How This CEO Bootstrapped His Way to Success

You don’t need investors if you make a great product that serves a true customer need better than anything else out there.

With all the noise and light emanating from Silicon Valley creating immense pressure on entrepreneurs to seek out and accept massive investment rounds, it’s hard to imagine the old-fashioned business method of just making a product and selling it still works.

Ross Andrew Paquette didn’t intend to build a hyper-growth SaaS business. He had learned sales on the job during college, when he was recruited by a friend to a sales role in a SaaS company. Frustrated with the tools and approaches it seemed everyone was using, he set out to build a better mousetrap.

Ross focused on what he felt were the key metrics missing in most email marketing product lines: deliverability and customer service. Maropost was conceived originally to directly address this gap in the market. Ross thought he’d be able to find a few steady customers who agreed with his vision of what was missing in the market, perhaps enough to set him up with a comfortable lifestyle business.

Unexpectedly, his innovation really hit a nerve. So much that today, he’s leading a team of 150 employees, that’s been ranked as one of the top five fastest-growing companies in Canada three years straight. All without raising any funding for the first several years!

But there was a winding road between that initial success, and the position Maropost currently commands in the market. First, there is the issue of timing.

When you’re truly innovating, Ross says, you have to break away from the norms of success of the old system. There is no real way to measure your impact in the beginning because the measurement system doesn’t exist yet. That was certainly true with the solution Maropost set out to build to solve the proven, but broken, ways that email marketing was being done previously.

Next there is the challenge of building a team. Maropost functioned with an incredibly small team, just 5 people, until 2015, before they really started hiring significantly. Eventually, they had to grow in order to service the demand they’d surfaced. But, of course, that only led to new problems.

“Our approach was broken when we first started — we would bring someone into a position they’d already had and expect them to perform without any coaching or guidance. ‘Here’s your laptop, here’s your phone. Call me when you have some results.’ But that just isn’t realistic…Now, I can say I really appreciate how important upfront training and ongoing support are to building — and keeping — a solid team.”

Ross learned the hard way the importance of having a good culture, being transparent about your values, and hiring for fit rather than the details on the resume. When people join Maropost today, they know exactly what’s expected of them. Professional development is strongly aligned with the strategic goals of the company.

Ross is now assembling a top-notch C-level leadership team to assist him in taking the company to its next level. This will probably be his toughest challenge yet.

“Delegation and succession are all about trust, but you can’t just trust a skillset — you need to be able to trust the person.”

I asked Ross about his attitude about the competition, curious about the Maropost strategy for staying ahead.

“The first few years were a lot more competitor-focused than we are today,” he says.

But that’s changed over time as Maropost has learned to align more closely with customer needs, and to build features to address those needs.

“We’re looking to create a new category — something we can own — not just compete in theirs anymore. With that, our focus is a lot more internal. It’s a lot less about what our competitors are doing and a lot more about what more we could be doing to simplify our customers’ lives.”

Did you know I’m publishing a second edition to Startup Patterns in the Fall of 2019? Adding more interviews like this one, and revising the original content with what we’ve learned since the first release, so you won’t want to miss it. Have a story to tell. Get in touch!

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