Thanks to Waterloo Record for featuring Brainpark in their 2009 Tech Spotlight. If you haven’t seen it yet, check out the magazine. Lot’s of great interviews and familiar faces. It’s nice to see a local paper pointing their spotlight, literally, at some up and coming local businesses. Honestly, I would have worn shoes had I known my feet would end up in the photo.

As well, a massive thanks to Communitech for their screwup in awarding me one of their 2009 Tech Impact awards:

“The awards recognize individuals and organizations who have demonstrated unparalleled leadership and support for the growth and success of the Waterloo Region technology industry.”

To be included in a group with Jim Estill and Steve McCartney could only be a clerical error. So to Brandon Gills, Ryan Gilies, or whatever the name of the person who was meant to receive this award, apologies but now that I have it, I’m keeping it.

My wife’s a photographer. That business is going through a major transition. Everything going digital was just the start of the commodification. These days, the wedding guests and photographer assistants typically have better gear than the photographers. Why? Well because those people have day jobs.

“Wow, is that the Nikon D300? I can’t afford it because I’m a photographer!!”

For me, as someone who spends too much time thinking about technology and business, it’s an interesting problem. There’s clearly been a massive shift in the entire framework that the current wedding photography business model was predicated on. That being limited access to resources in the form of camera gear and a darkroom. Yes skill etc comes into play but what’s primary is camera and darkroom. So I’ll ask you, what do you do?

For me, I start looking for the value in the new environment. What clearly has no value is having a great camera, access to darkroom, etc. Weddings are filled with great cameras today with hobbyists behind them. All that really matters is staging the shot and capturing the data. I have to manipulate the data into a pretty picture even if I’m the one who shoots it.

What has value? The staging of shots and the cat herding that’s required to get people paying for their photos to cooperate. The deft skill required to make the overall day a pleasant experience, ie bedside manner. As well, the long hours spent in photoshop after the wedding, editing the good shoots into great ones.

My photography 2.0? Hire me to shoot your wedding. I won’t bring a single camera of my own to the event. Instead I’ll coordinate the multitude of cameras and photographers at your event. I’ll have a memory download/storage device with me that I’ll download any and all camera memory to at the end of the event. Then I’ll edit and put together 200 high quality proofs for you, attributing the person who took the shot. All this for a fraction of what I’d charge to actually shoot your wedding.

Dumb idea? Likely but what would you do? This massive shift pattern is occurring more and more, as an exercise, what’s your wedding photography 2.0?

I’d write a summary of the night but luckily it’s done. The quick bits: Mathew Ingram spoke about how the Globe tries to run like a startup. Then we had demos from TribeHR, Declan Whelan, Steve Hanov, Don Walsh, Arni Mikelsons, and the audience favourite this time around Harry Scanlan.

Get your demo ready for #12 coming in December or January. Sign up to our google group linked off DCG site to stay up to date. My tip for demos? Treat them the same as pitches. I believe it was Austin Hill who summed it up best, hearts, minds, wallets.

Hearts: Tell me a story so I feel the pain you’re going to solve. Even in a technical demo you can pull this off. “So you’re up until 2am once again trying to cobble together yet another build by hand”. All you want is to get to the question “ok, I know what you’re talking about, but how are you going to solve that for me?”

Minds: Get into the techie bits of how you’re going to solve the problem you’ve now got me feeling, “my build tool will manage all your builds by…..”. The goal here is to get me to think “ok, I like that solution, how much?”

Wallets: How much, pricing model etc? Or if you’re raising money from me, how much and what are the details?

Mess up that order and you likely won’t get through it all or I’ll tune out. Most demos start with minds, then the crowd pushes them through questions to wallets and they never get to the hearts. Go for the heart first, make me cry first and then you’ll have my attention!!

I subscribe to a Canadian workshop magazine that runs a contest in each issue. The contest is simple, they print a photo of some ancient, odd looking device and you have to guess what that device is.

The contest is called “Learn How to Run a Tech Startup”. Ok, no it’s not but it should be called that. One of, if not the, biggest challenge of every business is connecting a real problem with your solution. Why is this more of an issue with startups rather than ‘traditional’ businesses? Tech startups often start with a solution, or a tool, not the problem or the customer. At some point the smart ones realize building a tool isn’t enough, you need someone to use it.

We startups often operate like that contest, in that we hand strangers wacky looking tools expecting them to fill in the blanks. Worst case they don’t give our tool a second look. If we’re lucky, they look at it, maybe play with it for a bit, then put it on a shelf to gather dust. Maybe, just maybe, some day in a distant future that person is struggling away with a task and has a revelation. They shout “hang on! I think I have something that’s just right for this” as they run to the basement to hunt for that wacky tool only to realize their son used it as an ornament for the spaceship he built last summer.

Now contrast that with this story. Picture a woman standing in front of a massive overgrown hedge on her property holding her grand-dads rusty pair of garden clippers with a look of despair on her face. You walk up and hand her your company’s nifty electric hedge trimmer all plugged in and ready to go. With a smile she breezes through her chore, writes you a cheque and runs up the street with your trimmers shouting “hey guys! you have to check this out!” Ignoring the liability of her running with your trimmers in hand, that’s a dream experience for a business.

Simple right?, yet rarely achievable. You must identify a real problem a real person has. Then conceive, create and build the right solution, AND show up in the instant when real people are experiencing the problem you solve? The opportunities to fail along that path are monumental and an easy trap is to focus on products and technology instead of customers, their problems, their business, etc.

Some related recent reading: The Customer Development Manifesto: Reasons for the Revolution, The Customer Development Modal.

Our next DemoCampGuelph is on for Sept 30th. Sign up to attend here. If you’d like to demo, apply for a demo spot by contacting me directly. Include a one or two liner pitching why our community needs to see your demo!

Check out demoCampGuelph.com for all our other links. Please spread the word!!

A quick wrapup post on last week’s DemoCampGuelph. Once again thanks to all who attended, demoed, helped organize, promoted, etc. These are community events and only as good as what we all give. Thanks to eBar for hosting us and our event sponsors Communitech, Sun, and our newest sponsor Guelph Chamber of Commerce.

The evening itself went smooth for the most part. Estimates are there were 60 to 80 people in attendance, including a great crowd that stuck around after the event to socialize. There are rumours that some people continued on at The Albion afterwards but I can’t speak to that.

Special thanks for Will Pate for stepping in last minute and saving our butts as our invited speaker. We had a solid list of demo submissions and unfortunately didn’t have room for all. If you didn’t get a spot for this event, please don’t let that stop you from submitting to the next event.

Our demo’s for the evening were:

• Adil and Ticket Trunk: Democratizing the online ticketing industry.
• Cory Fowler with jTweetr: jQuery tool that uses the search api to bring a feed of tweets to a website.
• Andrew Miklas with PagerDuty: aggregates alerts from your monitoring systems and forwards them according to your on-call schedule.
• Ben Vinegar with GuestList: Sell tickets to your event online and expand your audience. Manage your attendees and cashflow with a professional set of tools.
• Jason Hanley with BuyMyStuff:a nice easy way to manage an online garage sale of multiple items.
• somaICE: is a CMS that is SEO’d @ the core platform Level that allows end users the ability to manage their content while giving them comprehensive business management tools and reporting. Sort of like Salesforce.com + BaseCamp + Drupal on roids all in one Box
• Justin Lai with Markiter: an online service aimed at helping small businesses gather market research through instant focus groups.

Thanks to Simon for his major overhaul of the Crowie (pictures anyone??). The Crowie for demo of the night went to Cory and jTweetr, keeping in mind that the prick host forgot to get Justin and Markiter in the voting round.

Thanks again and keep your eye out for the next event, likely late September. Sign up for our google group to stay informed.

I’m just realizing now, less than a week from the actual event, that I haven’t even posted here about the next DemoCampGuelph. Lucky we don’t rely on this site to drum up demo’s and attendees.

This Wednesday July 15th at the eBar in downtown Guelph, come hang out and see some tech. Jason Van Zyl is our invited speaker and will kick the night off with a short talk. We have a load of demos so it should be a fun night.

Sign up here if you’re attending. All you have to do is show up, you do NOT have to demo to attend. If you are interested in demo’ing, contact me directly asap.

If you missed DemoCampGuelph9, Blake took some appropriate notes.

Here’s a little tip I use a lot when interviewing/hiring. Make sure you involve people in the process who appear to have NO decision making power. A receptionist or admin type person is great but technically anyone will do, all that matters is that the people you’re interviewing think you have no say in the process. Let’s call these non-decision makers NDM’s to save me some typing.

Now flip it and make those NDM’s key decision makers in the hiring process (Yes I realize I’ve just nulled the NDM term I created by making them decision makers, slack please).

Why?

I alluded to this before, in that you can get a better feel for a person’s true character by observing how they treat the NDM’s. They can’t help but put on a show for the decision makers, they’re trying to impress them.

At brainpark, if you treat our NDM’s like slop you have zero chance of joining our team regardless how many sql’s and sharp C’s you have in your basket. We need people who treat others with respect regardless of their ‘power’ or title. I’m actually considering taking this a step further and intentionally introducing some mild conflict between candidates and NDM’s to see how they handle it. In cases where some tension has naturally arisen between candidates and NDM’s, it’s always incredibly revealing. Through this we’ve found some lovely, gracious people and we’ve uncovered a few nasty pricks. Both of which are impossible to spot on a resume or by asking what the difference is between a class and an object.

Now a tip for the other side. If you’re interviewing for a job, don’t assume the manager, and other ‘power’ players are the only ones making the decision. Or even better, just don’t be a dick to anyone period.

As Mark writes, Brainpark has been selected to the final four for Launchpad at Enterprise 2.0. As the selections were based on community voting, I just wanted to say thanks to everyone who took the time to vote.

One of the talking points in my recent MeshU talk was “lead with action and change, not policy”. For whatever reason, maybe just front of mind, I seem to be repeating this thread more of late.

Whether it’s HR type processes within a company, product design or your software process, it’s rare that leading with policy is effective. Symptoms of this are referred to as ‘adoption’ issues. Why aren’t we doing what we said we’d do? Instead of using policy, cultivate a focus on making small course corrections, of a reasonable scale from an implementation perspective. Watch for the changes that are successful and then find ways to codify those, ie make them policy.

In my opinion, policy should be a communication and sharing strategy rather than governing or leading. Does this scale? I have no clue. Certainly you can take the small change approach within smaller groups, then codify the proven ones to a larger population. I don’t want to tackle the scaling issue here, just convey a simple approach that works for me personally.

This approach is heavily influenced by Jeffrey Pfeffer’s book The Knowing Doing Gap. For a shorter summary read, try this article titled “Why Can’t We Get Anything Done?” The basic premise is that organizations struggle with major gaps between what they know(policy) and what they do(action). The painfully obvious solution being that if you only create policy through action then you have less of a chance of having a gap.

Bottom line, use policy less as a tool to create change and action and more as a way to communicate(share) successful change.