Instigator Blog

If you don’t think personal branding is important, you’re flat out nuts.

Nowadays it’s so much easier to brand yourself online - through blogging, social media, networking - and then leverage that effectively offline as well. Bringing your online branding efforts offline is key; because you can’t live exclusively online. And this is especially true in the job market.

There are plenty of places online to look for jobs, and we know that Gen Y and Gen X do almost all of their job searching online. It makes completely sense. And now we’re seeing tools to help companies and candidates brand themselves more effectively online. But ultimately, hiring people is about one-on-one connections and meeting people face-to-face to see if there’s a fit. The online job market helps bring people together, and it’s getting better at it, but you still need to bring your online brand with you when you meet potential employers for interviews, etc.

Dan Schawbel gets personal branding.

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The pervading approach to launching a startup is to do it quickly, iterate constantly and make as much noise as possible throughout the process. It’s not a bad way of doing things, and given the lower cost of startup operations, and the nature of consumer web startups in particular, and it’s completely doable. But be careful if you’re not a data hog.

Getting your startup launched as quickly as possible is fine - you need to get it in front of people to understand what’s working (and not), and get as much feedback as possible - but you should also spend a good chunk of time preparing to collect data. That means building the necessary infrastructure into your system to collect, review and analyze the data generated by users.

What Data Should You Collect?

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Marc-Andre Cournoyer was the first employee we ever hired at Standout Jobs. Since then he’s done a lot of cool things (for us) and on his own, including the fastest Ruby web server, Thin.

Now Marc-Andre has been invited to speak at MeshU - a 1-day conference on development, design and business. Marc’s doing a workshop on using Thin and Rack to solve performance issues and have fun.

Other speakers at MeshU include: Leah Culver (Pownce), Daniel Burka (Digg), John Resig (Mozilla), Avi Bryant (DabbleDB) and more.

MeshU will be held in Toronto on May 20th. It coincides with the Mesh conference.

If you’re interested in development and/or design you should check it out. Marc-Andre is a great speaker (as are the other speakers), and it looks like it’ll be a jam-packed day.

I’ve been way too quiet here lately which is a combination of going to ERE Expo, getting sick and being insanely busy. But I did want to make this quick announcement as an update to what’s going on with Standout Jobs.

Standout Jobs has been selected by CIX (Canadian Innovation Exchange) as one of Canada’s Hottest 20 Startups.

You can read my official announcement on the Standout Jobs blog.

CIX is an event being held on April 29th-30th in Toronto - where a mix of VCs, angel investors and entrepreneurs from across Canada (and North America) get together and network. Standout Jobs will be presenting there to the audience — it’s an 8-minute pitch (with a couple minutes for questions.)

So now I’m knee-deep in PowerPoint and having the time of my life! (*chuckle*) This presentation will be a bit different than others I’ve put on and should be interesting.

I’m looking forward to going to Toronto, connecting with tons of people and having some fun. If you’re in Toronto and want to connect, just get in touch!

Startups have a hard time staying focused. It’s the nature of the beast. The enthusiasm founders have for their startups can very quickly lead to chasing too many opportunities.

The big risk? Running in every direction, chasing every lead, idea and opportunity only to realize at the end that you’ve made very little progress. And this might not sound too serious until you also realize you’ve run out of money, can’t raise more capital, certainly haven’t generated enough revenues and…ugh.

Startups are great at finding opportunities. The enthusiasm, creativity and freshness of startup founders often gives them the ability to find new solutions - they’re not locked in a box. And don’t forget their risk profile. Startup founders, by their very nature, have to be risk takers. That’s a good thing when looking for new opportunities.

So you can’t take away the things that make startups and startup founders successful - risk-taking, enthusiasm, creativity, etc. - but at the same time, those traits often lead startups to chase too much at once.

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