(By Scott Annan, founder of Guides)
I started Guides.co in 2014 after launching the first startup accelerator in Ottawa, Canada. At the time I was running a small tech consulting company (Mercury Grove) with offices in Ottawa and Cincinnati with a speciality in developing customized large online communities for billion-dollar companies (Coleman, Procter & Gamble, Fidelity), and online collaboration software for small teams.
Through the accelerator, and my broader experience working with entrepreneurs across Canada, I realized that there was a lack of practical information available to entrepreneurs who needed to execute quickly to launch their businesses. Entrepreneurs are smart, driven people with deep knowledge in one topic (developer, marketing, biz dev) and limited knowledge or skills in other areas that are critical to growing a business quickly (sales, digital marketing, product development, etc…). Most of the information available online and at conferences is anecdotal or opinions (blogs) that lack the details required for someone to replicate success.
Seeing an opportunity, I assembled a small team and we launched "startupPlays.com - blueprints for entrepreneurs". Working with entrepreneurs from across Canada and the US who had had success in one area of their business, we created step-by-step plans (guides) on how they did it, including checklists, tools, spreadsheets, documents, or presentations that they used. Lots of entrepreneurs agreed to share their knowledge, even though they were all busy, because it is ingrained in the tech startup culture to share everything from code to tactics. There is a sense that we're all trying to build important things and we're creating the rules as we go.
The project was very successful. Thousands of entrepreneurs from around the world used these blueprints to help them grow their business. In true startup style, we tried many different business models including charging for individuals guides, charging for "bundles", and charging a monthly fee for "all-you-can-eat". We would then share the revenue with the authors. While each of these models saw some early success, none of them seemed to fit. The best entrepreneurs weren't interested in benefiting financially from sharing their knowledge, and we didn't want to be in the business of selling knowledge to a community that prized open sharing.
2015
I always intended StartupPlays to be a "market test". In reality, most of society faces similar challenges as entrepreneurs: we're constantly faced with new complex and urgent challenges with no clear path forward. We need to adapt, learn "on the fly", and make decisions quickly (often with important implications), without deep knowledge on a topic. Some obvious examples include:
Despite the best efforts of public institutions and access to billions of websites on the internet, information on how to learn and act to overcome these challenges remains inaccessible -- especially for rural and most vulnerable.
Guides was born from this necessity.
Creating a free platform for people to create and access guides on topics that are constantly evolving presents several social and technical challenges:
We tackled these challenges and learned a lot:
1. We asked people to contribute using brute force: emailing thousands of instructors, authors, and influencers asking them to contribute to our growing library with mixed results. Many agreed to contribute with help from our team. But we had a classic "2-way market" challenge: Most influential creators responded that they would join once our audience was much larger. Here is an example email from Seth Godin:
"the chicken and egg here is a significant one. Right now, it would be my 200,000 readers, not yours, and I can do this without much in the way of tech, I think... on the other hand, when you have actually acquired and organized hundreds of thousands of readers and you come to me on their behalf, it's a different discussion, but that's the paradox, because it's hard to do that without authors bringing their audience and paying you for tech they don't actually need at first."
2. We created (and have since evolved) our own "Guides format" that is digital first (optimized for every device, not paper), modular (broken down into small chunks), embeddable (like youtube) for easy re-use, and web-based (html5) so that any media can be published.
3. Rather than using a traditional "file and folder" structure that applies constraints taken from the physical world (a physical document can only be in one physical folder), we used the concept of "channels" where guides can be added to multiple channels - (similar to Pinterest boards).
The fourth challenge (revenue) wouldn't be addressed until the following year.
In 2015 we had many great examples of how we could amplify the reach of knowledge sharing in many "non-tech" settings ranging from organizing your home to personal wellness, and dealing with chronic illness. But one of our favorite programs was working with Stephen Ritz, the founder of the Green Bronx Machine. Stephen introduced the world to growing gardens in classrooms in low income neighborhoods and incorporating it in the curriculum. While Stephen was inspiring the world with his TED talk, he didn't have a guide on how other educators could replicate his success. With our help, Stephen created several guides that are now used by thousands of educators in the New York school board, across the United States, and around the world.
2016
While building a free platform on important topics for individuals, we recognized that these challenges were also present in organizations, of all sizes. We work in an equally rapid pace, changing world driven by a connected global economy where the speed from discovery to market is fueling unparalleled progress. But this progress is creating massive skill gaps in every industry, felt most acutely by small rural businesses, which in Canada represents almost 98% of our economy. Consider some of the challenges faced by organizations today:
The platform we built for creating documents that could be changed on the fly, are more secure than other file formats, and that can be organized in a more user-friendly way is a compelling value proposition for businesses. One that the Philips Medical Division understood immediately. We started working with Philips and a dozen other corporate clients (ranging from large companies to franchises and small business owners) to understand their unique needs and see if our technology could meet them.
In the spring of 2016 we joined the Founder Fuel accelerator program in Montreal to work on a business version of our guides.co platform. The main areas of focus included permissions and security. We "forked" our code base and began developing an offshoot product which we called "guidehub". Through four months of rapid development and continuing to work closely with our new customers / partners through the end of 2016, we completed the main features to meet the needs of our business clients. We now had a platform that enabled companies to host their processes and procedures, employee manuals, and training content on a secure platform. This platform was a more secure but similar product to Microsoft SharePoint, Atlassian's Confluence, Google Docs, or other document creation and sharing platforms.
2017
We now had two platforms - Guides.co for publishing and consuming public guides and GuideHub for private documents. Much of the year was spent consolidating the products into one single platform for individuals and businesses of different sizes - while supporting existing clients and onboarding new ones.
While this effort was underway we worked on several projects that helped guide us through real-life scenarios. One of those was the devastating hurricanes in Texas and Florida. We were contacted by a volunteer team of "tech-responders" from Unicef, FEMA, and dozens of local organizations that were creating and assembling post-disaster guides for victims and relief workers that ranged from how to explain natural disasters to children, how to find displaced people and pets, who to contact for various issues, how to find and hire a contractor for immediate repairs, and how to submit claims to FEMA and other organizations. The Guides platform not only made it easier and faster to produce the material, but made it easy for each organization to share, distribute, republish, and update / notify people when information changed. Each organization was able to distribute information they could trust to people who relied on it and keep them updated when information changed.
I'm proud of our minor role in helping victims during the hurricane crisis and it provided the evidence that Guides could be a useful tool in helping coordinate information between organizations when the stakes were high.
By the end of 2017 we had successfully combined the two products and moved all customers onto a single platform (Guides.co). Now anyone could create an account and:
2018 - 2019
Starting 2018 we had an interesting dilemma. We now had a single product and a small but wide range of customer types: individual users that included entrepreneurs, hurricane victims, students, parents, and athletes; "creator" authors, influencers, enthusiasts, teachers, and corporations; and organizations that ranged from volunteer clubs, small flower shops and fitness centers, to associations, franchises, corporations, and governments. And the growing library of guide topics were as varied (but limited) as our users.
With its powerful tools and unique benefits, the next phase for Guides was to scale the platform to increase use. The most obvious method to achieve this was to leverage network effects, and the best way to develop these was to focus on industries. Luckily, in 2018 and through 2019, two different opportunities enabled us to use them to build network effects.
In 2018 we were introduced to Ottawa Fire Services who were interested in creating a new website to host new training material that had been developed and funded by the Canadian government and over 150 fire services around the world. We quickly realized that Guides would be a perfect fit given the modular, multimedia format of their material. The material was converted to the guides format and hosted both on a new simple website and through the Guides.co public library.
Over the last 14 months over 800 fire departments have registered for Guides and registering over 14,000 unique sessions per month. The material is most frequently used in Canada (42%), the US (25%), the UK and India (3%), Australia, the Netherlands, and Spain (~2%).
In late 2017 we were contacted by NAIMA Canada, a trade association for the insulation industry. Partnering with GreenON, a now defunct provincial program in Ontario offering incentives for energy efficiency, NAIMA had created a free training program for residential insulators that covered everything from building science to diagrams and videos on proper installation in different situations to meet efficiency, safety, and regulatory standards. GreenON wanted to offer the training to insulation contractors, and requested that some of the training be offered online, which we were able to do on the Guides platform. There was one major problem… as an unregulated profession, nobody had a list of contractors in Ontario. To overcome this obstacle, GreenON created and promoted a residential rebate ranging from $500 - $2,500, but they had to prove the work was done by an approved ("certified") contractor. Soon thousands of contractors were contacting GreenON asking how to be certified, and at the 11th hour, they decided to only offer the training online - on the Guides.co platform.
Within the next 2.5 months over 2,500 contractors from across Ontario registered and successfully completed the GreenON training program on the Guides.co platform. The modular format of guides lent itself well to the modular content and an integration with a third-party software embedded a quiz at the end of each guide that "unlocked" the next one. Of the 2,500 students we had 6 support requests, despite being the first course ever offered on the platform.
With 2,500 contractors in a single industry we saw an opportunity to build network effects into the platform by recruiting other industry partners to publish new content and connect with the contractors. Over the next 8-months we onboarded new clients including the federal government (NRCan - Natural Resources Canada) for technical publications, Enbridge for current rebates and extended customer-facing training, Building Knowledge Canada, the experts in residential building science, and dozens of other smaller associations and small consulting companies. We also expanded the program in Alberta and British Columbia with provincial governments and utility partners.
Today we have over 5,700 residential contractors on the Guides platform and over 500 guides that range from technical specifications to rebate programs and online training. This experience has helped us create and improve how we categorize guides and our recommendation engine, which I believe is our best way to boost engagement, distribution, and connections on the platform.
Perhaps the most important story for both insulation and fire services is in the details. The purpose of the new fire training program is to reduce mortality rates for firefighters, which is on the rise. Fires behave differently in 2019 then they did thirty years ago, because buildings are constructed differently - they're more energy efficient and use different materials. Fire science and building science is making progress much faster than people in the field can keep up. And based on our experience and discussions with key stakeholders, it's the rural fire departments and small insulation businesses that are affected most - they don't have the resources to afford, or proximity / access to ongoing education.