independent flower shop, as well as their current ethos of building their software and network directly with customers, they have a great chance of building the next big disruptive B2B platform.

    Until now, clearRoot has been doing a lot of direct selling of their network, but they have also been growing organically in their vertical. Later on, they are planning to do joint-promotion with other complimentary services in the florist industry.

    While growth has been strong, the market for something like clearRoot is also growing and my guess is that is why they are currently looking to raise financing.

    clearRoot is currently run by Jeff Richman and their team is built of people experienced with the florist industry, or developers who are working on building their platform out.

    Contact Jeff Richman