LampPost Victoria

Every year, our BCom entrepreneurship students rise to the challenge of creating their own business ventures as part of their final term. Out of numerous innovative projects, the top four ventures are selected to participate in the Gustavson Business Start-Up Competition, sponsored by Tiny, with $30,000 in seed funding on the line. We’re proud to announce this year’s student winners who walked away with the support they need to turn their dreams into reality: 🥇 1st Place: Jules Marie Design Studio by Julianna Iacobelli – Awarded $20,000 to launch her vision of preserving the traditional craft of dressmaking for a new generation of empowered women. 🥈 2nd Place: LampPost Victoria by Simon Larocque & co-founder Jared Leary – Awarded $10,000 to scale their event curation platform that simplifies finding local events. Finalists: 🔹 Ascendant by Reed Smith – An exclusive club for young entrepreneurs, models and creatives. 🔹 CycleSyncs by Madelyn Waldhaus & Karina Nina-Marcu – Gummy vitamins tailored to the four phases of the menstrual cycle. “Winning this competition has been an incredible confidence boost," says 1st place winner Julianna Iacobelli. "With the support of the judges and my classmates, I’m excited to fully devote myself to bringing Jules Marie Design Studio to life.” Thank you to our panel of judges, special guests, Athenic Award donor Ellen Cmolik and sponsor Tiny for their invaluable support in helping our students turn their entrepreneurial dreams into reality. 🌟 Discover how these innovative ventures are making an impact. Learn more about the student businesses here: https://ow.ly/Kr5H50Tlo1G

Very excited to announce that LampPost Victoria was one of this summer's winners of the PitchIt competition from Coast Capital Innovation Centre! Was so awesome to hear the other great pitches and see all the cool things everyone is up to in our community! Lots of great ideas & great minds. Huge thanks to the judges and everyone involved in putting this together. Back to work 😤

LampPost Victoria just hit its 5 month birthday (and yes, we're one of those - we absolutely count the monthly birthdays), so I thought I'd do a small recap on what we've been up to, from successes to complete and utter flops. February: Simon Larocque and I launched Lamppost Victoria and sent our first newsletter to just the two of us. We slowly grew our subscriber base to 40-60 by pestering friends, family, and roommates. At this time, we were focused on creating systems, defining roles, and developing a minimum viable product. March: With positive feedback on our first iterations, we poured some fuel on the fire through Facebook and Instagram ads. Despite our complete lack of marketing experience, we reached over 500 subscribers by the end of March. We also introduced a second weekly issue, the 'Mid-week Medley,' (who let us get away with that name?) April: We participated in the PlanIt competition through the Coast Capital Innovation Centre. We didn't win but got a ton of great feedback to help guide us on next steps like offering free ads to businesses and hosting our own events, the first being a pub crawl. May: 1000 subscribers! We had set this target for a year in, so this was a huge validation. Organic growth started to pick up, and less than a month later we hit the 2000 subscriber mark. We integrated user feedback, rebranded with a new logo, and switched from Substack to Beehiiv (which was probably the best decision we've made so far). June: This was a big month - we surpassed 3000 subscribers through organic growth and some successful ads. We introduced a highly requested calendar feature and started on a website. We collaborated with Habit Coffee to plan an offline cafe event, which was a TON of fun. We also started monetizing through Beehiiv's boost and ad networks, and provided advertising boosts for several events. And that brings us to today! In the spirit of building in public, here are our big takeaways. Successes: - Gurus will try to tell you to grow 100% organically. This is BS. We had a ton of success getting high quality subscribers at a CAC of $0.2. - 1% every day. This has been our mantra from day 1, and we've held true to it. Burnout and fatigue is real, but incorporating this into everything we do means we make progress every day and are continuously building on our MVP. - Constant learning, constant shipping, constant reiterating. We've not been afraid of just releasing things and changing them on the fly. This has occasionally been really embarrassing, but it also keeps us moving forward. Failures: - Invest in systems from the start. Starting on an inferior platform (substack) meant we had to backtrack and start again with Beehiiv, which distracted from other important things going on. - Not partnering sooner. We've met a ton of great community partners recently, but seeking these partnerships earlier would have sped up our growth a lot. Much more to come folks! Thanks for your support