The First Customer - Feathered Fortune Flying High in Business with Parakeeto CEO Marcel Petitpas

and then, I think one of the things that I started to, pay attention to and I guess reject a little bit was the small. Thinking that tends to happen when you're in a small place, a lot of people are thinking about their life on a scale of the town or the province. And they're not really thinking far beyond that. And I was one of those kids that growing up, the first thing I wanted to do was leave and go see what else was out there.

and it wasn't until I did that, that I realized a lot of things that I appreciated about, being from a small place and enjoying some of those luxuries.

I wanted to be a physiotherapist and I ended up dropping out after my first year and I never went back after that.

I don't think I've gone longer than a week without exercise. Yeah. In over a decade, like since I was 14 years old, I've always been to the gym at least four or five times a week for that time period. It's just has become such a critical part of my routine that not going to the gym feels for a lot of people not having a cup of coffee in the morning.

And so I think it's one of those natural things when you're a kid, you're like, what am I really interested in sports and being around sports and health was one of those things. It was something I had an aptitude for. And one of my first mentors was a prominent physiotherapist that owned several clinics and did all of the physio for the, biggest hockey team where I was from and all the university athletes, at the university of PEI. So he was like the man.

And I had the privilege in high school of shadowing him as a cooperative student when I was in high school. And I think looking back, what I was really more interested in was being an entrepreneur. Cause that's really what he was an entrepreneur, but the proxy for that was physiotherapy. And so I think that was the hook and the path that I started to pursue. But over time I started to realize that what I was actually more interesting in was the business behind, this discipline of helping people,

So I definitely appreciate, hockey much more than I, I did growing up. It's a hell of a sport. very cool. so tell me about the transition. You started to get the bug, you got the itch, you started to realize hey, maybe this business thing is for me more than just the. Being really fit. w what was the transition like into the business world for you?

And then after those four years, you applied again to physio school. And out of our province, there was only two slots available. So you might've had a class of, 30 or 40 people applying and they were only going to take two. So you have to have a perfect GPA. That's like the table stakes. And then you have to have an endorsement lever letter from the Pope or something after that to, to get in. and a side note is my brother just got accepted to physiotherapy like a couple of weeks ago.

So really proud of him, but after one year of really trying very hard. My marks were not even close. Like my grades were not even close to good enough to even be competitive for the physio program. So I realized right then and there, okay, this is not really the thing for me and I'd never been like an amazing student. I was always just an average student in the school environment. So I said, I'm going to take. Some time work, save up some money and kind of figure out what my next move is.

Cause I don't think that this is a path that I'm going to be able to go down because I gave it everything I had and I'm just not even really close to being on the bubble for something like this. So I, I worked, selling cell phones for a while at a Best Buy. And through that, I got head hunted to work for Apple and really lucked out. And early in my twenties had a great job doing account management for Apple.

And that brought me to Moncton where I met, Dan Martell, who became a really close mentor. And I just really got lucky and started meeting these entrepreneurs that wanted to, spend time with me and mentor me. And we're open to inviting me to things. And that's when I started to get the bug. I started spending time around these people that were doing things that inspired me. And started, seeing the opportunities and what it could be like to be an entrepreneur.

Now, of course, at that time, the funny thing was I really wanted the outcome. I had a superiority complex that was combined with, crippling insecurity. And so I would say that I got into entrepreneurship for all of the wrong reasons. I wanted to prove something and prove to people that I was, better than them and all these other things. But, looking back, I don't have any regrets. It was a very humbling experience.

And now I think I'm in it for the right reasons, but that's really how that transition started was moving to a new city, changing up my circle. And that circle just happening to be a lot of entrepreneurs that kind of inspired me to look into it.

And now that I'm later in my entrepreneurial career, I think I realize, what I didn't realize then, which is at that time, I was asking that question for myself. Like why do these people want to spend time with me? Why would the CEO of a multimillion dollar company want to open up time in their calendar to spend with me? I don't have anything to offer them. I haven't done anything. I have no reputation. Like why would they do this?

And. What I'm realizing now is that they already achieved success and now what they were looking for was meaning and a really great way to find that sense of meaning was investing back in young people. And now it's I just can't say no. I canceled meetings and rescheduled podcast episodes so I could drive three hours to a high school in New Brunswick a couple of weeks ago to spend two hours with a group of students. Cause I got asked, Hey, could you come?

And spend time with this entrepreneurship class. And I just can't say no to people at that age. So I get it now. It's I will go way out of my way to just do that because it feels so good. And so fulfillment, I think, is what they were getting from spending that time. And if there was anything that they saw in me that is rare.

And I know this from experience was I actually did things after the meeting and I would follow up with them and I would keep in touch and I would let them know how things were. I would let them know that something they shared with me had impacted me and that I had done something about it. And it's very rewarding to spend time with somebody and to be able to coach them and answer their questions.

But it's even more rewarding when you actually see it impact the way that they behave and the way that they execute. And maybe that was something that stood out was there was a. Thank you. feedback loop there that was really positive for them where we'd meet. And then I would actually do something and come back to them and be like, Hey, this is what I did. Thank you for inspiring me. And then they would be like, Oh shit, that makes me want to keep giving you my time and attention. yeah.

I don't want this service. so that was the first business that I started and it lasted about six months. And what I realized early on, which is now the core thesis behind parakeeto was that there wasn't enough margin in that service for me to build a business. It could only ever really be a job, a shitty job that I didn't like doing because houses at that time, it wasn't like it is today in Moncton, New Brunswick, the average selling price of a house was like 150, 000.

It was very much a buyer's market houses were sitting for 18, 24, 36 months. And realtors just weren't willing to spend that much money on. Pictures and videos and, creative services for their listings. Cause they, it could be sitting there for three years. So they were willing to pay about 250 for a service that at the time took almost 30 hours to do. So clearly it was not a great deal. not something that I could hire other people to do for me.

So I ended up walking away pretty early from that business, but that was my first kind of entry into trying to do something on my own. And then. There's a whole bunch of other things that I did for years after that, but I'll pause there.

we've all, I think, if you've done anything in business failed, so what did you mentioned why it failed, but where did you what did you take from that and where'd you go?

He was much more experienced than I was, but he was really pushing for simplicity. Like when we go into sell to a realtor, we can't have a hundred options. We got to have two or three and keep it really simple. And at the time I just didn't, it wasn't landing with me and I. Kept making things more complicated. And it's that classic thing that now I see in other people and I'm like, Oh man, it's so frustrating that they don't understand this.

But at the time I was that guy who was so caught up in my own curiosity and creativity that I couldn't appreciate the value of keeping things really simple. so that was another mistake that we made was, there was a lot of complexity that was really unnecessary in the early days of the business and made a lot of things harder and slower than they needed to be.

I, a lot of opportunities were opened up to me and it's a big part of the reason that I think Dan started. Inviting me to things. And he was a really important mentor of mine. Another really important one was a guy by the name of Eve Doucette who ran, runs a company called Dovaco in Moncton. He was really the first person he introduced me to Dan. He was like the first real successful entrepreneur that spent a lot of time with me and I think saw something in me.

But as I was going through that, trying different projects and starting different things, the real catalyst for me was. I had quit my job at Apple because they had in their employment contract that you basically you couldn't have a side hustle. They owned it. If you had any IP, they were going to own it. So it was very prohibitive. I would have kept working there if it hadn't been such an aggressive, employment contract, but it left me with no choice.

So I said, I want to try to do something on my own. I'm going to quit. I'm going to work. I'm going to go back to selling cell phones part time on evenings and weekends. And I'm going to, side hustle and try to start businesses. So after doing that for a year and trying and failing at real tours and a couple of their ideas, I came to this realization that I was spending a lot of my time, trading it for money, but I wasn't really learning anything from selling cell phones.

Like I had done that been there. It was easy. And so I asked myself, what could I do so that this time? Was spent learning and getting paid. And so the first thing I did was I thought who's in my Rolodex that I want to spend more time around that I could learn from being around and let's see if they're willing to pay me to do something, anything. So one of those people that was on my Rolodex was Dan and I just called him and I basically said I want to work for you.

And he was like, what do you want to do? I said, anything, I'll clean your toilets. I'll follow you around and pick up trash. Be like, I don't care anything. I just want to be in proximity so I can learn by osmosis. And Dan, being the person that he is, he says, I don't work with people until I work with them. So let's do a test project. the test project is, you need to organize a speaking event. I'll speak at it. I'll be your keynote speaker.

You need to sell at least a thousand dollars worth of tickets. And you have 30 days. This is the date. This is the time I'll be there. you do everything else. Good luck. And that was basically it hung up the phone. And what that long story short, what that ballooned into was a speaking event where there was six speakers. I was one of them. I got Eve and a few other people from my network together.

We sold almost 13, 000 worth of tickets, had a couple hundred people show up to an auditorium and I didn't end up working with Dan at that point, but I think that really put me on his radar because it just, it was this level of execution that is unusual where I just said, okay, and I just figured it out.

and I ended up actually becoming a professional keynote speaker from that day forward, until we started parakeeto, and paid my bills, just doing speaking engagements and things like that for the better part of a year afterwards, completely unintentionally. It wasn't something that I really thought was going to happen. So that was my kind of turning point where I became an entrepreneur for real. I was like, eating what I kill and fending for myself.

And, it was also, I think a really important jumping off point because there was a period about a week after that project kicked off where I realized I can't keep. selling phones and do this event. I just don't have the time to do both. So I'm going to have to quit my job and go all in on this project. And afterwards I'll just figure out whatever it is that I have to figure out.

And that was like a really important moment of no return for me that I think, looking back was a catalyst for me to keep doing what I'm doing today.

and then from there, I developed, a keynote that I gave in a lot of high schools where I talked about, just the difficulty and angst of coming out of high school and kind of the paradox of choice of, trying to figure out what you're going to do. And it was really a reflection on. My experience coming out of high school where it's I felt like I could do anything. and because of that, I found it really hard to figure out what I wanted to do.

And I floundered for a while and I carried a lot of anxiety and stress around it. And I also did some public speaking about my, personal journey through my teen years, where we had a lot of difficulty at home. And it was the question that the talk pose and the framework that I offered was what's the difference between people who experience really difficult, sometimes traumatic things in life.

That end up thriving from it and get stronger and the people that don't, that allow it to hold them back. And so that, those were the kinds of things that I did keynoting on for a while.

I would assume where you get that rush of being up in front of a bunch of people and you're talking and you're doing your thing and you're, everybody's asking questions and then you switch gears to being a full fledged entrepreneur, business owner, what was that transition like?

I was testing them and validating them and doing that process. But he called me one day and said, I got a friend. His name is Jared. He has an idea that every agency owner I've ever talked to. Needs. And so he's can I connect you? He needs a CEO to come in. He's the technical person. He's got the idea, but he's running a successful agency right now. And I think he needs a jockey for this horse essentially. So I said, yeah, I'm open. Let's we'll do the connection.

So I get on the phone with Jared and he goes on to explain the problem that we still solve today at pair keto, which is he's my team spends like. A day, a week building spreadsheets to answer all these questions that we need answers to in order to run our business, are we making money on clients and projects, which ones aren't going well? What's our utilization look like? Can we take on more work? Should we hire somebody? Should we fire somebody?

Like all of these questions that have to do with time capacity projects. Like it's simple, but it's not easy. And there has to be a better way to do this. And I was like, I totally understand. Cause in those six months that I ran real tours media, I was trying to figure that stuff out and it was like really impossible. There's no good information on the internet about it. it's not even really clear how you're supposed to do this stuff. Nevermind, like putting together the numbers to do it.

And so I was like, yeah, I get this problem. Let's. Let's explore this and we did a lot of stuff from that point forward, but that was really the jumping off point. And we just haven't looked back since on that problem. We knew the problem was real and then it was just a question of what's it going to take to build the best solution in the world for it.

So we just never changed it. It just grew on us. and we just rolled with it and we haven't changed it. And that's really where it came from. So it's not, It's a person who's really passionate about brand stories and brand development would probably gawk at this cause it's total happenstance, but that's the truth of it.

what we need to do is be really specific. And so we just took Jared. And said, okay, let's go sell this to other people that look like you. And let's make sure that we keep things narrowly focused. And it's a good thing that we did because there are a lot of nuances. Like the language that you use to describe certain things is different in these different industries. And those nuances add up to, marketing actually working and feeling compelling and potent not.

So our perfect customer today is a firm that sells creative or digital services. so they build websites, they do marketing, they do SEO, they do brands, and the common thread is that almost all of them do some kind of website design and development. And then the adjacent stuff is sometimes more technical, sometimes more marketing focused, and sometimes more brand focused, but that's really our perfect customer. And they're generally At between 10 and a hundred employees.

So they're big enough that they can't get away with not solving this problem anymore. Like the founder can't just solve problems with their evenings and weekends, but they're not so big that they've got the resources to build, a full data operations team internally and just hire expensive people to solve these problems.

Licenses to this software before we start building it. And so the way that I sourced those people was I first thought Hey, how do I find agencies on the internet and LinkedIn and clutch, which is like a database for agencies were two places where I could basically just. Build a huge list. I built a scraping bots, using something called parse hub. And then I would go and use like a hunter. io or something like that to find the email addresses of these people.

And then I just started writing cold emails. I spent an entire summer. I'd read a couple hundred emails a day. And what I figured out. Was the formula was asking for advice instead of asking for the sale. So the email basically read something like, Hey Jay, I noticed you're running a successful agency. I'd really love your advice. Given your experience in the industry, I'm working on an idea. This is the kind of stuff that we're trying to solve for.

I'd love to get your feedback on what we're doing and learn from your experience. That was a really effective tactic because it played into the same thing that worked for getting mentorship, which was, I was asking them for their advice and stroking their ego a little bit and they were like, Oh yeah, this is. This feels good. This feels fulfilling to help this young person out. so I got a bunch of people on a call. I would get their feedback.

And then if they seemed really interested, I would be like, Hey, look, I'm putting together this kind of early adopters founder circle, heavily discounting access to the product and really creating a feedback loop so you can influence the product roadmap and how it works and all that stuff. it's a thousand dollars. You get access for a year, you get a lifetime discount.

And we eventually got 10 people to, to pay us for what were essentially, images in a Google slide deck of what a product might look like someday, as a way to really validate, are people serious about solving this problem? So that, that was how we got our first, 10 customers.

if you, if you had to start Parakeeto over again tomorrow with all your lessons learned, what would be step one?

which is something that I was really afraid of when I was younger. And now I. It's it seems like a really exciting opportunity because what I figured out is now that I know I'm a competent operator, I know that I can out operate almost anybody in any industry. I don't say this to be condescending, but what I figured out is that entrepreneurs are human beings and most of them are, don't really know what the fuck they're doing. We, none of us know what the fuck we're doing if we're honest.

and a lot of them are not really that competent. and in certain industries it's worse than others. if you've ever tried to get somebody over to fix your toilet. All you've got to do to absolutely destroy your competition in most markets is answer the phone, be nice, show up when you said you were going to show up, do the job that you said you were going to do, send an invoice. if you do those things, it is like way higher than what I expect.

Like I am bracing myself for that phone call and so that's. Something that I would first of all do is just probably not start a brand new product in a blue ocean market, because the risk is around finding product market fit. It doesn't matter how competent you are. It doesn't matter how perfectly you execute some lean startup process. You don't know how many experiments it takes. To get the end result.

but if I was going to do that, if I believe strongly enough in a thesis to pursue that, I would look at it in a very different way. And I believe that the formula for finding product market fit comes down to the velocity at which you can experiment. If we think about it like a brute force engineering problem, right? It's a question of, we don't know how many experiments it will take, but we can increase our likelihood of winning by increasing the velocity at which we can run experiments.

So if I can do, one experiment. A week, I can do 52 in a year. If I can do one experiment a day, I can do 300 experiments in a year. Who has a better chance at finding product market fit? obviously the person with 300 experiments. So the formula for this is customer interaction multiplied by. So if I am not able to get in front of customers very quickly, then I don't have any feedback. The thing I'm going to build is it is inherently speculative.

So the first problem to solve is, can we get surface area with the market? And that has to do with can I go into a forum or a user group or go to a meetup and talk about the problem? Talk about my thesis. And it's interesting enough that people want to talk to me about it. If that's not true, then there's probably nothing there. there's no problem and it's not worth really pursuing anymore. So you have to build your funnel first.

And the best way to build that funnel is to just start talking about these problems and seeing if anybody. Resonates enough to start talking back to you and wanting to engage with you and wanting to converse with you. So now you have the fuel for this system. And then the next thing is, and this is the thing that I screwed up constantly was speed of iteration, right? Over engineering the thing too early.

Parakeeto became a service three years after we started, because we tried to make it a software for three years. And we realized that the problem with software is it's scalable. But if you're not doing the right process, it doesn't matter how scalable the process is. So all we were doing was slowing ourselves down from actually closing in on what the right process was. So services are a really malleable product because you can just show up to the next call and do it differently.

You can change the script, the process on a piece of paper instead of having to go and write code. So if I could go back and start over again. I would still do what I did, which is I started marketing and figuring out how to get contact with customers fast and early. That was the right choice, but I would approach product very differently. And I would almost certainly have sold a service as opposed to selling a product initially. And then thought about product as a way to.

Automate scale and leverage that process because, people talk about MVP as minimum viable product. And I really believe you've got to zoom out and start with minimum viable product problem. That's the first MVP. When you talk about this problem, does anybody care? And the second P is minimum viable point of view. And the point of view is here's my point of view on how to solve this problem differently. And do people resonate with that? Then the next thing is minimum viable process.

I'm going to do this process and does it create the result in a consistent way? Until you figure that out, what's the point in building software? All software does is automate and scale a process. If the underlying process doesn't work, the product doesn't work. And so only once you validated the problem, the point of view and the process, do you then start thinking about product. And that was the thing that I kept skipping over, were those kind of first three things.

I knew there was a problem, so that's good. That's why we're still alive. But the point of view and the process. I was overlooking and I should have spent more time. That's what I would have done differently is gone back and really been maniacal about those things and shifted my mindset away from what I was trying to do then was prove myself right. I would have been more maniacal about trying to prove myself wrong instead. Cause there's inherent bias in trying to prove yourself right.

So I that's all those points are awesome so let's switch gears just a little bit. you are obviously a health focused guy So I'm curious what points two and three will be but I've already mentioned one of them what? What are three kind of healthy things you're working on for your longevity, right? you're still a younger guy, you're obviously in shape, you do the gym, but what are some other things you focus on health wise to keep yourself, tuned up?

and a lot of that is diet. Related and I just stopped drinking not because I don't drink like it's not a hard line on the sand, but it just never makes me feel good. It never feels like a good time. I never feel like I can afford to be hung over like my schedule. It just is not conducive to not being productive. and in, in some ways I've created that circumstance for myself. So that's the first thing. The second thing is sleep. I'm really dialed about sleep. yeah.

And nothing has improved my quality of life more than really getting good sleep quality and monitoring it. So I wear a whoop strap before that. I wore a Fitbit before that I had an aura ring. There's lots of different ways to track this stuff. But the key for me has been temperature. Of all the things that has improved my sleep, consistency and temperature are the two big ones. So getting to sleep at this, at a similar time every night is a big one.

And making sure that the room temperature is low enough that my skin temperature, my surface skin temperature can drop by two degrees throughout the night. If it's not cold, my sleep quality is just like noticeably worse. so sleep is like a really big one. And then supplementation. I go, I get regular blood work done with my naturopath. And, we talk about what vitamins I should or shouldn't be taking. And we're regularly updating that to make sure that, all the bases are covered.

that's really getting into optimization. But what I find interesting is I talk to a lot of people and they're asking questions about. supplements and what do you take and what kind of protein are you on and what kind of vitamins do you take? And I'm like, dude, you sleep like four hours a night. You eat like shit. You don't exercise. start there. there's no point. There's no vitamin that's going to fix that stuff. That is by far the most important thing is exercise, diet, and sleep.

those will get you 90% of the results. Everything else after that is gravy.

Alright, the one, last question, mystery question, that I always ask... so if somebody, and people always tell me I say the same thing, but, If there was something you could do, anything on earth, and you knew you couldn't fail, what would it be?

And, it's been a really valuable experience, but, I've found that I'm much more fulfilled as like a coach and a supporter and somebody that can come in and I can add a lot more value in that way as well. as an outside perspective with a little limited scope. and so that's, I think the next level for me, it's where I want to go in my trajectory as an entrepreneur is to go up to that next level of resource allocation and capital allocation.

that's what I think I would do and I would just back incredible founders and try to support them and help, use my abilities and my resources to help a lot of other people make an impact and kind of build their dream life.