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Old School Style

Another business I’m involved in is Orange Life, which started out as a print magazine back in 2004. We distribute about 100,000 copies of this magazine in Canada, mostly in Toronto and Montreal, but also in Calgary and Vancouver.

Orange Life Magazine

More recently we launched a new website, essentially a blog about design, art, culture, and a million related things, but for which we’ve tried to apply some more old school editorial principles.

Through a network of about two dozen amazingly talented writers, many of whom have written for the very best print and online magazines, we’re starting out simply by trying to find a consistent and unique voice.

We’ll see how much room there is in the blogosphere for that consistent and unique voice, particularly a voice that has nothing to do with celebrity gossip or link-baiting reactionary politics. We’ll also see how well we can translate our offline business model (selling brand advertising to the largest luxury advertisers) in the online world.

Posted 28 June 2008 † Daniel Gibbons § Advertising ‡ Comments (0) °

A Brief Interlude From Fantasyland

Vancouver’s real estate market used to be notoriously fickle. Now it’s notoriously predictable. No matter what happens to our local economy or further afield, it just won’t stop going up. By contrast, it’s commonly understood that the US housing market is, not to put too fine a point on it, f*#ked, with average resale prices now down to about $195,000.

So I thought it would be interesting to see what $195,000 buys in my neighbourhood in Vancouver, the answer to which is apparently not much of anything. In fact nothing.

No house for you...

OK, so you could probably run the same gimmicky little test in several major cities and come up with nothing, or at best only the most pitiful of studio apartments. But, it’s at the other end of the market that the insanity is most pronounced, a condition nicely illustrated by a house I observed for sale last night just a few blocks away.

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Posted 23 June 2008 † Daniel Gibbons § Miscellaneous ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , ,

Risk and the (real) early adopters

For about 15 seconds earlier this week I was mildly interested in Plurk. I signed up after reading Mark Evans’s blog post referencing another blog post, which indicated that the Twitter-esque service was spreading rapidly among early adopters. Actually it said “first adopters”, which was what really got me thinking.

There’s a certain bravado to being a first adopter, with its connotations of inside knowledge, risk and thought leadership, all of which I think absolutely don’t apply to anyone who does nothing more than experiment with a free, consumer-focused service.

When I first read Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm, it was one of the few non-fiction books that really resonated with me. Since I first read it in the late ’90s, it’s fallen out of fashion a little, in part because of concerns that its model for marketing new technology encourages start-ups to look too far upstream, worrying about the leap from early adopter to mainstream rather than from innovator to early adopter. Still I like the book’s core message about how new technologies find their market and succeed.

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Posted 04 June 2008 † Daniel Gibbons § Marketing ‡ Comments (0) °

Simplicity

We launched the new Carrie & Danielle website last night, quietly and without a lot of fuss (but thanks for the coverage, Techvibes). I’ve been through many website launches in the past and inevitably there are things you didn’t think of until the very last minute, tiny but significant differences between the staging and production environments and hours of “shall-we-shan’t-we” push the big red button moments.

This time, though, I took care to stick to the mantra of keeping things simple. To start we have essentially one feature on the site: a Daily Q&A that poses a question to the audience and encourages their replies. It’s deceptively simple, actually, in the sense that the questions themselves encourage thoughtfulness and reflection, so the answers from our community shape a discussion that we think is quite different from typical pattern of blog posts and comments. But still it is one feature, and to be perfectly frank by no means rocket science to build.

But that’s the thing about rocket science, you only really need it to build rockets. It’s foolishness to over-spec. websites these days, since so many fabulous tools are available to reduce the cost and time it takes to launch your business and build your community. As I’ve said before, the great thing about Matt and the WordPress community is the extent to which they build things that make sense for their market, rather than some arcane supposition of what the market should want.

And I’m always a huge fan of everything Marc Andreessen has to say about the importance of the market in determining whether business of any kind succeed. You have to understand your audience, build something that addresses a real need, and in many respects the rest will take care of itself.

Now I’m not suggesting we’ve built close to everything we want to build for our audience. But we have built what we’ve created for them, which I think is the most important point.

Posted 27 May 2008 † Daniel Gibbons § Investment § Social Media ‡ Comments (0) °

Seasons in the Abyss

I’ve been watching episodes of Showtime’s Californication recently. It’s so good that it actually makes me sad, not because its plotline is tragic, but rather because so many people I know are gleefully (if inadvertently) celebrating the death of this kind of creativity, and if they get their way, relentlessly clever entertainment simply won’t exist anymore.

Showtime, HBO and their ilk anticipated much of what would change about the way TV content was consumed, positioning themselves to benefit from the fragmentation of the captive network channel audience across more specialized, subscription-based cable channels. This trend enabled a series of smart, witty and foul-mouthed shows to stick it to the mouth-breathing creationists AND generate serious revenue, what they call in the business a win-win.

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Posted 18 May 2008 † Daniel Gibbons § Rants § Social Media ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , ,

Why WordPress Will Make Drupal Irrelevant

Vancouver’s big on Drupal. On almost every corner in Gastown you’ll find a passionate advocate who’ll talk your ear off about its flexibility, the benefits of leveraging its community of developers and the extent to which out of all the choices for Content Management platforms it sucks the least.

But surely the primary function of a CMS is to make content management simple and idiot proof for non-technical users. It’s here that Drupal fails so spectacularly that I’m astounded it is even referred to as a CMS. Developers often argue that it’s unfair to expect Drupal to be user friendly because then it would inevitably be inflexible. A classic logical fallacy if ever I heard one, sort of like saying “all developers work faster if they use a command line interface therefore everyone who wants to work faster should use the command line.”

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Posted 04 May 2008 † Daniel Gibbons § Miscellaneous ‡ Comments (26) ° Tagged: , , , ,

Navel Gazing for Dummies

I’m all for the emancipatory power of the blogosphere and the various tools and services it idolizes. But occasionally don’t you want to have a Kingsley Amis moment and long for a more evolved and sophisticated level of discourse?

I realize it’s boring to play the disillusioned elitist card, but it all gets a little wearing when you’re bombarded by the minute with barely literate ramblings unpacking the minutiae of each new feed aggregator, groundbreaking use of the Twitter API and bombastic rubbish about the world changing in lock-step with the launch of each new navel gazing set of online tools. Particularly when you know that, deep down, none of the people writing about this stuff actually believe in it themselves.

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Posted 28 April 2008 † Daniel Gibbons § Rants ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , ,

Why You Shouldn’t Build The Next Twitter

When a company like Twitter raises a large B round at a giant valuation for a pre-revenue company it tends to send ripples of scorn through the tech community. People were similarly bewildered and upset when Slide got their $550 million valuation and of course livid when Microsoft’s strategic investment in Facebook valued the social network at $15 billion.

As Mathew Ingram points out, Twitter is clearly worth something if only because of its feverishly passionate users. Most likely it will get bought well before the pressure to make money really begins. But I think all of the anxiety about these success stories (and they are truly successes, exits or not) is more than a little misguided. The problem isn’t Twitter so much as it is the legion of me-too start-ups trying to build something with the kind of viral appeal of Twitter so they too can get funded and have exits.

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Posted 27 April 2008 † Daniel Gibbons § Investment ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , ,

Debt is Your Friend

I attended a great talk by Rick Segal of JLA Ventures this evening, hosted by my friends at BootUp Labs. Sort of a primer on the process you go through to raise VC money. Outsiders often have the best insight, and as an American running a Canadian VC fund, Rick’s better placed than most to offer an objective perspective on our strengths and weaknesses.

The short version: don’t dig yourself a hole with poorly structured friends and family rounds; convertible debentures are your friend; don’t try and raise VC money for a lifestyle business; really know your numbers (trust me, almost no-one takes the time to understand how their business actually works; it’s a huge differentiator); and make sure you check your ego at the door and really have the stomach and drive to exceed your VC’s expectations. All self-evident once you’ve emerged from the process of pitching VCs without knowing this stuff, and all things it’s infinitely better to know before you get started.

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Posted 21 April 2008 † Daniel Gibbons § Investment ‡ Comments (2) ° Tagged: , , , , ,

Getting Funded in Canada

I just got around to reading Paul Graham’s post on the VC industry’s reluctance to change its investment approach, despite evidence that its model might be broken. It’s hard to argue with the point that it costs less than it used to to create many kinds of technology-based businesses, and by extension that a valid approach is to make a larger number of smaller bets. I also like the idea that things are essentially binary. That is, web startups either work or they don’t, but it takes far less than the typical $3-$5 million A round to determine if you’ve got a zero or a one. Graham’s own YCombinator is of course leading the charge in proving this point.

In theory this climate should be good for Canadian startups. Historically we’ve had to do more with less, and some of our best home-grown success stories (Flickr, StumbleUpon, iStockPhoto, among others) have had great exits with little or no institutional funding. But what I’ve noticed in my own back yard (Vancouver), and what it pains me to admit I’ve been guilty of, is an expectation that a requirement for less capital makes a startup somehow less serious or demanding an endeavour.

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Posted 16 April 2008 † Daniel Gibbons § Investment ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , , ,