Instigator Blog

Customers are great. If you don’t think so, you’ll never succeed. Surprisingly, a lot of people consider their customers to be “the enemy” or a nuisance they’re forced to deal with.

Just remember that customers:

• pay the bills
• provide good feedback
• find bugs you’ll never find on your own
• use your product in new ways (which can result in new opportunities)
• recommend your product/service to others
• serve as references

Without customers you don’t have a business. It’s as simple as that.

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The latest addition to the Standout Jobs team was Alain Wong, who joined us late last year for the big push to DEMO 08. I knew Alain was a world-class dancer, but I didn’t realize he was a hardcore biker as well. Turns out he isn’t…but he will be biking from Vancouver to Tijuana, Mexico for a great cause.

Alain is joining the folks at Agents of Change for the 3,000km bike trip to raise money for the AOC’s micro-credit fund.

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Blitzweekend is coming up this weekend, and I’ve been asked to speak on Friday, February 29th. Looks like I’ll be doing the first presentation of the evening around 6pm.

Blitzweekend is a great event for entrepreneurs and soon-to-be entrepreneurs that want to test their mettle in a weekend of coding. Can you build an application in a weekend? It’s time to find out!

Blitzweekend runs all weekend with a variety of great presenters and activities. I’m sure everyone will enjoy it. And I think anything that brings the startup community together is a good thing, especially if it succeeds at interesting people at the University level (where things are lacking the most.)

In the meantime, I have a presentation to prepare. Hope to see you there!

Location: 1 rue St-Charles, Longueuil, in front of the Longueuil metro station.
Blitzweekend will take all the ground floor of Université de Sherbrooke’s Longueuil campus.

Standout Jobs is hiring. We’re looking for a Senior Business Development Guru.

We need someone with recruiting industry experience that’s interested in working at a startup. We have a ton of opportunity at-hand, and need someone to convert that opportunity into reality.

If you’re interested please apply (link below). If you know someone that would fit the bill, please pass this along.

Visit our Career Site for the full job description.

Young entrepreneurs don’t have a lot of experience. That’s a given. And in many cases this is rarely brought up as an issue. But in certain industries (especially in “older industries” or B2B-related industries) that lack of experience will be a sticking point. At least for many people inside the industry.

It’s certainly been a point of discussion around Standout Jobs. We’ve received a fair amount of good press, but one of the sticking points we see consistently is our lack of experience in recruiting. None of the founders are recruiters. We haven’t lived the last 15 years of our lives in HR.

Experience is valuable. There’s no question about it. But it’s not a guarantee of success. If that was the case, very few startups would ever succeed. And there are ways of getting around a lack of experience.

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