Montreal Tech Watch

This post follows last week’s about the strengths of Montreal as a technology entrepreneurship center, with results and analysis from the MTW survey. Those initial results highlighted Montréal’s characteristics, a creative, low-cost and friendly city, which are more or less its USP.

The report dedicated to the challenges met by technology entrepreneurs in Montreal is now online. Since the 2nd question had more choices, I will only comment the first 7 answers

1. Challenge #1: The community and its different resources are not visible enough to outsiders. Indeed, one can be a student or a 9 to 5 engineer in Montreal without being aware that the city has its share of startups. I believe 99.99% of Montréalers don’t have any idea that you could actually launch a technology “startup” in Montréal, nobody knows about MTW and even less about MSU or bolidea. I can see several explanations:

• The community uses in majority the English language while we are in a french-speaking city
• Technology is much less popular than say, cultural events (arts, music concerts, festivals) are heavily promoted and supported, by the media and the government
• There are physical main places promoting local startups and tech companies
• There is no offline media or newspapers promoting the community
• The events might too geeky and not open enough to the general public
• There are no Youtubes or Facebooks in the city
• etc.

I have ideas on how to go past this challenge, but this wouldn’t certainly be solved by one sole actor. NextMontreal plus other initiatives can certainly help.

2. Challenge #2: No urgency in making it “Big”; unawareness of global markets. This is a criticism found frequently when people compare the attitude in Montréal compare to what’s felt in other cities (say the valley, tel aviv, or places like hong kong). Often, it’s told that Montrealers like lifestyle business, and target only local markets with no desire to explore other markets.

This might be improved by highlighting more what’s done in other cities, and pushing Montréalers to expose themselves and also make them discover other places, with probably strong coaching behind

3. Challenge #3: Entrepreneurship and risk-taking are not encouraged. This is also probably related to the problem #2. Well, Canada is a developed country, life is easy, and there’s strong social support from the Quebec government. Whatever your plans are, people are cool with it. So why would anyone try to revolutionize the world? One has to be strongly motivated to have the guts to launch a startup.

Creating a focused, strong and entrepreneur-oriented community helps. That’s probably MTW

4. Challenge #4: Poor promotion strategy & practices I haven’t seen a Montréal-based startup who nailed an effective Twitter campaign, and apart from identi.ca, it’s hard to see any startup who managed to had a wildly successful viral product. For email marketing, I like what Cakemail does but well that’s a bit given they know how to use it. Same for facebook, adwords or any other promotion strategies. The fact is, for a city knows for its music, tv, cinema, advertising, and festivals activity, there is little creativity and thought given in promotion from Montreal startups.

5. Challenge #5: Difficult to find and convince investors I think we have good existing investors but there isn’t probably enough and there is no diversity either. In recent news, it’s always the same names (MontrealStartup or iNovia) so a new entrepreneur has very limited options. If there isn’t a match with MSU, where can you go? BDC? apply for grants at different SAJE or CDEC centers? which is crazy, since you’ll discover after 3 months they don’t understand high-tech

I don’t have any solid answers for this problem (well, read: I don’t have enough resources). Probably Teralys or the government only can help improve this

6. Challenge #6: No media site with a global audience to support local tech

Well the answer is easy, we need a site like MTW but with the 1 million rss subscribers.

Jokes aside, this is probably the same problem as #4. In a city knows for its creativity, we can find ways to create more buzz. Stay tuned for this.

7. Challenge #7: No focus on useful, user-friendly, sticky and complete products This was referring to the fact that many local startups are in fact technology projects, with one or a collection of features. Features don’t make a product. Features don’t ease anyone’s daily life. Features cannot be sold in a market. Features impress engineers but doesn’t solve any problem.

Technology founders should get inspiration from successful startups like Tungle, which makes a useful tool. There is probably a lack of great UI and UXP specialists, and not enough people knowing what’s product design. Montréal needs more Caterina Fakes or more of those guys

There are more problems listed. Go over to the report to see the details

I am working actively on #1 and #6, with major initiatives to be announced soon. Plus one potential for #2. We’ll see. But as written above, one can’t do everything. I hope you’ll join the fun and lend a hand gladly from time to time to get together a stronger community.

Again, thanks for all your help, first in promoting the survey, and second by answering the survey. I’m putting together the last and final report of the survey and it should be up very shortly.