A weekly event we think of as group therapy for people crazy enough to try creating something from nothing. A room full of creators and inventors working on each other’s projects.

Let’s Reinvent The NDA, For Entrepreneurs.

Brydon

I work on 20Skaters, ThreeFortyNine, Ontario Startup Train and a few others. My vanity site is brydon.me.

Do you sign Non Disclosure Agreements(NDAs)? In general, I’m told most funding folks do not. I have signed many but I do so cautiously. There are many opinions on signing and not signing. I tend to view it as a red flag when early stage projects request that I sign an NDA before we’ve met, […]

Roadmaps, Focus Groups, Personas and Other Ugly Crutches

Brydon

I work on 20Skaters, ThreeFortyNine, Ontario Startup Train and a few others. My vanity site is brydon.me.

Have you ever created and maintained a Product Roadmap? It’s an excellent tool that allows a team, or the execs, to plot the precise path a software development team is heading. You then simply share the roadmap with the team and they start following the directions that will take them on their way to a […]

Gardening-focused Mobile Startup Needs Your iPhone

matt

Digital marketing professional and gardening enthusiast. I blog about the intersection of gardening and information technology at blog.plantola.com .

Are you forgetting the names of your plants, and where you purchased them? Do you wish you could find new plants without driving to the garden centre?  We are building a mobile App that makes it easy for gardeners to catalog and share their plants with friends and retailers. The App will be released this […]

Don’t Wait To Find Your Partners

Brydon

I work on 20Skaters, ThreeFortyNine, Ontario Startup Train and a few others. My vanity site is brydon.me.

Jim Collins book Good to Great introduced the concept of getting the right people on the bus. The idea being that curating the people who make up your company is as important as developing the business itself. As immersed as I’ve been in coworking, including founding and running ThreeFortyNine for 3+ years, I’m only now […]

Connect Not Protect

Brydon

I work on 20Skaters, ThreeFortyNine, Ontario Startup Train and a few others. My vanity site is brydon.me.

I always struggle to explain our weekly Founder’s Club. I’m quite comfortable in that, in fact I feel no pressure to explain it. The people involved are comfortable with it’s ambiguity and people not involved can stay curious. “Success requires no apologies, failure permits no alibis“, Napoleon Hill My simplest pitch for Founder’s Club is that it’s group […]

Feedback Required

It’s not optional, it’s not just good to have, and it shouldn’t be low priority, feedback, is vital to success. Not everyone will like you, things won’t just click for your audience, and not every idea you have will be a home run. Don’t ignore those that can make or break your product, but rather […]

Startups, Just Pick Up An Instrument!

Brydon

I work on 20Skaters, ThreeFortyNine, Ontario Startup Train and a few others. My vanity site is brydon.me.

I reference this great post by Jason Fried almost weekly. He compares learning to create new businesses to learning to play an instrument. Getting is more about pickup up an instrument and making noise around like minded folks than it is about pitch contests and incubators. My kids and I were watching Danny MacAskill’s video the […]

Products vs Services

Founder’s Club recap for January 17th meeting… We had Michael Lewkowitz from Igniter start a wide-ranging discussion around shifting business focus from products to services, or vice-versa. We touched on many topics: A false dichtomy? Received wisdom recommends small businesses focus on seeking either products or services, but not both. But a business may slowly […]