#26

Thoughts and life updates

I write this letter to share some of the things I’m working on and thinking about. A little about me:

I own and manage a digital agency in Toronto called August, where we design and build websites, web apps, and mobile apps. We spend about 80% of our time on client work and the balance on internal projects. Most recently, we’ve been working on an AI-powered 311 platform for municipalities called 311AI, and a directory of real estate development vendors called Buildstack (think: Builtwith for buildings). I also invest in and develop real estate with my two brothers.

some thoughts

• In 2005, legislation was passed in Ontario introducing the Province’s “objective-based” building code. The general idea with objective-based codes is that all solutions are linked to one more of the code’s objectives, which could relate to safety, health, accessibility, fire protection, and so on.

• As with many objective-based codes, the Ontario Building Code allows for so-called alternative solutions. As described here, “an alternative solution is a proposal regarding building materials, systems, and designs that differs from, yet still proves the same level of performance as, the technical requirements found in the Building Code.” The idea here is to provide some flexibility, including room for innovation, in building design and construction. You can propose something that doesn’t strictly adhere to the building code so long as the code’s objectives are met.

• Around that same time, in 2005, the Province deliberated on whether or not it should require municipalities to establish a database tracking and publishing all approved alternative solutions. This would make it easier for designers and builders to search for precedents to track trends, draw inspiration, and build support for their own alternative solutions. Every alternative solution added to the database would in effect expand the realm of possibility and reduce the rigidity of the building code.

• Ultimately, the Province decided against requiring municipalities to establish these databases. Their stated reasons for this decision are that 1) many alternative solutions are unique and site-specific, meaning that their applicability to other projects would be very limited, 2) there are privacy considerations regarding the release of personal and confidential information, and 3) there are issues related to payment for work—for example, designers should be compensated for the work they perform including by a third party using an alternative solution at a later date and time. Do those sound like good reasons to you?

• The Province should now revisit this decision and require that municipalities establish these databases, or establish one itself and require that municipalities contribute all approved solutions as they’re approved. This would be the sort of small but high-leverage action that would have a disproportionate impact on housing construction and cost zero political capital.

business stuff

• The August team has been doing a bit more work with our sister agency Junto. Typically, these projects are structured so that Junto does the design work and we do the development work. And there’s now enough of them that we’re trying to think through the best way to handle project liability, billing, reconciliation between us, and that sort of thing. As an aside, it feels like administrative tasks are taking up an ever-expanding share of my week, and I don’t love it.

• We’re now neck-deep in RFP work for 311AI. This is great in that it signals demand from municipalities to upgrade their CRMs and resident engagement platforms, but also not-so-great as we could really use another three to six months to make some more progress on the product itself and ideally land a couple of clients. These municipal RFPs always include some scoring for track records. That is, we’re more likely to win them if we can point to other municipalities using the product. And as we don’t yet have any other municipalities using the product, this is definitely our weak point.

• That said, we have made a tonne of progress on the product, including through the addition of some major features like notifications and better dashboard metrics for municipal staff. We’ve also made some small updates to our marketing website. Let me know what you think.

• I think that content marketing could be good for 311AI, even if just through the expansion of our website’s FAQ section and the introduction of a broader knowledge base. Beyond that, we could write articles on the promise of GPT-like technologies for municipal operations for the sort of publications that track those sorts of things. There’s even a podcast targeted to city managers that we should (and will) try to get on.

• We’ve been working through some small product improvements for Buildstack, including bug fixes and some flow improvements. We’ve also been continuing to add company and project data to our database. The grind continues.

real estate stuff

• I have a brother who lives in Vancouver and recently quit his job to start a general contracting business. I of course live in Toronto and think that I could generate a flood of multiplex conversion leads for a general contractor here. I’ve been trying to convince him to move here and work these but have not to date been successful. It wouldn’t be easy but I think that he could scale past $1-million in fee revenue in his first year doing this with a team of two or three + a part-time bookkeeper.

• FH1* is still on pause. See last month’s newsletter for our thinking on this. We’re now trying to think of creative uses of the (very raw) space that could generate some revenue and cover some portion of our carrying costs. Maybe storage, though no one has taken us up on that offer yet.

• I’m not at all banking on this but it would be really cool if the Province updated the Ontario Building Code to allow for a single egress up to four or six storeys—as they’ve promised to do—before construction started on FH1*. That would make our pause all the more worthwhile as we’d be able to significantly improve the efficiency of our floor plans.

• I mentioned in last month’s newsletter that I was waiting for the Province to share some direction on land use within Protected Major Transit Station Areas (PMTSA). The rumours then were that this would drop immediately following Toronto’s municipal election. It’s now been over a month since then and we still haven’t heard anything. I can only hope that the news will be worth the wait, as it will have a material impact on our plans for MR1**.

*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 midrise multiunit residential building (tenure to be determined) in Toronto’s west end. We’re starting with a rezoning and will see where we take it from there.

stuff I’ve enjoyed

• Article: This piece by Sam Bowman arguing that Britain is a developing nation and that it should adopt an economic policy that optimizes for catch-up rather than frontier growth, is very compelling. I think that the same argument could be made, convincingly, about Canada. We should, for example, stop spending any money at all on innovation policy and focus on eliminating interprovincial trade barriers and restrictive urban land use rules. We should also get some pipelines built so that we could export liquified natural gas across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. That is, we should focus on the basics, the obvious stuff, rather than on anything particularly cutting edge.

• Book: I’ve started reading Trust, though I have not yet finished it. It’s the first fiction book I’ve read in a long time and I don’t yet know how I feel about it. I bought it because it’s about Wall Street in the 1920s, which is maybe as good as it gets, and because it came highly recommended by a good friend. I’ll have more to share in next month’s newsletter.

• Podcast: Jeremy Giffon on Invest Like the Best is maybe my favourite podcast episode of the year, so far. I’ve listened to it twice since its release

• Video: I really enjoyed this deep dive into Anduril, “the startup trying to prevent world war 3”. When I look at Canadian military priorities, especially procurement priorities, I think that we’re underestimating the extent to which the future of warfare looks a lot more like Ender’s Game than it does D-Day. And that we’re underestimating how near that future might be. Canada has a small population and a relatively small military budget. We should be spending much more of our money that semi-autonomous systems that could be controlled by a small group of highly trained operators. That is, we should be spending much more of our on Anduril products.

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And that’s all 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.