Why Rick Perreault Waited Until 40 to Become an Entrepreneur
Most people picture the stereotypical entrepreneur as a college kid writing code in his or her dorm room. Unbounce founder Rick Perreault was about as far as you could get from that stereotype when he started his latest venture. “Being 40 and going back to living like a student, and convincing five other senior professionals to do the same is hard,” he says. While he says he always had it in him, he didn’t specifically know he wanted to be an entrepreneur until much later in his career. Perreault held several senior management positions before becoming an entrepreneur in a few years ago. ”I don’t even think I ever used the word before I started Unbounce, and I certainly couldn’t spell it properly,” he says.
Perreault’s first business was Fanyard, a crowdsourced football matchup predictor. He says it was educational as he got to make some common big mistakes which he subsequently avoided with Unbounce. “The project was a classic example of ‘this sounds like a cool idea, lets build it,’” he says. “A big takeaway was that had I spoken to potential users before we started development, we may not have even built the app in the first place, or we would at least have done more than one pivot along the way.”
The idea for Unbounce came out of Perreault’s own need to get a landing page live for a small ad campaign. ”I literally found myself saying out loud ‘all I need is some thing where I can upload some images, add some text, throw in a CTA and I’m done!’ Getting a landing page live without having to wait for someone else shouldn’t be that hard,” he says. “At that moment I figured someone somewhere must have solved this problem, so I looked around and realized that there was no simple self-serve, small business focused solution that was as easy to use as MailChimp.” He then realized that the pain of dealing with other departments to get highly targeted landing pages built and deployed had been present in every online campaign he’d previously been involved in, and when he couldn’t find an easy alternative he knew he might be on to something. “I then set out to validate that the pain was either universal (which would mean an opportunity) or non-existent, explaining why nobody else had done it. Feedback convinced me to become an entrepreneur.”
Today Unbounce helps marketers create, publish and test landing pages. The company’s goal is to provide a solution that’s quick to adopt and easy to use – their site claims that if you can use PowerPoint, you can use Unbounce. In the first nine months after they launched they became cash-flow positive, and grew their customer base to over 1,000 businesses. They also added some prolific entrepreneurs to their advisory board, including Lean Startup founder Eric Ries, and SEOMoz founder Rand Fishkin, and have integrated with KISSinsights and MailChimp.
In the earlier days of the business Perreault says raising funding was one of the biggest challenges. “Raising an angel round when nobody on the team had any experience with raising capital for a startup is hard,” he says. He bootstrapped for the first seven or eight months of the business, and then raised money locally. He also said that saying no to edge cases and opportunities outside of their core market focus was essential in the early days, as was the focus on launching a Minimum Viable Product, allowing them to learn from their users as they built it.
Perreault says the key to an impressive client list that includes MailChimp and SlideShare has been marketing the idea since day one. And not day one of the launch, day one of development. “I believe that if you provide a product/service that is easy to use, solve a pressing pain point and deliver outstanding customer support to those who need it, your customers will talk about you,” he says. “That said, we started our marketing the day we started development. We created quality content on our blog which helped generate leads. By the time we were ready to go into beta, we had hundreds of potential customers waiting for access, many of them we got to know quite well.” He says they knew it was the right time to unveil Unbounce to the public the day that one of the beta users said the product was at a stage where they would pay for it.
As for growing their customer base, Perreault says they have an effective inbound marketing program and an easy signup process. “Most of our customers sign up, launch their campaigns and pay for the service, all without ever talking to us,” he says. “However, the key to make this no-touch approach work has been to reach out to our customers and work at understanding their challenges – especially those who have a pressing need for a solution like ours but have yet to fully adopt it – and try to focus on improvements that have big impacts.”
Perreault says his customer service experiences have taught him the importance of talking with your customers. “Using/making assumptions to drive business and product decisions is the fastest way to fail. Talk with your prospective customers before you spend a dime on development to validate that the pain your proposed solution addresses is something people would pay for. Talk with them while you are developing, and also after you release your product/service to keep you focused on what the majority of customers will pay for.” And as soon as you get to a point where one person will pay, you’ll find yourself in Perreault’s shoes – and if your experience is anything like Unbounce, you’ll be ready to launch.
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Have a question for Rick Perreault about optimizing landing pages or his journey as an entrepreneur? Ask him live Thursday, June 2nd at 3pm ESt. Submit a question or view his Q&A at Sprouter.com/rickperreault.
15 Responses to “Why Rick Perreault Waited Until 40 to Become an Entrepreneur”
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Great interview, and I am the biggest fan of Unbounce! It took me a little while to figure out how to add it into my mix of tools, but now that I have – OMG, I don’t know how I did anything without it.
Thanks for the interview and Rick… YOU DA MAN SONNN! LoL
P.S. R u hiring? ;-D
40? Hell, I’m 53 and I just quite my job to launch a startup. But please don’t take this as another sign of a bubble. I saw a need that I don’t think is being filled plus I just got sick and tired of leaving my professional “destiny” in other peoples’ hands. It’s now or never.
Ha, I’m an investor and I had no clue Rick was 40
.. he’s certainly doesn’t look it and is young at heart. Amazing Entrepreneur!
Thanks for drawing my attention to Unbounce. Love the concept!
Glad you like Unbounce, and thanks for reading!
A gentleman never tells his age
Best of luck with your business!
Glad it’s been such a must-use for you! Now you know the story behind it.
Thanks for reading everyone, I’ll be available tomorrow (Thursday) here for the live chat at 3PM ET if anyone wants to ask me any questions related to starting Unbounce.
Congrats Rick great initiative and innovation.
The stereotypical entrepreneur may be in a dorm room eating, ramen noodles, but the average age of an entrepreneur in ’09 was 39! You’re practically a baby.
Congrats on your success. Will check out Ubounce right now!
Rick is the real deal. Go Unbounce!
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Hooray for Rick – and for Erin for noticing. Applause for all the twentysomething entrepreneurs, but it is time more people understood entrepreneurs at 40 … or older like me and many others. We’ve seen the rise and fall or many (often repeated) fads, good times and bad, approaching doom in several forms and many fools as busy leaders and customers. When we become passionate about a market need, it is more likely sustained and fundamental than superficial. And we are less likely to say, “What the hell, I’m young and can do this several more times.”
Watch us “older” entrepreneurs. We’re probably really on to something.
I have to give all credit to Sarah for noticing Rick
I think you’re right, there are advantages to being an older entrepreneur. You’ve been through the Dot Com crash and understand how the market fluctuates – something that will help you when this supposed bubble bursts.
While I think 40 is pretty young, some of us start our own ventures later in life because we no longer have to worry about providing for our families so we can afford a little more risk.