Soliciting Fame

For as long as I’ve had my cafe I’ve offered free wireless access to anyone who comes in. The idea is simple, if you’re here you’re probably going to eat or drink something while using the wifi. If you aren’t, then at least you’re putting a body in my window for other people to see.

Until recently my router only went a few feet past my building. It doesn’t help that I’m in an old cinder block building and the router was at the back. When I was still working for Nexopia I had schemed with a few of the engineers there about bouncing free wifi down Whyte Avenue using different repeaters. We came up with some grand schemes but nothing materialized mostly due to the time and cost restraints we all had.

Traditional wifi networks require the customization of each router, known as a node or repeater. I bought a Linksys WRT54GS router with plans for re-flashing the device with my own firmware. However after a lot of research I realized I didn’t have the technical expertise to do that. I could teach myself but it would take me a long time to become familiar enough with Linux to properly implement the router.

A while went by and I just kept offering free wifi to my customers in the cafe. Then along came Edmonton’s NextGen focus group on municipal wifi. Before I attended I once again opened up my research for free wireless networks and I stumbled across a company named Meraki and the idea of an open-mesh wifi network. I decided to order one of the Meraki Outdoor Pro repeaters.

I went to the municipal wifi focus group and we talked mostly about where to recommend the city implements free wifi. I was a bit turned off by the idea of leaving it up to the city’s IT department to make recommendations on how to implement this sort of system. If it’s anything like the U of A, it will be ancient, expensive, and unreasonably secure. I let everyone know I had already been considering this and I would be going ahead with my own experiment. This was met with a lot of encouragement because it’s exactly what the city needs to see in order to get something done. Perfect.

The idea behind a mesh network is that one plugs in a gateway node to a hard line to the internet. This node starts broadcasting a wifi signal. Any additional nodes that are given power within range pick up this signal and start repeating it. This is all automatic without any setup. You can only repeat a signal so far before the quality degrades, so every once in a while you’ll need to add another hard line. With enough nodes you can blanket whatever size area you want.

Meraki is a great concept… but with faults. They create neat looking wireless repeaters that have all the firmware pre-installed out of the box. Unpacking and plugging in my router was as simple as that, unpacking it and plugging it in. Then I logged on to their management page and put in my order number and it automatically connected to my device.

Meraki has one of the slickest dashboards I’ve seen for anything hardware related. It lets you map where your nodes and are track who is using it. As well you can introduce payment structures for people accessing your wifi if you’re greedy enough to do it.

Where Meraki fails is in letting their customers customize the product. Initially you were able to hack the devices however you want until Meraki decided to remotely update each device’s firmware and change their EULA. Read more here: http://www.virishi.net/from-happy-hacking-screw-you-story-meraki

Unfortunately I don’t have a lot of creative control with the splash page for my router. The splash page is going to be how I justify deploying these nodes. If a few ads on a welcome screen can cover the cost of the hardware I’ll keep adding them. So far I’m going to sit on this one for a month and see what the usage is like.

Meraki pros:

• Simple to use
• Great tracking and management software
• Payment options
• Super easy to expand

Meraki cons:

• Expensive!
• Very little plash page customization
• Extremely vague on payment terms and what sort of cut they get
• Evil ad bar for regular versions
• Evil EULA that doesn’t let you modify their hardware

Since Tuesday afternoon there have been 42 unique users of the network, and only about 5 have been inside my cafe. The Meraki repeater is supposedly good for around 700ft., and I can get a connection well down the street in several coffee shops. Right now it’s suction cupped to one of my windows.

In the future I’ll be looking more into Open-Mesh.com, the open source wifi mesh project that is much cheaper and fully customizable.

This last week I spent a good portion of my free time deliberating over new designs for my business cards and flyers.

The biggest complaint my customers have had is finding the cafe! Visibility is pretty limited so I chose to include a map on both the business cards and the flyers. I originally had a Google map pasted in there but it wouldn’t scaled properly so I ended up tracing it with the pen tool in Illustrator. The Starbuck’s and Wee Book Inn logos are popular landmarks here on Whyte Ave. A friend suggested I should have added the Princess Theatre as well but unfortunately they aren’t organized enough to even have a website, nevermind a logo.

The green is a major change! The cards used to have a bright red text on them (against the better wishes of my designer friends). Months ago I painted one wall of the cafe green and I want to continue to white/wood/green colour scheme.

Another major change in both flyers and cards is the amount of information. I had previously thought a minimalist look was pretty snazzy, and while it might look neat it’s essentially useless to anyone who picks up the card. So I included a long list of service we have and I highlighted the two I felt people use the most: “download anything”, and “type your resume”.

Download anything

I pride myself on having the best and most unrestricted computers on Whyte Ave. Other cafes or libraries really crack down how well you can use the computer and what you can do. I let my customers install whatever they want and look at whatever they want. This means someone can download all the file sharing software or porn (yes porn) they wish.

On the topic of porn: a great deal of my regular customers like to use dating and otherwise “private” websites. I have a very strict “I don’t care” rule as long as nobody else is being bothered, including staff, and most people are pretty modest anyway. The set up in the cafe is great for this. The computers aren’t super secluded so it’s not just a bunch of creepy people sitting in the back of the room. Instead each monitor is separated by the box and a good deal of desk space. This provides some good respect for the individual while leaving the cafe friendly and open.

Type your resume

Most of my customers don’t own computers, hence their visiting an internet cafe. There are a fair number of younger patrons who stop by the type up or print off a resume. With the number of (assumed) low-income young people living around Whyte Avenue and in the university area I want to encourage the continued use of the cafe as a cheap place to come in and type up your resume.

Along the resume tangent I have been considering offering a resume “doctoring” service where a customer drops off a rough version of their resume and I can take a look at it and spruce things up for them. Any pricing suggestions are welcome.

All that is left with the re-branding is to change the website and ordering a new sandwich board.

Over a TechCrunch, Michael Arrington wrote a post agreeing with some parts of Jason Calcanis’s post on how to save money running a startup. The two great points Arrington brings up strike a cord with my small startup experience with Nexopia here in Edmonton.

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.

Today my new signs arrived! After much shopping around I decided to order a sign from EdgeLitSigns.com a branch of Carmanah. They do all sorts of neat LED and solar panel stuff, check them out.

The signs ended up costing me exactly $1,267.72 including shipping from Calgary. They took about four weeks to make which I thought was long but I’m happy in the end. Apparently Carmanah has a $1000 minimum for any work they do, so I assume my signs would have been cheaper if not for that.

The edge lit LEDs are pretty unique and not as bright as neon, but that’s fine because it cost approximately 1/3 what I would have paid for a channel letter sign with neon inside. Plus you can see through these when they’re mounted.

Initially there was supposed to be one bank of LEDs but it wasn’t bright enough for the order had to be change, again no big deal.

Now I need to mount them higher up on the windows, I still haven’t decided how to do this yet.

More pictures:

Visibility has been a huge problem I’ve faced since purchasing the cafe. Being located on the second floor is a real drag even though the rent it cheaper. At night the place is very hard to recognize without some illuminated signs. Really I should have boughten these babies six months ago, they’re worth it.

Entrepreneur tip: If you ever start or buy a business make sure you analyze how visible you are to your target market. For me, half my market is people passing by on foot or car.

My sincere apologies for the radio silence this last week. It has been a hectic and stressful last few days but everything seems to be coming together now!

So here’s the scoop. I took possession of my new internet cafe on June 30th. I went over everything with the owners and he showed me the ropes. It was going pretty smoothly until we realized that a miscommunication between us ended up with him disconnecting the phone and internet. He was under the impression that I was arranging that all myself. Fortunately my old girlfriend is dating a guy who works for Telus. So he phones me up and essentially puts through a work order on the Saturday instead of me having to wait until Tuesday because Monday was a holiday.

A tech rep shows up on Wednesday to fix the phone line, apparently something went wrong when they tried to reconnect it. Unfortunately I had to wait until this afternoon for the ADSL to be hooked up.

In hind-sight it was a good thing that I wasn’t able to open until now. It gave me a chance to clean out the entire place and rework some of the software bloat that was installed on the machines. The bad part is that a ton of money never came in which I could have used.

Since the seller of the business wasn’t using a lawyer it created more work and made things more difficult for my lawyer. Also, June 30 is the busiest day of the year for real estate lawyers since it’s summer, middle of the year, and end of the month. Lots of possessions take place on that day. Apparently I was 1 of 32 possessions he had to deal with!

So part of my stress was from some missing money! Since my lawyer was swamped, when I wrote the cheque for the purchase out to him (he holds it in trust for the seller) we forgot to subtract my previous deposit of several thousand dollars. Needless to say when I looked at my bank account later I was pulling hairs out wondering what I could have overlooked because I needed that money for some first month expenses! I ended up pulling it from my credit card which is very very very bad, never do this! In the end I figured it out and gave him a ring, I’m picking up the money tomorrow morning and hopefully I can convince Visa to waive the cash advance fee.

Apparently debit machine accounts aren’t transferable. I have a useless machine sitting in my storage room that is still assigned to the old owners. Good thing my bank is hooking me up with a decent rate and any deposits don’t count as transactions in my bank account.

It’s really poor that Telus has taken so long to reinstate my internet connection. I’ve basically missed a week of all things Nexopia and work does need to be done! Now I’ll be able to spread my time across both the cafe and working for Nexopia. Obviously I won’t be full time, more like 1/3 time, but it’s still a connection I want to keep. I’m just going to have to put my trust in everyone else there which in the past was hard to do when I wasn’t involved in a decision. Oh well, I can’t have my cake and eat it too.

Tomorrow I’m going to install Firefox and some other goodies on the computers. The last owners knew how to set up a network but I don’t think they had much knowledge of tweaking and making good software perform.