Toronto Entrepreneur

In my previous post Pre-startup education part 1/2 I talked about educating yourself about the startup world by finding the right classes at your university as well as following good and relavant blogs in your field. In this post my goal is to point out some of Toronto’s startup events which have truly helped build our startup community as well as their importance in the community. I will also mention the use of some well known social networking tools and how you can leverage them.

Toronto can now claim that it has had a startup community for a couple of years. Being a part of these communities is crucial for your startup. You build very good connections, you will expand your thought frame, get to know about other great startups in your city/country and of course you may want to motivate others to join the community. This blog for example is a result of my interest to share my experience with all those who are thinking of starting their startup (specially those who are close to graduation) and don’t know enough of the startup world. I would like to make their life a little easier by helping them avoid the mistakes I made.

There are several great events that happen regularly in Toronto. First there are the local collaborative style events such as TorCamp, BarCamp, StartupCamp, ProductCamp and DemoCamp. These events are very engaging and really make you feel at home while you learn plenty of great stuff. The format is always as follows except for DemoCamp and StartupCamp: the day is divided to around 6 one-hour time slots. For every time slot there are 3-4 rooms available and each person attending the event can write a topic of their interest on a piece of paper and put it in one of the available slots. Then whomever is interested will attend whichever event they’d like. Now if you fill a slot with your great idea, it doesn’t mean that you have to give a lecture or anything, you just have to kick-start the conversation and bring up questions you might need answers for. Great group dynamics and you really learn from others experiences in these sessions. DemoCamp and StartupCamp are slightly different in that 5-8 teams are chosen to either demo their product or to showcase their new startup respectively. These are great events where you can learn from others experiences and you get introduced to new ideas/tools and of course people.

Then there are the more formal 1 or 2 day conference like events such as StartupEmpire which was held on November 13, 2008 in Toronto and of course the annual Mesh conference. These are more conference style get togethers and you’ll meet peoeple from various industries and positions. You’ll hear many great talks whether it is by angel investors, VCs, other successful startups or the CEO of craigs list. These are yet another great way to connect to people. You can still either purchase tickets for the upcoming Mesh conference or if you’re a student, you might be able to send them an email and see if you can volunteer for them. That way the event is free for you but you’ll have to help out a bit.

Now that you’re a participant in the community you should also take advantage of the great social networking tools that others have built so far. The two examples I’d like to point out are Linkedin and Twitter. Linkedin is a great way to build your professional network. Try to keep your resume updated and try to expand your community. This can really open your eyes in terms of the industry you’re in and the stuff you might be interested in. And twitter might seem like a not so very smart idea at first but believe me you learn a lot of interesting nuggets of information as you build your community on there. Make sure you also contribute your share of knowledge to your twitter community. If you find out about a new startup, event or anything else that you find useful, share it and people slowly will follow you. The better the content you provide the more people would want to know what you have to say, so be smart about what you share.

Yours truly,

Rokham

Your level of education before starting your business will truly help you throughout the entire process. Unlike many other experiences you’ve had with education, this one can actually be fun and motivating. One of the main reasons that it’s fun, is because it involves a lot of creativity and innovation. You don’t only get marks in return for you assignments, you get recognition, criticism, followers, competition, evangelists and of course revenue if you do your assignments well. The best time to start your education, is before you start your startup.

I know how busy life is when you’re close to graduation. As I mentioned in one of my previous posts Starting a startup after graduation, I also know how tough it may be for you to decide that you’re going to start your own startup. But believe me educating yourself on how to start a successful startup is going to become the exciting and fun part of your life. It will motivate you and help you take from school the things that matter most in the real life.

There is plenty of education that I need myself but here are some stuff I’ve picked on the way so far. First of all try to take advantage of any business related course you can take at your university. For example UofT’s Business of Software (CSC 454) course was an amazing course that I took, for several reasons. They teach you what a business plan is, what goes in it, why it is important and finally how to write one. As you go through this process you learn about other aspects of the business such as angel/VC investment, marketing, your competition and much more. You are introduced to great references throughout the course, such as Art of the start, Selling the invisible and if you’re looking for something to really increase the adrenaline in your blood, Netscape time. Last but not least, these courses are great places to make connections. You will meet other like-minded people and people who are in the industry who are sometimes invited to give a lecture at your class. Next step is following the right blogs.

Learn to follow blogs and make sure you follow the right blogs. You learn about good blogs over time and you’ll learn who’s a good blogger and who is not. A great blog reader is Google Reader. If you’re not familiar with blogs and like a starting point, I could recommend Alltop which they call “an online magazine rack of popular topics”.

I will have a second part to this post where I will talk about various social networking events in Toronto as well social networking tools and how you should leverage them. I will point out some of the very active people in Toronto’s startup community and their efforts so far to build this community from ground up.

Yours truly,

Rokham Fard

Don’t get boggled down with the details, they consume your time and don’t give you anything in return. Once you find your idea, stop yourself from going into too many details. Don’t try to define every single feature that comes to your head. You know all those moments you say “wouldn’t it be cool if…..”, the answer is NO, it wouldn’t. The more features you try to include, the more you have to argue over these features with your partners.

Keep the idea simple, and try to sketch the MAIN pages on paper. Again don’t go into the details when you sketch. Don’t sketch every single page/tab/button or option. This helps you stay focused and keep your eye on the ball. The more detailed you get, the more problems you have to deal with.

Once the sketch is done, try to research the market. The sketch is supposed to remind you what your business is all about and to help you stay focused when you research the market. If your business idea has to do with assisting travelers and somewhere in between your research you find a very nice gallery on pictures from Italy, don’t start watching those pictures. That’s not research that’s what we call “going to the sand box” (a Persian expression for people who get sidetracked).

Good research prevents later surprises and gives you plenty of guidelines. Research has many advantages. It tells you about your competitors, it shows you some of the obstacles your business has to deal with later on. It shows you some solutions that your competition has chosen to overcome those obstacles and of course it gives you a great idea on the scope of your problem. Don’t underestimate the time research takes. It took us a good two months to get a descent idea about our market. Build tangible stuff.

If after your research, you know you still want to go on with your initial idea, then you need to get to work. You have spent a good 5-6 months by now and not only you’re not making any revenue, you don’t even have a product. So now you have to decide whether you need some angel investment down the road or not. You have to know if the 2, 3 or however many founders there are, are able to overcome all the obstacles the business foresees in the future or not. Does your business require sales people. Does it need more than just 2,3 developers to speed things up. Does your business depend on other businesses? If you don’t think you don’t REALLY need investment, then delve into building your product and your business model. If you only have a strong technical background, be ready to learn about marketing, sales, pricing, positioning, branding and all those fun sides of business. I mean it, they are really fun but you need to spend time on it to learn it. If you need angel investors, then you need a demo.

Demos are great, since they are visual. Your demo should only cover the core of your business, no bells and whistles whatsoever. Investors need to understand the core of your business and the more you add, the less they understand. You can put together either a flash demo or a plain html/css/javascript demo. Whichever you think is easier for you and more powerful to the investor. Don’t spend too much time on the details of the demo. It will consume your time without you noticing it. Design is a hell of a time consumer.

I will talk more about angel investors, the first version of your product, learning more about the business side of things and putting together a business plan later.

Yours truly,

Rokham Fard

Starting your own company can be easy, hard, boring, fun, exciting or scary. It all depends on what you make of it. If you do start your own venture, it probably means you’re up for the challenge and you’d like to create something of your own, which you strongly believe in. That’s the best reason to start your own startup.

The first few months of a startup both get you excited and lost at times. You’re excited because you’re starting something truly of your own. You’re lost because you don’t yet know what exactly it is. In my case, no idea at all. It is really true when people say “the devil is in the details”. The more you delve into the details the more lost you get. Don’t worry though, because you will figure it out.

Perseverance is your engine and innovation is its fuel. You must accept that you will deal with several new problems every single day. Whether it is a conflict with one of your partners, a technical bug, not having money to pay the bills or your girlfriend telling you you’re not around enough. Don’t let these things discourage you. Come up with innovative ways to fix them because you can. If you have partnership misunderstandings, try to support your partner and show them you’re there for them. If you don’t have enough money to pay some of your bills, sell something you don’t need that much on craigslist or ebay. Take your girlfriend out to a nice musical or play (I recommend Dirty Dancing). Yes girls like these things and you would even get surprised that you might even like it because let me tell you the quality of that show is phenomenal.

At first you might not have a clear idea on what you wnat to do. It took us almost 3 months to find that one idea. You’ll end up scrapping 200-300 ideas maybe. Don’t worry because if you think about it hard enough, you’ll find the problem.

You might need money while you’re coming up with that great idea. So get a part time job somewhere and set regular hours in every week with your partners to get together and discuss business. It’s always great to have a team that is both critical and optimistic at the same time. Critics find the flaws of the optimist’s thoughts and the optimists help the critics find motivation in those thoughts although they have flaws. Don’t think things are not moving forward if ideas get criticised.

Yours truly,

Rokham Fard

Today I started my blog as a way to communicate my experience as a Torontonian entrepreneur. My goal is to share what I go through so other entrepreneurs know it is easy to follow their dreams.

A couple months before graduation, I had to decide whether I’d like a comfy, well paid job with benefits or to start my startup, which I had been dwelling over for a year by then.

In order to make the decision process easier for myself (in reality it made things harder for me) I decided to look for jobs, while I had 3 courses and two part-time jobs (I had just picked up a part time position at UofT at OISE alongside IBM). So putting the right resume together took around a week and a half.

I really tried to pass my resume to as many professionals as I could and tried to incorporate their suggestions.The outcome was great and the resume looked great I think. I started sending out resumes (to pretty much anywhere I could think of). A couple days later I was in trouble.

I was getting 5-10 calls every day from all these head hunters for jobs all over Canada and US. A lot of these jobs didn’t have much with what I was looking for so I ignored them. So I ended up getting 5 interviews all together in 3-4 weeks (the market was doing really well back then). 4 job offers came out of these 5 interviews (I told you the market was doing well). Now with these offers on the table, it was a lot harder to make a decision.

I ended up consulting with anyone I could think of. My profs, my manager at IBM, my boss at UofT, my friends, parents…etc. Bottom line everyone gave me one answer. Do what you really want to do. That didn’t seem like much help back then but now I realize it was the right answer.

Anyway, one morning I woke up at 8 am and realized I wasn’t really happy being in my comfort zone. I’ve always been the kind of guy who needs things to go up and down in his life (as long as I can predict those ups and downs). So that was the first step in starting my startup. It’s been a year since then and I’ve loved every day so far.

Yours truly,

Rokham Fard