Off to a great start, thanks!

StartupNorth has gotten off to a great start. We are only just over 2 weeks old but already up to 300 visitors a day and about 80 (give or take) RSS subscribers according to FeedBurner.

While these numbers are still tiny in the grand scheme of things, they are a respectable amount of growth in 2 weeks and I think it shows that there is a need out there for a place to talk about being an entrepreneur in Canada.

We are going to focus on getting more west-coast content. As one of the most active startup regions in the country, BC really needs some coverage. We have also started to hunt for great startups in Atlantic Canada and I think we’ll all be surprised at the quality of the ideas coming from the east.

So, keep the startups coming in and don’t hesitate to ask about contributing to the site. As the site’s popularity grows, we will all benefit from having a healthy community and we will try to find ways to make things less one-to-many and more about helping people connect.

CreateWorkspace: Web Development Environment

Createworkspace Workspace is an Ottawa-based startup co-founded by Obaid Ahmed and Marc Windle.

Workspace provides an online collaboration environment for web development projects, allowing for management of many remote servers through a single interface, a built-in editor (no local machine IDE required) and support for six programming languages. A potential boon to freelancers and consultants, Workspace has 2,000 beta testers from around the world providing feedback on bugs and feature requests since beta testing began at the end of March. Pricing has not yet been determined, but will likely follow the freemium model familiar in Web 2.0 applications.

Beta users were identified early on (prior to development) by starting with a blog and using Digg to get some attention to the idea from likely customer/users and signing people up with a simple online form. Workspace is currently working closely with their beta users and will be looking for seed funding this summer to expand the team to add more features and to support scale at launch.

waka.ca – Real Estate Information Liberation

Waka.ca is a Quebec City (Quebec City has to be one of the most underrated cities in the world) company that provides a real estate search engine. They have already launched for Quebec, and will be expanding significantly in the coming fall and have been making steady progress since their launch in 2006.

Waka scrapes data from a slew of sources. From classified ads to real estate agent websites, it’s nice to see someone start to aggregate all this information. Anyone who is trying to buy or lease real estate is probably familiar with how frustrating systems like MLS.ca can be as they constantly try to hide information from you.

With about 10,000 people coming to the site a week, waka is slogging up the typical curve and will have a lot of hard work to do in order to get wide acceptance, but they will be the first (and currently only) site in Canada that aggregates all of the available sources of real estate listing information. Being the first and best established resource in Canada is going to be a big deal in the next few years as more people start to research their housing purchase online.

While they do not seem to be actively seeking investment, and are currently funded with friend/family money, my guess is that as their expansion plans get larger, and as some competition starts to move in, Waka may be on the lookout for friendly angel money.

Waka plans to make money through advertising, which can be a painful process. They will have to focus on pulling in large amounts of visitors, which may take their focus away from more focused goals, such as creating a market or ensuring that their tool drives more off-mls sales.

With two founders and 4 other employees working on the project, I am looking forward to watching Waka evolve quickly, and we will keep checking in with them.

Contact Samuel Bouchard