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Startup Canada Podcast: Flexibility, Finding Time for Family as a Founder

Entrepreneurship can be a long, arduous, and gruelling journey, but if you ever wanted proof that there’s light at the end of the tunnel, look no further than Manny Padda. Padda is an entrepreneur, educator, angel investor, and philanthropist. He is the founder of New Avenue Capital as well as the founder and managing director of PM Search Partners. A self-made entrepreneur who built his first multi-million-dollar company at age 26, Padda is dedicated to providing education and mentorship to today’s youth. He is a co-founder of GradusOne, an organization that connects students and graduates with mentors and provides them with resources

Understanding your ideal customers and how to sell to them

Fiona Lee: You’ve probably heard this before: “What gets you to your first $50 million is not what’s going to get you to $100 million.” We’ve thought about this truth a lot during the last few months as we’ve been going through our annual planning. As part of the process, we’ve spent a lot of time reviewing who we should be selling to these days, and how we should be selling to these customers. The process of defining your positioning strategy is not a one-and-done deal – in a crowded marketplace, it needs to be an ongoing exercise. And as

The Place of UX

Ryan Singer: Debates continue to rage about the role of UX designers, user research, and how far knowledge about the user should permeate the organization. On one extreme, UX is seen as a specialized pocket of knowledge that informs the definition of projects and sets requirements. On the other, UX is something for which the entire organization should somehow feel responsible. A few concepts can facilitate a deeper discussion by drawing meaningful distinctions.

Product engagement: the most important metric you aren’t tracking for your SaaS business

Derek Skaletsky, writing for the Intercom blog: If you have followed us over at Sherlock, you will likely have heard us say many times that product engagement is the lifeblood of any SaaS business. This is because the entire SaaS business model is dependent on people using (and getting value from) your product consistently over time. The entire model is dependent on product engagement. In short, creating a method for scoring engagement is essential for every SaaS business. Without a proper way to score the engagement of your users and accounts, it’s pretty much impossible to know what the hell is

Moving our developer docs

For years, our developer docs have been on their own site at docs.flybase.io, but now we’ve moved them back into our main site at flybase.io/docs, this lets us keep all our content together with our blog being moved into the main site last year, and works well. We’ll be making changes to the docs content coming up shortly.

You Have a Great Tech Idea. Now What?

Frank Landman, writing for ReadWriteWeb: There are seemingly countless stories of tech innovators who simply woke up with a brilliant idea, got investments to build it out, and ended up becoming billionaires. Of course, these stories are extremely rare, but they are exciting to think about—especially when you wake up with a brilliant tech idea of your own.You don’t need much experience in the tech field to have a good tech idea. For example, you could have come up with the idea for Uber without an in-depth knowledge of how to build it out, or you could have come up with

The Bezos way: sleep, puttering, and three high-quality decisions a day

Dan Kim on “The Bezos way“: Jeff Bezos has always been one of those people whose ideas and thinking make a lot of sense to me. When he talks, I listen. So when I recently came across a fantastic interview with Jeff Bezos, I jumped right in. The entire interview is great and I really think watching the whole thing is worth your time. But there was one section that really stuck out to me: his prioritization of sleep, calm, and quality. It’s 2 minutes and 29 seconds of your day well spent, but here’s the basic gist: 8 hours of

Quote of the day: Ends and Means

Do the ends justify the means? Is it worth lowering your standards and giving up your principles in order to find a better outcome? Many times, the means are the ends. How we choose to act changes who we choose to become. The way we choose to get to where we’re going defines what it’s going to be like when we get there – Seth Godin

An Intro to Web Site Testing with Cypress

Devon Campbell: End-to-end testing is awesome because it mirrors the user’s experience. Where you might need a ton of unit tests to get good coverage (the kind where you test that a function returns a value you expect), you can write a single end-to-end test that acts like a real human as it tests several pieces of your app at once. It’s a very economical way of testing your app. Cypress is a new-ish test runner with some features that take some of the friction out of end-to-end testing. It sports the ability to automatically wait for elements (if you try

The Orange Juice Test

Des Traynor: Spending money is very easy. Spending money effectively is very hard. There are lots of dodgy people & service providers out there who will promise the world, send the invoices, and deliver mediocrity six months late. Or worse. It’s helpful if you can eliminate these chancers from your considerations early on, to make sure you’re only talking to people well equipped to solve the problem you have. This is where the Orange Juice Test comes in. What follows is a brief extract from the book “The Secrets of Consulting“. LeRoy was president of a custom software firm that

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