I write this letter to share some of the things that I’m working on and thinking about. A little about me:
I own and manage a digital product studio in Toronto called August. We spend about 80% of our time on client work and the balance on internal projects. I also invest in and build real estate with my two brothers.
some thoughts
Have you heard of Project Independence?
It’s an initiative that was announced in 1973 by then President Richard Nixon following the OAPEC oil embargo and subsequent oil crisis with a stated goal for America to be energy independent by 1980.
As part of the initiative, Nixon called for the construction of 1,000 nuclear power reactors by 2000. For context, there are currently, 93 operational nuclear power reactors in America.
Nixon, as we all know, resigned the presidency the following year, following the Watergate scandal and facing an inevitable impeachment and removal from office.
Project Independence died on the vine.
It is interesting to consider what a revived version might look like. In Canada, it might be introduced in a social media video featuring Prime Minister Pierre Poilievre calling for the construction of 100 small modular reactors, of various sizes, by 2050.
A new report from the Breakthrough Institute projects that the cost of electricity from advanced nuclear could reach $41/MWh by 2050. That’s about one-third Ontario’s current average cost of electricity.
That would be pretty cool.
business stuff
August: The first rule of business, I’ve discovered, is “stay alive”. The longer you’re alive, the more likely you are to catch lucky breaks. This might be derivative of a Donald Trump quote: “protect the downside and the upside will take care of itself”.
About three years ago, when we were having a hard time closing new clients, we decided to reach out to design agencies in the city who didn’t do development. Our thinking was that if they already had the clients and didn’t compete with our service offering, they might be receptive to some form of collaboration.
So, that’s what we did. We invited principals from a few dozen of these agencies out for coffee, told them who we were, what we did, and that we had the capacity to do more of it.
A year later, none of that had lead to any business.
Two years later, we almost went bust following the winding down of our largest client responsible for about 80% of our revenue. But we stayed alive.
Now, three years later, we’re working on three or four projects—which is a lot for our small shop—directly attributable to those early coffee meetings. Not bad!
I can’t imagine what else will come our way in a year or two or five if we continue to stay alive.Buildstack: Our first month live is now officially under our belts. And what a month it’s been!
We spent most of our time working on product improvements—including a tonne of mobile optimization—and telling our small corner of the world that we exist. To that end, we’re hosting a meetup at our (August) office next week to eat, drink, and celebrate the launch.
If you’re in Toronto, you should definitely come.
Now that the product’s in pretty good shape (though still with an extensive roadmap to chip away at), I’ve been spending more time thinking about how to drive traffic.
I keep coming back to AngelList*’s acquisition of Product Hunt.
AngelList is kind of like Buildstack in that it’s a directory. And like me, I think that it’s founder, Naval, grappled with the challenge of driving traffic—both for its own sake and its property as a moat. Unlike Product Hunt, AngelList isn’t one of those sites you check daily.
Is that why they acquired Product Hunt? I think so, partially.
Is there some sort of content feed that we could add to Buildstack that would make it an interesting daily destination for some meaningful number of users? I’m thinking about it.
What do you think?
*As an aside, I have noticed that AngelList’s core investor directory business has moved to a secondary domain, angellist.com—which, for about a decade until mid-2020, just redirected to angel.co—while the primary domain is now all about the job board.
Interesting…
investment stuff
FH1*: We’re still holding tight on this project as our successful 4-1 Committee of Adjustments decision remains under appeal. I’ve mentioned before that there’s basically zero chance of the appeal being successful. This is all just sand in the gears of a shitty system.
We’ve been in and out of communication with the appellant which makes it hard to come to a quick resolution. So, what can we do? We’ll keep pushing.MR1**: We’re continuing the process of pulling together all drawings, studies, and reports from our excellent consultant team for a Zoning Bylaw Amendment application. Unfortunately, as with FH1, there’s not much new to share about this project just yet.
We’re also actively searching for more projects, and think that we might (counterintuitively) benefit from rising interest rates.
For the past decade+, property owners have benefited from strong price appreciation every year that they’ve postponed the sale of their properties. And they know it. It’s been very hard to get off-market offers accepted since at least 2019. That might be starting to change. They might now, as a whole, be wondering whether it’s a good time to realize some of their tremendous gains.
*Forever Hold 1. A proposed four-storey multiunit rental building in Toronto’s west end that we plan on holding forever.
**Midrise 1. A proposed nine-to-eleven-storey multiunit residential building (tenure to be determined) in Toronto’s west end. We’re starting with a rezoning and we’ll take it from there.
stuff I’ve enjoyed
This is some of the content I’ve come across over the past month that I’ve particularly enjoyed.
Article: Why can’t we (North Americans) build infrastructure at the same pace and for the same cost as Europeans and East Asians? I don’t think we spend enough time trying to answer that question. In fact, our relative performance keeps getting worse, while our politicians only ever ask how to pay for it all and never how to pay less for it all. This piece, published in Palladium Magazine, takes a crack at a comprehensive answer. It’s really good.
Book: I’ve started reading John Hoskyn’s Just in Time: Inside the Thatcher Revolution. John Hoskyn was a successful software entrepreneur who built and sold a company before deciding he wanted to get involved in politics. He then took a year in 1977 to write a report, the Stepping Stones Report, which was his analysis of what he considered to be wrong with the UK. The report caught Maggie Thatcher’s eye and he ended up as head of her Policy Unit from 1979 to 1982. It’s a great story.
Podcast: I've just discovered the Indiehackers podcast. It’s great. This episode in particular, featuring Canny’s Sarah Hum, was one of my early favourites, as it’s a relatively straightforward tale of two founders hustling their way from nothing to $50,000 Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) with no outside funding. (Two and half years later, following that episode’s release, they’re now at $180,000 MRR.)
Video: Last week, I interviewed Ontario Labour Minister Monte McNaughton along with my brother Matt and our friend Jamil. It’s for a new interview series we’re hosting with the Canada Strong and Free Network called Canadian Optimists. You can check it out here, and get my explanation for the series name at 7:10 here.
startup ideas
This will be a new section of the newsletter. I regularly come up with ideas for startups that I think are pretty good—or at least not bad! You be the judge.
Canny for municipal urban planning.
For those of you who don’t know, Canny is a tool that helps you capture, organize, and analyze digital product feedback in one place.
I think that municipal planning departments could use something like this for community consultations and other public meetings.
Currently, for any real estate development proposal that requires an amendment to the Official Plan or Zoning Bylaw, a public meeting is required, where City planners try to gather feedback from the community and the public more broadly. Similarly, when major changes are proposed to streets and parks, a similar consultation process is undertaken.
Since the early days of Covid, in Toronto, these have been conducted through email and webex meetings. The planning department is able to capture feedback through these channels but isn’t well setup to organize or analyze it.
We pretty sure, for example, that a few dozen people are responsible for a disproportionate share of negative feedback to any sort of upzoning proposal in the city. (Just google “Geoff Kettle” or “Ceta Ramkhalawansingh” if you don’t believe me.) But do we have data to demonstrate to what extent that’s true? I don’t think so. Should we? Obviously, yes.
At the risk of turning this blurb into a full pitch, let me just say that improving such important processes by even 5% would be a huge win. And I think that a purpose-built tool with a similar user experience to Canny’s would do just that.
Selling to governments is hard, of course, and slow, so I’d start by pitching my way through tier 3 and then 2 municipalities to get some momentum (and case studies) going.
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And that’s it for now. Here’s to a good and productive August.
Feel free to reply to this email with any comments or questions. I love chatting about everything mentioned above.