Jonathan Brun

Help, I need somebody!

For the past year I’ve been trying to find a reliable software developer who wants to build a long-lasting sustainable business. Ok, that sounds a bit cheesy, but in contrast to most propositions that start that way, my main company, Nimonik, actually makes money and is growing at 100% a year. It is a painful growth with a long sales cycle, but when we do get a client, they always stick around. We need someone who has the technical chops to tackle iOS – Rails App synchronisation, verification of differences on remote pages, and dynamic linking to content based on semantic algorithms. Don’t say you won’t be challenged!

To better understand my approach to business and why I think this is a great opportunity, take a look at the founder of AutoDesk to his employees way back in the 80s here and see what Stephen Wolfram has to say about building a long-term company.

One main caveat is that we do not believe in external financing and are running everything with real revenues, sweat and our own seed money. Some might say that stunts our growth, but we feel it allows us the independence and freedom to build the business as we see fit. There is a lot of work left to do and a huge market out there, yet few people seem willing to take that jump.

Despite being active in the community, opening up government data, organizing open-data hackathons and personally emailing many developers, I have had a remarkably difficult time convincing them to join us. No doubt, their 150$ an hour rate is hard for us to match, but do people really want to be a consultant all their lives? I know I didn’t and that’s why I quit to start a company. Don’t people want to build a company that they can stand over with pride? Am I crazy?

We believe in long-term hard work, in independence and in doing for others as you would have them do for you. I clean the dishes of my employees, put their pay before mine and strive day in and day out to provide a challenging and dynamic work environment. People before products, but products before money.

We offer strong technical challenges, flexible work schedules and a great team of honest, nice, hardworking people – yet we keep losing talent to social media startups who are financed to the hill. What to do? Does any developer have an interest in building a long-term business anymore? Maybe I’m just old fashioned, but it feels like the ease of credit from banks, VCs, and angels has devalued sweat equity. We can pay a reasonable salary, but what we really want is someone who is passionate about their work and building something that will span generations.

Email me to chat jbrun@nimonik.ca about the job posting found here.

Make your Girlfriend Happy – my side project

Relationships are complicated. For one, they rely first and foremost on your understanding of yourself, your needs, priorities and desires. Second, they rely on your ability intimately understand another human being with equally complex emotions, history and feelings. If humanity were given a grade for its romantic relationships, we would fail. Over half of marriages end in divorce and the vast majority of less formal relationships don’t work. To paraphrase Anna Karenina, “Happy couples are all alike, each unhappy couple is unique”. With that in mind, it seems like a service which promotes the commonalities of happy couples might help pull us towards a passing grade.

For one reason or another, I have kept this little side project off my blog. But alas, it has engulfed much of my time and is now receiving thousands of visitors a day. As with all projects, the idea has been growing over time. The original idea was born out of a discussion with some friends in Paris and was centred around a reminder service and mailing list for men in relationships. The next addition to the site was a registry type service where women can indicate their sizes and preferred brands for shoes, clothes, jewelery and lingerie along with secret wishes. We have been adding videos, tips, and games to the site with some ambitious plans for the year ahead. With Valentine’s day in just a couple of days away, maybe take this opportunity to think about how you can make your girlfriend or wife happy. Visit Makeyourigirlfriendhappy.com to see what all the hubbub is about.

Feel free to send comments and suggestions to me jbrun@jonathanbrun.com or, cyrano@makeyourgirlfriendhappy.com.

We’re on twitter too, click here to follow us.

Heck, we’re even on Facebook too, click here for that!

And, here I am introducing the site!

How to end domain squatting

Domain squatting is a major problem. Companies go around picking up every imaginable domain name in the hopes of reselling it or placing ads that generate revenue. This land grab slows growth and drives people and businesses towards less intuitive names. Many registrars allow you to grab a trial period for a domain before purchasing it further increasing the incentive to bulk grab names to test traffic before splurging the 5$ on the actual purchase. To solve this issue, we could raise the cost of domain registration and renewal and remove the trial period. Nothing exorbitant, perhaps 50$ or 100$ per domain – the revenue from the increased price could be donated to charitable causes, schools, hospitals or some other worthy cause. The effect would be increased revenues for our struggling public services and a reduction in domain name squatting.

4 free business ideas to start 2011 off

Here are 4 crazy ideas, let me know what you think.

Membership for restaurants

Restaurants have cash flow problems, patrons often hesitate to go out because of cost. How about a membership (or time-share) system for restaurants. You create a subscription for restaurants where you pay a monthly fee and get x number of meals (table d’hôte – fixed meny). This allows for restaurants to improve cash-flow and for patrons to go more often. There are supper clubs for hard-core foodies, bit this would be for the normal folk.

Justify

Government, like many large organizations, are wasteful. How about we create a website to list the budgets of different government institutions and ask people to vote if they think the budget is worth it. Each institution should have to justify itself in relation to its budget, purpose and impact. As anarchists say, we should constantly question why an institution with power exists and if it no longer lives up to its requests, the institution should be changed or scrapped. Right now, budgets are hard to visualize. Where and why tax payers money goes is a mystery to even the most hardened government official. With this website, the people coulees vote on whether or not they agree with the budget in proportion to the justification.

TED Talk of the Week

When TED started out, they put out 1-3 talks a week, now, there is close to 1 a day. Sadly, I am having a hard time keeping up. Concurrent to the increase in talks, there has been a decrease in consistency. You still have some amazing gems that rock your world, but many talks are now average. What if we set-up a very simple website that allowed people to vote on their favourite talk of the week and propose a winner. This would allow some filtering and perhaps make the real gems stand out.

Contests Aggregator

There is tons of free stuff out there to be had. Local papers often offer movie premiere tickets, raffles give away gift cards and other contests offer innumerable items. Many people, sometimes elderly, spend their time combing through the papers, applying and winning these items. How about we build a simple aggregator for contests for free trips, movie tickets and other items commonly offered by newspapers and promo companies are offered. The site would be membership based with a 15 day trial period.

3 free business ideas

This is a follow-up to my last 7 free ideas, which you can read here. And the excellent discussion that happened on Hacker News.

Why give these ideas away? I have too many ideas and too little time. If anyone wants to take these and run with them, go for it! If you do, I would be keen to know how it goes.

1. Small claims website (class-action suits via the web)

Faulty products, misleading marketing and neighbourly complaints are all too frequent. Most people do not know their rights or how to defend them. Filling out government forms and filing in small claims court is very time consuming and unless the issue really caused harm, you are not likely to file.

There may be an opportunity to build a web platform where users could select a Product or Situation in their jurisdiction and the forms and filing procedures would be automatically populated. This is similar to the online incorporation or will creation websites.

Eventually, if many people file for the same thing (i.e. a faulty product), a class action suit could be taken up by a law firm. This idea is very rough but came about when a friend (who is a lawyer) described his situation. He had purchased  Kryptonite bike lock which is advertised as having “unbreakable bonds, blah blah” and he then promptly had his bike stolen.

He filed in small claims court for the replacement cost of his used bike (about 250$ and a lock 50$). As a plaintiff, it costs 70$ to file, to defend against an accusation, it costs 120$. He filed against two parties – the bike lock distributor and the store where he purchased it. As such, for them to defend, it will cost a total of 240$, make it likely that they will settle. Now, my friend is a lawyer and knows how to file these things and write scary letters, for the average individual, this task is to daunting. We could automate it with some pre-populated forms where users can “fill in the blanks”.

2. A Site for the Elderly

Old people like simple things! Think the Jitterbug telephone, but for the web. In a sense, the iPad is already doing this – but that market is still very small.

Someone could create a web browser homepage with a few basic links: Email, Photos, Telephone Numbers, Skype Video Calling and Other reminders. You could also have a system that allows them to enter their family members contact info and have automatic emails go out to them asking for a phone call, or to send photos, which can be pushed to the grandparent.

Huge market potential.

3. A Marketplace for students to do legal research

Basically like RentaCoder but specifically for law students. A lot of people have no idea where to start when it comes to legal issues, and law firms are very expensive. Even law firms are outsourcing their work to India. Many law students could use the extra cash, they just need a marketplace to connect with clients who want legal research (i.e. compile jurisprudence on a subject, find resources online, do a bit of digging), but the students would NOT give legal advice.

In the UK, they just passed a law (the Legal Services Bill, alternativly called the Tesco Law, see BBC article) allowing non legal firms to offer legal information, soon Tesco, Wal-Mart and other retailers will have a low-cost legal desk. Until then, an online legal service could be great (though it might be illegal in a number of jurisdictions).

Update: It seems someone already did this and even selcted the same domain as me, ha! http://www.rentalawstudent.com/