Back From Startup Camp Montreal
I just camp back from Startup Camp Montreal, the fourth iteration of the event, but my first ever. The presentations were pretty interesting, even though some were of average quality. However, there was a lot of place left for networking. The whole startup community of Montreal seemed to be there, as well as a lot of investors. With over 400 participants, it was the largest Startup Camp ever done in Montreal. Here is a brief overview of the presentations.
The first person to talk was Michael Montano, a young entrepreneur from Toronto. He is the co-founder, with Christopher Golda, of Backtype, an application to find, follow and share comments on the web. His talk was about their experience in building their product. Backtype is in fact their second project, a project they built through the Y Combinator program. He first talked about ideas and how they are all usually seen as bad when you first propose them. You shouldn’t be rigid when it comes to you first idea, but instead try to release fast so you can get feedback to orient your product. He insisted on the concept of rapid iteration as a way to adapt to customers needs. Failing to do so may take you out of business pretty fast by a lack of interest on the costumers side. He also talked about the need to create value for the users before trying to acquire value. In other words, make a good product before worrying about your salary. Here are some good websites on the startup and the venture world he suggested during his keynote. I chatted a bit with him afterwards and it was interesting to hear how he managed to work on his company while still going to university.
The other keynote was by Carl Mercier, a serial entrepreneur from Montreal. His last company, Defensio, was bought recently by Websense inc. As such, he decided to talk about how he built and sold his different startups. He used a bootstrapping strategy for all of his 5 companies. This means he didn’t take any external investment and paid all the expenses with the gains. As such, he insisted on the need to have a working profit strategy. Don’t aim to big and instead, try to make something that works and generate some value. Like Michael, he doesn’t think there is such a thing as a generally accepted revolutionary idea. Instead of waiting for the great illumination, you should start fast and market your idea. As he said, developing your product his 100% of your business, but marketing his the other 100%. He also talked about the bad effects of taking external investment. His main argument was that by accepting investment, you take an additional burden on your shoulder. You have to please your investors by selling at a higher price or by growing faster and as such, you lose some control over the orientation of your company.
The first company to present was Sitezoogle. They sell a website building software targeted at niche market like music bands or dog breeders. They are looking for help to enter other niche markets.
The second company to present was Control Yourself, the company behind identi.ca and other social networking software. Evan Prodromou, the CEO of the company, made it clear that he is not Evan Williams and that identi.ca is not Twitter. He explained their business strategy and how they plan to sell their platform as a service to bigger companies and organisations. He is currently looking for investment to expand from a centralized system to a distributed platform.
Then came Praized Media, a company that sells software as a service to help merchants and publishers enter the social networking world to ease the communication with their costumers. They recently signed a deal with Yellow Pages to add a social search function to their website. They said they have other big customers and platform integration in mind, identi.ca being one.
The following company was Klaxa. They offer a software solution to help telecom companies manage and debug their network. The key points of their product is its ease of use and its big bug database that helps network technicians solve possible problems fast. The CTO, Stephane Monpetit, has more than 20 years of experience in the telecom industry and they are currently looking for $1 million in investment.
The last, but not the least, was Twtapps, a company that develops application for Twitter. Felipe Coimbra, the CEO and single employee of the company, built multiple applications that can be used to add functionalities to the minimal Twitter platform. He uses a freemium business model to try to make the company profitable. His most popular application, twtpoll, was featured in TechCrunch and is now widely use through the Twittersphere.
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