When we first conceived of Miso, we knew we wanted it to be a place for Toronto’s independent creative tech workers to gather and get to work. We are 100% behind the people that make this city overflow with talent and ideas.

So, in late December, a month before officially opening our doors, we began looking for ways we could put our resources where our ideals are. By looking to existing communities for support and direction, we’ve gotten to meet some really great people pulling off some incredible stuff. We are super honored to have been able to support these three recent initiatives:

Dames Making Games

We came across Zoe Quinn and Cecily Carver at the TIFF Nexus Women in Film, Games and New Media Conference on Dec. 9, 2011. As panelists at the unveiling of the Difference Engine Initiative games, Zoe and Cecily announced that they’d been so inspired by the initiative, they’d decided to form their own organization to support more women wanting to learn to make games. Dames Making Games' first project launched January 1—#JAMuary, a month-long game jam with 14 women making games for the first time. We jumped at the chance to host them at Miso!

We want Miso to be welcoming and comfortable for anyone and everyone—but especially those in under-represented groups in technology, such as women—who wants to learn and get work done in a collaborative environment. Providing a place for mentors to share space and time with eager learners is extremely exciting for us and beneficial to the community forming here.

Our first four weekends at Miso have been filled with bleeps and bloops, enthusiastic cheers at every breakthrough, and truly supportive teachers spending their free time passing on their knowledge and experience. We couldn’t have asked for a better group to break in Miso!

Lean Startup Machine

Carolyn Van, founder of thirdocean, is a mover, a shaker, and a connector. She picked up on the connection between what we do at Bento Box (build businesses), at Bento Miso (provide a space for ideas to grow), and the nascent interest in applying Lean principles to startup strategy. A few long conversations at Miso (and brief ones over Twitter) later, and we were signed on to sponsor a lunch workshop at Lean Startup Machine Toronto, a weekend crash-course in implementing Lean Startup principles.

Individuals pitched ideas, formed teams, validated their ideas, and built MVPs. We are advocates of the test-your-assumptions, create-no-waste way of building Web-based businesses, and are proud to support others willing to commit to being disciplined about turning ideas and energy into sustainable businesses.

To give teams a fighting chance beyond the competition, we’ve offered 10 individuals keen to further develop their business free access to Miso for one month following the event.

Global Game Jam Toronto

We can’t think of a better city in the world to be an indie game developer. This community is creatively diverse, supportive, energetic, and smart.

In December, Zoe introduced us to Troy Morrissey of Darc Productions. Troy, an interactive audio designer, had recently taken the helm of the local edition of the Global Game Jam worldwide event. We tripped over ourselves to provide energy-sustaining snack packs for the jammers during the 48-hour gamemaking intensive.

We understand the multi-disciplinary creativity required to take your idea from spark to playable (and enjoyable!) game. We want to support any #GGJTo-ers who want to take their game to the next level and turn their efforts and ideas into something bigger. We’re offering all participants 50% off their first three months as Miso members.

Looking at the technology behind startups, the focus is often on the end result—the shiny new widget that satisfies a craving we never knew we had; the timesaver in our day-to-day activities that fits so seamlessly into our lives that we can’t imagine life before we had it. What is often overlooked is how the technology and business model came together to create the end result.

As I write this, we’re in the middle of another technology bubble. There is a tremendous amount of focus on investment to fund an idea before it’s been conceptually tested with its audience, let alone a product actually built. Only once there’s a giant budget and assembled team of developers will the startup be able to determine if their product is going to sink or swim.

At Bento Box, we don’t think this is the right way to go. Through a disciplined process of experimentation, learning and validation, tweaking a fledgling startup’s idea into a sustainable business model can be a measured activity.

In order to be flexible enough to handle the experiments necessary to allow the rapid iterations necessary to optimize the relationship between both the product and the user and the product and the market, we look at applications like this:

• User Interfaces. The design, code, graphics and markup that users use to engage with the site—both to access features and fit within its business model. Think sliding interface panels, edible-looking buttons and gentle encouragements to buy an account with more features.
• Features. The specific code that addresses the functional activities that users engage with in the site. Think the map that magically appears in your profile when you add an address; the score that gets calculated when you answer a series of questions; the friends you’re suddenly re-connected with across several social networks.
• Engines. The building blocks of the application that support the abstract problems of the Web application users. Think the underlying concept that knows what a user account is; that understands that tests contain questions, questions have answers, and than answers have a specific criteria in their construction.

In traditional Web development, a great deal of planning goes into developing an application idea and the application is launched based on some business assumptions. If the assumptions prove to be incorrect or that the needs of the user have been misjudged, it typically means the developer has to go back and re-work the code add or improve the necessary features and re-deploy, hoping that this time, it will work out.

With the proper engines in place (such as Bento Box’s own Soba and Bonsai), the rapid reconfiguration of features are possible because the underlying technology is doing the heavy lifting. This allows the startup to focus on ensuring the product market fit is right, while independently developing the user interface as necessary without taking the whole system offline.

Backed by the right market experiments, it’s possible to test both the business and technology aspects of a new venture virtually simultaneously. The real data collected from these experiments fast-tracks the growth of the startup into a business as it gains the information it needs to become sustainable.

By getting their application and business model out into the real world for analysis, startups can gather the intel they need. And if the end goal is to build a successful and desirable product, there can be less focus on raising huge investment just to get started.