StartupNorth

Tag: community

  • Crowdfunding for Notman House


    We’re big fans of Montreal.

    There is a lot of really exciting things going on in Montreal. Founder Fuel. Real Ventures. c2mtl. Rho Ventures. iNovia Capital. MtlNewTech. Next Montreal. Grand Prix du Canada.  And Notman.

    Notman is conceived as a community space for the web community in Montreal. I remember John Stokes talking about his vision for this space in 2006. And how the efforts of Montreal Startup have demonstrated the value and benefits to the city when founders, entrepreneurs, designers, developers and others have something to rally around. Montreal doesn’t have a Communitech or a MaRS. This is the efforts by local entrepreneurs to bootstrap a central place. John, Alan, Mark, JS and Austin have led this vision for over 6 years. And it’s very close.

    Over the last year the Notman House  has hosted over 125 events, including user group meet-ups, hackathons, and learning events, been home to over 50 Startups, and been visited by over 10,000 entrepreneurs, investors, students, and others involved in the growing Montreal tech scene. It’s an incredible place.

    Our top priority is to connect the already existing community. Hundreds of groups, meetups and events are being created and take place every year in Montreal. They are loosely connected and aware of each other, but still essentially fragmented. The Notman House wants to bring them all together.

    We want to bring startups, students, investors, developers and artists all together in the same spirit that characterized the Montreal of the past.

    Notman and OSMO Foundation is looking to raise $100k in private funding. They need to raise this $100k to unlock the a combined $1.7M in grants from the municipal, provincial, and federal government. In addition a $4.3M loan has been committed by Investissement Quebec and the BDC. However, to access these grants we need to raise $1.1M in private contributions. $1M of this is being pledged by corporate entities such as Teralys Capital, Claridge, Telesystem, McCarthy Tetrault, and Fasken Martineau.  We are looking to the community to help close the $100K gap currently faced in the funding process.

  • ‘Small’ ideas are not the problem

    Editor’s Note: This is a cross-post (possibly some sort of reblogging) from Momoko Price’s blog originally posted on August 13, 2012. Momoko Price  is a web writer, editor and communications consultant based in Toronto. She runs a communications consultancy called Copy/Cat and frequently blogs about startup culture and web communications at http://copy-cat.co/.

    In a recent blog post called ‘Toronto is Broken’, Upverter co-founder Zak Homuth wrote that Toronto’s startup community suffers from an overabundance of ‘small ideas,’ implying that ‘thinking small’ is somehow intrinsically less valuable than ‘thinking big.’

    I’m not a web startup founder, but I am an entrepreneur and many of my clients are web startups. And as a writer, sometimes I can’t help but focus on how the wrong word ends up detracting from the soundness of someone’s argument. This is one of those times.

    So let’s clear something up right now: There is a world of difference between a ‘small’ idea and a shitty idea. Let’s please stop equating one with the other; it’s not helping to solve the problem (ie: a cultural aversion to creative & original ventures).

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    Zak isn’t the first person to complain about small uninspired ideas, and derivative product pitches certainly aren’t unique to Toronto. But trying to combat an epidemic of ‘small ideas’ by being ‘frighteningly ambitious’ instead is, well, not exactly great advice. Here’s why:

    1. ‘Small ideas’ can be built and launched more quickly.

    Creating a successful product involves much more than just the idea, or even the product itself. Testing, marketing, financing, selling, scaling, management — these factors will often end up playing a far more critical role in determining your startup’s success over the long run.

    So rather than worry about whether or not your idea is ‘big’ or ‘game-changing’ enough, why not bite off something you know you can chew now, whatever it is, and start getting some real-market experience as soon as possible? That way, you’ll actually know what to do (and what not to do) when that crazy, once-in-a-lifetime idea strikes you.

    2. Traction, not ambition, defines a ‘world-changing’ idea.

    I often help entrepreneurs structure and refine their pitch decks, and it never ceases to amaze me how frequently they include 5 or more slides about their idea or product, and none about whether the idea is actually taking hold with anyone.

    Meanwhile, most experienced investors don’t really care what your solution is, as much as they care about whether lots of people want it.

    A product or service doesn’t have to be complicated or even tech-based (as Derek Sivers points out in his popular ‘Ideas vs. Execution’ clip). The important thing is to gauge its market traction.

    After all, an idea or product can only change the world if people actually use it. In business, if your solution takes off, then it was a great, world-changing idea. If it doesn’t, then it wasn’t. Simple as that.

    Editor’s Note: This is a cross-post (possibly some sort of reblogging) from Momoko Price’s blog originally posted on August 13, 2012. Momoko Price  is a web writer, editor and communications consultant based in Toronto. She runs a communications consultancy called Copy/Cat and frequently blogs about startup culture and web communications at http://copy-cat.co/.

  • Do Startups Need Community Managers?

    Editor’s note: This is a cross post from Mark Evans Tech written by Mark Evans of ME Consulting. Follow him on Twitter @markevans or MarkEvansTech.com. This post was originally published in March 26, 2012 on MarkEvansTech.com.

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    Do start-ups needs community managers to operate their social media activities…and a whole lot more?

    It’s an interesting question. On one hand, social media is seen as a low-cost marketing and sales channel for lean and mean start-ups. On the other, every full-time hire is a major decision so start-ups need to decide whether having a community makes sense, or whether having another developer or salesman is a more pragmatic option.

    If the right person is hired, a community manager can be a valuable asset for a start-up. There are, however, several important skills a community manager needs to possess. These include:

    1. Have in-depth knowledge of social media strategy and tactics. It’s more than knowing how to tweet or post an update. It means knowing how to execute, when to get involved in a situation and when to lie low, and how to build relationships and connections.
    2. Excellent communication and writing skills given so much of what a community manger does is engage and talk with a variety of people in a public forum. A good community manager has the ability to prepare blog posts, presentations, case studies, and speak at conferences.
    3. Understand and appreciate the business development process. In talking with lots of people and consuming tons of information, community managers have the ability to discover, identify and nurture prospects, which can then be passed along to the sales team.
    4. Provide top-notch customer service. It means having the knowledge and patience to deal with all kinds of issues and problems – big and small – that emerge. Some of them can be handled online, while some needs to be tactfully taken off-line.
    5. Sell and, even, close a deal: There are potential customers who make it clear about the products they need. A savvy community manager will be all over these opportunities with the goal to complete a sale.

    Like a stellar five-tool baseball player, community managers require a variety of skills to not only be effective but provide startups with maximum bang for the buck. They need to multi-task AND be good at all of the tasks that pop up during the working day.

    Community managers who have these skills can completely justify their hiring and, in the process, serve a startup in many ways to support its operations and growth.

    What do you think? Is there a right time for a startup to hire a community manager?

    Editor’s note: This is a cross post from Mark Evans Tech written by Mark Evans of ME Consulting. Follow him on Twitter @markevans or MarkEvansTech.com. This post was originally published in March 26, 2012 on MarkEvansTech.com.

  • Should We Drink the Local Kool-Aid?

    Editor’s note: This is a cross post from Mark Evans Tech written by Mark Evans of ME Consulting. Follow him on Twitter @markevans or MarkEvansTech.com. This post was originally published in December 15, 2011 on MarkEvansTech.com.

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    In the post I wrote earlier this week about the demise of Thoora, there was a comment suggesting that “Toronto failed Thoora” due to a lack of community support to make it a “winning formula”.

    It was a puzzling comment because it suggests a community has an obligation to support a startup so it can thrive. This strikes me as an absurd idea because startups should succeed or fail on their own merits, and the ability to attract an audience near and close.

    Sure, it’s good to drink the local flavour of “Kool-Aid” but only if a startup is offering a product or service that meets a need or interest. There are lots of local startups, including some that pitch me directly, that don’t resonate because nothing something interests me or the product/service doesn’t resonate enough to warrant further exploration.

    It doesn’t mean I’m not supporting the local community; it just means a startup has a service that didn’t pass the sniff test.

    At the same time, I do think Toronto’s startup community is extremely supportive. There’s no lack of enthusiasm, energy and a willingness to share ideas, feedback, resources, real estate and time to provide startups with a boost.

    This has been a fact of life for the past five years, even before we started to see a flurry of startups appear on the scene. There has always been a strong, support community that has pulled together in different ways. A great example is tonight’s HoHoTo party, which has become a major fund-raising machine due to tremendous support from the community.

    The bottom line is if a startup needs to rely on the community to make it, it also suggests what it’s offering can’t survive  without artificial support.

    For startups, the market has to be bigger than its own backyard. It needs people to support it or not based on what’s being sold as opposed to a sense of duty or obligation.

    Editor’s note: This is a cross post from Mark Evans Tech written by Mark Evans of ME Consulting. Follow him on Twitter @markevans or MarkEvansTech.com. This post was originally published in December 15, 2011 on MarkEvansTech.com.