We are a startup accelerator
We provide marketing consulting to new ventures, turning great ideas into successful companies.
Contact us
Categories
- Anticipate (2)
- Case studies (1)
- Communicate (21)
- Competition (2)
- Create (13)
- Exit strategy (2)
- Funding (6)
- Jobposting (1)
- Standing out (15)
- Startups (19)
Monday, July 21st, 2008
The path less travelled by
in: Communicate, Create, Standing out, Startups
What can a bookstore teach Canadians about positioning their companies? Marketing is increasingly about attention, and less about product. Most competent people can build a competent product or service. But in today’s world of instant attention, it’s often more about how to succeed in the market than how to get the product right. I had lunch a couple of weeks ago with Robin Axon, formerly of VenturesWest (and candidate for the coolest cyborg name of a VC ever.) We were chatting, as often happens among Canadian entrepreneurs, about The Canadian Ailment. Despite tremendous competence in product design, we never seem to make it North of the Border in the same way the US does. Even US bookstores, apparently, know this instinctively. But more on that later; back to Robin. He had a pretty clear theory about what ails us, which I’ll paraphrase (badly) here: Canadians try to succeed with a product, but Americans succeed with a market strategy.
View CommentsMonday, June 9th, 2008
Not following through on an idea
A lot of startups have great ideas. But unless they follow through with them to the end, they can backfire. Like mugs, for example. I was at a Starbucks in the Bay Area recently and someone brought in their own mug to avoid using paper cups. Unfortunately, Starbucks tracks cups by writing your name and order on them. It’s how they survive the chaos of the morning rush. So the same company that says, “save the planet, use a mug,” puts those mugs in paper cups to keep track of them. A lot of startups have a great idea, but they fail to think it through all the way. This is a great example of the consequences of thinking it through. If you have a concept, you need test cases. You need to describe your end user in great detail, then build a prototype, then watch them use it, and then iterate quickly.
Saturday, May 31st, 2008
Canada’s carriers undermine Canadian innovation
in: Startups
The Ottawa Net Neutrality rally last week was a decent effort, but Canadian consumers need to get fired up about their information infrastructure for it to catch on as an issue politicians care about. Canada’s telco monopolies — each of which is part of a major media conglomerate — have no reason to play fair on this. Bell’s land lines are dwindling (down 9.9%) according to its 2007 annual report; and revenues from long distance (down 8.1 percent) are vanishing to VOIP. But the problem is that telco stuff like net neutrality isn’t sexy, as extralife brilliantly points out. Class action lawsuits might make people care — particularly if there’s a $2,000 windfall at the end of them.
Tuesday, May 20th, 2008
DNS parking 2.0: 10 other places you should register your name
in: Communicate, Standing out, Startups
It’s not enough to register your .com, .org, and .net any more. Here are some places we’ve been camping out recently, reserving names and keywords before someone else does. Unlike the domain name world, where ICANN can regulate egregious violations of copyright, it’s unclear how naming disputes will be resolved by many of these sites. So it’s the first-come-first-served Wild West of the nineties I’m off to register some names.
Thursday, May 15th, 2008
Why isn’t there a Stanford in Montreal?
in: Startups
Last Night’s Founders & Funders dinner was a great networking event. Montreal’s Patrick Lauzon and Austin Hill brought together many of Montreal’s early-stage entrepreneurs, as well as investors from firms like Inovia and Montrealstartup. Austin kicked things off with a question about Montreal’s innovation, and the lack of university-fostered entrepreneurship similar to what one sees in Boston or San Francisco. Put another way: Why isn’t there a Stanford in Montreal?
Tuesday, May 13th, 2008
Jumping the sticker shark
in: Communicate, Standing out, Startups
Notebook stickers are the badge of pride of many a Web 2.0 denizen. It’s unlikely that an IBM Thinkpad will be festooned with colorful logoes and strange sayings, but head to any campus and you’ll see that the back of a Mac is the new car bumper. Stickers do more than profess your technical leanings. They’re a labor of love. And that love comes from having to work for them. In some cases, companies only hand out their stickers at special events. Or they make commemorative ones. There are blogs (like Stickergiant) devoted to Sticky Love. And some sites sell them if you weren’t able to attend their event, usually through self-publishing sites like Cafepress. Once, stickers had street cred. But now, scruffy-haired basement entrepreneurs toting the requisite messenger bag troll from booth to booth, trying to grab a sticker without having to sit through a sales pitch. Still, there’s some effort involved. A while back, Startup Schwag realized there was a currency in the stickers and T-shirts that are a kind of by-product of startup culture, and started sending out grab bags of stuff. The startup gets visibility; the subscriber gets momentary thought leadership; and Startup Schwag nets a cool $15. Don’t get me wrong — I grabbed one of them. But it’s more to hide the fact that I have a cheap Acer, rather than a glowing Mac. At least that’s what I keep telling myself. Maybe I’ll go find some blog bumper stickers to make me feel better.
But it’s definitely hitting mainstream. At Web2Expo in mid-May, Yahoo was giving out placemats of stickers, rather than individual ones. Have they jumped the shark? Certainly, this is the challenge of Big Internet — how does one maintain the allure of secrecy, of being “in”, while still achieving the economies of scale that investors anticipated. To me, this sticker placemat is a metaphor for many of the challenges Yahoo faces.