Here are the details:

• Tuesday, May 13th @ 9am
• Location: Bistro, Etc. - 1291 Avenue du Mont-Royal, E.
• Facebook Event Listing: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=13095875628
• Facebook Group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5502019497

We run the breakfast on the 2nd Tuesday of every month.

Anyone involved in technology + entrepreneurship (developers, startup entrepreneurs, curious people, angel investors, VCs, etc.) are welcome.

Software startups always start out very heavily focused on technology. They have to be; they’re building some kind of software application and most of their time has to go into doing that properly. Most software startup teams are made up entirely of developers or weighted in that direction. Have a team of 4? I bet 3 of those people are technical…

At Standout Jobs we have 8 people full-time. Six of those are on the technical side. That’s fairly common amongst early stage software startups.

But at some point, most software startups have to start changing. You can only focus on the technology for so long. Eventually, you have to start marketing and selling it. Occasionally you’ll find developers that can also serve as marketers and business development gurus, but more than likely you’ll hire on additional people to help.

Thats the evolution of a software startup — from being a technology company to being a sales & marketing company.

Most successful software companies make the leap.

You might have the greatest technology in the world, but if no one is generating buzz, marketing, brokering partnerships and selling for you, your company is very likely to fail.

Recently at a conference I was speaking to the CTO of a very successful technology company. I had heard rumors that they only had 15 people, which was surprising given their success. In fact, they were at 50 people. And when I asked him for more details on the make-up of the people, he said (and I’m paraphrasing), “We were around 15 for the first couple years, most of us were on the technical side and only the CEO was non-technical. But now in our third and fourth years, we’re over 50% on the sales & marketing side.”

That’s very telling. They spent roughly 2 years building technology and staying fairly quiet. And now that the technology is solid, they’re bringing on more sales people to ramp things up.

The best technology in the world is meaningless unless someone is out there knocking on doors.

We often hear stories of companies with less-than-stellar technology winning the day because of their superior outbound initiatives: PR, biz dev, marketing & sales.

Standout Jobs is facing that same evolution now. I see it as a threshold that software startups hit — build technology, get it out there, refine and reiterate, prove that it works and people like it, then go crazy on sales and marketing as quickly as possible. We see more and more software startups going with a free (or freemium) business model (including Standout Jobs), which means they’ll live and die almost entirely based on how much scale they can achieve. That scale is very hard to achieve through word-of-mouth alone, or through viral means (and these days we see a lot of startups try viral scaling approaches that are less-than-pleasant and accepted, such as email spam, spamming LinkedIn contacts, etc.)

If you don’t have a roadmap to scale customer acquisition, get one.

Even if you’re not ready to execute on that roadmap, you should be looking at it while you’re building your technology. You’re probably not the right person to be succeeding with that roadmap either, but when you go to hire sales and biz dev people they’ll want to see what strategies you’ve been thinking about. And, those strategies will impact product development. Just think about the viral components or features you might be able to build into your software application that could help with gaining traction…

Ultimately, the most successful software startups aren’t really technology companies, they’re sales & marketing companies. Even companies that have armfuls of patents won’t succeed in a huge way as technology companies alone; they have to prove people will pay for what they’ve built and that they can scale it to some degree before real value is proven.

So if you’re running a software startup, think about how and when you’re going to make the transition and evolve from a technology to sales-driven company. And don’t let the evolution take too long…someone will pass you along the way.

The guys behind StartupNorth and a number of other initiatives, have recently launched StartupIndex, which they describe as, “…a free, community-based index of technology startups and investors in Canada.”

It’s similar to CrunchBase and TraveVibes.

This is a much-needed addition to the startup scene in Canada. It’s great for Canadian startups but also for others, around the world, to get a detailed glimpse into what’s going on here.

Anyone can update entries, but I believe they’re approving them all manually. Each startup’s entry can include basic information - size of company, industry, blog RSS feed, investor information, etc. Over time you can see more and more data and content appearing for each startup’s profile (and for investors), which will make this a must-use resource.

Here’s a miniature version of the Standout Jobs profile (click the image for a full view):

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.

The man is building himself a mighty fine soapbox, and he’s happily and constantly standing on it to espouse the importance of personal branding. In many cases he’s speaking directly to Gen X and Gen Y about personal branding in the job hunt.

One of Dan’s initiatives is the Personal Branding Magazine, which is a subscription service you can buy. Here’s a link to a free sample from the latest issue of Personal Branding Magazine.

This issue is particularly interesting to me because … well, I’m in it! And, it’s all about the job market.

Dan interviewed a host of people in the job market, including yours truly, asking us each one very important question, “If you could change one thing about recruitment, what would it be?”

Here’s my answer:

The one thing I’m most interested in changing and seeing changed, is that a strong influence be put on the relationships between employers and candidates versus anything else. Ultimately, people hire people. We don’t hire machines. We don’t hire a resume. We hire people.

Here are a couple other answers worth highlighting:

From Chris Russell at Jobs in Pods:

To get employers to open up more and show more transparency when it comes to their work environments and company culture. This means engaging the next gneeration workforce on their own turf, using new media like blogs, podcasts and social networks. Recruitment’s future is all about establishing relationships, not just advertising jobs.

From Joel Cheesman at Cheezhead:

I would eliminate the barriers that restrict recruiters from being innovative and experimentative, such as legal, marketing and IT departments.

From Alex Rudloff at Emurse:

Job seeker empowerement. Candidates are intimidated, overwhelmed and often don’t know where to even begin. Better tools and easier access to helpful information go a long way towards helping someone build the confidence to tackle a modern job hunt.

The feature article in the magazine is entitled, Job Hunting in a Brand YOU World — which is an interview with Rob McGovern, Founder of JobFox. It’s a great interview, and the rest of the content in the magazine is well worth it too.

The Importance of Personal Branding

Personal branding matters now more than ever because of the proliferation of ways in which people connect online. It makes it easier and easier for people to stand out and really build up their own profile. If you’re competing with them for a job, and you’re not as actively developing your personal brand, you’re in trouble. Of course the same holds true for employers - if you’re out there looking for top talent (and you should be!) then you’ll need to build up a brand that gets recognized and resonates with job seekers. Otherwise they’ll skip past you without batting an eyelash and move on to the next company that gets it.

Check out Personal Branding Magazine — it’s definitely worth reading.

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?

Anything and everything. Collect as much as you possibly can, even if you’re not sure of its value upfront. Data has a sneaky way of revealing things over time - things you might not have thought of immediately. Data has a way of helping you figure out what questions to ask, because it exposes trends, and allows you to look at things with different perspectives.

Ask Basic Questions to Start

Start by asking yourself some basic questions on how you expect your application (or hope your application) will be used. There are some fairly common questions and data points that will be of value regardless of what type of application you’re building (be it B2B, B2C, etc.) For example:

• how often do people log in?
• how long do they use the system?
• what features are people using?
• when are people using the system?
• where are the users located geographically?

If you’re out of the gate with a business model and charging customers, there are a whole bunch of additional questions you can ask:

• how many people are paying?
• what are they paying for?
• what payment plan are they using (if you offer monthly, yearly, etc.)?
• how much are they spending?

Questions Beget Questions

As you start to ask questions and answer them with the data you’re collecting, it will lead to more questions. Getting into an analytical mindset of evaluating trends through data will help you uncover all sorts of interesting things. Here’s a good example from Standout Jobs…

We currently distribute job postings to a variety of job boards and job aggregators, including SimplyHired and Indeed. We also sponsor jobs on both SimplyHired and Indeed (through a pay per click model) to see how well those jobs perform in terms of generating clickthroughs and applications. And we want to compare the two of them.

A few simple and obvious questions we ask (and collect the data for) include:

• how many clickthroughs are generated from these job aggregator sites?
• how many applications are generated?
• how much is it costing us per click and per application?

What’s interesting is that we notice a higher clickthrough and application rate for new jobs that get submitted through our feeds into SimplyHired and Indeed. That makes sense, of course, because people are always looking for the freshest jobs. So that leads to the next question, “How many clickthroughs and applications do we receive for jobs over time?”

This is interesting because it can affect how we spend money on sponsoring jobs. If we see that a job receives almost no applications after it’s been in an aggregator for 2 weeks, why bother paying for it show up anymore? So that leads us to think about optimizing our spending based on the age of jobs…

That leads to a whole bunch of other questions, all of which are answered through the data we collect.

Data = Money

You can make money from data in a few ways:

1. The data itself can be valuable. People will pay for data if it helps them answer questions they need resolved. It’s really as simple as that. And entire businesses have been built on collecting data and reselling it, or selling the knowledge gained from the data.
2. The data can optimize your business. You can use the knowledge gained from data to become more efficient and innovate, which will save you money. And saving money means making money.
3. The data can lead to new business opportunities. Simply understanding what parts of your product people use can help you find ways of staying focused and making more money from it.
4. The data can drive product development. You may even discover new products worth building based on the data you’re collecting.
5. The data can drive sales. For example, we track “last login” for customers that haven’t yet published their career web sites. When we see a prospect that’s recently logged in, we get in touch to see how things are going, and very often can convert them on the spot.
6. The data can improve customer support. Fixing bugs is always frustrating when you don’t really know what a user was doing. And as much as you’d like them to tell you, they can’t always do a good job of it. If the data can help you figure out how somebody was doing something when they ran into trouble, you’ll be able to fix it faster. That’ll make your customer happy. Happy customers spend more money.

Startups need to collect data.

Incidentally, VCs love data. They understand the value behind it, and how entire businesses can be discovered, created and evolved off of collecting lots and lots of data.

Data Doesn’t Always Tell You Why

Data can tell you a lot of things, but it doesn’t always answer the question “why?” Answering “why” typically requires more analysis of what’s going on, a deeper understanding of user behaviors, some guesswork and investigation. Don’t be afraid to go to your customers and ask them “why” — often they’ll be happy to tell you. And then you can correlate user answers to what you see in the data, and make the best decisions from there.

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.

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!

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.

Focus.

That’s really the key. Startups need to be laser-focused on what they’re trying to do. It’s damn near impossible - especially when having to simultaneously build a product, sell a product, market a product, hire A-talent, raise more money, manage operations and more - but without focus your startup is in big trouble.

I’ve suffered from “opportunity-itis” on numerous occasions. I still do. It’s so easy to get a bit of product feedback and chase those feature ideas. Or have a good conversation with a potential partner, and then decide to find 10,000 more partners like that. Or see a minor shift in the marketplace, only to revamp your entire business model and 12-month product roadmap (OK, I haven’t done that yet!)

Focus.

You know you need to…but at the same time you have to be looking for the right opportunities to make your startup a success. So how do you achieve startup focus?

1. Be Systematic. Running a startup is a crazy experience. Most of the time you’ll feel like you’re running a 600-mile sprint (because startups are the ultimate combination of sprinting and marathon racing), and doing anything in an orderly fashion is farthest from your mind. But taking a systematic approach is critical.

   For example, let’s say you decide that partnering with a certain type of service provider would make sense - they can act as resellers of your product. Attack that idea systematically:

   • Research the space
   • Put together 2 or 3 offers
   • Find a list of 50+ similar service providers
   • Pitch them each one of the offers
   • Measure the response
   • Collect feedback
   • Decide if partnering with those service providers make sense
   • If yes, find a list of as many as you can, hone the pitch that worked best and go get ‘em!
   • If no, drop it and move on.
2. Be Merciless. Opportunities that take too long to materialize are bad opportunities. Startups don’t have the time - especially right out of the gate - to spend long periods of time in negotiations or chasing leads. That’s not to say that every long-term deal is a bad one (raising money for example takes many, many months), but don’t waffle around on things that aren’t making serious progress.
3. Be Organized. It’s almost impossible to succeed unless you’re well organized. That goes beyond stating the obvious. But something that might not be as obvious is making sure you have the infrastructure in place to support what you’re doing. For example, once you get into generating leads and sales, implement a CRM tool. It’ll help. It’ll keep you focused. A project management tool of some kind isn’t a bad idea either; at minimum be merciless and vigilant about priorities so you know what needs to be done first, second and third.
4. Be Analytical. Question everything. Track data on everything. Test everything.

Staying focused in a startup is a true balance between enthusiasm, creativity, new thinking, aggressiveness and being systematic, merciless, organized and analytical. On the one side you have all the “fun stuff” and on the other side you have all the “boring” stuff. Lean too far to one side or the other and you’ll start losing focus very quickly. Finding a balance is key: Being receptive to opportunity without jumping on every single one that comes knocking. And generally I don’t think startups will lean naturally to the “boring side” so implementing some of the stuff I’ve mentioned above will almost immediately create more balance than was there before. And that’s a good thing.

• Tuesday, March 11th @ 9am
• Location: Bistro, Etc. - 1291 Avenue du Mont-Royal, E.
• Facebook Event Listing: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=13184066626
• Facebook Group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5502019497

We run the breakfast on the 2nd Tuesday of every month.

Anyone involved in technology + entrepreneurship (developers, startup entrepreneurs, curious people, angel investors, VCs, etc.) are welcome.

Public Relations is all about getting the word out. But generally, PR is used to reach the mainstream press and a mainstream audience. So a lot of startups - especially those living in a Web 2.0 bubble - don’t focus much energy on PR. If your startup is in the Valley or another true startup ecosystem you may be able to generate sufficient buzz through the community, but for the rest of us, we need everything we can to keep in front of people, garnering attention.

The thing with PR is that it’s not just for attracting mainstream press, although that’s a good reason to use it. The press certainly looks at blogs, social media and less traditional avenues for its scoops, but they still work via press releases & press relationships as well. And even companies living in a Web 2.0 bubble - the ultra-coolest of the cool consumer apps only for the “Facebook crowd” - can still benefit from breaking into the mainstream. Ultimately that ultra-cool Valley crowd is still pretty small, and you’ll need to break out beyond it for real success.

So what can PR bring a startup?

• mainstream press
• increased reputation as an expert
• speaking engagements
• analyst interest
• writing opportunities
• partnership opportunities
• customers

Tell a Good Story

The key to PR (and it’s the same with using social media and blogs) is that you need to tell a good story.

PR isn’t simply about stating facts, or announcing straightforward news. It’s about telling a good story to the right audience at the right time. A great press release is crafted to tell stories behind the words, to trigger ideas and possibilities in other people’s heads, to indicate the direction your company is going without stating it explicitly.

Before publishing a press release, ask yourself, “What’s the purpose of the press release?” Are you trying to reach potential partners, customers, mainstream press, investors, etc.? You can’t target too many audiences at once, so really think about the type of press release you’re writing and who will be interested in it.

The timing is important too. If you’re attending an event, for example, publish a press release just before to get people’s attention. It can lead to more buzz around the event. If you’re going to release a new version of your product soon - think about staggering in some press releases beforehand - to build buzz.

And PR isn’t just about posting press releases to the news wires. PR is about building relationships with your target audience (primarily mainstream press, analysts, but now also online press as well) to develop a strong reputation in your field of expertise. You want journalists coming to you asking for quotes, opinions, etc. — so that your press opportunities aren’t exclusively for news about your startup, but also for industry trend stories that journalists are writing about.

Outsource PR

I would suggest that you outsource your startup’s PR efforts, unless you’re an expert already. But even if you are, you’re probably too busy to focus on PR effectively.

It doesn’t have to be expensive. PR shouldn’t consume a huge part of your marketing budget to work. It’s an evolving process that should create a snowball effect — one press release lands you a couple press mentions, the next one a few more…then you’re invited to speak somewhere, and then some partners come knocking…

And you certainly can and should do some of the PR yourself. Every startup should have a company blog. A startup blog isn’t used exclusively for PR, but it certainly can help.

Matt Hulett suggests that you should fire your PR firm. He points out that the startup CEO should do the PR because s/he’ll get better results:

Startups will get better results when a CEO takes the time to target a writer directly. There is so much noise that an authentic conversation from an executive does punch thru the sea of press releases being stuffed into inboxes by agencies.

I completely understand Matt’s point, but most startup CEOs won’t be schooled enough in good PR to pull this off. But consider hiring a contract PR person instead of an agency. Make it clear that you’re hiring the person to execute on PR efforts but also educate you (as the startup CEO) on doing some of the work yourself. Turn it into a collaborative effort.

Don’t Forget PR

PR might be seen as blogging & social media’s old cousin (and to a degree it is), but don’t dismiss it too quickly. All the mentions on a handful of tech blogs might not be enough (although they’re great!), especially when it’s time to break out of those relatively closed circles and reach a much bigger audience. I found a Startup PR 2.0 ebook (for free!) from Brian Solis that might interest you.

Startups need every advantage they can get their hands on to stay top-of-mind with as many people as possible. And a good, constant (but still relatively small) PR effort can help.

Additional Note: I just read a post on CenterNetworks about press embargoes from guest writer Rick Turoczy. Definitely worth reading.