Waterloo mafia invade Toronto

I’m guessing this is confirmation that Waterloo Region is really just part of the Toronto ecosystem.

CC-BY-NC-ND-30 Photo by nadiakushnir
AttributionNoncommercialCreative Commons - By NC-NDSome rights reserved photo by nadiakushnir

I have seen The Communitech HubSpot space. Not a bad name given the facility that houses Communitech is called The Hub, calling a smaller zone in Toronto “The HubSpot” would make sense. Other than one of the leading CRM vendors based in Boston that has raised a combined $65MM in financing is also called HubSpot. That’s got to be bad for SEO.

I first saw the Communitech HubSpot space when I looked at moving the Maintenance Assistant offices earlier this year. It’s space located on the 2nd floor of 170 University Ave, that doubles as offices for Phil Deck. Phil was previously the CEO and Chairman of MKS Inc. which was acquired by PLC for $305MM in 2011. Phil is also on the Board at Communitech, which features other key players in the Waterloo and Toronto ecosystem including John Ruffolo of OMERS Ventures, Carol Leaman of Axonify, Ali Asaria of Well.ca and John Baker of Desire2Learn.

“It’s been a lot of hard work and even more fun putting Waterloo Region tech on the map with the help of a hugely supportive community.”
Iain Klugman, Communitech Marks 15 Year Anniversary of Supporting Waterloo Tech

Communitech in Toronto

It’s great news as Well.ca already has offices in Toronto. Previously Waterloo-based companies like Top Hat Monocle have moved to Toronto. There are a large number of Waterloo alums actively working in the Toronto startup ecosystem (I’m a UWaterloo alum along with Farhan Thawar, Zak Homuth, Zach Aysan, John Phillip Green, Dan Holowack, Oshoma Momoh, Bruce Chin, Garry Seto, Mike Rhemtulla, Monica Goyal and that’s just off the top of my head).

Too bad they chose to leverage an existing StartupNorth brand for the event. The least they could have done was invite us. Oh well, they stuck with our own “invite only” model.

 

For Startups, Target Audiences can be a Challenge

Bullseye by Joe Prosperi (prosperij) on 500px.com
Bullseye by Joe Prosperi

Within a marketing strategy, it goes without saying that target audiences are a key consideration.

For all the focus on nurturing an idea, addressing a point of pain and developing a product, the ability to achieve traction hinges on the ability to connect with target audiences. Again, it’s an obvious statement.

The trick and challenge is identifying target audiences, their demographics, needs and buying behaviour. For some products, target audiences can be straightforward, while other products appeal to a variety of target audiences with slightly different needs.

For startups, getting a good grasp on target audiences can be a challenge because they may not have the resources to conduct in-depth research – be it through surveys, interviews, focus groups, etc.

It means developing target audiences can be a quasi-guessing game that include a number of assumptions. In an ideal world, these assumption are pretty accurate so a startup’s sales and marketing activities are aimed in the right direction.

It also possible the target audiences that had been identified are either not right or a startup attract customers who weren’t originally identified or seen as a priority.

It is important to continually get as much information about their customers. Who are they? How did they find you? What are their needs and motivations? How did you find you? What alternatives or competitors did they consider?

Getting this information provides valuable insight that can confirm target audiences or deliver eye-opening information about new customers and new sales opportunities.

So how does a startup begin the target audience process?

It begins with creating personas that identify a customer’s age, education, needs, goals, purchase risks, how they get information and do research, and the buying process. This will help you create a pretty good buyer profile. Keep in mind, there can be multiple buyer personas for your products.

Buyer personas provide direction and insight into the ways to reach the different parts of your target audiences. If possible, you can interview people who fall into these buyer personas to test your assumptions and, if necessary, tweak or overhaul them.

The reality for startups is nailing their target audiences can be difficult to achieve out of their gate. But by taking the right approach, you can establish a good foundation upon which to build.

Editor’s note: This is a cross post from Mark Evans Tech written by Mark Evans of ME Consulting. Follow him on Twitter @markevans or MarkEvansTech.com. This post was originally published in Sept 18, 2012 on MarkEvansTech.com.

How to get the most out of AngelList: As a VC and as an Entrepreneur

I love AngelList.  I truly believe it is disrupting the way early stage deals are being discovered and funded.

When I was with BlackBerry Partners Fund (now Relay Ventures), I used AngelList to virtually meet and screen tons of companies.  I set up Super Fridays for myself, filling my mornings and/or afternoons with back-to-back 30 minute calls with 10-12 companies.  I really recommend this to any young VC looking for both dealflow and honing their game.  The velocity and juxtaposition of all these entrepreneurs, pitches, and companies really taught me how to evaluate deals along the VC spectrum:

  • (NO) polite and immediate no thank you
  • (NOT YET) check back with traction
  • (NOT SURE) send me your pitch deck so I can another set of eyes on this
  • (POTENTIALLY) let me bring this up at the next Monday partner meeting and see if someone bites
  • (YES) holy moly let me get John Albright right now

All told, I probably screened 150-200 companies every three months on AngelList alone.  Ultimately, after all those Super Fridays, the firm funded two great companies: PubNub and ClearFit.

Now as I sit somewhat on the other side, running Extreme Startups, I am spending time trying to get VCs to view our companies’ AngelList profiles.  To help figure out what companies should be doing on AngelList to help maximize their exposure, we at Extreme Startups recently had a session with Ash Fontana from AngelList to get his advixe.  Ash shared some best practices that I’d like to share with our community.  His advice included a lot of great tips and some common sense details that time-crunched entrepreneurs might glance over.

Company Profiles

  1. Fill it out completely.  All the sections and tabs.  Comprehensive profiles are definitely the best so that there is both pertinent and substantive information.  One good tip is for the Founder Bios – include university info as well as some investors search for key schools.
  2. Be open / generous with information.  Specifically for the Fundraising tab, the Deal Terms should be filled out.  You don’t need to put valuation, but some indication helps investors looking for certain price ranges or structures (convertible note vs. equity).
  3. Use graphics – slides, screenshots, graphs, and videos to make a static page pop.

Key tips to stand out

  • State the most original thing or function your product and company does.
  • Information about the market size is key.
  • Name something extraordinary about your company or founders.
  • State the hardest problem you solve.

How do you get featured?

For those lucky four startups on the feature page on the front page of AngelList, what is the process to get there?  It’s curated by Ash, who uses a number of different tools to track interest and traction.  Note that there are now over 80,000 startups on AngelList, with ~100 getting added every day.  Only five get featured per week – so only top 0.5% have the chance to be featured.  We are lucky to have our alumnus Granify on the feature page!  ShopLocketSimplyUs, and Verelo all have great profiles as well (shameless plug).

So what should you do after your profile is up?

  1. Be active.  It’s a social network.  Start and engage in conversations.  Follow interesting companies, entrepreneurs, and investors.  Comment on people’s status updates.  Refer interesting deals to other people.
  2. Be proactive.  Reach out to investors and advisors.  Ask for referrals and recommendations!
  3. Match your offline activity to your online profile.  Add an advisor or investor?  Make sure you AL profile reflects that.  Have your network post and share your traction and successes online!

Other AngelList resources recently launched

  • AngelList Docs is in beta, but only for US incorporated companies for now.  It’s a great resource to close your deal online, industry standard docs and no legal fees.
  • AngelListTalent recently launched and helps startups recruit, and talent identify great jobs.  It uses a double opt-in structure, so you only get shown the jobs of the companies you follow.  It’s a great resource for recruiting.

Hacking AngelList articles

Lastly, Ash mentioned he loved and supported the hacking AngelList posts.  Somewhat analogous to the black art of gaming the iTunes stores, there are ways to succeed on AngelList outside of what is included in this post.  I just googled and found a couple of hits.  There are the most useful imho.

Final thoughts

I really hope more Canadian companies use and publish on AngelList, Gust, and others.  It’s a great way to get your profile out to Canadian, US, and international investors.  Not to mention its a great way to help entire cities and regions get noticed for great deal flow.  Maybe some young VC down south will start arranging their own Canadian Super Fridays…

Please follow me on AngelList! (and Twitter).