Embracing Experimentation and Adventure
Why creating opportunities for experimentation and adventure help entrepreneurs overcome uncertainty as they work to build something incredible.
Last week, we hosted Startup Edmonton’s first gathering of our Founders 50, a team of local entrepreneurial leaders that we’ve recruited to help us drive our plans forward. I was filled with pride as I looked out across a room full of well-respected leaders of all generations who came together to support us, and to engage with entrepreneurs who have made great strides building their startups during our first year together in our downtown space.
Looking back, we talked about the momentum we’ve gained over the last twelve months:
Our building is alive and full, from the coffee house to the top floor. We’ve heard community conversations about startups and entrepreneurship. Every major media outlet has visited our space regularly, running stories about the founders at work there. National publications like The Globe and Mail have written about our startup community that’s quietly emerging.
Big companies like TELUS, ATB Financial and BioWare have invested and committed resources to us around entrepreneurship and startups. Federal and provincial ministers and senior leaders have been coming by our space, seeking our advice and seeing entrepreneurship in action first-hand.
Fast growing startups like Granify, Mover, Jobber, Mitre Media, Login Radius and Poppy Barley have been leading the #yegstartups charge - gaining customer traction, attracting investors, and putting us on the map for the right reasons. Best of all, they’ve committed to growing their companies from Edmonton.
Yes, it’s been an exciting first year. But amidst this excitement has been hard lessons, financial stress and all the uncertainty that comes with being a “start-up” ourselves. We’re a socially-driven startup who must balance customer-generated revenue (memberships and programs) with social impact (inspiring entrepreneurship across the community).
Experimentation towards proof of value
“Startups are temporary organizations built to search for a scalable and repeatable business model.” - Steve Blank
Startup Edmonton is in the business of supporting entrepreneurs. But we’ve tried to do it differently, as startup entrepreneurs ourselves.
There’s a reason why government agencies and service providers have a terrible record with entrepreneurial initiatives. It’s not necessarily about the programs they create. Instead, the problem lies in the process around how programs are developed, started and scaled up. They go straight from “industry consultation” to full program rollout. They have no proof that what they’re delivering is what the market wants. They don’t experiment.
Startups experiment as a byproduct of bootstrapping. Without the luxury of cash and time, one needs to find small-scale proof that there’s real value in what’s being created and delivered. The only way to do this is through experimenting.
Consider some experiments we ran this year (that totally failed, but had other impact):
1. We expanded to the second floor around the concept of a creators studio. It was a build-it-and-they-will-come move that didn’t work as well as hoped. We quickly learned that the separation on multiple floors was terrible for shaping a co-working community. We also discovered that more creators desired private studios or shared workspace/performance space (neither of which we had). In response, we’ve created more shared working areas on our third floor main space (leading to an increase in shared memberships), and are dividing the second floor into private offices (which is already sold out).
2. We explored multi-week coding and design courses, based on successful programs that we had seen in other cities. We had some initial success with our Everybody Can Code workshops that we thought was an indication in potential demand for more intensive courses. But poor registration based on cost and time commitment ultimately led to us cancelling the initiative before it started. However, going through the process helped us shape our Student Startup Program, which will provide post-secondary students with opportunities to flex their coding/design skills within the context of building a product and startup.
The key to experimentation is about creating conditions where you can take opportunities to try something on a small scale, in order to determine if it’s worth pursuing or not. Experimentation is never reckless, but must always be calculated, since it requires some degree of investment in time and money.
Adventures are bold with uncertain outcomes
“Proceed and be bold.” - Samuel Mockbee
A startup’s goal is to get to product-market fit early, finding ways to scale up from there. The difference between entrepreneurs who build small businesses versus those who build high-growth, scalable startups has everything to do with embracing uncertainty and being bold.
Startups who build something incredible and disruptive solve problems in ways that no one else has done before. This is what adventure is all about: “bold, usually risky undertakings, with uncertain outcomes”. (wikipedia)
At our Founders launch last week, we unveiled a bold roadmap, built around six distinct project areas - Startup Campus, Startup Labs, Startup City, Startup Academy, Startup University, and Startup Communities.
The first project, Startup Campus, is operational. Our downtown campus was designed to provide a foundation to take on the other projects. We’ll be talking more about these projects as they take shape over the next few years. I know that each will consist of many more experiments and adventures, complete with scale up plans that may or may not be part of Startup Edmonton, tomorrow or years from now.
As an entrepreneur, it’s important that know the path of entrepreneurship you’re heading down, aligned to some sort of vision. Small business entrepreneurs might be in it to build a solid, profitable business around a known business model and the lifestyle that comes with it. Scalable startup entrepreneurs are in it for the adventure - complete with all the highs, lows and uncertainty that comes with changing the world in a meaningful way.
In year one at Startup Edmonton, our earned revenue from memberships and events generated 20-30% against our operations costs. If we were to convert the entire space (all 14,000 square feet) into rentable co-working space and meeting rooms, we get closer to breaking even. This would change things dramatically. Being completely revenue driven would put all our focus on direct customers (members, renters) over the needs of the community as a whole (event space for meetups).
If Startup Edmonton was simply about providing a co-working space locally, our business model would be closer to that of a hotel or conference venue. But the value we’re creating can be about more than space. We feel we can provide flexible spaces for startups to grow while also inspiring the broader community around creativity and entrepreneurial thinking. Entrepreneurs do more than just create businesses. We think entrepreneurs are key to reshaping and redefining our city’s culture as a whole.
So this is the balance that we’ve built into our roadmap - create a platform for entrepreneurship that can both impact our company’s bottom line and our community in the long run. Now, while I don’t know exactly how the roadmap will all play out or precisely how everything will be funded, we have to embrace some uncertainty. We have to trust the process that we’ll figure it out sooner rather than later, and scale up from there.
The uncertainty around entrepreneurship is really hard to deal with. On the other hand, embracing the process in overcoming uncertainty is also one of the best things about being a startup entrepreneur. We get to experiment around new products and models, and embark on bold and crazy adventures, all in the name of building something incredible.
