Request for Toronto Companies
Niche Businesses I’d Love to Help Start in Toronto
The bigger a city gets, the more niche companies can be and still find the 1,000 true fans they need to thrive.
Niche businesses are a big reason big cities feel special. Once you’ve lived in a big city like New York or Shanghai, it’s hard to live anywhere else. You miss the niche businesses — the quirky vintage clothing store or the hipster vegan bakery. Size breeds specialization, and special places.
And yet, a large population doesn’t automatically give rise to niche businesses. Often, the niche businesses we love exist thanks to small landlords renting small spaces. If I owned a small retail space in downtown Toronto, I’d happily rent it to a small entrepreneur, as long as they could pay the rent. As someone thinking of starting a niche business, small retail spaces let you to try your idea without too much risk.
But in rapidly redeveloping cities like Toronto, small buildings are being replaced by huge corporate real estate developments. These developers prefer — perfectly rationally — to rent these new spaces to “safe” anchor tenants like Starbucks and bank branches who can sign long leases. Small, more risky entrepreneurs are pushed to the edges of the city. What’s left downtown is a creeping sameness.
For niche businesses to survive, we need to remove as much risk as possible for entrepreneurs thinking of starting up. We need to say what businesses we want in our communities, then provide small entrepreneurs with the resources to compete for prime real estate.
These are a few niche businesses I’d love to see in Toronto. If you want to make one of these problems your life’s work, I’d love to invest and help. Email me.
1. A Tea Bar
Many people have sat at a bar and enjoyed a cocktail prepared by a professional mixologist. Or maybe it’s been a single-origin coffee brewed by a skilled barista. Sadly, few people have ever enjoyed tea prepared by a tea master in a beautiful atmosphere. Let’s open a tea bar so that more Torontonians can experience the joy of tea.
2. A Breakfasts-of-the-World Restaurant
World Breakfast Allday in Tokyo has a unique, and educational, take on breakfast.
Each week, the owners pick a few countries from around the world and prepare an iconic breakfast from each one. The result is a menu that’s always new and unique. Better yet, it teaches you about the world through food.
3. A Bean-to-Bar Chocolate Maker
I’ve developed a love for wine, coffee, and chocolate. (Indulgent, I know.) I’ve learned to appreciate the craftsmanship they take to make, and the subtle differences in flavours that surprise and delight when you enjoy them.
Toronto needs a great bean-to-bar chocolate maker. SOMA is great, but let’s focus exclusively on small-batch, high quality, and affordable bean-to-bar chocolate.
4. A Kids Cafe
My wife and I spent March in Seoul, South Korea. Each day, we took our infant son to one of the countless “kids cafes” in the city. These amazing places combine a hip cafe for parents with huge play areas for children. The key is that they’re places parents want to go — located in trendy neighbourhoods where friends can meet for food and drinks the same way they used to before having kids, but where their kids can play too!
5. Cooking Studios for Everyone
Every day, 10,000 Tokyoites gather in big, beautiful cooking studios and learn how to cook. They’re everywhere — in shopping malls and on busy downtown street corners. It’s in these studios that entire generations of Japanese learn the basics of cooking — everything from chopping vegetables to braising meat — and how to prepare the healthy meals that are the staples of Japanese cuisine. All of this in a fun and communal setting.
6. A Tasting Menu Cocktail Bar
Bar Gen Yamamoto is unlike any cocktail bar you’ve ever been to. What makes it unique? Well, everything.
The decor is minimalist to the extreme. There’s no music or artwork or shelves full of bottles, just a single table made from 500-year-old oak that seats six. It’s an atmosphere that focuses your attention on owner Gen Yamamoto, his cocktails, and his craft.
The menu is unique, too. You don’t order drinks. Instead, Yamamoto-san prepares a four or six-course cocktail tasting menu using only fresh, local, seasonal ingredients. Each drink is served beside a flower on a small slate board, always in a different piece of glassware chosen to best compliment the flavours of the drink within.
A cocktail tasting bar, like Gen Yamamoto, is a special place. It combines the craftsmanship of an omakase sushi experience with the inventiveness of a farm-to-table restaurant. It’s wonderful.
7. A Mastery-Based Learning Elementary School
My wife and I have been discussing what kind of elementary school we want our son to attend. Toronto has plenty of options — public schools, religious schools, and private schools of all kinds — except the one we want.
In traditional schools, students are lectured and tested together. Those that achieve even a 50% grade on a subject like subtraction are pushed forward to learn division. The result are classes full of students trying to build their education on shaky foundations.
Instead, we’d like our son to attend a school that teaches for mastery. Mastery learning is when each student learns at their own pace, moving on to more complicated subjects only when they’ve mastered prerequisite ones. The benefits of this approach speak for themselves: in one study, the number of students getting A grades went from 20% to 80%, along with profound changes in the students’ sense of self.
Teaching for mastery is hard to implement. For one, it requires software to track the progress of every student on every concept (addition, subtraction, etc) — a huge number of data points. Luckily, incredible organizations like Khan Academy have developed tools for teachers and parents to do just this. A much harder challenge is changing the way classrooms work. Teachers must transition from lecturer to tutor, helping different students learn different concepts at the same time.
Let’s start the school Toronto kids deserve — one that uses modern software and modern methods to teach for mastery.
Check back as I update this list regularly. And email me if you’re an entrepreneur solving one of these problems.
