By Hailley Griffis 
Happy Friday everyone. This week, as usual, we have our favourite articles of the week lined up for you. Since we’ve been talking about startups and entrepreneurship in Ottawa in a few posts on the blog this week (look to Leo and Francis’ duelling posts), our first article talks about why startups should opt for digital marketing. Next we take a look at the latest change to Facebook and what that means for B2B marketers. Finally, the last two articles we’ve rounded up talk about how to combine your customer service and marketing efforts by making your marketing useful and avoiding silly mistakes on social media. We pulled this week’s content from Nashville Business Journal, Convince and Convert, Social Media B2B and Memeburn. Let us know what you think!
4 reasons startups should invest in digital marketing
Samantha Owns Pyle, Owner of Green Apple Strategy, looks into some excellent reasons why entrepreneurs should consider beginning their marketing efforts with digital marketing, as opposed to jumping into traditional mass marketing. Cost effectiveness is a big one for startups, as is setting up early-stage personal branding.
Read More
By Francis Moran
When Ottawa’s newly reconstituted economic development agency Invest Ottawa earlier this year unveiled its proposal to convert a disused former city workshop in the Bayview Yards into a hub for the city’s technology and startup communities, I thought it was one of the boldest initiatives from an organization whose hallmark, at least in its previous incarnations, was not exactly one of bold and innovative thinking. I have long looked covetously at Kitchener-Waterloo’s Communitech Hub, Toronto’s MaRS Discovery District or Campus London in the British city’s east end, and I welcomed the IO effort to create a similar locus and anchor point for Ottawa’s considerable but largely fractured technology communities.
(And I use the plural of community advisedly here. Ottawa’s tech sector is an amalgam of communities that, best efforts of many people notwithstanding, continues to fracture between the older, west-end companies focused mainly on communications infrastructure and the younger, downtown companies working on software and apps.) Read More
Leo Valiquette
This may seem like an odd topic to raise in the early days of August. After all, it was a story that first broke in January and doesn’t seem to have garnered much media attention in the months since. But after my recent trip to Kitchener-Waterloo and immersing myself in the environment of the Communitech Hub, it seems that some discourse should be attempted on a subject that has perhaps provoked too little attention so far from mainstream media.
I am referring to plans by the City of Ottawa and Invest Ottawa to construct at Bayview Yards west of the Canadian War Museum an “innovation complex” that would repurpose an old 150,000-square-foot city workshop (pictured). According to a city staff report from January, the complex “would help to meet the growing demands of new entrepreneurs in Ottawa” and be modelled after Communitech and the MaRS Discovery District in Toronto.
The site is nestled in a rather forlorn light industrial area characterized by weeds growing from cracks in the concrete. However, this area is the focus of the city’s Bayview Community Design Plan.
Read More
By Hailley Griffis
Last month’s lineup featured great posts that shattered common myths about how your brain functionality affects sales and marketing and whether or not your software demo may be killing your sales. We looked at worst practices in the world of social media marketing (and how to avoid them), as well as how to pitch an investor slide by slide. Most notably, our website was redesigned and we are happy to present to you the new and improved layout. Let us know what you think!
In case you missed any of it, here is a handy recap of our posts, as ranked by the enthusiasm of our readers:
Read More
By Francis Moran
Ottawa entrepreneurs were treated last night to a rare performance when seasoned entrepreneur and pioneering angel investor David Rose, founder or funder of more than 75 technology companies, spoke at the city’s monthly StartupGrind event. Describing himself as a third-generation entrepreneur, Rose spent fully 40 minutes answering StartupGrind organizer Cheryl Draper’s very first question about his early adventures in company creation and angel investing. As entertaining as his personal story was, it was the concrete advice he gave to entrepreneurs that made the evening valuable.
Like many other tech sector observers, Rose pointed out that it has never been easier to start a company. His first venture consumed $20-million of investors’ money to get to a revenue-producing product. His next venture cost $2-million to get to the same stage, and the third just $200,000. The costs have dropped by another order of magnitude — or maybe even two — to the point that today, he said, “almost anyone can start a web company at almost no cost.”
This low cost of entry means that too many people start companies to do easy things or to mimic things that have already been done, Rose said, a paradox that I don’t hear enough people emphasizing. The world doesn’t need another recruitment site or social shopping site, he said. Instead, “look around for real problems that haven’t been solved by anyone else…The first question (every entrepreneur needs to ask) is, ‘Does anyone want what I’m going to build?'”
Read More
