a canadian startup

More on Defensibility

After my last post on defensibility, I read David Crow’s post about the very same article. The links David gives at the end of his post are great reads.

The links, copied from David’s article are:

• How to Change the World: Defensibility
• Counterpoint: Patents and Defensibility
• Union Ventures – Defensibiltiy
• The era of the disposable startup?
• Concurrent Startup Idea Generation and the Pervasive Copycat Fallacy

As someone who has been through the patent filing process, has been involved in the legal process of defending IP (ugh), and as someone currently involved in a web startup, defensibility is definitely on my mind. Thinking about defensibility is is core part of strategy and, in my experience, is likely the very first question potential investors will ask about.

When answering a question about defensibility or competition, I think a crucial point you have to make is that while a) you are concerned with and have thought long and hard about the issue b) you know that there is no magic solution. You must constantly think, adapt, and improve strategy. Startups can do this with agility, but agility means nothing without good guidance.

Two good quotations from the above articles include:

When all the dust settles, the goal is to paint this picture:

• You’re street wise, so you know that you can’t depend on patents.
• You understand that very few companies are truly defensible for reasons other than because they either achieved critical mass or had a nine-month head start.
• You have domain expertise, connections, and what you’re doing is hard.
• You’re not the only team that can do this, but you’re in a better position than most.
• You believe that you can build a business better than anyone (a little cockiness is necessary for an entrepreneur to survive)

and:

The question when pursuing a new idea for a business isn’t “has someone else thought of this and how can we prevent that from happening?” but rather “how can we beat someone else who is thinking of this right now?”

Thanks for the links, David, it was good to read those articles again.

Upcoming Demo/Bar Camps

It’s the season again!

Starting tomorrow (Sept 28th) is Entrepreneur Week by Communitech. I’ll be attending a few events here or there — please do come and say hello. Forgive my frazzled hair and now permanent dazed look, the last month has been a blur.

As a side note (no offense to my buddies at Communitech), but Entrepreneur Week has the ugliest logo. See for yourself. They even made T-shirts. If I get a free one, I promise never to wear it in public.

(I am just teasing)

(psst… but seriously. It’s ugly)

The thing I am really excited about is the upcoming Bar Camp Waterloo on September 29th (this weekend). I’ll definitely be there! I want to see if Chris and I can prepare a demo in time. We have some interesting things to show. Tell your friends and please do come and say hello.

And of course, we have an upcoming Guelph DemoCamp happening on November 7th. I’ll let you know more once we’ve planned more!

My lawyer (and sometimes psychiatrist) Suzie makes fun of all these camps. She joked about making her own SuzieCamp. I’d attend.

Notes from Bill Gross

This has been a series of weeks filled with great learning for me.

Here is some smart advice from Bill Gross from the last issue of Business 2.0:

We started making only Internet companies because we felt this was an incredible new medium that had unbelievably high gross margins. If you could make a Web site, you could sell something online and you could make margins of 90 percent or higher. When we looked back at the ones that were most and least successful, we realized it had nothing to do with their margins. It had to do with how protectable the idea was. Was there a core intellectual property with which you could differentiate yourself and earn sustainable margins? Because you can make good margins online, but if you can’t sustain them, it doesn’t mean anything.

and

Q. How do you figure out whether the market is ready to accept some of these disruptive services?

Well, one of the things we learned is that you definitely want to have first-mover advantage. It’s always great to be first when you have a new idea that is a potential game-changer. But you also want to have the “last mover living” benefit – meaning that if you just go first, if you’re way too early, you’re not going to make it until the market catches up to you.

So I think the biggest lesson we’ve learned is that you need to find a way to raise enough money and spend it slowly enough that you can stick around until everybody catches on to your idea. The race is not to run out of your money first – it’s to be there at the finish line.

via Ajax Girl

Do you want to be rich or famous?

A startup adviser told me this over dinner last night. He was asked this once by Henry Kravitz of KKR:

Do you want to be rich? Or famous?

Because they’re not the same goal, and we often deceive ourselves. (Perhaps we could replace “rich” with “successful”).

We’ve Opened our Doors!

Well.ca is officially live an open for you to visit. Take a look!

We’re really proud of our new beauty site: well.ca/beauty. At our /beauty site, we’ve got tons of great beauty products from brands such as Maybelline, L’Oreal, Almay and more. I have a feeling this is going to be popular with women…

(Don’t worry men, we’ve got great beauty products for you too, check out this line from L’Oreal called Men Expert)

The major things we’ve done for this new site include:

• A full redesign of the look. Take a look at our new purple and green colors!
• The new beauty site, with it’s own look and product selection
• A better job of linking products together by brands — people like to shop by brand!
• A faster, easier to use site that is simpler to navigate
• Bigger, more clear pictures

But we’ve got much more planned. We’re working on personalization, communities, and secret stuff we can’t talk about but we can’t wait to demo!

So yeah take a look at the site and let me know what you think or if you have any suggestions.

Man, I’ve been waiting to put up this “We’ve Launched” blog post for so long!

(here’s a coupon that will give you 10% off until the end of the month. Just enter: BEWELL when you checkout)