By Alexandra Reid
“A million people walk into a bar in Silicon Valley. Nobody buys anything. The bar is declared a huge success.”
Harley Finkelstein, CPO of Shopify, shared that illuminating joke during the panel discussion at Startup Canada. It seemed to resonate with the audience because, aside from it being funny, it identified a serious problem in the way many entrepreneurs run their new companies.
The lesson is that startups will fail if they can’t see past the hype and generate sales consistently. Yet there is a common perception that if a new company garners attention, whether that is through media, word-of-mouth, or otherwise, it will automatically be successful.
While attention and success can support one another, this isn’t a business model on which startups should bet their livelihoods. The focus of attention must always be the needs of the customer.
“Need is the mother of all invention,” declared serial entrepreneur Sir Terry Matthews during his speech. It is identifying need and positioning a product to solve it that enables startups to go to market quickly, beat out any competition and ultimately be successful.
Read More
By Leo Valiquette
Over the past couple of weeks, I have been speaking with a number of entrepreneurs, executives and others with a stake in Ottawa’s economy on topics ranging from international trade and building an export-oriented business to financing. The common theme has been what business owners must do to get out of their own backyards and make things happen.
There are, no doubt, those who take miserable comfort in pining away for the old days of high-volume VC and the glory that was Nortel. They would rather spend more time complaining about what’s lacking in the commercialization ecosystem than engage in a more productive exercise to find a workaround. I really wasn’t interested in getting mired in those perspectives. The world is what it is – deal with it.
Read More
By Alexandra Reid
Social media has become an integral part of the marketing mix for new companies. Startups are employing these valuable channels to promote themselves, receive market feedback, interact with key industry players, and offer relatively inexpensive customer support to beta testers and other early adopters of their technologies.
Yet despite these benefits, many startups aren’t allocating the resources necessary to support social media initiatives until after the product is released, their first customers are established, and they begin seeing revenue. As with all marketing activities, social media should be regarded as an investment that will generate profit. And just like launching a new product, social media requires a runway to set up the strategy and channels and develop the audience and content to succeed.
Read More
Editor’s note: This is the first of what we hope will be many contributions from Jesse Rodgers. I first met Jesse via Twitter, and then in person when he became director of Velocity, the student dormcubator at the University of Waterloo. I seem to run into him every time I go to the Waterloo region and he’s always in the middle of conversations with interesting people. I asked him if he’d consider contributing to our blog because I liked the stuff he was writing on his own space and on StartUpNorth. I was delighted when he said yes.
Welcome aboard, Jesse. I’m sure I’m with our readers when I say we’re looking forward to your insights on how to bring technology to market.
-Francis Moran
By Jesse Rodgers
I am excited to write my first post for Francis Moran and Associates. Francis is someone that I have crossed paths with many times over the years and having him ask me to start writing for this blog was a nice surprise. I have always learned a lot from our interactions and I hope I can contribute to the great stuff found on this blog.
I am often called the ‘startup person’ but I have spent the last 10 years working in higher education working on web-based technology. Only in the last seven years have I been focused on building connections between the University of Waterloo and the startup community. I was lucky enough to help shape one of Canada’s best incubator/accelerator programs (that is extra-curricular, like a varsity startup team) for student entrepreneurs for the last three years.
I only found the courage to do my own startup a little more than three years ago. I co-founded TribeHR, which has gone from a whiteboard idea to a funded startup with offices in Waterloo and Boston. It has been an exciting ride but when I look at what I knew just 15 months ago and what I know now, I don’t really understand how 15-month-ago me could make decisions.
What happened in the last 15 months that changed me?
Read More
By Alexandra Reid
As a regular weekly feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of some of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are the Guardian, Information Age, MarketingSherpa, Social Media Examiner and Fast Company.
UK’s technology, design and startup blogs ranked by influence
Eloqua has published its latest U.K. edition of Blog Tree, designed by the specialists at JESS3, where blogs covering topics including technology, design and startups are ranked according to their influence.
Read More
-
Victoria Lennox: Startup champion
April 26, 2012 by Alexandra Reid
As co-founder of Startup Canada, the country’s first-ever entrepreneur-led national movement celebrating Canadian entrepreneurship, Victoria Lennox is a bona fide startup champion […]
Read more... -
Do you know how to dance with angels?
April 25, 2012 by Francis Moran
It’s been a busy couple of months for Matt Lemelin, CEO of Genevolve Vision Diagnostics, as he hustles across the U.S. to raise Genevolve’s profile and, ideally, its bank account. A year ago he made the mistake of letting his fundraising efforts lose steam after he secured a short-term investor. But those funds quickly ran out […]
Read more... -
-
There is no magic recipe for a successful company, only good cooks
April 24, 2012 by Francis Moran
I have shamelessly adapted the headline of this post from a Wall Street Journal article I read on the weekend that reviewed two excellent books tracking the ascendancy of Africa over the past decade and predicting that the continent’s rise as an economic force to be […]
Read more... -
Tales from the trenches: New associate joins our team
April 23, 2012 by Jeff Campbell
It is at once intimidating and encouraging to be invited to blog with Francis Moran and Associates. Intimidating because I hold Francis and the folks that work with him in such high esteem, particularly as writers, editors and communicators. Me? I write like I talk. That […]
Read more... -
-
Great articles roundup: patenting, startup lessons, and finding the right B2B marketing mix and best marketing hires
April 20, 2012 by Alexandra Reid
As a regular weekly feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of some of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are TechCrunch, Fast Company, Forbes, ReadWriteWeb and MarketingProfs […]
Read more... -
What’s going on in Waterloo?
April 19, 2012 by Francis Moran
Regular readers of this blog will know that I spend a fair bit of time in the Waterloo region where both the buzz and the substance of the startup scene seem to get louder and more solid every day. (And before folks in Ottawa think I’m ignoring my hometown, let me […]
Read more... -
-
What an entrepreneur can learn from a literary conference
April 18, 2012 by Leo Valiquette
Back in March I blogged about the striking similarities between an entrepreneur who is trying to bring technology to market and a writer who is attempting to publish a novel. I referenced the fact that I would soon be attending a literary conference, Ad Astra, as part […]
Read more... -
Social media strategy: Why meeting in the ‘real world’ matters
April 17, 2012 by Alexandra Reid
I’m a huge advocate of social media and how it helps bridge new relationships and strengthen existing ones, but I think it’s bad practice to rely on it as a sole means of communicating with others […]
Read more... -
Twitter
Tweets by @FrancisMoranRecent Comments
The Future of A&R – Walabe : [...] http://francis-moran.com/marketing-strategy/top-10-questions-every-strategic-communicator-should-ask... [...]
Traditional Marketing is Dead – Long Live Bikini Waxer Marketing | Scalexl : [...] pointed out by Alexandra Reid on the Francis Moran website content marketing is becoming more and more like journalism. So, it is not just about the content, [...]
It’s Summertime…and the Networking is Easy? | THE MERRAINE BRAIN : [...] In fact, summer is perhaps one of the times least used to network, yet at the same time has shown to be the most productive time to network. People tend to be in a brighter mood compared to during the gloomy winters-especially where I am from in England! Networking needs to be fun and not approached as another chore, like mowing the lawn. (http://francis-moran.com/marketing-strategy/social-media-strategy-why-meeting-in-the-real-world-matt...) [...]