[Uncut] Milton Innovation Community Meet-up #3

Milton Innovation (00:41)
Alright.

Let's grab our food and find some seats so we'll kick start this show.

Ugh.

Alright, can we turn the music down slightly? Thank you, sir.

having a good time so far, or at least it looks like it. I love the networking, I love all this, I appreciate everyone coming

I love the people getting cozy in the couches, got the nice people out front, I appreciate this. Got the bunch of networkers in the back, really appreciate this too. Awesome, so we have a fun kind of session here that we're gonna go through. I'm gonna try to talk as...

as less as possible in all of this. I think that we're all here for this cut right here. So I'm gonna stop before the main show. I'm gonna be the blocker. We got a couple things to go through. And then one of the things I wanna talk about, well, we'll get through.

So first of all, just thank you. I think that this is a great turnout overall. Just thank you to the community, whether you're watching on live, if you're here in person, just thank you. Thank every single one of you that came out tonight. I know that you could have been anywhere else and you chose to be here, which I really, really appreciate. I would love just a show of hands if this is your first time here.

Awesome. Just over 50% brand new people. This is great. I hope you do not have your hands up next time. Hopefully you guys can come out to the next ones that are here. But a great turnout overall. I love that it's 50% new almost every single time. And this is just a great turnout. It shows what's actually here in Milton. Thanks to the venue for hosting this, setting up the mics, kind of lights, all this stuff. This is great. Thank you for the food as well. Please don't feel like you can't go and eat while I'm talking or Dave's talking or anyone else.

and get the food, do all that fun stuff, it's there. I'm hoping that it's empty by the time we finish tonight, and if not, feel free to take some home. Also, thank you to Rick for coming out here and his son for checking everyone in, a volunteer. Big round of applause for Rick. Thank you.

Thank you, Rick. Thank you for checking everyone in. I gave him a 30 second crash course on what to do right before everyone started showing up. So he adapted very well and I appreciate that. So a big shout out to Milton overall. This is helped and sponsored by the Town of Milton overall. I worked directly with the economic development team to kind of do this and grow these events and kind of push what's next. Whoa, that was loud. Push what's next. So I think that this is kind of good. So thank you to Milton. I don't know if there's anyone here representing Town of Milton.

We had a couple of councillors that showed up, but they unfortunately had to leave. So thank you to the Town of Milton overall. I would also like to thank our new upcoming event sponsor. So this is something that was new, kind of just happened between the last event and this event. So first of all, RBC. RBC has come on board to kind of talk about one of the, be a sponsor of one of the actual events and we'll talk about that a little bit later on. As well as the Halton region itself, kind of coming through for an actual event and actually helping sponsor the event overall. But we'll talk about that at the end of the presentation. But just shout out to our new sponsor.

I appreciate every single one of you. Yeah, more on these later. So here's my wonderful agenda. We're going to try and go through this almost as fast as we can, but I'm going to make sure that everyone understands what's happening next in a little while. So this is our agenda. You can see 3A is the main title why everyone's here. So no harm, we're just glad that you came out. We do have a quick little talk too from Dynette like Duck.

Thank you. And I do want to open this up to the community overall. So please feel free to start getting your pitches ready. If you own a business, if you're in Milton or local, if you're here today, feel free to come up after, kind of at the end and come and pitch your business. And that way you can get some good networking in, whether you're a mom and pop shop, whether you run an IT company, whether you're consulting, anything like that. It's always good to make sure that people know who's out here. So feel free to, you know, the mic will be open to you as well.

So for, since the crowd is new here, I'm gonna go through who I am, just so everyone is aware. Please feel free to come up and ask me any other questions afterwards. I think I'm approachable, I don't actually know, I feel like I am. But please feel free to come chat with me about anything that you see on here, anything that is on your mind. This is for the community, by the community. So if there's anything that you ever need, any other tweaks, any other information that you want the community to have, come find me.

So my background, mega nerd. I went to school for computer software development in network engineering, so I'm actually an engineer by trade. Really sat there and realized I didn't wanna code. I'm not a developer, I understand how it all works, but it wasn't my, yeah Justin's shaking his head, that you get an awesome PM to work with.

So now I transfer into PM, so I've been a product manager for over a decade, serial entrepreneur, I've run five companies in the past, kind of currently looking for my next thing. I spent three years working with Justin and Eric.

a Silicon Valley startup that was in the short video space and live streaming by e-commerce, shopping, all that fun stuff. I came back here, so I currently hold nine patents, three of them are in AI and one of them is in blockchain. So there's my background. So I'm still a nerd as you can tell.

Today, I run a company called ShossX and it's a holding company that focuses on delivering customer value through innovative solutions, and that falls into a whole bunch of categories. But really what it means is Milton Innovation, while we're here today, kind of getting the community together, getting them out, getting you whatever you need. So this is what I mainly focused on.

I own a consulting company as well, Epilogue Consulting Group for Business and Entrepreneur and Startup Consulting. So if you need some, you know, how to price your startup or, you know, how to go for fundraising or how to hire your first, you know, engineer, stuff like that completely on board, spent again, spent three years kind of doing this already. So this is my world as I sit right now. And then I'm a co-founder in something called Liteworker which is building the AI.

store for basically all the AI apps. So we're aggregating, reviewing all of the AI apps that are out, aggregating them all so we can provide a good user experience because there's no central place right now for AI.

Startup advisor, business mentor, so kind of falls into kind of the epilogue consulting, but also going through and actually working with startups and being able to help consult with them. I am part of a couple different programs through a couple different schools, so I can't talk about them right now because we're still finalizing some details, but through some major schools or some startup incubators and stuff like that, I'm a part of those programs. I'm an angel investor through AngelOne. I don't know if anyone here is from AngelOne.

There we go, got one in the back, appreciate it. So, angel investor through angel one. Deeply interested in AI and health tech. AI is everything and also nothing. I was just having this conversation. AI is in everything and yet is nothing to a lot of people but also very scary, so hence the other business about trying to democratize AI. Super interested in health tech. My husband, I have a little dog as well. He's 15, cute little fluffy thing and I absolutely love him. He's my background on my phone if you want to see him afterwards. And then mechanical keyboard and watch enthusiast.

So there you go, this is where I spend my money. These are kind of unnecessary things, especially mechanical watches. So this is my life. Feel free to come talk to me about any of this. I can talk your ear off about a lot of things. Being a PM, I have a lot of opinions about things. So we can sit and we can chat. So, nothing in innovation, kind of why we're all sitting here, why we're kind of gathered all around.

And the goals, I just wanted to kind of go through about the goals, about what we're doing, making sure we're all aligned, because again, this is the community for a community by the community. So the short-term goals is, you know, build a tight-knit community of like-minded people. I think that all of you here today share some sort of passion around tech or innovation, and whether that's, you know, scary innovation like AI, or, you know, you just want to bring a subscription service to your flower shop that you own. There's tons of different types of innovation, but we're all here for trying to push the boundary forward. Create innovation circles. So within this, there's gonna be

groups of people, whether you're a designer and want to have a design group, whether it's women in tech, whether it's all these other pieces, I want to be able to build this out and be able to have all these groups supported. This isn't just engineering, this isn't just product management, this is everyone who supports around it. It's sales, it's lawyers, it's all these pieces.

Spread the knowledge between each other. Again, you guys spent a whole lot of time networking right before, I'm glad that you guys are all chatting together. Again, this is a community, this is for all of you guys. So spreading knowledge, spreading that information, making sure that everyone has all these fun pieces of nuggets and information to be able to be had. Feel free to share, I'm sure that I'm hoping that everyone learned something today, even if it's AI is not actually scary.

Empower connections. Again, you guys are all here. We're all having a nice conversation. So just empowering these connections. Some of you have numbers on your name tags. I got numbering some of them, so please feel free to go connect with your numbers. Not everyone has a number, so feel free to connect with people who don't have numbers. And go and sit and talk to them and learn about them and kind of feel free. You might find the inspiration you need from the person who you least expect.

promote diversity and inclusion. I'm glad that we're trying to go towards this. This is a big thing. Came from Silicon Valley where they did not do a good job of this and I wanna make sure that we do a good job of this. This is one of the biggest mandates that I wanna be able to follow through for this group is how do we make sure that everyone feels included? This is a warm, welcoming, not scary environment and how do we make sure that this is kind of good going forward?

and establish a local network. So this comes back, this goes into something else I'm gonna talk about in a little bit, but just kinda just establishing a local network. There's a lot of good incubators, there's a lot of good technology places, there's a lot of good schools, there's a lot of good banks, a lot of good people around who can help build, who can help transfer knowledge and start building that local network. So we're more of a connected piece overall. We're not just Halton, we're not just Milton, but it's where we fuel the whole ecosystem.

And also just have fun. None of this is serious. This is not war. This is nothing. This is to get away from all the not serious stuff. The goal is to come out here, have fun, eat some food, have some drinks, meet some people who might one day be your co-founder, but worst case scenario, you shake a few hands, you can make a few new friends. Let's have a sip of

Great, longer term. This is where the fun stuff happens now. So one of the main things I came through over the past little while is trying to become the tech-teo of the HALT in the unrepresented areas. If you're familiar with tech-teo, I actually think some of you are from there, thank you. Trying to become that. Tech-teo is obviously a very well-known established organization. I've become good friends with the founders overall. This is an unrepresented area for outside of there. So how do we replicate what they do, what their success is?

all those pieces in these underrepresented communities like where we are. We want to be seen as an industry leader so we want to be not only following what everyone is doing but also pushing the boundaries forward. We want to be able to have this group of people who when you think of innovation you think about coming to Milton, you think about coming to Halton because this is where the industry is actually being pushed forward.

establish a global network, so I did talk about the shorter term about establishing a local network. There are a whole bunch of great incubators and ecosystems all around the whole world and how do we tap into those? How do we make sure that we're spreading knowledge? How do we make sure that we're giving knowledge and taking knowledge from these large organizations?

Kind of pushing into that as well, how do we make sure that innovation is being pushed forward, but also how do we kind of do public policy? We talked about AI just in a little conversation off to the side, and should it be, you know, should it be governed or should it be not? And this is a wonderful topic, and I hope that we can, you know, start to have some opinions on this about, you know, whether it should be or should not be. I think it's an interesting topic overall, and one of the things that I would like this group to be kind of a leader in.

And just generally have more fun. As we go through, we're going to get more people. We're going to have a bigger group, a bigger audience overall. And I think we can just have more fun. I'm hoping that everyone's having fun today. And this is literally just the start.

Long term, I don't know why this didn't show up. Cool. So long term, I do own a holding company, so we're also looking at a couple other pieces in here that are outside of kind of the Milton space, and one of them is a coworking space that we're looking at. Nothing's official yet, but just trying to gauge interest for what's going on. Milton doesn't have anything that's a coworking space, an innovation space, an incubator. We have to go to all of the other regions. So this is something that we're in the middle of looking at. I've called it the lab because if you'd like Dr. Dre, I mean the lab would depend.

nice little reference there, which I really like. So dedicated to hot desks, office space, boardrooms, content creation, mentorship, all of these pieces are all bundled together. So this is something that we're looking at again, the community has been asking for it. We did have the MEV before, I'm hoping to branch some of that into this. And the other one is kind of a venture kind of arm. So I do the angel investing. I do want to give the ability to have people who are accredited investors, to be able to have people who are interested in tech, but may not be able

effort to be able to invest alongside myself to be able to come in. Check sizes are a heck of a lot smaller for things like this. You're not writing a $50,000 check, you're writing a $1,000 check to be able to get into startup. So both these things are things that we're looking at. None of these are official. These are just things that we're trying to get your interest about. Please, if you're interested in either of these things in the community, come talk to me. This is a QR code for you to sign up for just information around the venture stuff about how it works, so please feel free to scan. This deck will also be shared afterwards.

But yeah, there you go. That's kind of the longer term play for the holding company overall. So what steps, right? We have short term and long term goals. We wanna make sure that we're doing pieces in here. So since we last met, HALT and Small Business and RBC have come on as sponsors and they're both sponsoring events.

Our Halt and Small business is coming on for February. RBC is coming on for March. So these are both really good sponsors. These are kind of making sure that the collaboration effort is there. Again, it's not just us, it's how do we empower the ecosystem? We want the Slack community, I think about 50% of you, if you came through to one of the previous events, you were actually invited to the Slack group. Please feel free, if you have not been invited to come find me, I'll make sure that you're invited. I'll send out the link to be there on the Facebook or Instagram, sorry, the Facebook or LinkedIn page. So please feel free to come and join those.

It's called Halton Innovation, just because we want to be able to get all Halton together. So it's not just Milton Innovation, it's all of Halton, again, fueling that ecosystem, putting all this together, really putting kind of Halton on the map. Started a whole bunch of content creation. Two new podcasts got launched under this umbrella. One is Uncharted Business Paths, which is I've been bugging Jack forever and this is on my fault. It's not to actually go through and do this.

kind of telling the stories about people who are in these smaller areas. So if you own a business, whether it's tech related, kind of consulting, anything like this, please reach out to me. I'd love to give you some exposure.

going through this and then the Milton Innovation Podcast, which is really just talking about kind of the recorded version of this, making sure that you get some representation kind of in more places than just being live or just live streamed also in the podcast. Also, if you follow me, I've just started to make TikToks. I'm very, very awful, but I would appreciate some follows. You will see some dance moves at some point. They're not gonna be very good, but you will see some, cause I, yeah.

And membership program. So membership program we're going to talk about a little bit later on. There was a brief time when the website did have a membership program on it. I do know that some of you signed up for it. That old, that one is now deprecated. I do appreciate people going through. We went through and kind of redid the pricing structure. We did the mentorship program, a membership program. So I just want to make sure that old model that you might have signed up for is deprecated. So I know a few people added it to cart, went through the checkout process. It was free, but it will be deprecated and rolled into this new system.

happening this quarter. We're going to be doing reusable name tags in lanyards as much as I own. Oh, do I have a name tag on? I'm Mike.

We're going to be doing reusable name tags and lanyards. I think this is something again, pushing the green by being reusable. Why we're not wanting to do this, not wanting to waste, not wanting to have the single one off, we're going to be able to get name tags. Again, kind of link this to that membership model too. Your membership will be printed on the actual name tag itself. So we'll be doing reusable name tags and lanyards. We're focusing on building out a job board too. I know that a lot of people right now are in the middle of looking for jobs. Either you're here job hunting, you just started a company, your company might be hiring. I think there's a lot of pieces around people

for jobs, especially wanting to stay local. So we'll be launching a job board this quarter. Courses for online and in person. So we're looking at a data analytics course, and unfortunately Nick, who is making this course, couldn't be here, he had a meeting conflict at last minute. But also we're looking at courses, so please feel free, if there's anything that you wanna learn, there might be someone in the community, if you wanna learn software development, Justin could just hand up already for this stuff. There you go, there you go, if you wanna learn, Elixir.

Go talk to Justin. You want to learn engineering? Go talk to Justin. You really like JavaScript? You can go. Please feel free. If you want to, anything that you want to learn, someone in the community might have that knowledge already who wants to share, who wants to give back. And we can start to coordinate about learning things and not only being a community and being out here to be networking, but also to upgrade your skill set to get that next job. Or more importantly, find a job.

And our ecosystem partner program, which is the kind of building that full ecosystem program with the local incubators, the local communities, making sure that we're building all together, making sure that we're all tied together and making sure that we're sharing knowledge, people, information back and forth. All right. This is the fun part. So water

So over the past little while, we've been working on a new brand, and you might have seen these in places, and these were just placeholders. The left one was made from... I have no idea where I got the left one from. The right one was made from Shopify's free kind of program. That's because I couldn't figure out a good placeholder or a good logo enough, and my designer was very busy because he's also my co-founder in Liteworker.

So he was very busy doing things, so we went through and we actually finally, finally launched a logo. And we're going to show it off today for the first time. We are going through, and what I do want is actually community feedback as well. This is, again, our logo overall. It's not just my logo. I spent a whole lot of time and energy going through, but I would love the feedback on it overall. So...

So colour scheme a little bit. We wanted to be collaborative and community based. We wanted to be shared ideas through conversations and we kind of wanted the branding of the M and the I in here. And we also wanted to make sure that the representation from the tech side was there. We wanted to make sure that it felt inclusive. We wanted to make sure all these things. So this is the logo that we came up with. This is very clean and simple. The goal was to have it look like people. So if you see them, they actually look like people overall. The M and the I are based on a grid system overall.

very simple. And the little areas between what I would call the heads, and unfortunately I don't have a pointer, looks like speech bubbles. And the goal is to have a community-based logo overall. It's also built on a grid system, so it's very, very structured. Though I look at this as the way of...

like tech, it's very structured, it's based on a grid, it's based on ones and zeros, it's very, very precise and that was the goal of this, while still introducing a little bit of playfulness with the rounded corners. So this is the new logo that we're going through. The color is also meant to represent kind of, just green and innovation and pushing forwards. We went through a whole bunch of color schemes, green was kind of where we ended up. The good thing about this is it's also a little bit flexible. So we wanted to make sure there's something that could adapt to different sizes. We wanna make sure that it was adaptable,

all it was kind of oh sorry it was one size fits all in multiple different ways so there's multiple different versions of this and it can expand and contract depending on what it what it needs to be so this is it on kind of one line it shrinks it can also go longer and taller depending on what we want to do if you ever want to launch Milton Innovation courses it can just fit and expand to that as well and this is just a wonderful kind of pattern that was made based off the logo again kind of not just tying it into a logo but tying into a whole brand overall

So this is what we're looking at as it sits. This is kind of where we spent our time and energy over the past little while. We wanna make sure that it feels good. It feels a hell of a lot better than those other two logos that we made. Again, very well balanced, very clean, very simple. Wanna make sure it's community-based. Wanna make sure it represents all of us.

This also leads into swag. So today we actually have stickers to give away too. So I think I printed off some stickers. I'm not sure I actually have enough for everyone. So come find me and we'll get some free stickers. And we're gonna go through and do t-shirts and hoodies and lanyards, and more importantly, whatever the community wants as well. If you want water bottles, things like that, we wanna make sure that we can give these away just to make sure that we have kind of representation within the community overall. Also, we're gonna be hopefully doing some limited edition stuff. So if you're a speaker, if you're a volunteer, if you're stuff like that,

as rewards for coming up here. Dave's name is on the list for a shirt when it comes out that says I pitched or I talked at. So kind of a picture.

Okay, I think this is the last piece. I've talked for a heck of a lot longer than I thought I was going to. Membership. So community member, being in this room is always gonna be free. That's the goal here. I wanna be able to drive the community. I want everyone to be in the same room. I always want that. But we wanna introduce a couple new tiers to provide more value. And the goal is always to give more than we take. So we wanna show off these three new tiers. And I stole this from TechTO. And this is, you can find yourself on this map in here, whether you're a mentor, a future founder, a startup team. We wanna make sure that we have something to offer you

We want to make sure that we are giving you value. Not everyone fits in the same boat. And this is probably from the previous pricing that we, or the previous outdoor membership. I narrowed it down too far. That was a full mistake. So this is much more open and inclusive. Are you new to Canada? Are you new to tech? Are you a founder? Are you a future founder? We want to make sure that this group has something to offer you.

So we've gone through, so the membership that you have right now, you come out to meetups and stuff like that, completely free, that will never change. We're introducing a digital membership, an all access membership, and an innovative membership. These are kind of three different price points. We're going to start doing digital and online classes as well, and digital online courses, to making sure that we can actually have a voice and make sure that we can do it more than one. We don't want to be limited by the people being able to get together. We want to have multiple different things.

You have the ability under digital to attend additional events. All access will have kind of exclusive events that are more...

towards talk to your investors, founders, operators. You have free tickets and stuff like that. To the standard events, we'll talk about the events on the next page, and then the innovators kind of mentorship session. So whether you're going through and you're building up your business, you're trying to grow it overall, you're trying to do that next thing. This is kind of the three kind of tiers that we're sitting in. And then they all sit under, you get special perks for each one, you get special discounts. This is still in the middle of being built out overall. I just wanted to show the first version of this. So the meetups, this is where we are today.

to be free, this is in person. This is partner locations, it's networking, it's speakers on specific topics. Some examples, AI machine learning, founder series, next slides we'll talk about that as well. Standard events, so this is at partner locations, but maybe more industry panels, hands on experience.

data science, how to build a brand, product management, venture capital, things like that. Something that's above and beyond. It's not necessarily not gonna be available to everyone. There will still be speakers at Meetups that do these things. These will just be more hands-on sessions. And then the innovator ones. So like paid location, one-on-one to experts, mastermind courses. So this is event leadership, corporate partnerships, stuff like that. This is kind of what we're looking at as it sits. And again, this is, as we're going through, we wanna make sure that Meetups are always free.

But at the end of the day, we want to make sure that we're providing more value. If you're in the middle of growing your business, we want to be able to support you. And we want to be able to do that in the best way possible. And we want to be able to do this with different types of memberships.

So next three meetups we're going to talk about. First one, February 28th. This is with Halton, small business. The topic overall is how to brainstorm better, workshop on ideation. I definitely want to attend this. The tickets are free. There are no deposits required like there was for this one. There are limited tickets available for this one, so please feel free to scan this QR code.

Right now to buy that ticket you register or when you leave this event. This is a just because of the partnership here These are limited tickets. So please feel free to scan this one definitely acquire those tickets Yeah, how to brainstorm better. It's going to be a hands-on workshop. It's from 930 to 1230 So this is a morning event. This is slightly different, but it is in this location This is just a slightly different variation again, just doing the partnership

Next one on March 27th is actually in partnership with RBC. The topic is finance related, so we're going through and still trying to figure that out, but because it is with the bank, we are trying to do more finance related. It's actually going to be at a different location for the first time. So RBC has a meeting location. We're going to be doing it out of their venue. Again, it's going to be the same kind of thing as this. Nothing really changes, just the location. The timing is the same, but this is in partnership with RBC.

Tickets are free for that one as well. Again, no membership. No deposits needed nothing like that This one is fully free So please feel free to sign up for this one and then we come back to this location this come back to April 24th This is a topic that is TBD, but it is in this location. This does have the $10 deposit required as well But again, as you know when you show up you get that money back because I want to make sure that people still come Out if you come out I want to refund you the topic for this is TBD just like these ones So if there's ever a topic that you want whether it's how to find that your company how to build your company

company, how to do marketing, how to do XYZ, how to do your first hire, please feel free to come tell me. We'll find the right people, we'll bring them in and we'll make sure that we have a good talk on them. All right. I've talked for a lot longer than I thought I would. I want to make sure that I have time for questions. We can also do this afterwards since I'm blocking Dave. But if any questions, I'm more than happy to answer, but if not, I will hand it

Awesome, no questions for Mike. So presentation wise, we've got a presentation from Dave. We're gonna have a quick little session with Dynamic Duck from Lauren and then open Mike. So please feel free to get your pitchers ready to have your three seconds about what your business does for networking and stuff like that. But let's hand this off to

It actually worked. Oh, that was a tough act to follow. I think you had a lot of stuff going on there. Yeah. I feel like I should have spent more time on my slide and my intro. Hi, everyone. Thanks for having me. My name is Dave. I'm going to talk about a couple of topics tonight. The first one is finding a problem that's worth solving. So you might be...

to start a business, you have an idea, you're not sure if it's a good one or not. Went through that with RBC Ventures and I'll talk about the process we use. The second one is profitable acquisition of new customers. So this is what I currently do, I'm a product manager at Shopify, so just some tips that could help you find people online more profitably.

So just a bit of my background. I'm currently a senior product manager at Shopify. Basically, I've been working kind of in the back end of different things, things that are quite technical, but really add to the bottom line of merchants. So making it quite easy for them to acquire customers online without breaking.

I spent four years at RBC Ventures. And I founded a business at the bank, it was called Brentle Sheen, and also I was the head of product for another venture called Moose Down. And previously I was a product manager at different startups, I had part of their crew of engineers probably for the past 12 years or so.

Okay, so the first part, finding problems that are worth selling. So I'll basically show you the business that we came up with. There was a payment tool in the renovation business called General Shum. And I'll start out with the one we came up with, but then talk about the

So RBC Adventures, this was about four years ago. They hired people to develop new businesses that went beyond banking. These businesses were either acquired or they were partnerships or they had the ability for people to start new businesses from scratch. This is what I did and it was probably the funnest time of my career, basically getting paid to ideate new ideas and then basically make some money to try and cut.

So this is what we came up with. Basically a renovations payment platform. We saw there had been issues in the renovation industry and I'll talk about that with trust between contractors and homeowners. And this was a payment tool that basically provided trust where there wasn't. It basically helped money in escrow. That could be held within the app. It could be released. It could be...

was done digitally, it was done online, and it had the backing of the bank. This was a fun little promo video. Let's see if the sound actually works. Contractors have been given a bad rap. Clients have been given a bad rap. I've got to listen to this. I guess the sound's not working, but basically it was a renovation podcast that was going on, and we were promoting it, we had customers. Ultimately, it didn't make...

to full scale, but the process was great. And this is what I'm gonna talk about. Somebody came to you and asked you how to look at the Canadian renovation industry, come up with a business that is viable and is something that could scale across Canada, how would you go about it? Well, this was the process we used. And...

It's really common for people to jump to solutions right away. But what will help ground your idea is trying to figure out what are the problems that you want to solve first. So the first thing you want to do is look at different market research, hop into interviews. And the interviews are very contextual when you're asking people about what that problem was and how they actually made it.

experienced it. And then there's something called outcome-driven innovation. So I'll bring you through that and talk a bit more, but it's a way to weight the different problems and to help you target the ones you wanna go after.

So market research, nothing groundbreaking about this. There were some interesting stats that came up though. So pretty big market, $80 billion in Canada, renovations, for renovations that people know about. A lot of the renovation is done under the typical cash, but the ones that are reported, it's about $80 billion market.

10% of people in Toronto actually get their deposits stolen. So there's people that go around, they poise, they show themselves as a contractor, and they just rip off people. Like 10% of people in Toronto just get ripped off. They pay their deposit and they never come back. And other major cities, it's about 7%. You don't see it as much in smaller cities because people know each other, but it is something that's happening.

And then these two stats were very.

64% of homeowners don't trust their contractors, and 53% have problems with the renovation. So basically an industry with all types of problems. So we want to interview people and hear from them what their problems were. The key thing here is not to pitch people on a solution. Hey, if I had this payment app, would it work for you? You have to find out what are the key problems and are they the problems that are worth solving?

So a tip for interviews, if you ever do customer interviews and want to know more, I highly recommend this book. It's called The Mom Test. The idea is if you have a great business idea and you were to pitch it to somebody like your mom or somebody that's close to you, what this book tells you is those people don't want to let you down, so they'll likely lie to you. They'll tell you that it's the best idea ever.

It's gonna make you a lot of money. But unfortunately, they're lying. So this book talks about how to ask questions so you get to the truth of what people really need.

So the interviews, this was really scrappy, like even though it was part of a bank, we didn't go through some agency to recruit people. We created Facebook ads, and we drove people to like Google Forms. So the point is it's pretty accessible. You can do this very easily. We offered $25. We talked to 10 people one hour each, and we got a lot of good insights. These are 10 different people, actually 12.

at the outcome survey. So this is again looking at the problem and looking at the outcomes people want to achieve. So when I talk about an outcome it's like getting a reliable contractor, having a renovation that's delivered on time and on budget.

Those are outcomes people want. But those are necessarily really important to people. Or maybe they are really important, but they have a good solution already. Those aren't necessarily things you wanna go after. So after we had our themes and ideas of what people potentially wanted, we went back and we surveyed a couple hundred people.

And we basically came up with different opportunities. The opportunities lied in the things that were high importance, but they have a low level of satisfaction kind of in this area. You could have problems that were really high importance, but they have a high level of satisfaction. It means like there's probably a really good solution in the market out there that you don't necessarily wanna go after.

So this is, probably can't read it, but some of the ones that basically said to us were big opportunities. So big one was unexpected cost. It always goes over cost with the renovation. Another one is finding a reliable contractor. Those are things that people have high importance, but most satisfaction. So.

That was only part of the story. So the other part was the contractors as well too. In the news, a lot of the media likes to talk about contractors as being the villain. All these people that go around and basically steal people's money. However, what we found was it's also true. There's great contractors out there that get ripped off by consumers, by homeowners. So there's some different quotes. You know, David said, we've always been hurt by a contract.

always been chasing payments, that's what contracting's all about. I have to tighten up the payment schedule to protect myself and I feel defenseless when the client refuses to pay. Litigation will end up costing more. So a lack of trust on both sides and that's where we thought we could step in and create Reynolds Shield.

And this is kind of how we summed up the problem. So much on the line homeowners and contractors are too exposed during renovations. Both contractors and homeowners are getting ripped off. So that's a problem that can be solved by many different things. But you know that it is a valid problem and it is something that you can continue to iterate on and go after. So it's a good way to...

figure out, you know, if your solution that you might think of is directed towards the right problem. And also, you know, you can pivot pretty easily too, because you know that problem is still going to be there, even if your initial solution doesn't work. So some of the key points. When speaking to customers, really try and focus on the problems they want to solve. Determine which problems have high importance or low satisfaction.

and avoid pinching your solution and asking them if it's a good idea, it's likely going to lead to false positives. The best way to test a solution that you have is put it out into the market and see if people actually pay for it or

So, yeah, so that's the first topic. I'm also happy to take questions to you, or we can talk about it afterwards. The next topic talks about digital advertising, so it is quite a bit different. However, you know, let's say you have your startup and you have a problem, you have a great solution, you need to find people. And what I generally work with is digital advertising.

space and help people drive traffic to different websites. So I'll talk about that. So let's take an example here. This is a fictional website. They're selling jackets. How do I get people to my site? Exactly, right? Like that's a perfect ad. That's a perfect ad. It's shown it to one person and that person wants to buy. That's what you want to

Yeah, we have to see if he actually puts his money up, right? So this is pretty basic, but there's many ways to get traffic to your site, to get potential buyers. So people could fill in what the actual, sorry, my alarm's going off. They could fill in what your URL is and go direct to the site. You might have your email, their SMS, their phone number. You might be able to send them a message.

You might be able to improve your site so that it ranks higher in search results. And then you get over to different, you can pay for different keywords, you can pay for ads as well. I'm going to focus on the paid part. That's not to say these other kind of owned organic parts, but they're quite important. But people, unfortunately today with all the distractions online and that, many businesses need to put money into ads to drive people to the site.

So this kind of goes without saying, and probably many people know this, but these large advertising platforms collect vast amounts of data on people. All these people that they have on their platforms, they know them very well. It's been reported that Facebook has 29,000 data points on the average user, and they have, I think, three billion people right now online on their site. So the missing ingredient, though, with this,

is they don't know which of those people are going to buy that jacket. So let's just go through a basic ad targeting example. So what happens is you go to an ad platform, you say, I want to target people from the innovation group. And if you want to target people on the

They see the ad, hopefully they click on it, and then they go to your site, they add it to the card, they put on the payment information, purchase.

What the ad platform knows is really the first two steps. And steps three through seven occur on your site. In reality, these algorithms on the sites that pick the person to show the ad to, they need a lot of direction and data to figure out who is that right person. And they do that by showing it to thousands of people.

The goal that you're sitting on is the people that come to your site and what they do on your site. And you need to transfer that data back to those ad platforms more efficiently.

So that's where you might have heard the term pixels or tags. You might have heard of that before with digital advertising. That's where they come in. So they're a little piece of code, JavaScript code, that runs on your site. And 24-7, they're basically sending data back. The data they're sending back is like a page view or a product view or add to cart or somebody purchased something.

The ad platforms use that information to optimize who to show the ads to. And with higher purchase intent, or sorry, events with higher purchase intent, so those are like the ones that get farther down the funnel. Those are the ones that are rated highest. So if you look at kind of the intent to buy, when somebody first comes to your site, they might just see a page for your product view.

Then as they go down the funnel, they get close to the purchase. Those are the people that have the highest intent to buy, or they actually purchased. So the ad platforms really prioritize these purchase events to find other people on their platform to send to your site. So they'll see this gentleman here who purchased the site. They'll have 29,000 data points on him. They'll find other people like him on the platform.

in probably the target area I'm looking and show that ad to them and then send them to the site. So it's really leveraging all that vast information they have on the people on their platform. But unfortunately, there's a problem. So a lot of the data that is sent back, 98% of it is anonymous. And a lot of it's powered by these different third-party cookies that allow to do that. And a lot of that is continuously going on.

As you get further down into the funnel, there's usually email or phone numbers. Because the data that happens onto your site, those ad platforms need to know who is that user. So the way they match that is usually with an email or a phone or a cookie. So what does this mean? If there's no identity, there's no optimizations.

If an event doesn't have identity, the ad platform can match that activity back to the user. Unmatched events don't help reduce your ad costs. And then, just talked about, like, email, phone, click ID, that's what they use. So, a little bit of plug for what I do in the business that I work for, Shopify. So...

We built a lot of these built-in systems where a lot of that transfer just works. And we do it in a couple different ways. We augment the data that the merchant already has so that when that data gets passed back to the ad platform, it matches. A couple of examples of that are...

TikTok. So we did an integration with TikTok. They found that with the integration we did, they got 19% more events, so more data, but it also on average for the hundreds of thousands of merchants that are using TikTok to advertise on average, they saw their cost acquisition drop by 50% just off the board.

So the different partners that we've worked with so far are Meta, TikTok, Pinterest, and Snap. So if you do use Shopify, I would suggest, and you do want to advertise on those platforms, I would suggest using those apps that are there. And it really does the best to get the most out of your probably minimal ad budget.

So a couple of the key points, ad platforms know a lot about their users. The mission link is what happens on your site, what people are buying, those people are. And then basically the better the data transfer between your site and the ad platform, the lower the cost of ads. If you don't use Shopify and you're selling online, something to maybe ask your team or...

perhaps yourself if you're into this stuff, is server-side data transfer and different data augmentation techniques. That's really gonna help, especially going forward with third-party cookies going away. So I think that's it. Yeah, so I referenced a couple of the books.

So those were two kind of meaty topics, but I went pretty quick through a lot of them. So I'm happy to answer any questions you may have, but hopefully some of that was

I just bought

Absolutely. So for people that may not have heard the question, this gentleman just purchased flip-flops and he's still getting targeted by flip-flop ads. What's happening? Yeah, that's a huge opportunity lost. So what might have happened is the data transfer, you might have had an ad blocker would have blocked that. You may have...

you know, tracking, which is good too. So that basically means that whatever ad platform is serving up those ads to you doesn't know that you purchased. So they're wasting money on him because they already purchased, he's not gonna buy another pair for fault again. And they're also wasting money on not being able to know that person purchased to find other people on the platform like you to get those people to purchase. Yeah, good example.

It's so important to you, right? But yeah, why are you wasting your money?

So we built up the prototype. We transferred about half a million dollars of money across about 10 different renovations. And at the time it was developed. It was considered a business that didn't need to set itself up as reporting to FinTrack because we were sending, we were admitting money for renovations specifically. So that legal opinion happened.

I think about a year later after we got some results and we got the product built, we were told that was not the case anymore, didn't wanna take that risk. And if we were to be like a FinTech business, right there costs hundreds of thousands of dollars of reporting and risk and different things. I'm not a banker, but it wasn't worth it to the bank to keep going. So, oh, okay, yeah, so.

They basically cut

That's

Yeah, totally. You want to repeat usage. But sir, what do you mean? Like how do you manage like if you're only selling to one person once? We'll see. You

Oh, yeah, I'm not an expert on that.

So what I've seen in the past though with other businesses and there's people much more skilled at these types of things is things that would potentially be complimentary in what they're buying. So for instance, if you know somebody who's buying flip-flops and it's winter time, perhaps they're going on like a vacation. So you might want to target them with other swimsuit or something like that. But yeah, it's tough. It depends on the type of business.

That's not my area of

Great questions. Thank you. Sorry my slides are so ugly. It's not my

for passing that

Yeah, yeah. So my team, we work on what's called customer behaviors. So we're part of our larger team too that's called Engage. That team has, we have an email tool, we have a chat tool. But me specifically, I'm the data transfer manager and it's both with pixels on client side and then also we've done the server side stuff. We have a built in identity graph for each merchant.

That's managed by a different team, but we utilize that data to augment the data that's sent off to the ad Yeah.

All right, Lauren, I'm going to, so of all, round of applause again for

Cool. So this is the part of the time I'm going to open it up to the floor for businesses to come talk about themselves. Lauren is going to start when we let her tell you all about her business. I think you might have seen her face here before. But please feel free. This is not a scary spot if you want to come and pitch your business. If you're a consultant, if you're a recruiter, if you're in home renos, if you're in any of this stuff, please feel free to, if you built a Shopify app, if you come and just want to pitch your business and kind of.

for what you're looking for. If you're looking for clients, if you're looking for a co-founder, if you're looking for anything like this, safe spot overall, please feel free to come and give some shout outs here and feel free to let me know what you need. Here you go. Please use both, one's for the live stream and one's for everyone else here. Okay. This one looks like a rabbit's foot. Okay.

All right, so like Dave was talking about, like a reliable contractor, you also need a reliable marketing partner. So you might've seen these little ducks laying around. These are my new venture, my marketing agency. So a little bit about myself. I've been in marketing for over 18 years. I've worked at both the B2B level, working in law firms, working with...

document solutions companies, as well as medical devices, the whole gamut. So I've probably done marketing for every single industry at this point. I just recently finished a contract with the Town of Milton where I was serving as the digital service squad. So my job was to meet with small businesses here in the Milton area and help them walk through their marketing practices, as well as help them to acquire grant funding.

So that's a little bit about what led into Dynamic Duck. So with Dynamic Duck, obviously we're always looking for innovative ways to market yourself, right? So the dynamic part of it is that the marketing world is always changing and you need to adapt to different things. Facebook is always changing their algorithms, so is Instagram, so is even the search engine pieces. Google Ads has significantly changed

last year, so trying to find innovative ways that you can tap into all of those pieces. So what I'm here to do with Dynamic Duck is to help you in whatever facet you're in. So I have three consultations, feel free to book a meeting with me, we can sit down and talk about what you need from your marketing. To also piggyback on what Dave was talking about and what you had asked about, kind of what people purchase products and how do you lead into additional sales. So there is that add-on sales component.

And then also creating automations, which I think a lot of you are familiar with within the tech field, creating automations to make sure that lead funnel for additional sales is present. And so I can work with you to create automations through your email marketing platforms, through your website. I'm familiar with Shopify as well, so I'm sure there's a lot of integrations that Dave and I can both assist you with.

So any questions that you have, feel free to ask. I'm kind of an open book. Like he also mentioned with the mom test, my mom is not one of those lovey-dovey moms. She's quick to tell me when I have a horrible idea. So I'm fine to kind of, I feel like I don't need someone to hold my hand through the process. So I'm happy to kind of walk through everything. But basically what sets Dynamic Duck apart

agencies is that ability to train and to coach you into what you want to do. You are the expert in whatever your field or your business is. I'm just there to help you understand the marketing pieces so that you can implement a strategy that works for you. So as opposed to other agencies, I'm not here to outsource your marketing. I'm not here to charge you monthly fees, to take on your Facebook or your Instagram accounts or your email marketing. If you need some templates to put into place, you need that marketing strategy piece.

I'm happy to help you kind of go through that consulting piece and walk you through the process and give you a strategy that works. And the thought is that once you've developed that strategy and you're ready to fly away, that when that strategy no longer works for you, that you come back to the pond. And I'm happy to reinvent a new strategy that works for you. So any questions that you have, feel free, if there's a duck on your table, to take one. If you don't get a duck and you want a card, feel free to come and chat with me.

I think that is pretty much it. So any

All right, have a quack-tastic evening. All right. Thank

All right, so Lauren broke the ice. Anyone else want to come in here and talk and just chat about their business? Again, save space. Eric? All right, let's tap Eric in. Let's give Eric a round of

Sure, all right. Cool. Use both mics, ones for online. Thanks.

Hey everyone, my name is Anish. Dave did a good pitch for my consultancy because what I do is user interviews, user research. I have a background in computing, I've been on the developer side, I've been on the research side. So yeah, this is something I just started a month ago and I just found out about this yesterday, so I don't have any cards and stuff, but you can look me up online. Search me on Anish Tharoon.

your company, you're looking for user research, prototyping, design, I do those. So yeah, thanks for

Awesome. All right, Eric's next. We'll take a line up here if anyone wants to pop in after Eric. All right, thanks, Mike. Hey, everybody. I was here at the last meetup, and I had done a presentation on my Shopify app called Sync'em. I just wanted to come up here and.

for any developers or anyone who has any sort of technical expertise or just a moderate knowledge of programming for the web, that I would just consider applying Dave's techniques for finding needs and then consider if that need does have an e-commerce aspect, building software on Shopify is extremely easy. And extremely...

are like 10 steps ahead because they give you all the tools you need to build your app, which can plug into every aspect of the Shopify platform. And then the best part is that you get exposure in their app store, which literally puts your software, which may have zero users at the time, in front of merchants who could potentially use it.

five years ago and now I do full-time. So that was my one pitch. So just to encourage people who are looking for ideas, what to build. If you are a programmer or you have some moderate level of programming knowledge, I would encourage you to look into that specifically.

Shopify is a great place to find merchants who have chosen Shopify because among all the options out there Shopify is one that actually costs them money every month. So they there's a that barrier to entry which is bigger than you'd expect to actually have to pay some money really filters out a lot of people who are just trying to get free crap. So you're talking with real people who really want their businesses to be successful and so that's great.

That's my first plug, just to encourage you to consider that if you're looking for a place to get involved in building your own software and managing it. The other thing is slightly different, and that is more a plug on my, not necessarily my own software, but what my software does is it connects multiple Shopify stores, any Shopify stores.

two or more who want to have their product and inventory synced across multiple stores and that includes routing orders from store to store.

Any sort of configuration that requires your stores to be linked in that way, whether you have a wholesale store and a retail store separate, or you sell in Canada and the US and you've opted to use two different stores, but you have one fulfillment warehouse, so the inventory needs to be synced. Those are some use cases, but additionally, one thing I see, a huge...

is in the not necessarily just drop shipping space, but sourcing products. Every customer, not literally every customer, but so often I'm asked, this is great. I have a store, I have my own products. What other products can I sell on my store? So I don't really have an answer for that question. My...

But what I'm saying is that there seems to be a large need out there for products to sell. Everybody wants to... It's easy to set up a store, you know, and not necessarily easy to set up a store. It's not easy to market your products, but also

very difficult is to find products to sell. And with things like drop shipping, all the tools that you need to just have an incredibly easy drop shipping

arrangement. Those exist. Synchro provides that, by the way, on top of the many other use cases it serves for multi-store merchants. But yeah, everybody's asking me, what products should I sell? So I don't know. Maybe you have a product that you, Garrett, you had said that you, was it Garrett? Yeah, you. Sorry, Russell. Sorry about that. You had mentioned that you're a barber.

Maybe you have a great line on products, you know, haircare products at a wholesale rate or something, but you have access to that product.

Maybe you'd like to be facilitating the fulfillment of orders across multiple Shopify stores, or maybe you sell supplements and you have a wholesale account with some supplement supplier and you want to then further push that along to other satellite stores who don't actually warehouse your product but want to sell them for you, and then you can fulfill that order. There's two examples,

from wherever in the world. There's so many stores out there, even around the Golden Horseshoe, who they're selling products that they don't themselves fulfill. And they're just looking, they're just begging for products to sell on your behalf.

Not necessarily you selling the products, but if you happen to have a good sense for what are some nice products to bring into Canada or you happen to manufacture some products that you think would be...

It would be effective to sell those through a channel such as drop shipping. It's a great way to get your product out there. You know, TikTok shop or TikTok, Instagram, those are all great ways to bring people into your store to buy your products. But imagine if you had now stores, completely separate stores as your sales channels as well. And they themselves are also all over social media.

Potentially, you know, decent opportunity there, no promises, but the tools are available. I do provide those tools, so there's a bit of a plug there, but I see that as a definite need when I'm talking to my customers. Please give me some products to sell. And I just say, sorry, bring your own supplier. So yeah, reach out if you have anything along those lines that you think might be interesting or if you'd like to learn more.

I'd be happy to chat with you and spread some knowledge. Yeah, those are my two things. Yeah,

Awesome. Anyone else want to come up

Hello. My name is Mayank. And I recently moved to Milton around six months ago, really enjoying the quiet, suburban life here. So the product that I'm working on is AI-powered documentation tool. So a quick raise of hand, maybe if you guys have worked with software development teams

or if you

You guys require documentation when a product is shipping. So I think I've been doing product management for almost 10 years now. And this is one of my own issues that I wanted to solve. I hate documentation. But it's like when you're releasing a new feature, or when you're working with sales team or partner teams, they need some content to make their audience aware about what is being released or what is developed. So.

My product is currently in closed beta phase. The name is Fastdoc. And if somebody is using Jira, essentially what it does is it takes all the raw project management data, all the stories, epics, tasks, all of that information, and then convert into different documentation types. So think of release notes, technical documentation, health center articles, marketing copy, sales pitch, these kind of things. And we're using OpenAI GPT models, so it's quite...

I mean, of course, there's a lot of underlying technology that goes into it. But I'm here for if anybody wants to understand this a little bit more. And if you guys have this problem, I personally hate documenting something that I've already done while writing requirements. And I guess people who work with the technical team, they can relate to this problem. It's not for everyone.

The product we are building is currently not launched. We are thinking of Q1, end of Q1 to make it available. But we are doing closed beta. So if you want to be the tester, if you want to be early adopter and want to give some feedback, you're more than welcome, and I can give you access. So feel free to reach out to me. I'm here. If you want to say hi or learn more, please do. Thank

Awesome. Anyone else?

No need to be

Hi everyone, how are you doing? My name is Jack Abrams. I'm a fourth year business management student at the University of Guelph and I'm the founder of Ultimate Renewable Technologies. I have a booth back there, come on by afterwards for some questions, but we are essentially a solar installation company based here out of Milton. I've been in business for about a year now and working slowly but surely. But yeah, we, our business model involves a fully vertically integrated process. So right from dealing with your city's building permits for structural design, dealing with your hydro company.

and of course the supply of materials and insulation. Essentially how solar works is we have the ability to design a system according to your current hydro usage to completely offset your hydro costs and so forth. We also do emergency battery backup systems and so forth. We are primarily in the residential space doing a little work in commercial side as well. But for you or whoever is a primary homeowner here, the federal government is offering up to $5,600 grant

$40,000 loan interest free, pay it back over 10 years. So that's just a little info. It's a very technical business side of it. So if you wanna learn more, come on over to the booth afterwards and happy to give you a quick rundown.

That unlock, please. Awesome. We're approaching 9 o'clock here. Do we want to get one more in? Awesome. I'm going to flip the script here for 30 seconds then. Is there anyone here that's looking for a job that wants to pitch themselves and set up their

No? Yes? Awesome. Let's do it. I think that there's a lot of us in this boat too, so feel free to use this the other way as well. This is a great networking opportunity not only to pitch people for your startup, but to find jobs. Thank you. Hi, guys. My name is Halima. And I am

There we go. So I'm a machine learning engineer. I'm currently doing my master's in computer science, and my goal is to eventually go into the realm of AI ethics. That's what my research is on. So I just recently published last year was my first publication that I published within the AI ethics realm, and specifically looking at kidney diseases and how you can potentially use ML.

for this use case. So I would like to go into a bit more of a research field that has something to do with ML. And if you guys are interested, please reach out to me. I'd be more than happy to talk about any potential opportunities.

Awesome. It's nine o'clock. I'm going to wrap it here. Please feel free to go through, network with everyone. I think, again, a lot of good presentations, kind of a lot of good information overall. I really like the pitches that we just did from the community overall. I think it was good to make sure you know what people in the community are doing. So with that, I'm going to wrap it up. Shout out to Dave, shout out to everyone who gave a presentation Awesome.

Thank you all for coming out. Let's spend the next hour eating, I guess, the rest of the food since it's almost gone. Congratulations, good job guys. And just drinking, hanging out and all that fun stuff. So anyways, thank you all for coming We'll chat soon. Thank you very much.

It was a good guy.