We recently started the process of shooting yet another Brainpark video. This time around, we’re working with our friend Mark Rabo. In working with Mark I started dreaming of a video about Guelph and what’s happening in our Technology scene here. If you spend your days in Guelph tech, it’s easy to become deluded in thinking that we have a tech scene. The reality is that until outsiders think that, we’re still just cows, vets, and music.

There’s a simple battle of the minds that needs to happen. It requires an external focus, ie focusing on what people outside of Guelph answer when you ask “What do you think of when you think of Guelph?” Until technology is mentioned in a large portion of those answers, we all still have work to do. While no one’s asked me to, I’d love to build a simple Guelph tech ambassador program to attack this. In every talk I’m able to give outside of Guelph, I make sure to promote and mention Guelph.

If you ever catch guys like David Cohen speak, you’ll find yourself thinking “hang on, is he pitching Boulder Colorado to me?” The answer’s yes! David and his crew are focused externally on marketing to the world that Boulder is the tech city to be in. That’s what it takes, it won’t happen by focusing internally.

Back to Mark Rabo, check out the Hillside video he shot this summer. I’ve been collaborating with Mark on how we could produce a similar video to promote Guelph tech. We would use a DemoCampGuelph event as a medium for the video but the message would be about Guelph tech. I noticed today that Vancouver produced a similar video. With respect, ours will be better!

Our video will be web length, two to three minutes covering three topics. If I’m a business owner considering Guelph for my company, I’m probably thinking about these three:

1. How big is the knowledge pool (will I find talent to fuel my business in Guelph? Is there a support structure of other tech businesses to work with?)
2. What is the growth trend of the tech industry in Guelph?
3. What are the afterwork activities (nightlife, culture, family-friendly)?

The video will consist mainly of interviews with people at DemoCampGuelph, ideally 5-7 people from different companies ranging from established household names (wow, they’re in Guelph!) to brand new start-ups (they’re small like us). We will likely mix interviews with DemoCampGuelph footage and shots from around town.

In order to do this, I need to raise the money required to produce this video. We will likely need in the $3000 to $4000 range. If you are interested in sponsoring this project, or help raise the funds, please let me know. Or if you know who I should be talking to, City of Guelph, let me know? Or if you think I’m wasting my time, let me know that as well.

I’m very excited to be speaking at the upcoming Ignite Waterloo event. You can get tickets now! I’d hurry as the tickets just showed up today and they’ve already sold over 50, which is insane.

If you haven’t attended an Ignite before, you should. The tagline for these events is “enlighten us, but make it quick”. Have a peek here for videos from previous Waterloo events for a taste.

I noticed an undertone to the first day of talks at this week’s Business of Software. That was to be different, stand out, be unique. Create a different company. Towards the end of the day, when a speaker once again suggested that we all should build a ‘different company’, I considered raising my hand to ask… “But if everyone in this room follows your advice to be different, won’t all our companies end up being the same?”

I didn’t ask that question. In the end, that was good because it was answered by the final speaker of day 2 in the clearest way I’ve heard it before. Youngme Moon opened her brilliant talk with the following video:

My lame attempt to summarize: Strong brands stand out and somehow manage to get their customers to view their negatives as positives. Weak brands, through competing, drift towards sameness resulting in their customers viewing their positives as negatives.

One of her examples? While every furniture showroom competes by offering free delivery, great customer service, and quality product, only one brand stands out. There is only one strong brand in this space and it’s Ikea. The others have their positives flipped on them. Their amazing customer service results in “man I wish they’d just leave me alone when I’m in the store” while Ikea’s negatives are flipped as well, “Ah, assembling it is kinda fun”, “I can’t find anyone here who actually works at Ikea but this place is cool”.

Youngme also talked about how vulnerable different ideas are in their infancy. The reason being that a truly different idea is almost indistinguishable from a crazy idea. I’d love to see the looks you’d get if you’d suggested these ideas to Leon’s before Ikea came to Canada:

• Let’s not offer shipping.
• Let’s not compete by increasing the quality of our furniture.
• Let’s offer free daycare to our customers.
• Let’s not have great customer service, people can just roam around on their own.
• Let’s put in a full restaurant with cheap breakfast and meatballs.

In that setting those ideas would be considered lunacy right? If you’ve committed to building a different company then crazy ideas are one of your most precious assets and allowing them to be squashed puts you straight on the path to sameness. You will quickly become indistinguishable from your competitors. If that’s your goal then eliminating crazy is a good start.

Dharmesh from Hubspot talked about how your business has to make happy customers not make customers happy. What’s the difference? The latter is about tooling your entire business to churn out happy customers. The former would have killed Ikea. Had Ikea focused on making their customers happy they would have quickly offered free shipping, made their crappy furniture better quality and easier to assemble etc. In short they would have become the same as everyone else.

Does this mean you need to focus solely on your negatives, build crappy software and make your customers hate you? Well no. If, however, you have decided that being different is important then you need to decide what negatives you’re going to hold on to. Don’t apologize for them, in fact start trumpeting them. Being different for the sake of being different is being a clown. Being different to create a bit of friction and offer your customers a better overall experience is the path to a strong brand. If different is you then you also need to hold crazy in high esteem and foster it and you need to worry less about making everyone happy.

A personal example? I own a Daihatsu Hijet Jumbo. For me it’s the perfect truck. Someone recently told me “you have the coolest truck in Guelph”. People smile when I drive by, kids shout and cheer at the truck, people take photos of it, etc. Sure they’re laughing at me but if you’re building a brand, isn’t being noticed important?

Why is this crappy little truck cool anyway? Look at all the negatives. You have to drive on the other side of the car, it’s so small you can’t fit anything in it, nothing’s automatic, it barely does 100 km/h, you have to shift gears with your left hand, there’s hardly any room in the cab etc etc. Somehow though, all those negatives are considered positives and people think it’s a cool truck? If Daihatsu aggressively tried to make their customers happy, what would they do? I’m sure you can imagine what the average company would do and within a few years their trucks would look like every other truck on the road. They would become same.

I say keep up the crazy, own your negatives, do something different!

While it was only for a few minutes, I was incredibly honoured to share a stage in Boston this week with Seth Godin, Joel Spolsky, Eric Sink, Dharmesh Shah and many other monsters from the software business.

First, a huge thanks for Neil and Joel for once again setting the standard software conferences need to chase. If you work in software and hate conferences, then you need to hit BOS 2011. Neil’s taken all the good parts and stripped out all the hated parts, which results in an amazing event that’ll melt your brain, in a good way.

As always, I did my best to pitch Guelph and beer to the crowd. My slides are here if you’re interested.

After attending the first first Business of Software in 2007 I recall telling Neil that I’ve set a personal goal of speaking at his event someday. While it was only a minuscule lightning talk I feel like I kinda sorta achieved that goal this week. Who knows, maybe someday I’ll speak on the grown ups stage?

While it’s only a short lightning talk, I’m very excited to be speaking at Business of Software in Boston tomorrow. By excited I mean over my head, out of my league, utterly unprepared and skeered out of my wits. Having been to two of these conferences in the past, I have so much respect for the crowd Neil and Joel get out to these. I’m glad I’m on the first day so that I can relax and enjoy the rest of the conference stress free. Possibly humiliated and embarrassed but stress free.

With Corey from Freshbooks talking as well, there’s at least 20% Canadian content in these lightning talks which we should be proud off up north.

I’m asked occasionally what the City of Guelph needs to do to better support Guelph technology. I’ve even tried to answer that the odd time. An idea I’ve considered often is how the city can help our companies both recruit new people to relocate to our city and help people already here stop commuting elsewhere to work. Over the years I’ve hired a fair number of people who have moved to Guelph. In that process, I’m forced to compete against larger companies in Toronto and Kitchener/Waterloo with significantly deeper pockets. Their job offers typically include significant reimbursements related to relocation costs. This can cover anything from the cost of movers to lawyer and real estate fees.

Smaller companies are rarely in the position to offer this as part of a job offer. How can the city help me with that? I’m helping to sell Guelph. I’m creating jobs in the city and then recruiting people to move to our city. Why can’t the city help me with some of this? Find a way to empower our smaller tech companies to recruit people to move to our city.

What if the city, or some other organization, offered a relocation package? If a person has a job offer in Guelph that requires them to move then they can apply for this package. That would be a powerful tool I could use today to attract talented people to our city. I’m sure the city could partner with local businesses to make this happen as it could represent a significant amount of work for a moving company or lawyer. I’m sure people in real estate or home builders would be interested in sponsoring a program like this and seeing it thrive.

Insane? Likely but you asked what you could do to help…

At Brainpark, when we have the odd spare cycle, we’re working on getting a basic product development team area built. It’s a place away from our corporate site where we can be a bit more playful and be a voice for the design and development team. We’re looking for inspiration and ideas.

• What does this site need to include?
• What should it not include?
• What are the best product dev team sites you’ve seen?
• Should we talk about formal stuff like roadmaps, upcoming features, power user tricks etc?

Due to a number of conflicts, the biggest being that it’s election night here in Guelph, the date for DemoCampGuelph 15 has been moved to Nov 17th. If you signed up to the previous date, you will have to sign up again. Apologies for being flighty…

As always, you can sign up at next.DemoCampGuelph.com

My slides from IgniteTO 4 last week. I’ll work on getting some of text from it up here soon as well.

We currently have a bit more space here at Brainpark Guelph offices than we need. That may change at any point. We also really like hanging out with like minded folks and being ex coworking folks, we want to share space.

So, if you’re interested in having a desk or two on a semi-permanent basis with us here, let me know. We have a boardroom, great coffee, an awesome crew, and a keg of beer. Anyone who’s interested will have to come meet the team here, a first date?, and make sure we can ‘live’ together.