Instigator Blog

I instigated the first Montreal Tech Entrepreneur Breakfast over a year and a half ago because people were complaining that there was a lack of casual get-togethers for entrepreneurs, techies, investors, etc. It was straightforward to do at the time, and with the help of Sylvain Carle we got the ball rolling.

The goal was to give people a meeting time and place - in the morning (for those of us that can’t do evening events as easily) - that was casual, without presentations, to meet, catch up and encourage new people to get out and meet the community.

Over the last couple of months, things have tapered off. This is primarily because I’ve been swamped; and unable to host, run and promote the Tech Entrepreneur Breakfasts. But it was never my intention to run things, or create an event that required any significant organization to begin with … nevertheless, we’ve seen participation drop off.

With Heri’s help at Montreal Tech Watch we’ve got a great discussion going on what to do with the Montreal Tech Entrepreneur Breakfasts.

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The folks at Akoha are working on something very cool. I should know - their CEO and founder, Austin Hill, is also my co-Founder at Standout Jobs. And Akoha is in the same building as us, so we get to see the team and interact with them on a regular basis.

Working at Akoha could easily be a life changing experience. Aside from the fact that they’re going after a huge ass dream and tackling an enormous and incredibly fast growing industry, I can almost guarantee you’ll learn more there than anywhere else.

And Akoha is hiring.

Specifically, they’re looking for a Community Manager.

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I’ve got two critically important articles to point your attention to today - on startup communities and startup failure.

1. Jevon MacDonald talks about how startups can save venture capital (in Canada). He includes a great presentation that he’s given in a few places about how startup communities can work more effectively to get great startups off the ground.

   My take, without turning this into a blog post of its own, is that the early, but growing startup communities across Canada need to do a much better job of policing their own and touting their own. This is something that I have yet to see addressed effectively by anyone. Somehow, as a community, we need to be able to get together, vet ideas, provide honest feedback and bring new teams together with new ideas, where old teams and old ideas have failed. If we don’t take a hard look at our own “house” (i.e. the collection of startups we’re launching), and be honest with each other when things aren’t working (and celebrate that failure), then we do ourselves a disservice. Once we - as a startup community - are truly creating great startups, pumping out great teams with great ideas, mashing up people and ideas in new ways, and proving that we can raise the bar on the quality of the community, I guarantee you the funding will follow quite aggressively.

2. Roger Ehrenberg writes a very detailed and honest post-mortem on Monitor110, a startup he was involved with from an early stage. They raised around $20M dollars, but couldn’t get where they needed to go. What’s most important about Roger’s thoughts is the fact that he’s completely honest and open. He includes a list of critical mistakes he made, many of which we’ve all seen from within our own startups. You can be sure that Roger has taken those mistakes to heart and significantly improved his outcomes in other businesses he’s involved with.

   Post-mortems like this are hard to do. It reminds me of Phil Chrun’s own deconstruction of his failed startup, MyCarpoolStation. It was open, raw and real. If you can’t learn from Roger’s mistakes and Phil’s mistakes, you’re in big trouble, cause you’re not learning at all.

Startup communities work when they’re honest and mature. We shouldn’t go around publicly bashing one another, there’s no value in that, but privately we have to be able to look at things with an honest eye. I don’t like the thought of negatively impacting a young team of entrepreneurs by providing real criticism - the worry is that they abandon their goals of being startup entrepreneurs - but if we can’t provide that criticism, step up with our own honest stories of failure, and then find active solutions to building great startups with the pool of people and ideas we have, we can’t succeed as a startup community.

At this point, you really can’t question the power of blogging. It works. There are examples of blogging working across different industries, for different reasons. It’s great for customer service. It’s great for building up a following (that you can then leverage into all kinds of different businesses.) Blogging might not be for everyone, but you can’t deny it’s value. Even when some people are supposedly quitting…

After all, look at what happened to yours truly recently — I was quoted in The New York Times (free registration required).

Truth be told, I didn’t even know the author, Paul B. Brown, was going to quote me. I’d never heard of him until a reader emailed me to congratulate me. My guess is that Mr. Brown used Google to search for relevant content related to his article and came across my blog. Unless he’s been a faithful reader for some time, but the article he quoted was from April 2007.

In Mr. Brown’s article, Being Serious About Your Own Money, he’s taking about how entrepreneurs often forget to manage their personal finances, because they’re so focused on their businesses. Often, entrepreneurs put their personal finances at huge risk to accommodate and support their business ventures.

The article he quoted that I had written way back when was on that very subject — Entrepreneurs Should Plan Their Finances And Invest Wisely. I re-read my post and it’s certainly true; it’s easy to forget your own finances, let things slip (even paying bills, or paying yourself!) and get overwhelmed in an avalanche of financial trouble…

It was cool to be quoted in The New York Times. It was great that one of my readers pointed me to the article. I really do owe Mr. Brown a thank you…

In a “me too” world of easy-to-build and low cost startups, it’s becoming harder and harder to differentiate yourself from the competition. Just think about your potential customers and all the “stuff” they’re getting bombarded with on a regular basis. You might have invented a better mousetrap, but getting that message across isn’t easy.

And one of the areas where companies (startups and non-startups) continue to fall flat on their faces is customer service and support. It’s amazing to me that so few companies do a great job when it comes to treating customers well and responding to them in a timely and professional manner. To me, that’s basic. It should be a given. But it’s not.

You should look at those continued missteps in customer support as a huge opportunity.

Every company needs to differentiate itself in a crowded market — and one way of doing that is through great customer service.

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