KW Startups Blog

Stories of Startups KW & Toronto .

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Doggy Spa @ Nanning- China

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Mathew Milan – Normative and Design.

What is Normative all about?

Normative is a software design firm. We use design practices and principles to make software and help other companies improve their software. We have a full or holistic view of software which means everything from the code and algorithms to how information flows to and from the software to the interfaces, users, interfaces for other software systems. Design excels at identifying what the problem is by building something. It is not something you do in your head or the whiteboard. Design is the act of making something to understand it better.

We're helping companies solve the right problem by making software.

Did you always know you wanted to go into design?

Both my parents were designer; graphics and interior. I grew up in a household where design was very prominent. When I went to school I was very interested in technology and environments. Initially I thought I'd be using technology to design the physical world, doing things like urban planning. Along the way I realized I wanted to work in the emerging digital world but soon realized there is fundamentally no difference between the two.

Was I always interested in design? Yes. Did I think I would end up here? Not specifically but I ended up here because that's where the interesting problems were.

What is your take on design being a competitive advantage?

Design is really fantastic to really help reduce risk in a business context. Design really helps you solve the right problems. People's perception of what good design is; is unfortunately based on fairly superficial perspectives. that comes from a superficial perspective on what good design aesthetic is. So to be quite critical and I have said this professionally in a number of contexts - The aesthetic of the design or beauty of design for the digital world is not the same as aesthetic that comes from graphic design. So making a beautiful button or making a beautiful UI is good, but it is not the whole problem. Design is about more than just making it look pretty in the visual aesthetic level or even the interaction level. This is something that good designers have known for decades. You look at the Eames and Herman Millers making furniture in the 50's. They made beautiful chairs that were also cost effective, created new markets for the business. They solved problems that impacted the bottom line of the business in a positive way, it wasn't just about is that chair comfortable or pretty. In contrast a lot of the digital design we talk about these days, people are still saying 'I made the chair comfortable look at how good it is'

So I look at our design practice at Normative as wanting our digital design practice at the same level as Charles and Ray Eames had or Paul Rand had with IBM.

Here at Normative we say that when you design software you’re designing a system. You’re designing a part of a system, that with its interface and programing changes the way people and machines interact with each other. So fundamentally when you design software, the purpose of software is to give someone superpowers.. The Google Search bar gives you superpowers - it’s like a memory you never had but you have perfect access to. You see so many to-do apps out there but a few of them get any serious uptake or traction. What are they really solving for people? What's the superpower? Is it the organization of stuff? What if the superpower was the need to do less stuff?? But as designers we don't think about that. What we should really ask ourselves is; what is the capability we want to design for the person and what is the value exchange?

How can you justify the business case around design?

A couple of years ago, a good friend of mine talked about the roi of User Experience. At that point the thinking was - if you can prove ROI, you would have a better chance of selling design to business. I personally believe that is not the right approach now. I believe that showing that you have a real business problem and what needs to be done to solve it and having that understanding with your partner or client or boss is much more valuable in terms of establishing design as a tool for business then saying 'here's how we're going to measure my success".

How do you create the culture that encourages this kind of work and thinking about problems?

It is really hard! It is one of the hardest and most humbling things for me to try and do really well. Especially when as you try to create culture your personal biases and perspectives come into play and actually go against the culture you want to create so it’s impossible to create culture in purely prescriptive way. Because everyone sees the world differently and respects and values different things, finding common ground is really hard especially when the way you talk and look at something is really different. I'll be honest it is both a struggle and a point of success that we have be able to become so attuned to the needs of the businesses we're working with.

What are some of the projects you’re working on currently?

We're working in areas of wearable technology, future currency, augmented reality, personal finance, media consumption. We're working on problems like How do you help an organization that acquires hundreds of new companies a year bring those into a standard interaction, code base - what does that framework look like. Because the real problem you’re solving is not making all the websites, you’re creating a system that reduces the cost and complexity of bringing consistency. So we're working on a lot of system level problems that are solved by tactical design work and building software.

How would you compare Toronto to Silicon Valley?

We have clients in the valley and we are looking at whether it makes sense to have a more permanent presence there.But I also want to say that one of the reasons we're in Toronto is that we really felt that as a technology environment there's a lot of potential in Toronto. I have seen how the start-up ecosystem has evolved since the early days of the work of David Crow to the really rich ecosystem we have these days. There's a lot of people out there who are doing great work which I really respect. If we as a community don't become divisive and focus more on being integrative and understand that entrepreneurship and investing in the future doesn't just have to happen with a bunch of laptops and a co-working space but can happen anywhere else. If we build those sort of bridges, a lot of interesting things can happen here.

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Startups & KW

Over the past couple of months I've been talking to startups in the Kitchener/Waterloo ecosystem. These conversations mostly about their story, vision and starting up in KW lead to some larger themes about the start-ups in general:

There are no silver bullets in marketing:

While talking to Decision.io co-founder Josh Wright, I was struck by how they had already acquired paying customers during their closed beta - 'Our first customer was the first to pay us' were his exact words & they tell a strong story. Josh and his co-founder Jesse and Duncan kept their day jobs while working part time on their startup until the early customers were happy to pay for it. Decision.io is currently in New York as part of the Angel Pad Incubator and they have moved into the Green House. This is an excellent example of selling from Day 1. All too often I've talked to startups that are either waiting to finish their product development process without leaving their rooms or vaguely refer to 'PR & social media' as their marketing and sales strategy. There are no silver bullets. A feature on TechCrunch may land you a couple of thousand page views but the question becomes how many of those actual translate into cold hard inflow of cash? Marketing - especially the free sort take's time to build up. Blogs, social media and ads and other inbound and outbound strategies take time to show results. There is a lot of experimentation involved with tweaking the strategy as well as tactical decisions to see which channel works best for your company – if your selling manufacturing software, it may make little sense to have a Facebook Page. Alot of early stage technology companies undermine the value of building up a marketing engine from the start. Communities aren't built over night - they're a labour of love and time. All too often a marketing guy or girl will be brought on post soft launch and expected to bring millions of page views, thousands of twitter followers and 80% conversion rates within months if not weeks. Don't fall in love with your technology: Ramli Jon from Family Tales mentioned how Family Tales started out as a Facebook for Dead People (Yes...). But while having a potential user testing out their app something surprising happened she put in her baby's name instead; 'When we asked her about it she said my baby is my everyday life’. Afterwards they had to pretty much start from scratch changing the focus of their whole product and re-designing it from the ground up. It's a common problem for technical founders to fall in love with technology and lose sight of the problem they are trying to solve. As a startup you are solving a problem for X number of people. That problem might be solved with better technology or it might even be solved by a manual process that can later be scaled with technology. Currently the team from Family Tales are putting their venture on the back burner to peruse other opportunities. Which brings me to the final thought. Celebrate failure: I don't mean pop champagne over it. Rather don't be ashamed of it and be open about sharing your learnings. Post-mortems seem to be popular in the blogosphere right now so write your own. Ryan from Coachd; mentioned how the part that eventually proved to be a bottle neck was the gathering and filtering of content. After having been through Hyperdrive in the first cohort they were running out of funding and capturing and filtering content from professional athletes proved to be inefficient. They shut down soon after. All is not lost - There's certainly a lot of exciting things happening in KW - Roger Pensky, Tom LaSorda and their venture firm IncWell dropped by at the Communitech Hub today to meet the local start-ups and even invested $300K in a local company. Wriber - a startup building an intelligent blogging platform raised $50,000 from local angel investors and Apartmint aims to replace Craigslist and Kijiji for the rental market. As the ecosystem matures - hopefully there will be some technology companies that can become the next Blackberry of Waterloo Region.

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Startup Spotlight - Family Tales with Ramli John

I caught up with Ramli Jon on a cold winter evening near the university plaza in Waterloo to catch up on Family Tales and the story of the startup. Family Tales is based in the Velocity Garage and Mars Toronto.

Telll me about yourself:

I studied at UW like 5 years ago. Math and Comp Sci. After that I worked at a large beverages company but at the end there was too much red tape. For 4 years. After that I started a startup which failed.

What was the startup?

It was called Lesson Sensei - so we were trying to connect people in Toronto with Sensei - people who are expert at their things. So perhaps like learn to bake a cup cake or something like that or make sushi. So we are able to connect people looking to learn how to make sushi with people who know how to make sushi. And then I ended up doing my MBA. The reason was that I thought I didn't have any business skills. I was very technical, coming from a math and computer science background.

How did you go from Lesson Sensi to Family Tales?

Ali (Co-Founder) was my classmate during our MBA and that's where we met. Originally we started Family Tales as a Facebook for dead people & that's how we pitched it. That's how met the folks from MBET, we were working with a prototype called Halo Lane where we were trying to capture people's lives after they passed away.

So why a Facebook for Dead People?

When my grandmother passed away she left us with a lot of stories but people started forgetting them. We felt like the current offering for the death care industry for capturing those stories was too focused on the negativity and depressing. So we tried to liven it up.

So more like cherishing their lives?

Yeah exactly. We tried to stick there for a bit thinking we could innovate there but its tough trying to market death to people so we decided to pivot to families. Capture your family stories in general and we really focused in on mothers to capture their babies stories. So we came out with our beta on our web version, April we came out with the beta for our web app. We got an okay traction. It's not that great and it didn't meet our expectations so at this moment we're working on making a pivot away from the web and we're going mobile first and connecting to printers right away. As for our target we're broadening our focus from mothers to families in general. That was one of the biggest learnings - our expertise is web development and we kept pushing web. We really didn't listen to our market and while talking to mothers and families in general we noticed that they don't use their pc's much. They're on their phones and tablet almost all the time so we're focusing on creating the best experience we can make on an android or mobile tablet to almost create a scrapbook feel.

So now we're not focusing on baby stories exclusively but family stories - like Ali my co-founder is getting married so why can't he create a FamilyTales booklet about it and print it. Another use case is family trips and make it simple on mobile and tablets.

Our goal right now is to put together a Kickstarter campaign in the next few month. We haven't started building yet and one of our greatest learning was don't build until you validate the market and that they would be willing to buy. That's one of the biggest mistakes we did was that we build alot and all of a sudden we realized that this is not what they want. So this time we're going through Kickstarter to validate the demand and see if people are willing to pay for a scrapbook generation through the tablet and pay for the booklet in advance.

So how did it evolve from the deceased to families? What was the defining moment.

Yeah, I think the toughest moment was trying to share it on our personal Facebook page. I didn't know how to market this our reach out to people with such a grim message. We talked to a bunch of funeral homes and they were very resistant to it. The revenue from their memorial page was very minimum compared to their caskets business. A small memorial page for them in terms of revenue sharing was very low so we had hard time partnering up with them.

We showed our product to one a person who recently had lost someone and asked her to do whatever she wished with it and she put her babies name in. Our assumption was that she would write about the person who passed away. When we asked her about it she said my baby is my everyday life, I take pictures of her and I am with her everyday.

That was one we were like 'Aha!' but that is a very competitive space. There's alot of players in photo space. One of our differentiators with family tales is that we don't want to be called a photobook. We are more of a story book - stories with photos. When you print your FamilyTales book it'll actually look like a story book (Photo's with stories).

Quickly I just want to jump back to the first startup you did - How long did you work on it & what went wrong?

I worked for a year and one of the biggest learning I had was team. The reason that it fell apart was the team cohesion. There was a point where the team of four just imploded because we had a lot of disagreements in terms of the direction of the product. So my greatest learning coming out of there was to make sure everyone gets along in the team.

The other thing that I was scared of was double sided market - its like your marketing and connecting two different markets at the same time and that was tough. At the same time Groupon was doing coupons for classes and people trying to learn & Lesson Sensei couldn't get the traction we needed.

What are some of the tough moments at Family Tales?

When we weren't getting the traction we were getting - it was tough. We had set ourselves a goal of growing 6-7% a week in terms of users. The other tough learning is that to be successful with mothers you have to be a parent yourself. You have to be a mother yourself to leverage the network affects and get word of mouth going. We looked at the other companies that are focusing on the parents/mother's market and they were basically parents themselves who go to meetups and talk about their product. We aren't parents so it's tough for us to reach out to other moms.

What is the Big Vision.

We want to capture everyone's family stories. The bigger picture is that imagine when 20 years down the line, your great great grand children can read your story, listen to an audio of your voice and look at your pictures.

Capturing family stories right now almost like a time capsule so future generations can know more about their relatives and ancestors.

In short it is Connecting Families.

Post Script: Ramli was recently invited to speak at the Lean Startup Conference in SF. You can read about it & watch his talk here

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Post Mortem of a HypeDrive Startup - Coachd with Ryan Wilson

Transcription of the video coming soon.

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Start-up Spotlight - Marmot Labs

Author: Kamil Rextin <a href="https://plus.google.com/+KamilRextin"?rel=author">Google+ | Twitter

I met Josh Wright co-founder of Marmot Labs which just launched Decision.io on a hazy Tuesday morning at the Communitech Hub. Yes - it does seem that the Communitech Hub at the Tannery Building is the ‘place to be’ to hang out with, build and start companies. It’s the cool space in town - a mix of industrial and modern interiors with red bricks, exposed ceilings with massive ducts snaking throughout. The walls are adorned by contemporary art - map of the world made from Apple Circuit Boards, Christie Digital MicroTiles, an installation made exclusively with BlackBerry PlayBooks (they are not THAT bad), and paintings by local artists.

Josh, full of energy and enthusiasm was happy to spare some time to chat with me about Marmot Labs, their first product Decision.io, and of course about everything in between.

So how did it all start?

Jesse (Guild) and Duncan (McDowell) - my two co-founders and I have known each other since we were about eight years old. We grew up together and we’ve always been sort of coming up with business ideas. We’ve known we want to start something up for a while now, but this is our first real go at it.

We were the sort of guys that spent our time making business plans crazy ideas like wind farms as early as 15 or 16 years old. We soon realized we didn't have the money or the expertise to undertake that one.

Later, after we finished school, we decided to take the MBET program together which was a great experience. It really gave us a chance to really work with each other and learn to start and build companies focused on solving real customer needs and problems.

So what sparked Marmot Labs and Decision.io?

During our MBET degree, we did a lot of work with Professor Paul Guild and we started thinking how we can help companies innovate better. How can we help business allocate scarce resources more efficiently? Where is the best place for money to be spent on innovation or how do we decide which are product to develop next?

We worked on the idea for a little while and we came up with massive development plan that would take a long time and a great deal of money! So we decided to break it up into smaller pieces which is where Decision.io was born. It was a great starting point from our perspective. I had been working at the Accelerator Centre near the university and there I had experienced some grant administration work. Jesse & Duncan were working with Venture Services Group at Communitech and dealing with all kinds of application and review processes. We saw a pretty clear need to have a system for group or collective decision-making when it comes to application review.

There’s lots of other areas and use cases that Decision.io, but we decided to validate granting, startup support and university applications first. In essence it is a an online platform for collective decision making where (our) customers can capture their decision making processes. It’s very easily configured and you can set it up however you like, in a very short amount of time. You can aggregate data from various sources and set up a funnel with multiple stages of review. The idea is that streamlining this process online and making this very accessible to a team of reviewers can help you make higher quality decisions and really enrich the conversation around this type of review. Each of the reviewers get a log in, they can come in rate, rank, review and make comments for different items at various stages of the funnel.

The items can be lots of different things but we’re starting with online submissions. So our early target market is grant agencies, startup support programs like incubators and accelerators, as well as educational institutions.

Why start so young? What drove you personally to start a venture and not take a job?

Essentially, this is a really interesting way to build experience, keep challenged, and do something different. I love the risk and the pressure.

I get bored really easily so having the ability to do a lot of different all at the same time and trying to figure out a lot of new things that you have no idea about. I never thought I would be writing employment contracts or SR&ED claims, but I like the idea of figuring out how to execute on whatever is needed. You are on the fly figuring all that stuff out as you go, and it’s pretty fun.

When I graduated undergrad, I wanted to be an investment banker because I wanted to be a millionaire by the time I was 30. I am 29 so it’s getting pretty close, but either way, I really enjoy the path my career has taken and I’m excited to see what happens next. Getting rich was one motivation at the very beginning but since I’ve gotten into it and started learning about entire ecosystem, support, organizations the community here in Waterloo, I really realized that I am in it to solve problems for customers and build a sustainable business.

The other guys, I’d say the same for them - we wanted to build something that has an impact something that fills a void. We have followed a certain simple methodology as best we can – Identify a need that a potential group of customers have, get them to test out our solution and give us feedback and make sure they will pay for it. Rinse and repeat.

Being a Non-Technical Founding Team - Has it been challenging?

Its hard for sure. It was something that we battled with a lot at the very beginning.

We had a ton of different ideas and we have a product that always is improving - its about finding the right people to join your team who are technical.

We’re lucky to have Duncan who is UX / Web Developer / Front End Designer but finding the right people to join us that can actually code is always going to be a challenge. We have found some great guys to join full time and we work with a consultant to help with the planning and mentorship of more junior developers. It’s working really well, but we wouldn’t have gotten where we are today without these great and motivated dudes.

What’s the eventual goal for Decision.io?

The eventual goal for Decision.io is to grow our presence in our early target market and then explore different decision-making workflows within small to medium sized businesses and enterprise.

Working with Prof. Paul Guild, we have a big source of cool and cutting edge ideas for next steps and new products.

Are you aiming for an exit for Marmot Labs?

If someone came to us and said we want to buy you guys - we would have to think about it.

Until then, we are going with the mentality and motivation to grow a sustainable business and build it like we’re going to IPO. If we get into the market and can't get enough revenue then pivot. If we do get traction and people want to buy us we will talk about it and figure it out. At the same time if there is huge traction and growth and 10 years we do an IPO then great! Why not? There’s a lot of opportunity in decision making space itself.

As a company, what is your passion?

Our passion is innovation itself - innovation planning & product management. We really want to learn a lot and grow from there. There’s a lot of different use cases that Decision.io can be potentially applied to and we’re excited to explore these.

So what stage is Marmot Labs at right now?

We are currently in Open Beta and growing our revenue and improving our product.

We aren’t doing much marketing yet, but we are focused on streamlining our customer acquisition model. We were in a Closed Beta for 8 months. Our first customer was the first one to pay us.

And every customer since then has paid, which is lucky for us. It brings in some revenue and helps us bootstrap.

November 2012 we started working with the HYPERDRIVE Program where they used Decision.io for their Accelerator’s application review process - that was great for us in terms of learning but also proving and validating our idea

In our closed beta we acquired 12 paying customers. We went into open beta couple of months ago; now up to 17 and hoping to continue to grow quicker next month. For us right now it's about improving the product and building a story so eventually we can look at raising a private round of funding so we can get on our feet.

So what are some of the challenges of being in a startup? And do you think it’s being romanticized?

I recently read really interesting article which was about turning Startups into Hollywood - people get into startups thinking they will get rich and what not. Doesn’t always work that way. There are definitely some success stories that fuel that fire, doing huige early investment rounds and getting great traction; but it is still a tonne of work no matter what. People need to realize it’s not all that easy, it’s a grind everyday. An emotional rollercoaster with ups and downs. Some days you might be on top of the world and some days you might get some very critical feedback and feel like you’ve been hit by a truck. But the important thing is to keep pushing through the bad times and focus on the wins.

Being broke is another thing. Being a bootstrapped business, we can’t afford to pay the founding team yet. We will eventually get to the stage where we can raise a private round but so far, we are doing the best we can with what we’ve got. We have tried to keep grounded and we want to prove it out and show traction and growth. We are really excited to keep things moving forward!

What is your take on Kitchener Waterloo’s ecosystem vs. what they have down at Silicon Valley?

There’s good things and bad things. It’s a small community and you get to know most people. It gets pretty busy with events and there is a lot of support. Everybody is willing to help and there are some great mentors and community leaders. We have been really lucky!

I don’t have much experience in Silicon Valley, but it does seem like there are a lot of companies and so much more investment money available. It seems really competitive as well, but it definitely has the track record.

That story is building here in the Waterloo Region, but it’s not there yet. It’s a great place to build a company though and we think it’s only going to get better.

The key is to keep looking towards building a scalable and global business and to prioritize your time as best you can!

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Startup Spotlight - SoundBrush

Author: Kamil Rextin Google+ | Twitter

As part of the on-going series to profile local startups, I met with Basil Al-Dajane Co-Founder and Product Lead at SoundBrush - an iPad app that lets users create music by drawing lines on the screen, in the VeloCity Garage at the Communitech Hub. We found a quiet room aptly named "Fortress of Solitude" and Basil was kind enough to give me some time out of his busy schedule to talk about his journey with SoundBrush, the experience with Y Combinator and everything else (related to startups and tech)

>SoundBrush recently won the VeloCity Venture Fund(VVF) with Ted Livingston (CEO KiK Messenger) personally handing him the prize money. Post VVF, Basil and Jayson are busy developing new and exciting features for their iPad app. For those like me wondering if there will be an Android version - Sadly no.

Lets start with - What is SoundBrush and what’s the story behind it?

SoundBrush is an iPad app that allows you to convert lines you draw on the screen into musical notes. The whole value behind drawing music is that all of a sudden you don't have to learn how to play an instrument to create music. Right now what’s the best way to create music? Play an instrument. So we have completely flattened out that curve.

>"You can think of SoundBrush as the Instagram from music"

Originally Jayson and I were sitting in front of a whiteboard coming up with a bunch of ideas to learn iOS. That’s how it started - finger painting. In 3 months we developed the first version while we were doing Co-Ops, working 8 hours a day and then developing on iOS for another 7 hours after we got home. That was literally our days and weekends! We moved into the VeloCity Garage in December and for the next month we worked all day and night - just popping by the house for a shower and nap then back to work again.

So we launched it and the biggest thing we learned about why users are using it was that all of a sudden they didn’t need to learn an instrument anymore. They could just create music that they wanted. So this is what led us down the rabbit hole of asking ourselves what exactly are users looking for and is this actually solving the problem which is ‘anyone can make music’

We developed it further and we made a new version of SoundBrush and released it in June this year.

For perspective:

Version 1 had 130,000 downloads in a year

Version 2 130,000 just within a month

What got you the downloads? Any clever marketing tricks you can share with us?

Well the first reason was that we switched the first version from a paid app to a free app - that definitely spiked our downloads. And secondly, Apple featured us in their App Store in the UK and we also landed a feature on TechCrunch.

Apple featured you in the App Store? How did that happen?

After WWDC (Apple Developer Conference) I emailed Apple, I called up Apple, I found every single contact at Apple and sent out a whole bunch of emails.

Incidentally one of the many emails I sent ended up in the right person’s inbox at the right time. Even though the queue was massive (after WWDC), he liked us enough to get us on the front page.

Before that we had no downloads and it was really bleak but the Apple feature really got us going.

And how did TechCrunch happen for you?

I emailed John Biggs who I met at a conference. I have emailed him before but he ignored every single one (haha).

So I emailed him again with the subject “Apple featured App SoundBrush”. And I explained that Apple might feature us at 5pm today in the UK. Do you want to talk to us? He said Yes and that resulted in the feature on TechCrunch.

Did TechCrunch result in a server crash?

Surprisingly no. Techcrunch resulted in a 15% increase in downloads. But surprisingly it is not as crazy as people think like 80% or 90%. It was really the Apple feature that really pushed everything and set things in motion.

All this with zero dollars spent on Marketing?

Actually we spent $5000 dollars on a video by Arc Media which has been viewed 25,000 times on Vimeo as of now. Goal is 100,000 views but we’ll see.

We regularly check in on public metrics and see how we stack up against other startups from VeloCity and other startups in the space. If someone else has better numbers than we do at something then I talk to them about what they are doing and look at what we can do better. Metrics are crucial to our business and they keep us in check. We set benchmarks for ourselves to know how we are doing.

Our primary marketing strategy is social media. Two instruments can be unlocked in the SoundBrush app if the user tweets about us or likes us on Facebook creating a viral loop on social networks.

Sharing and integrating with YouTube is another area we are looking at. Say a user has a couple of thousand views on YouTube but not as much on Discover (SoundBrush’s social sharing platform), we can pull those views from YouTube into Discover. Our target demographic is teenagers as they spend a lot of time on social networks so essentially we’re trying to penetrate more deeply into social networks. Another tactical item we’re looking into at the moment is talking to various YouTubers and inviting them to make a song with SoundBrush and share it with their audience.

Going back a little bit, back when you were starting out, did you know you were going to be targeting teenagers and how has that evolved with SoundBrush?

Back then, I didn't even know what a target market was! I thought oh yeah everyone’s going to download it and what not. That didn’t happen. Even for a while with the second version we were stuck and we didn’t know who the customers were. Are we going for the educational aspect? Children aspect? But we soon found out that the children aspect is a bad idea - Simply put kids will play with it for 5 min and never again.

When we looked at teenagers we also thought about how we can fix the >‘This is a cool idea, I am going to play with it for 5 min and never again’.

Discover - the SoundBrush music discovery network played a huge role in that, which is something kids can't participate in it.

Brett Shellhammer and Mike Kirkup have been great mentors for marketing for us.

What about people who say ‘There are just too many apps out there?”

There are too many websites, doesn't mean you stop making websites. We always envisioned it as an iPad app because we feel that the iPad is still generally neglected.

As a CS Guy - how was the transition from coding to focusing on marketing/business for you personally?

That’s a change that I had to go through the tough way. You focus on the product so much that you forget about the signup page. How are they going to go in if there is no signup page! Most people focus on the product and never the signup page. And it’s not just about building a signup but focusing on the right areas. That’s something a lot of people including ourselves have struggled with.

So you're the marketing/business guy then?

I am responsible for strategy and other business matters. Usually I go to Jayson and propose a crazy idea without any back-thought - one example is when we released V-2 for SoundBrush as a different app and not as an update. We did not have backwards compatibility. So instead of reworking the code, we decided to release the new update as a separate app.

The role I see for myself in the future is Product Lead and Jayson as the Technology Lead.

So how did you guys meet?

We met at residence on campus during first year and when I moved to a friend’s house afterwards, Jayson ended up taking one of the rooms there as well. It was after that I asked him for help on a project (LeafNotes); he was the only web developer I knew back then that we become close friends. After helping for 2-3 days, he offered to work with me on the project and it started snowball from there.

It’s the two of us right now and we’re hiring two Co-ops, including one for social media and community.

So what are some of the things you're looking for when you're hiring co-ops?

We’re looking for personality and then skills, in that order of importance. If you don't have the personality or ability to bring new ideas to the table then you are no better than a hired developer from Elance in my opinion. That’s not something we’re looking for. I want this (SoundBrush) to be part of who you are.

Why do a startup? Why not go to Google, Facebook, Desire2Learn or you name it?

When you're working on a startup everything you do can't be marginal by definition. Everything has to have an impact. When you work at Google or Facebook or most other corporation, almost everything you do is marginal to the bottom line of the business. You messing up or succeeding isn't going to make or break the business.

Jayson and I come from an audio/music and graphics background. Jayson is an instrumentalist and I know more about digital audio music techniques and graphics design. It was a good match for us to work on SoundBrush together.

Wait, you have a Graphics Design background? So you did the visual design for SoundBrush?

All the UI and images except for the brush I drew out and we have over 8,000 images in SoundBrush . We’re actually thinking of adding 25 more instruments so I’ll be working on those graphics as well.

So tell me about Y Combinator and infamous tweet by Paul Graham.

We interviewed for Y Combinator - what actually ended up happening was that we got two interviews at Y Combinator. They interviewed us once and they couldn't decide. So they interviewed us again and decided no.

The story behind the tweet by Paul Graham is a very interesting one. He never actually interviewed us! He wasn’t even in the room when we got interviewed. During the second interview Paul Graham heard SoundBrush through the wall. He stuck his head through the door, comes in stands next to us and says

>‘Oh Wow that’s Cool!’

And everyone ends up playing with SoundBrush. We’re sitting there going ‘hey guys, what about the questions?’

Anyway so while we continued our interview Paul Graham takes my iPad and disappears into the next room and that’s when the tweet happened. Before the interview we were warned by everyone that don't let any of the partners or Paul Graham have your iPad because they will get distracted with it.

That was a very interesting experience to say the least.

Silicon Valley vs Kitchener/Waterloo: if you had gotten into YC would you have stayed back in Silicon Valley?

There’s a lot of opportunity here and there’s a lot of opportunity in Silicon Valley. I haven’t lived there so I can't comment but Kitchener/Waterloo does have a lot of opportunities right now.

Speaking of which, what are some of the best things about being in Kitchener/Waterloo as a startup?

VeloCity Garage, Communitech easily said. Not to mention UW and the Co-Op system. With the Co-op processes not only can I hire quickly and end the contract quickly, I also get a lot of good feedback on the interview process.

What’s your take on the idea vs execution debate?

Execution is more important in my opinion but even a small idea can make a product great. It’s all about how you execute it.

Looking back on your journey so far, was their any pivotal moment that you look back on? As a company?

I don't think we have had our pivotal moment. I see this as a long journey. We do celebrate our successes but we always try not to get caught up in it and move on to the next challenge.

Special Shout Out to Mike Kirkup & Brett Shellhammer

[wadef]

How to Raise Money as a First Time Founder

This week’s Startup Edition question: How did you raise money for your startup? Here’s everything I wish I knew the first time around.

In September of 2012, Zapier closed our seed investment round of $1.2MM. In May of 2012, I had no idea where to start when it came to raising money for a company or if I even wanted to raise money.

Raising money one time certainly doesn’t make me an expert at raising money. But since I’m relatively fresh off of the experience I get asked by first-time founders how they should go about raising money for their startup.

Without further ado, here’s my ultimate guide to raising money as a first-time founder - leaning heavily on the experience and advice I’ve learned from other smart people who understand raising money much better than me.

Read More

[kw-startups]

Start-up Spotlight - Wriber

Author: Kamil Rextin Google+ | Twitter It’s a cloudy Saturday evening and I catch [John Zupancic](http://www.linkedin.com/in/johnjzupancic) – founder of [Wriber](http://wriber.com/) at a local coffee shop here in Waterloo.

I’ve known John for the past two years; we were in the [MBET](https://uwaterloo.ca/conrad-business-entrepreneurship-technology/) program together and have been close friends since. Dressed casually in jeans and a t-shirt, we catch up Wriber among other things. Wriber which just raised $50,000 in Angel funding and from the Jumpstart grant has been the full-time commitment for John over the past year. Those not familiar with Wriber, here’s the pitch: _[Wriber](http://wriber.com/) wants to change the way you write_ Sound intriguing? Read on. **To kick things off, what is Wriber all about?** _The greatest challenge being faced by bloggers, publishers, and marketers is creating original and interesting content and doing it continuously. A lot of the time, the people writing content are not professional writers. Publishers often have volunteers that are writing that need to be chased in order to get their work done. Marketers have other parts to their job and are busy. No solution comes close to solving this problem._ **And how does Wriber aim to solve this problem?** _I'm building a platform that makes it easy to create and manage written content. Wriber helps bloggers, publishers, and marketers maintain their content strategy by supplying a fresh flow of topics to write about and helps writers expand on content as it is being developed to be more engaging. Wriber is going to be a blogger's best friend!_ **What’s the story behind doing Wriber? What was the “aha!” Moment?** _I came up with the idea for Wriber when I was in school. I was spending too many late nights working on reports. Writing has always been slow and frustrating for me. I don't enjoy it. I get writer's block all the time. I always remember muttering, "I wish this thing would just write itself." And then I thought, "What if it could?" That's how it all started. I wanted to create something that solved my problem. And then I realized that most of us face the same problems, but bloggers, publishers, and marketers face these problems most frequently._ **Tell me a little about your background story, what inspired you to take the road less taken?** _I have always wanted to do my own thing. It is the reason I went to school. I realized through the Master of Business, Entrepreneurship, and Technology (MBET) program at the University of Waterloo that my passion lies in disruptive ideas involving technology that have major impacts on people. Writing has always been the same since I can remember. Why not change the way people write?_ **What are some of the less glamorous sides to startup dream?** _There is a lot of work involved that simply put is not fun. I love figuring out my messaging. I love coding. I don't particularly love writing funding applications or drafting patents. I'm also very impatient. I'm always thinking about what to do next with Wriber. It can be difficult disconnecting when out with friends and family, especially when they always ask how things are going with Wriber._ **What are some of the best things about being in KW?** _There is an overwhelming amount of support in the region. If you have a problem, it is not hard to find someone willing to help. I have mentors through Communitech, the Accelerator Centre, the Conrad Centre, and Velocity. Everyone wants you to succeed. Most are not afraid to candidly tell you things you don't want to hear but need to hear. There's absolutely no way I would be able to do this without all the help that I am getting._ **What does the future hold for Wriber and you personally?** _It sounds cheesy but I would really like to grow Wriber to be the next leading technology company right here in KW. I have dropped all my jobs to focus entirely on Wriber. I am looking forward to getting Wriber to a Minimum Viable Product and getting all of your feedback!_

You can sign up for the Wriber beta here

[kw-startups]

Always choose your investors based on who you want to work with, be friends with, and get advice from. Never, ever, choose your investors based on valuation. - Jason Goldberg

http://startupquote.com/

[kw-startups]

Startup Lessons Learned - II

Author: Kamil Rextin <a href="https://plus.google.com/+KamilRextin"?rel=author">Google+ | Twitter

Startups vs Small Business vs Outsourcing. This is not as much a lesson I learned but a rant that I need to get out there. Some background: I am from the wonderful but terribly mismanaged and underdog country of Pakistan. During the dot-com bubble, software was a all you could see. We went through our dot-com bust when a ton of undergads enrolled in CS degree programs and CS schools, training schools and academies popped up in every corner willy nilly (oddly enough a quick Google search did not reveal any good articles on it). You literally could walk in a a commercial area and see ‘Computer Science Courses’ or ‘Learn Corel Draw’ signs everywhere. The Rant: Back then and still, a lot of software houses (Custom Dev Shops) popped up. Their business model is/was quiet simple (to my knowledge) – Signup for services like Freelancer or ODesk, bid on projects and hire a couple of people and deliver (Mostly sh*tty quality products but the challenges of outsourcing are another discussion). This is NOT a startup – Maybe a small business, mostly it’s called off-shoring or outsourcing or even to keep labels simple freelancing. You are a freelancer not a startup. Another model for similar dev shops is to have a friend in states or Canada who poaches projects and sends them to his friend. Now India has a larger freelancing,off shoring economy then Pakistan – take Tata Consulting for example. They have a massive talent pool and they can provide you with contractors on site/off site or even outsourcing services, huge huge business. But nope they are not a startup, its just a business. Why aren’t these startups in my book? Specifically the ‘bid on Odesk and get project and call yourself a CEO’ type? Because:

1) Startups by definition are operating in a chaotic scenario where nothing is known. Thats part of the fun and part of the risk. You dont know what the f*ck is going on half the time.

2) Dev Shops are not innovating or creating a product. They’re doing what they’re told by a customer. The resulting code belongs to said customer. You don't own it. You cant sell it to other people. You can package it as a product.

3) Startups want to take over the universe. Dev Shops dont. I bet even the good folks at Tata Services have no plans to take over the universe. They have a steady cash flow and top line growth. Why would they risk it all? 4) Startups are innovative. They CREATE new products, services. They are small, they operate in high risk. They company might crash tomorrow. They might get 10,000 users in a month. No one knows what will happen. The folks who do startups are a bunch of crazy people who were dropped alot on their heads as kids (KIDDING) although I did hit my head alot on hard surfaces as a kid.

I know I started out saying small business vs startups vs outsourcing but in reality the dev shops are also small business. Sorry folks, I don’t have anything against outsourcing, dev shops, small business etc. I admire them in fact There’s alot to be learned from them, but I wont call them startups despite the fact that they look awfully similar .

[kw-startups]

Startup Lessons Learned I

by - Kamil Ali Rextin

After a long hatius from blogging here, I finally trudged myself to return and give it another shot. Since alot has changed since I started this blog, and my other one, I thought I should take it a new direction. Now there's alot of fluff and stuff out there on startups. It's the new hot kid on the block. Everyone wants to start a company, everyone wants to be called a CEO and have fancy business cards that says CEO on them. Yes, vanity is such a human trait.

Which leads to my first lesson:

Startups are no joke:

The folks at Startup Compass have written about this and I must say I couldn't agree more (not that my opinion matters much, I am but a blip in this vast universe). Startups appear to be cool and funky, working for fun seems like 'cool' starting one is just a 'cool thing to do' but before you take the plunge, ask yourself, and I mean really ask yourself, sit down in a quiet place and sip some coffee and ask yourself, DO I REALLY WANT TO DO IT?

Anyone who knows me, know's I am not the most disciplined person on the planet. Some call me a hippie, a free spirit, other's call me a Fakir (a holy man of sort) , my parents call me their weird kid (but are proud of me nonetheless, or so I like to think) and 2 years in, I am still trying to establish a routine and discipline in my life. My good friend John has a habit I admire - wake up at 5 am I tried it, imagine it for a second. Every day (even weekends) you wake up at 5 am. It works. it works like a charm! Puts you ahead of everyone else. Gives you time to reply to emails and shower and have the morning rituals out of the way, so by the time the rest of the town,city or world wakes up, your already ahead. I know. It sounds tough. It is. Take a second, think about it. That's what it takes. You have to be extremely self motivated and intrinsically driven. I'll leave this post with the 5 am point for now. Before you start something, ask yourself if you can wake up at 5am every single morning. Alot of people (and this is probbably more true in context of Pakistan then Canada) take starting a business as - 'Oh I am my own boss, I can work where ever I want etc' but no. To be your own boss, mean's you have to be tougher on yourself then anyone else ever can be. Do you have what it takes? P.S I still havent managed to have a routine where I wake up at 5am, but I haven't stopped trying :)

Adapted from my blog at http://chaicharsi.wordpress.com/

[longreads]

The Secret History of Silicon Valley

‘Let’s enlist universities directly in the war effort.’

Our video pick of the day is this 2008 talk (1 hr.) by entrepreneur and Stanford professor Steve Blank about how the defense industry first shaped Silicon Valley—starting with Stanford, which after World War II “became a full partner in the military-industrial complex.”

For a connection between this speech and PRISM, here’s a recent blog post by Blank on what the NSA might be doing inside your computer.