I've been a biker since my teens. I started on a Jawa 50cc moped (my dad had a Jawa bike when he was a young man in Romania) and the graduated to my first bike at the age of 15: a Suzuki TS180 Enduro.. I would "push" it to various trails and deserted beaches along the St. Lawrence river and meet up with friends. All my buddies had bikes and for us, they represented freedom. It didn't matter if rained or if we had to scrape ice off the seat. We traveled, camped and got into trouble.

Fast forward many years later to my 30th birthday.  A buddy of mine, Paul Graham, was selling his Yamaha Seca 650. He had offered to sell it to me after having lent it to me while he was away on various business trips but I turned him down. We had a one year old in the house and I didn't think my wife would be to crazy about me riding a bike. Little did I know that my wife, who had ridden on my original Jawa and Suzuki bikes, had purchased it and was planning on surprising me with it. What a thrill that day was … driving the bike around our 1 acre backyard with ballons on it in front of all my friends who had shown up for the surprise party. I still have the Seca 650, though it needs a lot of TLC. I'm probably going to need a new bike to make it to Sturgis, South Dakota for the Buffalo Chip this summer … it is a long way from Ottawa, Canada (26 hours to be specific).

Fast forward a few more years to 2012. I was on a business trip in San Francisco and my buddy Paul, who had moved from Ottawa to San Diego, invited me to drop by for a few days. He had since launched a motorcycle customization business as well as BikerBuddy, a company that manufactures active safety gear for bikes.

While sitting around the pool, I showed him what we were up to at FaveQuest. We had just launched MyEventApps, an affordable solution for building mobile apps and I was pretty excited about the product. To demonstrate the power of the solution, Paul and I built an app over the weekend. The app, called BikeQuest (now MyRiderApp) was aimed at bikers in southern California. It includes events and the best routes and biker friendly spots in the area. He couldn't believe how easy it was to build an app using MyEventApps and wanted in: we signed up his company, Dynamic Solutions Group, to rep MyEventApps in the motorcycle market. 

Paul's relationships in the biker business, coupled with our success in the mobile market in the last year eventually led to massive opportunity to build an app for Sturgis Buffalo Chip. With nearly 500,000 attendees, it is the world's largest music festival for bikers. Paul is heading up from San Diego and Bill Love (FaveQuest President and co-founder), Shawn Griffin (FaveQuest VP Business Development) and I are all heading to Sturgis in late July! We may post pictures

Read more about Sturgis and FaveQuest in the Ottawa Citizen right HERE.

Download the app by clicking below (Android coming in another 24 hours): 

I was introduced to Justin Trudeau a few years ago at a United Way campaign. I'm sure he doesn't remember, but I do. He has a presence that you simply don't forget.

Fast forward to several weeks ago. I started to become much more aware of Justin's campaign through my social media channels and decided I wanted to help. I'm not a political person but I wanted to "Be part of the change" and, as CEO of FaveQuest, had the means to do something.

It was late in the game and I had noticed that the campaign had not yet included a mobile app. Since that is what we do day in day out at FaveQuest, I rallied the troops and we used our own mobile app solution, MyEventApps, to build an app as quickly as possible.We designed and built the apps for the various platforms (iPhone, Android & Blackberry) and they finally became available last night.

Why is mobile so important? Here some interesting trends and stats:

• by the end of 2013, more people will be accessing the internet from their smartphones than from a computer!
• 25% of North Americans access the internet primarily from their smartphones (i.e. essentially never use a computer) and that number is growing fast!
• there are more smartphone activations around the word than babies being born!!!

Not having an engaging mobile presence can make you invisible to a growing percentage of the population and especially youth. We took it upon ourselves to build and launch the Justin apps as our contribution to the political process and the future of our children.

We hope you enjoy the apps and don't forget to get your picture taken with Justin by using the "JustinCam". Tell your friends!

EXTRA EXTRA: Read all about it in the Ottawa Business Journal!

Please click below to download the app for your smartphone:

Allan Isfan

CEO, FaveQuest

@isfan

In June of 2011, Shawn Griffin and Bill Love rode in Ride For Dad Ottawa. The ride was a great success that year, and part of that success was the large number (2,350) of riders who entered to support the event.

In doing the ride they learned a number of things. It was difficult to find a friend in a crowd of over 2,000 bikers, at the start, during and after the ride. It would be nice to know your location on the route. We all carried smartphones, but not many of us had a GPS on our bikes. It would have been nice to be able to engage friends and family back home in the ride. They had sponsored us, it would be great if they could follow along as we rode the parade route and poker run.

Earlier this year, Shawn joined up with Bill at Favequest, and one of their goals was to create great apps for riders, both motorcyclists and bicyclists. When they entered the 2012 Ride For Dad, they approached the organizers about an app that would help the organizers engage more on the social media, be fun, and provide useful functions for riders. It was from this experience that the Ride For Dad app was created.

The vision from this single app has led to creation of the MyRiderApp platform, a platform dedicated to creating truly great apps for riders. The MyRiderApps platform will be announced in the coming weeks.

Listen to Shawn Griffin, VP of Business Development at FaveQuest, talk about the Ride for Dad app on CFRA 1310. Shawn on 1310 re Ride For Dad

Download the Ottawa chapter Ride for Dad 2012 app here:

We work closely with customers, get to understand their business and develop solutions they love. The service has been the marketing and it has worked very well. The customers all come back and we grow together. We love it and they love it.

However, we were missing a great deal of the market that can't afford custom mobile solutions. Most solutions are too expensive and complex. After hearing this from many potential customers we decided to do something about it and developed MyEventApps. It allows event based organizations to get their own true native iPhone and Android apps for $750/year! We think this changes the game.

See what the Ottawa Citizen had to say this about this revolutionary product. The story got picked up all over the web including blogs and other papers like the Vancouver Sun. Our phone was ringing off the hook on Friday with interest from spas to malls and cleaning services. Things are going to get interesting.

If you wish to keep up with our story, please enter your email to the right and you'll get updates in your email when we have something interesting to share.

Ottawa Citizen, November 30, 2011

OTTAWA — An Ottawa startup is looking to democratize the business of building applications.

FaveQuest and its founder Allan Isfan has released its web-based MyEventApps program, which allows smaller businesses to create iPhone and Android apps in seconds.

To create an app for both Android and iPhone, a business needs to pay FaveQuest an annual fee of $750 …. click to read more

Our Canadian National teams are making an impact on the world stage and the games are very competitive and enthralling.You can therefore imagine how exciting it was for FaveQuest to work with the Canadian Soccer Association on their first mobile app.

You can check out the game schedule, add games to your personal calendar and get reminders and share all of that with friends on Facebook or Twitter. You can also get the latest scores, tons of videos, see what people are saying on Facebook and Twitter and even check out awesome photos. Take a look at the promo and go download it.

Cheers,

Allan Isfan, CEO

That's a crazy summer and we can't complain. There were also some deals we didn't get and some festivals that wanted to use our tools but couldn't afford the price. You either say "too bad" or you realize … wait a minute … there's a pattern here. What if we could serve the thousands of festivals and events that don't have multi-million dollar budgets? And that's what we're going to do with a focus on the biggest hole in their web strategy – mobile ( with a sprinkle of social). While we will continue to take on large projects, we're building a new mobile platform that will allow us to spin straight forward event apps in hours rather than months and for a price smaller event organizers can afford.

It is time to scale our company and clean up. Let's see if we can truly earn our "Bootstrap Award" and "Startup to Watch" accolades.

If you're a startup, I hope you gain some useful insight from our story or at least feel a kinship. We're all a bit crazy but we're not alone.

If you're a potential customer, I hope this helps you get a feel for our company.

Back to the story. As a startup we were in rough shape. We had been going for the home run but the pitcher (i.e. the big hairy customer) went straight for the head … boom, we're almost knocked out. It was tempting to rush the mound but our biggest worry was how to survive and not how to get revenge. We had built a great solution and had to find a new customer …. quick or the company would collapse.

Branson Saves the Day … sort of

When my friend Mark Saunders (owner of Saunders Farm) invited me to a breakfast event with Sir Branson for the launch of Virgin Radio in Ottawa, I jumped at the chance. We had been working on a s/w platform concept for radio as well as a "change the world through kids" concept called Zoogeez so the timing was perfect. I had both presentations on a thumb drive with my business card taped to it ready to hand it to him.

Richard walked in to the breakfast area and headed to the coffee bar. I ran to meet him and introduced myself. I got to the point immediately (as I had been trained by folks who know him). We chatted for about 5 minutes, mostly about the charity stuff. He told me about Virgin Unite, I told him about Zoogeez. He was extremely generous with his attention, accepted my thumb drive and then got pulled off by the media folks to get on the radio.

The Power of Relationships and connections

While still on a high and getting my picture taken with a few Virgin Angels, Mark Monahan, executive director of the Ottawa Bluesfest walks by. I'm was and still am a HUGE fan of Bluesfest. It is one of the biggest music festivals in North America with nearly 300 acts over almost two weeks. I book my vacation around Bluesfest.

Mark Saunders introduces me (dude knows everybody). I give Mr. Monahan my quick elevator pitch and without knowing it, set in motion a major company transformation. A few weeks later, we close a deal to deliver a prototype of our Social Video Calendar … a pilot project to see what happens.

Your Team HAS TO BELIEVE

It turns out that the only thing we were able to pull from the previous project for the media company was experience and knowledge. We had to start from zero on the software. Yikes! And funds were very low.

Time was also extremely tight … nearly impossible really. We approached a developer, Allain Lalonde, who had shown up to a presentation Bill and I had done to the Social Networking Think Tank months earlier. He had challenged a number of our assumptions and both Bill and I thought he was sharp. You simply can't build a start-up with lemmings.

Over lunch, we explained what we needed. Allain had a full time job he didn't intend on leaving so this would have to be in the evening and weekends. Sound familiar?

We heard the golden words "I'm in". Woohoo!

We didn't even discuss payment!! "We'll figure that out" (BTW, Allain is our lead developer and is getting paid

We were back in the game. Stay tuned for part 3 to see what happened.

Rewind back a few years to a meeting with Richard Branson, now rewind some more ….

Some of the biggest Risks are not Risks at All

I quit my job at Nortel in the late 90s just as that company was taking off to join a startup called Catena Networks. It was super early days and they were in stealth mode. I was one of the first dozen guys asked to join and they couldn't even tell me what they were doing or what my job would be until I accepted. But I knew the founders and some of the early employees and I knew it would be awesome. So over beers at the Old Mill in Ashton pub, we chatted and shook on it.

Not soon thereafter, the entire Nortel division I had worked in was laid off and we had a career fair at Catena. We became the Noah's Arc of the tech community during the melt-down. Times change quickly.

The First Risk is the Hardest

We built Catena into a serious business bringing in $100M a year. During this time, my wife and I sold our house, built a new one and had our third child in the middle of it all. In 2004 Catena got acquired by Ciena, a public US firm for nearly $ 500M. I stuck around for a bit to finish some projects and I cashed out in 2006. It was a bit easier this time. Scary but exhilarating. It seems I caught a virus … of the entrepreneurial kind.

The World Won't End, even when you make Stoopid Mistakes

I managed to line up some consulting and also joined Skypoint Capital, a local Venture Capital firm, as an Entrepreneur in Residence. I got to sit in on pitches and share my thoughts with the partners which was cool. I also started to toy around with new ideas. I'll never forget the opportunity Leo Lax, CEO of Skypoint, gave me.

I decided audio personalization was the future … I wanted to build an engine that would create a "radio station" just for me. Not just music … which had already been done by the likes of Pandora (which I loved) … but everything. I would tell it what I'm interested in ..type of music, type of news and so on and it would assemble this for me on the fly. If I skipped something it would learn and get better. Pretty cool, unique and possibly compelling.

I assembled a senior team, put together a board of advisors (this was a good move … highly recommended), built some prototypes, tried to raise money and ran the idea by some large media companies with the content we wanted to tap. We were told "do this for video and it might have legs, especially if you can make it social".

What were we thinking?

We had previously incorporated the company as MyDyo … my radio, my video .. MyDyo. Made sense but nobody could pronounce it. We forged ahead. Our friends at BitHeads provided us a developer for four months and with our lead developer, Dave Rooney, we built a video personalization Facebook app (Luc Levesque from travelpod had convinced me Facebook was going to be big . We showed it to an exec at a MAJOR media company and she loved it. We connected with the folks in one of their major divisions and worked closely with them to build a branded version for them with their video content.

In the meantime, I worked on the 52 page legal contract with the purchasing department. Trying to save paper, I printed two copies of the document double sided, signed them and mailed them overnight. A few days later, the dude in the purchasing department says "sorry, we can't accept double sided contracts … can you please re-print single sided?". What are you going to say … no? So I reprinted two copies of the 52 page document on my poor little ink jet printer and sent them off. Then things got quiet.

Be ready to get screwed … it will happen

We launched the app quietly in late December 2008 anyway since the folks we were working with really wanted it out … and so did we. The contract had been negotiated and all details had been agreed to … slam dunk, all we needed was a signature. We were on top of the world.

The incredible founders of this media company had died earlier that month and with the crappy economy, entered a major restructuring. Our key champion was gone and their lawyers raised flags about the legality associated with the video content they licensed from others showing up in Facebook. The plug was pulled.

It never got resolved. We were done. We owed people money, we had no jobs and no revenue but we had some cool video technology and a badly bruised dream. Skypoint ended up not raising their new fund and I gave up on trying to raise money. We were in the corner, bleeding and dizzy, close to pulling the plug on the whole thing.

Lessons Learned

Pivoting to social video was a good move (as you'll see later) but getting blinded by "the big win" was a mistake #1. We focused on this one customer and the rest of the attention on trying to raise money, mistake #2. Furthermore, the company had been assembled with top execs but few developers … we were going for the VC play, mistake #3. Mistake #4? Picking a name no one could spell and say.

How did we rebound, got named a "startup to watch", won a bootstrap award as well as some marquee customers? Stand by for part 2. It has some good lessons and dash of Branson.

Does any of this sound familiar? Anyone want to share juicy startup stories? Go crazy in the comments!

2011 Is Looking Great

We are feeling extremely positive about 2011. After toiling away on a few other ideas for the last few years, we launched a simple festival solution in 2009 and our full festival platform in 2010.

We're hitting our stride with major festivals. The deals are getting easier and are closing faster. Our existing customers are recommending us to others and we have some success to point to.We are quickly adding customers and ramping the business but doing so carefully.

We've been fully self & customer funded from the start which is pretty fantastic (though scary at times). It is also hard earned money and we're not looking to raise money for the time being so we have to use it very wisely.

Thank YOU!

Thank you to all our fantastic customers, the Ottawa Business Journal as well as our many supporters for believing in us. We're you're up in the middle of the night working on cash flow spreadsheets or testing new features, it really helps.

Cheers,

Allan Isfan, Co-Founder and CEO

@isfan