Are you a student, a recent grad, or the owner/operator of a Social Enterprise in Ottawa? The Ottawa Community Challenge wants you to apply to be a part of its inaugural event. This two-phase challenge gives student participants an opportunity to build their network with influential decision makers in Ottawa’s not-for-profit, business, and philanthropic communities, while offering social enterprises the opportunity to have students work in an intense, boot-camp style environment for 48 hours on a problem affecting their ability to deliver on their mandate and mission. If you’re looking to really ramp up your networking in town, you will really want to consider this event!

Techvibes TV: Scott Lake of SWIX from Techvibes.com on Vimeo.

If you’re not following TechVibes, you should.  They’re awesome for covering Canadian, local entrepreneurs and they work hard to get your story out.

Well done Scott and the SWIX team!

His talk is called "Let’s raise kids to be entrepreneurs", and I agree with many, though not all, of his views on that subject.

His comments about why he personally wanted to be an entrepreneur didn’t resonate with me at all, however. His childhood experiences (and later ones) were all about building business models. Finding arbitrage opportunities, discovering unmet needs for mundane products/services, hiring labour as opposed to performing it, etc.

That’s not why I’m an entrepreneur. What turns my crank is building products. Yes, there should be a solid business model behind those products, but to me, the business model is merely the thing that allows me to continue to build products, and not the end unto itself. Not saying one type of motivation is better or worse than the other, but they are very different.

Maybe there are two kinds of entrepreneurs: Those who are in it to build products, and those who are in it to build business models.

Which one are you?

"This is Avitu’s first of many video blogs about their experiences at Shopify. Since Shopify got their new office in downtown Ottawa, they have played a big role with the Ottawa community and have regularly hosted meetups such as Ruby Tuesday, Open Data Ottawa, and Fresh Founders Ottawa. As of July 26, 2010, Shopify gave Avitu the chance to work out of one of their offices as well as provide guidence with design, programming, marketing and business. This is an amazing opportunity that we have come across and we want to share our experiences with you.

If you want to check more about Shopify check out shopify.com. If you want to see more about what we are doing you can find us at avitu.com. Don’t forget to start a conversation with us! We are always listening."

Avitu incubating out of Shopify. from Avitu on Vimeo.

Ottawa based Inspire2go is a new social travel recommendation website that helps people discover new places that match their unique taste. It’s Travel Discovery Engine learns your taste when you rate the places you’ve been to. It then uses the ratings from the most like-minded people to generate your personalized recommendations of places to go and things to do. Members can also add new places, ratings, reviews, photos, videos and "Top 10" lists.

With Inspire2go’s new website there are also a launching with a contest to find the best travel destinations in Canada. Participants are asked to vote for places they consider to be "The Best of Canada" under the categories of Family, Romantic, Nature, Beach and Golf. The Best of Canada contest is open to public voting until August 31. Anyone can vote for as many places on each list as they like and add new places if their favorites are missing. The winners in each category will be featured on Inspire2go for the rest of the year.

Ideavibes, a start-up headed by Paul Dombowsky, is a crowdsourcing app that lets you engage your target audience online and increase their participation. What’s different about this company is that it’s socially driven; a percentage of their product, profit and time is donated to the not-for-profit sector to help socially conscious organizations move their brands forward. In addition to their app, Ideavibes also provides social media consulting and crowdsourcing expertise.

If you like nachos, patios and good times the summer edition of #GenYOTT is where its at. On July 29 Brixton’s on Sparks is playing host to this monthly meet up. This time the night is ’speaker-free’, but all those ready for some great chit chat are welcome out for what is always great evening.

Register for the event here.

As always this event is brought to you by @Japman_Bajaj @Alkerton @JenButson @MattRichling

Josh James, December 8, 2009 from Rollins Center at BYU on Vimeo.

I’m a big fan of successful entrepreneurs who visit schools and play a big role in the entrepreneurship classes. I recently watched this video of Josh James going back to Brigham Young and sharing some insights. Here are some of the tidbits I took out of it:

Josh dropped out of school, but took the most out of his classes. The only reason he dropped out was that he had learnt so much from his economics, statistics, and entrepreneurship classes, and applied them so well, that it didn’t make sense for him to stay in class when he was bringing in $125 an hour building websites for companies.

As a 4^th year student, him and his buddy turned a $12,000 investment in a CGI script business into a $200,000 sale of the company, which he describes as being “really cool. Like really cool. It beat selling out billable hours by a longshot, even at $125 per hour.”

In their next business, they had 50 employees, and in February 2000, they were sure they were going to fail. They moved to a paid model, and converted 0.05% (that’s not a typo) of customers. They were losing 800 customers a month, mainly small businesses. Of the 50 employees they had, 48 were working on retaining small business users, and just two were working on building the enterprise side. Then, they got calls from eBay and CNet encouraging them to keep doing what they were doing, at which point they took 46 people off of the small business side and put them on the enterprise side. That’s when it really took off, almost exponentially, ultimately leading to the $1.8 billion dollar sale of Omniture to Adobe last October.

Things he did personally that helped make it work:

1)      Reads a ton. Was reading books and magazines by the truckload. He used to read between 30-40 magazines a month, cover to cover.

1. Books and Magazines helped him shape his mentorship. He would read 15 books on a topic, and find the 5 best ones and just really absorb them. He did it on all the stuff he wasn’t familiar with, and when he was done, he would have 5 different opinions by experts, helping him formulate very strong opinions, and gave him more confidence as a young entrepreneur.

2)      Take alot of vacation time. Never work Saturday and Sundays, but work like a dog during the week. And when he vacations, he makes sure he vacations really, REALLY well, not just for himself, but for his kids and his family too.

3)      Puts the same passion at home as he does at the office. There are responsibilities at home that need to be paid attention to (i.e kids, family) that will help fuel you even more at the office.

4)      Get an Assistant as soon as you can afford one.

On where he got his ideas for business:

“They say necessity is the father of invention. Things that annoy me end up fuelling my ideas. Then I heard someone in an entrepreneurial lecture series tell us to make ideabooks. The idea is you write an idea down, you write the marketing plan, the sales plan, the employees you’re gonna get, the profile you want, your competitive advantages, and you just keep writing and writing and writing, and the next day, you move on to the next idea, unless you’re still so drawn to the last idea, in which case keep writing. And when you find one that you just can’t stop thinking about, that’s probably a good one to pursue.”

On starting a business:

“First of all, you have to make sure you have the right profile. If you’re too averse to risk, just don’t start a business. The number one problem people have is that they have ideas and they talk about it, talk about it, talk about it, but never do anything about it. And then they go to some professors, and the professors tell them “well you have to think about this this and that”… NO YOU DON’T.  Just start it, and I promise you, when you’re spending your own money on it, you’re going to pay a lot of attention on it!”

On getting your first sale:

“Do anything .. ANYTHING.. you can to win your first customers. As long as it’s not … (long awkward pause)... immoral… it might be borderline not legal, but as long as it’s not immoral, then whatever it takes. You gotta win those first customers. We had a customer come visit us, and i had all my friends come visit us wearing suits like they’re working on who-knows-what, pretending like they were working on stuff! Do whatever it takes to get those sales”

More on the first customers:

“Never give anything away for nothing. You may find you need to discount your price, but never give stuff away for nothing. If someone wants to pay less, you have to come back and ask them what they’re going to do to make up that difference. What kind of press release are you going to get? What kind of events are you going to speak and tout us at? What else are you going to do to make up the price difference? Never give away stuff for nothing”

On First-Time Entrepreneurs:

“It boggles my mind that people aren’t focussing more on revenue, revenue, revenue. Who cares if the desk isn’t put together, or some guy sent you an email you haven’t replied to, or some other guy wants you to attend some chamber of commerce meeting? Go after revenues. Sales is all that matters in the beginning. And if you can’t get a sale, THEN you go back and fix the product. But as soon as it is barely good enough to sell it, you sell it!”

On Business Ideas:

“For the most part, I don’t want a unique ideas There’s maybe a couple unique ideas that have turned into big businesses. But if there’s alot of people in the space, it’s vindication that people are willing to pay for it, it means there’s a market, it means you can make some money, it means you can compete, and it means you can be better faster stronger, especially if there’s only small players in the field.”

There’s a ton of good stuff in this video, and this is already a way longer blog post than I like to write, so I strongly suggest you check it out.