This post is a review of Episode 13, with special guest Matt Mickiewicz, founder of Sitepoint and 99 designs.
A few disclaimers. First, if you're new to the show, you've got to be prepared for Jason's arrogance and dry sense of humour. You learn to appreciate it when you've listened to enough episodes and start to get a sense for where he's coming from. Second, a warning: in this episode, he both claims there are three companies in Canada and tries to calculate the percentage of all Canadians that work for Research in Motion. Just let it go. Lastly, Jason's not necessarily known for brevity, as the 2h 25min run-time of this episode reinforces.
Why this episode appeals to me: Matt Mickiewicz is a young entrepreneur from Vancouver. As an applications engineer working for a Canadian start-up, it's nice to see a fellow Vancouverite getting some good exposure and Matt's breaking-in story as a teenaged entrepreneur is pretty inspiring.
My highlight: As a regular listener, the segment I look forward to most opens the show. In \"Ask Jason\" (00:23:00), questions from live callers about their challenges in starting new businesses always seem to illustrate that problems for new business ventures are common across markets: how to make your product or service most valueable, how to build a customer base and improve your visibility, and how to manage business relationships. This week:
Q1. What advice do you have for an entrepreneur looking to get into consumer electronics? Open-ended and vague, yes. It's not specifically Jason's area of expertise, but he was gracious with the caller and gave him some general pointers about getting into a hardware venture. The main take-away is \"zig where others zagged\". There's definitely a temptation, if you're looking to develop a consumer hardware solution, to veer into the lucrative big pond -- the billion dollar market -- with your new gadget or gizmo. But without a significant differentiator, you'll immediately find yourself up against the incumbants who have been there for ages. What consumer would choose Jim's Widget over a similar Dell or a Sony product. The key is to find the niche that people have missed and target your new hardware specifically to that niche. Definitely, in the research I do trying to find alternative applications for my company's hardware appliances, you can easily find yourself competing in areas with heavy competition and low margins. Not the ideal place for a new start-up to play.
Q2. How do you know if a potential partner/customer is really interested in your service? Two main valuable pieces of advice from Jason here. First, get a sense of a timeframe for the client's interest. How soon could we look to kick-off a joing venture? Without asking that question, you could find yourself without a target for follow-up, hanging out in limbo indefinitely. Second, speculatively offering a free version or mock-up to the customer can be a valuable strategy to drum up interest in your product and show a potential partner that you're serious. I've done this myself for web designs, with varied success.
New this week: In a new segment patterned after Dragon's Den, Jason and Matt take calls from entrepreneurs who pitch their start-up business ideas (00:45:00). Both calls this week were from entrepreneurs launching web service companies. You can hear the difference between the individual who understands the value he's providing and how to monetize his service and the individual who is still trying to understand the impact of his idea. Anyway, if nothing else you can learn a thing or two about what does and doens't make for an effective 120-second pitch, which in my case can be effective toward both a business venture and a screenplay sale.
Dating tips from Jason: Not a typical start-up conversation, but if you'd like tips on wooing your sweetheart from Jason Calacanis, tune in at 02:01:00. I'd crap on them, but they weren't half bad.
The back end of the show is dedicated to getting Jason's take on the week's tech news stories, this week largely Apple focused. Personally, for a show dedicated to start-ups and entrepreneurship, I think this segment overlaps with all the other This Week In... shows that Leo Laporte hosts and could be expendible.
Anyway, if your interested in entrepreneurship, even casually like me, give TWIST a listen and see if it can help answer some of the question you've had about your own money-making ideas.", 0, "Not helping me finish a screenplay. But, who knows, maybe it'll help me sell one.", 5, "Listening to weekly discussions on strategies toward entrepreneurship can only be good." ), new Blog( new Date(2009,APR,10), "pen pals", "Two months ago, I enlisted a partner in my quest to get a screenplay written and -- so help me -- if I'm going to fail to achieve that goal, I'm going to make sure I bring another good man down with me. My partner in this quest: my good friend, Randy, a film school graduate from Simon Fraser University, who has worked for the production companies of several of the big Vancouver-made films of the past few years: Watchmen, A Night at the Museum, and Good Luck Chuck among them. Randy and I have known each other for -- geez -- coming up on a decade now, and Randy was one of the principal collaborators with the Genus Theatre Company that helped put so many of our film shorts on the screen.
For the past two months, Randy and I have met weekly, each of us having brought a screenplay concept to the table. Each week we both write a scene from each of the two pieces, slowly piecing together a story structure that we hope will make two finished films. With a two three- to five-page scene for each screenplay being created weekly, we should have first drafts to go back and rework by the end of the summer. Randy and I have proven very creatively compatible so far. No punches thrown. That's a victory in itself.", 25, "Making weekly strides toward a screenplay is huge.", 0, "Haven't done much techie-preneurial though." ), new Blog( new Date(2009,JAN,31), "who writes short shorts?", "Some time in late 2008, I was asked at work to help come up with some entertainment for the company New Years party. Not exactly sure what would be the best idea, but certain that I didn't want a song-and-dance number in front of forty colleagues and spouses, I fell back on the medium I know best and wrote a comedy short film. A spoof based on the TV series Heroes, a water cooler favorite of the past year, I posited that our company would enter a down-hill spiral if all the engineers joined the marketing team. I used some cheesy time travel special effects, defiled the offices of all our executives, and included an obligatory dance number (Et tu, Slumdog?). A big success, pulled off with the help of several co-workers as actors and cameramen, it was my first complete piece of writing in a long time.", 5, "Creative impulses awakened.", 0, "No help here." ), new Blog( new Date(2009,JAN,2), "final cut", "I'm sure everyone has obligations that keep them from working on the things they'd like to work on. Projects around the house fall into this category.
I'm certainly not without my share of them. But I've checked a big one off the list. For the past 18 months, I have had two sets of wedding footage in my hands: one from my wife's sister, the other from a long-time friend who asked me in a last-minute panic whether I could point a camera at her on her wedding day. They've sat as captured footage on my Mac for the better part of two years, waiting my commitment to turning them into finished, tastefully edited renditions of their special days. Every time I sit down at my computer for more than ten minutes, I have had a little voice in my head reminding me that I needed fulfil my promise to the two special couples and deliver the final product.
In December, I finally did it. Both of them. Two sixty minute finished films for these couples, burned to DVD and hand-delivered. If you've ever edited video, you'll realize that it was no small time commmitment to complete (I think 20 minutes to every minute of finished film is a fair estimate, when you add color and sound into the mix). That said, it was my pleasure to do this for each of them and to return the original tapes for safe-keeping. But it definitely silences that little voice and will free me up to work on... well, the next household obligation.
Or maybe one of my two goals.", 1, "This can only free me up to make progress toward a script.", 1, "Sure tech ventures also." ), new Blog( new Date(2008,NOV,10), "took a ride on a reading", "Was invited this weekend to be a part of a script reading for Jake, a fellow actor/writer that came out of the same Simon Fraser University theatre programme as I had. Jake included five of us in his audience/cast, all of whom had either written or performed together over the past ten years.
I won't include any details of Jake's piece, it's an early draft for him, an as yet unprotected work-in-progress. But it was great to give and hear feedback for this screenplay, and to know that we all had complementary thoughts on the story and the characters. I hope it will be useful to him. Mostly though, it was nice to re-connect with a few fellow writers in a constructive environment and a good reminder that we're all plugging away on our own projects and have a support network waiting when the pieces are ready to be heard.",
1,
"No pen to paper for me on this night, but I'm giving myself a bump just for rejoining a writer's circle.",
0,
"Nothing techie about this event."
),
new Blog(
new Date(2008,OCT,16),
"making a racquet",
"For the first time since the mid-nineties, I am a member of a tennis club again. Tennis was the only sport I could really claim to be any good at as a child, having grown up across the street from the local club. I played almost daily and competed in the club tournaments, winning a couple of times in the boys singles event. But it's a sport I haven't kept up with any consistency. This year, with some coaxing from my co-workers, I'm now a member of the Burnaby Tennis Club and will be playing weekly to stay in shape all winter long.",
0,
"With at least one night a week that I'm not going to be writing, this isn't doing much to further my screenplay.",
0,
"Similarly, this is preventing me from inventing the electronic finger that pokes you in the side when you say something inappropriate, so my high-tech start-up is equally not furthered by this activity."
),
new Blog(
new Date(2008,OCT,16),
"website reboot",
"Spent some time this week tightening up the appearance of this website of mine and hopefully making this something I can actually use more to track my work. Tune in for more regular postings and updates.",
0,
"I guess that the act of re-vamping this website is actually taking time and effort away from other activities. Damn, behind already.",
0,
"Here, too."
)
);
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