Anyway, again, I’m still here. Midterms are done so I guess there goes my excuse for not posting. The cafe is still hanging in there and the Free WiFi Project is slowly growing. I need to really pound the streets in order to get some more nodes out there but finding the actual time during regular business hours is pretty tricky.

In other news I started yet another company, this one is named Campus Cards. We specialize in business cards for students. Cool idea, eh? That’s what I thought. I think that student business cards is a pretty untapped market segment so we’ve got a pretty good chance of doing well. The cool thing, in my opinion, about Campus Cards is how I set the site up to use fillable PDFs embedded in the page. Students fill these out and then pay through PayPal and I get a nice email with a PDF attached which is all ready to hit the printing press.

I started Campus Cards when I, in my position as “Director of IT” (yes, that’s in quote because I really just look after the website) with the School of Business at the U of A, was asked to look into helping our students get business cards. Realistically there are no printers around that will give you less than 250 colour cards for less than $30. Even if you find someone who is willing to do meet that price point you are still going to get dinged with design fees when your print ready art isn’t perfect and also shipping if they aren’t local. At Campus Cards we are offering students across Canada 100 colour business cards for between $15 and $20, inclusive of all GST and fees, and shipping is free.

This is sort of a unique opportunity. Doing the cards manually is time consuming, but I’m doing my best to streamline the process. Outsourcing isn’t really an option because of shipping costs. That’s one thing you can count against globalization: small transactions won’t survive international shipping fees.

Anyway, back to work at my new “home office” in the condo I recently moved into.

Unfortunately, being the poor ignored Canadian that I am, Google has chosen to overlook their largest trading partner and not include us. I’m not impressed.

Here’s the videos released:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Taujbud9DKA

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNT-JRyWykM

Arrington says that startups must:

1. Watch every penny, and
2. Hire the right people

I’d like to share a few of my experiences with these two points.

On watching your pennies

My first experiences with social networking, doing business online, web 2.0, etc. were both young and brash. I was 18 and I loved working with computers and Nexopia and I was full of huge dreams and couldn’t wait to make a million bucks. I was one of the original employees for Nexopia and in the early days we worked out of Timo Ewald’s kitchen! I thought it was pretty cool that we were so small that we didn’t need an office, yet we daily effected the lives of hundreds of thousands of Canadian youth.

The first half a year I was with the company I would come up with grand, money wasting, ideas. Of course the brilliance that was actually in charge shot down each one. It took me a while to realize that money wasn’t just sitting in a big vault that we could draw from. Sure the company was making lots of money, but it also needed it for future expansion, not for iMac’s or to send me to some stupid conference in Fiji! Yes.. I literally pitched that…

So Michael is right, startups need to pinch pennies. Timo and his personal advisor’s were very smart to be frugal in the early days. Now that the company is self supporting and doing well there is room for more extravegance. Heck, last year we moved into a nice loft office that houses almost 30 employees. I’m relearning this with my own business. I shouldn’t be buying things I can make myself, for example: a sandwich board or assembling a computer. It boils down to laziness and sometimes I’ve kicked myself for it. Live and learn.

On the flip side you need to spend money to make money. However, this is often misconstrued by us young brash entrepreneurs. What is really means is spend only what you need to make money. So if you’re trying to get your own business off the ground don’t go blowing a thousand dollars on classy fancy business cards or buying top of the line desks for every employee; you should order the cheaper regular cards and use your (free) personality to generate a relationship when you hand a card over. If you need a fancy desk or card to make up for your lack of sincerity and leadership you probably shouldn’t be in business anyway.

On hiring the right people

From personal experience, both in working for other companies and myself, hiring the right staff is like paying yourself more. Again with Nexopia, one of the first things I realized when I was working there is that we made some bad hires. Some people are just hired to plow through data, some as developers, and some as marketing or sales. Regardless of the position, someone who works for such a user driven site like Nexopia should be in love with their job and most importantly the website itself. This is especially true for small companies where everyone’s opinion actually matters.

Now obviously you don’t want to only hire employees who were members of your service. It’s important to draw from your outside resources and grab the best hires you can. However, being the best means willing to adapt to what your customers know, want, and love. In our case this was Nexopia, a Canadian social network mostly dominated by youth.

I realize that I’m not always right, but I firmly believe that if an employee is simply working to make the company as much money as possible then you have a problem. That’s the role management should play, to manage your employees so they work for the right reasons which then bring in the most money for the corporation. Yes, of course the sales team needs to try to make money, but never at the expense of the customer. There were many frustrating times when we would try to do things that were in our best interest, and not that of our young customers who have many social networks to choose from.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Nexopia and the people working there are great. It’s a good company that I hope finds it way through the maze of competition down south.

So far today they have made 9 posts! NINE! Holy cow, it must be because I’m out west here in Alberta. Radio3 must be pretty popular in the eastern Canada if they can be that active.

They also record and post live concerts which is really cool.

For being a Crown corporation I’m continually impressed with most things CBC. For instance, they rank fourth (previously third) in Google’s search results for ‘podcast’. Go Canada.