The startup ecosystem continues to experience rapid growth across the globe and there’s no better way to dip your toes into this growing ecosystem than participating in Startup Open House.

Brought to you by the City of Toronto and Shopify, Startup Open House reemerges for its third year this Thursday, September 22. Startups in Toronto, Montreal, Quebec, Vancouver, and British Columbia will open their doors to curious neighbours, investors, students, and top talent from 3pm to 8pm.

We’re pleased to announce that Say Yeah will be participating in Startup Open House 2016 for our third consecutive year.

For visitors, Startup Open House is a chance to grab a beer or other beverage with founders and employees of growing startups, familiarize themselves with the startup industry, gain insight on the brilliant minds behind Toronto’s current innovative businesses, and in some cases, find a job!

In fact, Startup Open House has joined in partnership with Jobbio for this year’s Canadian events. Businesses/founders can connect with potential candidates by receiving/saving their CV through the app. Users can follow startups that they are interested in and directly apply to jobs.

For founders, Startup Open House is an opportunity to showcase to their local startup community what they do on a day-to-day basis, how the startup came about, and their current or future goals.

Participating alongside us (literally) in the 77 Florence St building are our friends at Little Rocket.

Little Rocket is a studio of creative problem solvers who plan solutions that launch businesses forward. Specializing in commerce, as the leading Shopify Plus Experts in Toronto, they use design, development, and digital marketing to make a big bang for their clients.

For Say Yeah, we’ve been operating as a startup and are now set for growth. We’re excited to show you our studio!

Startup Open House is one of the largest initiatives formed to unite and publicize startups in Canada. Since 2013, they have hosted seven editions, with over 10,000 participants and over 600 startups have signed up to be apart of the movement.

Let’s continue to support the evolution of startups together. See you on September 22!

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“Startups live on growth. It’s the indicator of a great product.”

Sam Altman recently kicked off Stanford’s How To Start a Startup course. The course is running now through December, leveraging all the experience Sam and related founders and advisors (including Dustin Moskovitz, Marissa Mayer, Peter Thiel, and more) have been building over the past 9 years at Y Combinator.

Y Combinator’s four areas you need to excel at in order to maximize your chance of success as a startup:

1. Idea
2. Product
3. Team
4. Execution

With a massive dose of luck.

So much great market insight from Sam:

For startups, you want an idea that turns into a monopoly. But you can’t be a monopoly in a big market right away. Too much competition for that. You have to find a small market in which you can get a monopoly. And then quickly expand.

It’s good if you can say something like: today, only this small subset of users are going to use my product, but I’m going to get all of them. And in the future almost everyone is going to use my product.

Dig in and enjoy this fantastic lecture series

And here’s Say Yeah’s contact page for when you’re ready to execute on that great idea.

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One of the great annual conferences in Toronto is PWC’s Vision to Reality, a look at great Canadian success stories, the challenges they have faced, and how they realized their potential.

This year’s event takes place Thursday, April 10, 2014, and I’d encourage any product or service company hunting for product market fit to register for this event.
If you run a growth stage company, you may also apply to the mentorship program, taking place on April 9 with Ben Yoskovitz, Mark MacLeod, David Stein, Anish Acharya, and Elaine Kunda.

I hope to see you there on the 10th!

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You shouldn’t even make friends with people you couldn’t see starting a company with. Why bother? You only have so many friends you can have.

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1. Build something to meet your own needs and find a market with the same needs.
2. Find a market, then do real, qualitative, ethnographic-driven research that lets you truly empathize with said market and understand their needs.

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Competition in startups is an interesting thing. It’s something we can’t help but stress about. But it’s illogical. Because in startups, there really are no Goliaths. We’re all Davids, and the real fight that we have is with convincing users to change their existing habits.
Back in the day, our biggest competitor wasn’t dropbox. It was email, and the people that used it to share documents, too lazy to change their habits. That’s the case for most all startups.

David Quail shares his thoughts on startup competition at StartupNorth.

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Microsoft’s Office research team is conducting a study to help determine future technology products for small businesses and entrepreneurs.

The study is being led by the brilliant Sam Ladner, who I had the pleasure of joining on a panel at the first NXNEi.

If you’d be interested in participating in this study, with an in-person interview and a day of job shadowing in July, head over to StartupNorth for more details and to fill out the information form.

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The gist of it being:

We need to lead real conversations about what success is because it comes in many shapes and forms.

The article begins:

The moments we choose to celebrate say a lot about what we consider important. They’re a proxy for the metrics we value, because we’re signalling to others by their very celebration. And yet, I’ve always been of the belief that startups tend to celebrate the wrong things.

Instead of celebrating product launches, funding announcements, and winning pitch contests, Brydon challenges with a change in perspective:

Here’s an initial list of milestones and accomplishments worth celebrating to get you started.

• Performed 30 interviews with real potential users. First customer acquired.
• First customer acquired and you have no idea where they came from.
• Covering your monthly personal costs.
• Identifying the first product feature a potential customer will pay cash for.

Get in on this and other great startup discussions with Brydon and friends on the July 10 Startup Train from Guelph to Toronto to this year’s International Startup Festival in Montreal.

The post Defining Success for Startups appeared first on Say Yeah!.

Details and links for events, conferences, job and government resources, space, investors, entrepreneurs, and much, much more.

Dig in.

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