TechTO’s Marie Chevrier on Sampler’s Rise and Fall and Creating Safe Spaces for Canadian Entrepreneurs

Marie Chevrier spent 10 years building Sampler to a significant scale before losing product market fit due to post-pandemic market shifts, supply chain crises, and rising costs. Rather than staying quiet about the failure, she openly shared her bankruptcy story to help other founders.

Now running TechTO, Canada’s largest tech community with 60,000 members, Marie discusses the real lessons from startup failure, the importance of separating personal identity from business outcomes, and how she’s building supportive ecosystems for Canadian entrepreneurs across major tech cities.

Let’s dive in.

Mark MacLeod:

In this episode, I sit down with Marie Chevrier Schwartz. Marie was the founder and CEO of Sampler. Like the vast majority of startups, Sampler ultimately failed, although she got much further than most ever do. But unlike many founders, she was really open and shared, hey, my business went bankrupt, here’s why. And it was just completely open. And she did this to heal herself, but to share actionable learnings and insights with other founders.

She’s now taken that service mentality on behalf of founders to a new level, running TechTO, which is the largest community of startup founders in Canada. So we talk about the Sampler journey, particularly the kind of impact on her. We talk about TechTO, we talk about the Canadian ecosystem.

So, if you’re an American or from another country, maybe this episode isn’t super interesting to you, but if you’re Canadian, you’re definitely going to want to tune in.

Marie, welcome to The Startup CEO Show. It’s a true pleasure to have you here. How are you doing today?

Marie Chevrier:

Doing good. Thanks for having me.

Mark MacLeod:

My pleasure. I’ve actually wanted to have you on for some time. I’ve known you for ages, but I feel maybe once every two years I would just run into you at an event. So, the chance to just sit down and chat for a while is cool. And I think you have some really important lessons to share as an entrepreneur who’s been through the full journey and now in your role, kind of supporting the ecosystem as well.

For folks who don’t know you, maybe let’s just start off with just a little background on yourself, and in particular, just context for that last company, Sampler. Cause we’re going to chat about that experience a little bit.

Marie Chevrier:

Of course. So, Marie, originally from Montreal, grew up in a small city called Hudson and went to the University of Ottawa, kind of making my way towards Toronto. When I went to the University of Ottawa, that’s the furthest my mom would let me go. I wish I could have jumped right to Toronto, but she said you could go to Ottawa. And then once I showed that I wasn’t completely messing up there, she let me go further.

Mark MacLeod:

So she gave you a little more rope.

Marie Chevrier:

Exactly. Ended up in Toronto working in advertising. But I guess it’s around that time that I realized I definitely wanted to own my own business. I remember working at an agency, thinking, oh my God, there’s no way, just looking at the clock and feeling like time wasn’t going by fast.

Anyways, fast forward a few years, I got the chance to move to New York City to work for Rocket Internet and work on my first startup. So, that’s a part of my story that I don’t talk a lot about.

Mark MacLeod:

I didn’t know that.

Marie Chevrier:

Yeah, I was really super foundational. I got to work on business models like HelloFresh in the very early days in New York, which was really cool, to learn a lot about building businesses. And then I decided, well, I guess I was forced to decide to move back to Canada because I lost my visa when one of the startups failed, and then ended up moving back to Toronto and just decided to jump into entrepreneurship. I’d been sitting on an idea that was about digitizing the product sampling space, and that was 2013 when I got started with Sampler.

Mark MacLeod:

Okay, so what did that idea come out of? The agency work?

Marie Chevrier:

Yeah, it was kind of an accumulation of things. When I was at the University of Ottawa, I was a brand ambassador giving out free product samples. So I remember thinking that product sampling was highly inefficient. It was going out to kind of everybody that was walking by the agency, which would put me in front of a lot of consumer-packaged good brands, like Unilever was a client there.

And then when I went to New York for Rocket, I worked on Glossybox, which was a subscription box for beauty, and then HelloFresh had a big sampling element to its recipes, too. So I feel like I just kept getting hit by product sampling in every step.

Mark MacLeod:

I love it. I can’t remember if I ever shared this with you, but when I first started my investment bank before we decided to specialize in SMB software, my literal very first client was Extend, I think it was called, and I helped him raise some money in the sampling space. But I think with a different take than yours.

Marie Chevrier:

I think I remember that. Yeah, yeah, that’s awesome.

Mark MacLeod:

And you know, we were talking about Real Ventures before we started, and the predecessor fund to Real Ventures was this thing called Montreal Startup. It’s just like a little test fund. And the biggest company we had there was Beyond the Rack, which, actually, in its final years, leveraged sampling pretty extensively. And it was a nice way to just increase the basket size. Almost pure margin for the merchants, which was cool.

You wouldn’t know this talking to startup people, but most startups fail. I think 90% of startups fail, and venture funding actually only increases those odds. And I say you wouldn’t know it because when you chat with people and you ask how you’re doing, what they say is I’m crushing it. And you catch up with a VC and you’re like, hey, how’s your portfolio? And like yeah, they’re crushing it, which is mathematically impossible.

So, you had a venture-backed startup in Sampler, and it didn’t become a billion-dollar outcome. It ultimately failed. But you were open about it. First of all, I applaud that deeply. There are so many exits, I’m going to say that in quotes, exits that are celebrated, where the founders got nothing, the common shareholders got nothing. And again, it’s just feeding the bullshit and the hype.

And you were really open about it. In fact, not just open about it, but it was almost like a publicity tour, it felt like, for a while, sharing all of those thoughts. And so I don’t want this to be a postmortem on Sampler itself, but I would love just your thoughts and reflections looking back. I don’t know, I’m going to turn the mic over. Like, you’ve talked about this a bunch. What’s your postmortem and reflections looking back?

Marie Chevrier:

Yeah, so Sampler had an amazing run. Like, incredible growth spurts that were incredibly exciting. For example, in the pandemic, we saw such rapid growth because the model was really serving a big need in getting product samples into the hands of people in their homes. So, the company had a lot of potential, and it was such an exciting business to build.

I will tell you, there’s not a day until probably the last three months of the business that I didn’t love what I did. It was such an incredible journey, and I’m so thankful for it. If I were to give it a title, I would say we lost product market fit 10 years in. Like, I think that’s ultimately what happened.

We had several different market trends kind of come at us at the same time and kind of out of nowhere, one of them being the return into store. So, post pandemic, after having invested a ton into continuing to build the product, continuing to build the team, we saw a full return back to store, not just for consumers, but also for advertisers. Advertisers who had really took a bet on E-Commerce during the pandemic, immediately went back to grocery stores.

And I think we did everything we could to navigate that and adjust the product, and I think we did an okay job with that. But with that came also at the same time the supply chain crisis, which ultimately reduced the ability for production of product samples and eventually ended up in a massive increase of cost of shipping, and shipping was a core component of how we delivered the samples directly to people’s homes.

So, we saw our cost basis increase by 200% in our key market in one year. There were just a lot of different things happening all at once, including the last kind of straw was a funding market kind of dropped, drying up, and also interest rates increasing. It was just generally like in that macroeconomic context, and like the moment we were in as a business, it was just really an uphill battle and one that we eventually just couldn’t course correct.

So, I guess like some of my big learnings, because I think that’s what the question was, first off, I think, because I will build another business in my next business, I think I will force myself to be highly paranoid. I think we’re all paranoid a little bit as entrepreneurs, but I now understand that you can have product market fit, and you can lose product market fit.

And I think that that’s really important. Like, a good example for every founder was when the pandemic hit, you couldn’t have predicted that there would be a global pandemic. And we were all forced. I remember you were doing a ton of sessions with a lot of us founders during that time, trying to understand, okay, what does that mean for my business? And trying to understand, okay, what can happen next?

I feel like maybe we should be doing that quarterly, better. Like, what are the big macroeconomic trends that are impacting our companies? And what does the worst-case scenario look like? Yeah, so I think I would become a little bit more paranoid to hopefully see some things.

The second thing is what I think I would really ask myself: what type of company I’m really building? I think 10 years ago, when I was building Sampler, the market was really frothy as it related to funding. You know, you could be tech-enabled and was tech enough? Whereas these days funding is a little less available, and I think funding, especially in Canada, is focused on companies that have a certain growth profile and a certain size of market that is a lot larger than perhaps it was 10 years ago.

The reality is that, in hindsight, I don’t think that Sampler was a venture-backed business. You couldn’t have known that 10 years ago. But the market kind of tapped at $10 million, and some of my competitors are at 20, 30, but these are not $100 million companies. So, it’s good to know what I am building, and that way you can maximize for what the outcome is for you and for your investors, and be better aligned.

And then third, the most important, I think, and probably where we’ll focus a lot of the conversation, is that you’re not your business. To the point of the story, you said about like how I came out and just was very open about it, I think that was my biggest lesson, the last three months of the business were so difficult. I had a newborn baby. In fact, I was very late in my pregnancy when I learned that the business would probably not survive.

It was really, really difficult. But I can tell you that the day that I told myself okay, I did everything I could. I took care of everybody I could take care of. I made sure to do right by my investors and to be communicative. I did everything I could.

The next day, I was truly relieved, and I was truly ready for a new chapter of who Marie could be. And I want entrepreneurs to know that you are not your business, and you will have a second, you will have a third, you will have a fourth chapter, and in fact, it could be quite exciting.

Mark MacLeod:

I love that so much. Losing product market fit actually feels particularly relevant in these times because SaaS is being disrupted, perhaps not as a business model, but SaaS as this notion of I’ve got this user interface and I have to do a bunch of work to get value out of it. And now, I have a client in the marketing tech space that built a growth-stage, series B-funded SaaS business, and now they’re busy disrupting themselves with a series of agents.

So, the business is two things. I’ve got this pretty large, legacy business, but it’s not growing, we’re not really investing in it. And I have a pre-product market fit, a three-guys-in-a-garage agentic business. And like, I have to bifurcate everything, including my mindset. So, it is particularly challenging.

I want to really dig more into the mindset, but I’m curious, did you see an opportunity for a new Sampler, and was there an opportunity to maybe kind of go back to the garage again and restart?

Marie Chevrier:

The reality is that, and I think it’s important to recognize this in the capital structure that Samper had, it was impossible. We don’t need to go into the details, but at a high level, once you’ve taken venture capital, once you’ve taken debt, there are a bunch of people that are looking for a certain multiple or nothing, and that is ultimately the business model that I had sold to them.

So, we were not in a capital structure to do that. But having said that, we did talk about that with some of my leadership team, thinking, hey, do we propose a side project where we do this, we do that? I’ll say, last summer, we weren’t yet at the agents. I feel like people weren’t necessarily thinking about that. I don’t know that we were thinking about it exactly like that, but we were thinking of more nimble ways, and I think the reality is that even if it was possible, I think I was done.

I think I realized that you can be really obsessed with and love a problem for a very long time, and then you can never want to talk about that problem.

Mark MacLeod:

Yeah, I totally got that.

Marie Chevrier:

Because I got offers soon after to join companies in this space or to think about the problem in a different way, and I was just like, no, I’m gonna solve another thing now.

Mark MacLeod:

I love it. Sounds like you gained a healthy perspective really quickly. What do you attribute that to?

Marie Chevrier:

I think I was really lucky in the process to have an opportunity to really open every door possible. Like, it wasn’t an overnight thing. It was months upon months of opening a door and the door getting shut. And I’m a highly productive person, and I just remember always trying to find something else. And you know, 10 years of startups, that’s a lot of that. The doors were getting shut in a closer perimeter in the last little bit. But we get used to finding another way.

And there was just no more way. And so, I think that was cathartic in that sense. And I think I was lucky also because I was pregnant with a little baby, and it gives you a ton of perspective to just be above having done everything I possibly can, I probably should just go be a mom for a little bit and like, there are bigger things in life than our companies and I need to just go focus on my little girl and my little boy.

Mark MacLeod:

The two other startups. A much longer cycle.

Marie Chevrier:

Yeah, exactly. But yeah, it was fast, and I’ve had a lot of conversations with amazing founders who are closed all levels of communication, just shut down for a year, two years, and just really had a lot of difficulty coming out. And there’s no comparison; everybody deals with it differently.

The other thing that perhaps helped me, that I want to offer up to someone who might, like me, be a pretty public person to begin with, is like, I just ripped the band-aid off. Like, I went on social media and I just said like, my company went bankrupt, and it wasn’t necessarily a super popular choice.

Like, we don’t see a lot of people doing that. But for me, the wave of love and support that I got was also a huge gift. To see people focused on the impact I had made on their journey, whether it was a past employee saying how they loved working, the community helped me focus on the really good positives and impact that the company had had on our community, and on our industry, versus the negative.

Mark MacLeod:

Amazing. Did you know that it would be healing when you did it, or did you do it for other reasons?

Marie Chevrier:

I thought it would be healing to do something with authenticity. I think that’s a big value of mine. So, yeah, I knew that I would kind of want to get back out there and find a new role or something like that, or maybe find a new business idea, and I didn’t want to be shaking hands with someone and then them to be like, oh, what happened? Like, and then I have to tell the story a thousand times, and then perhaps not feel compelled to have that authentic discussion a thousand times. So, it just felt right to do it that way.

I was also forced because the media was publishing it. So, the timeline wasn’t exactly in my favor, but it was fine. And I think in the end it was a gift that it happened that way.

Mark MacLeod:

Yeah, you know, you talk about founders kind of just going dark and not sharing anything. And so many founders just kind of bottle up their emotions and think they’ve just shoved them down, but it doesn’t work that way. It manifests in the body in the form of physical stress and ailments. The issues are in the tissues; that’s what my yoga teacher tells me. So I love that you released it.

There’s a lot that’s really important here that people need to listen to, but I just want to reinforce one thing you said, which is you are not your company. And like, I have many CEOs, particularly my enterprise sales CEOs, whose sense of confidence, self-worth, and energy rise and fall with their quota attainment. Like, literally, it’s a graph that just plots along the axis of the sales of the company, which is, of course, super unhealthy. So yeah, I love that you had that distance.

Marie Chevrier:

Yeah, I think I didn’t have it throughout. I was forced to work on that muscle. But I resonate. So, I think I was definitely that person who was plotted to the performance of the company.

Mark MacLeod:

Switching gears, when I was at Real Ventures, I would go to these different cities. I didn’t get this question in Toronto so much, but in Ottawa I did, in Montreal, Quebec City, these kinds of maybe smaller cities, where entrepreneurs would come to me and be like, hey, how can I help develop my community and my ecosystem?

And my answer was always, just build a fricking amazing company. Because we need more big giant companies, and if you do that, the ecosystem will take care of itself. Now, I still believe in that advice, but it was self-interested advice because, as a VC, I just wanted to back people maniacally focused on creating giant outcomes. But you’ve actually been doing both while you were running Sampler; you’ve been involved for some time, and now you run it. So I would love to know, I guess first of all, what drew you to be involved originally?

Marie Chevrier:

Yeah. So, I guess now it would be like eight years or so that I’ve been involved with TechTO. Back in the day, I always loved the TechTO events. And when I was building Sampler, I felt that we didn’t have a community in the retail commerce space where founders of other commerce companies could get together. And Toronto has a lot of commerce startups.

So, it was kind of silly that that did not exist. So I had proposed to Alex and Jason to run the Commerce TechTO events, and they had welcomed it, and I think at this point it’s like one of the longer-standing verticals of the network. I think selfishly, I wanted that community for myself.

So, the platform of TechTO is well established, and we still do this today. In fact, if anyone wants to build a vertical community in any of their cities and is just passionate about building a space for themselves, we would welcome that. But the TechTO infrastructure gives you the space, the food, the ticketing, and the network. So, it was just very turnkey.

And I guess when I closed Sampler and came out on social, I had done a lot of reflecting. It was three months after we closed the business, and the main emotion that I had was a deep sense of empathy for builders, a deep sense of empathy for myself, which I think was really helpful in my recovery, but also for the rest of everybody else who was going through this.

I had been connected with like tens of founders who were going through similar things during that time, and they were all saying very similar things. So, when I came out on social and said what happened, I had said if anyone is working on anything for the community, I would love to give back for the next kind of chapter. And Jason and Alex reached out in like 15 minutes. I had not talked to them about this.

So, it was really awesome. And yeah, I just really resonated with the community. Like, TechTO has been around for 11 years. I think that the guys and the team have done the work of the first ingredient of community, which is spend time in the community and make sure that you give first for a long time.

And so, it was a really interesting opportunity to come in, and actually, I’m sure felt that too in your career, it’s pretty fun sometimes to just be in service of someone else’s idea for a little bit and kind of coming in with a new eye and renovating something. So, it’s working a different muscle for me, and it’s just really fun.

Mark MacLeod:

I love that. But I’ll say that last point is actually my entire career, honestly. As a CFO, you’re there supporting the CEO and their vision. Let’s make sure you get the capital, let’s make sure we got controls, and we don’t blow up. I think VCs get far too much attention and suck up too much oxygen in the ecosystem. But, at the end, VCs are not the stars and are not even in charge of their success. It’s the entrepreneurs who determine whether a fund is successful or not.

As a banker, the same thing. I’m behind the scenes. You built a company for eight years. Now I’m going to come in and try, and find a home for it and see if we can create life-changing wealth for you. And of course, as a coach, I coach some of the most ambitious CEOs in the world. But you would never know. I’m so behind the scenes. I’m just here in my home office in the middle of nowhere. I don’t go to the boardrooms. Like, I don’t travel for business anymore. I’m just totally behind the scenes and absolutely love it.

Marie Chevrier:

Yeah, it’s really fun. It’s a really nice hat to wear. It’s fun.

Mark MacLeod:

Yeah, it sure is. Let’s take one step back. You know, so TechTO, this is relevant to the Canadian listeners, which there are a lot of. But, in case there are folks living under a rock, what is TechTO? Let’s just make sure we cover that.

Marie Chevrier:

Yeah, TechTO is Canada’s largest tech community. So, we have about 60,000 readers across Canada. We do events in all the major tech cities. Tons of events in Toronto, at least one monthly, at least one quarterly in Vancouver, and Montreal. And then this year we have a very big, ambitious goal of spending more time in Atlantic Canada, Calgary, and Edmonton. And yeah, we’re really excited about just unifying the tech community across all those events, and we think the time is now.

I’m sure that’s one of the things we’ll talk about, but there’s a really interesting energy in our ecosystem that I feel like, back to our product market fit, I think we have a very good product market fit.

Mark MacLeod:

I love that. I’m curious, every city, every community has its stakeholders and enablers. Are they open in these other cities to you coming in, or is there a bit of resistance that you have to overcome?

Marie Chevrier:

Yeah, I think one of the reasons we changed the way we say TechT.O., to TechTO, is because when we go into other cities, we want people to feel that it’s not T.O., it’s really a national organization.

Mark MacLeod:

Like Toronto conquering Halifax.

Marie Chevrier:

Exactly. And I think with that, you have to do it with tax. We are not looking to own the community. We’re just looking to support wherever we can. So, for example, we’ll be very involved with a grassroots initiative that’s happening in Montreal for Montreal Tech Week, or just two weeks ago, we were there supporting the Startup Fest event, or SaaS North in Ottawa.

Like, we’re coming in to bring even more excitement around things that are happening locally. And I think the best way to build community is radical collaboration. So that’s been our ethos ever since I’ve come in, for sure. And I think for the guys as well, for a long time. But that’s really what we’re looking to do in these expansion plans, yeah.

Mark MacLeod:

So I have to say, I saw you on stage, I think, a couple of times during Toronto Tech Week, and my impression was you were in your element. Like, this is Marie in her natural habitat. She’s totally comfortable. So I gather you’re enjoying what you do.

Marie Chevrier:

Yeah, it’s funny, this goes back to reinventing yourself or, like, finding new strengths. And, when you think about it, when I started Sampler, it was 11 years ago, I was literally a baby. I was fresh out of corporate jobs and startup school, I guess, and it was my first business.

Obviously, 10 years would change you. Like, 10 years would have an incredible impact, and during that time, I got married, had two kids. So it was really interesting to go from the busy every day for 10 years to radio silence. And I know we’re both mindful people, to have that time to just be with yourself and realize, okay, what do I actually like?

And also to have the luxury of a kind of white canvas. Once I was actually able to get away and get silence, I remember it feeling like when you go on a Euro trip in high school, and the door to the airplane opens and you’re like, I can be whoever I want in Italy. I can do whatever I want. Like, it really felt like that once I was able to kind of change my mindset away.

So, I recognized that I really like people, I really like helping people, and listening deeply. And, they’re not necessarily the typical things that you would identify with. And I have a great sense of intuition. Like, I was looking for things that were at that level of skill. Not like, I’m good at sales, I was looking at personality traits.

And I really like details. So, event planning is really fun for that. Like, I love being on stage and listening deeply in the panels and creating a separate space, I love that. But I also really loved picking the flowers that were on the table.

Mark MacLeod:

That’s cool.

Marie Chevrier:

Very, very interesting. Perhaps not tech founder…

Mark MacLeod:

Not stereotypically, no. But good to exercise your inner OCD to the extent that you have one of those. So, you now have a front door kind of view on all of the Canadian ecosystem. Obviously deeply Toronto, because you’re really involved there. But like you said, you were just in Montreal for Startup Fest, you’re in Vancouver. So, you’re coast to coast. What are your thoughts on the Canadian ecosystem?

Marie Chevrier:

Yeah, I think that Canada is obviously in the best place it’s ever been as it relates to the tech community. We were starting to see some great unicorn companies come about. Like, I loved seeing the story of Jane App not so long ago. Like, here’s an amazing company that was silently building just an incredible company. Seeing the founders having the opportunity to take money on a secondary.

Like, it’s awesome to see, and these are the signs to me of an ecosystem that’s going to start being able to create like mini Janes and creating these companies that come out of these companies. So, I think we’re starting to see those awesome signs.

I think, unfortunately, we are clouded by so much negativity because the market is at the same time changing so fast. It’s really difficult to be a founder at this time. We talked a little bit about AI disrupting companies that have been established or even like for me, I feel if I went to go build another business right now and I have this conversation with a lot of founders that are kind of in between companies right now, it’s overwhelming to be like, do I even know how to build a business in the age of AI?

There’s a lot of anxiety about that. So, we think at TechTO that that just means that we need to be telling more stories, and more than ever, we need to be sharing more and being open. On the positive side, we need to be celebrating the companies that are taking massive risks, that are very ambitious, that have global visions for their businesses.

And that’s why we have initiatives like our national rocket ships tour, where we’re going into all the big tech cities, and we’re picking the 10 best companies according to the ecosystem. At any stage, they’re just being rewarded for big traction in the last 90 days, basically. And we’re telling their stories, we’re telling people to join their companies, we’re just like getting behind them.

And then on the flip side, if there are anxieties, issues, things that are happening, how do we tell the real stories of people that maybe overcame a problem and share the lessons learned with the rest of the community? And that’s always been part of our ethos, just like our events, our newsletter, it’s all about the real discussions.

But I don’t know, what do you think? Do you think that we’re starting to see the development of that repeatable ecosystem? Repeat founders. Like we’re seeing more and more second, third-time founders.

Mark MacLeod:

Yeah, for sure. I mean, there’s goodness, for sure. There’s a Shopify mafia running around, doing things. I mean, you brought up Jane, what an amazing company. Years ago, when I was running Surepath and I specialized in SMB SaaS, I figured out that it was a really special company. I need to get in there. Alison was pretty hard to get in front of, but I finally had a meeting with her. She was pretty frosty.

I had her on the podcast recently, and she admitted she was a bit frosty, but she just built a truly amazing business. And then you’ve got Jack from Clio buying a company for a billion dollars. Like that’s awesome. Like we need more of that.

So, there’s lots of goodness, there’s no doubt about that. My observation on the Canadian tech ecosystem has been for a long time that the best and simultaneously the worst thing about our ecosystem is our proximity to the US, because we inevitably compare ourselves to this thing that is 10 times larger.

You brought up Rocket Internet, for folks who don’t know, an amazing German company taking business models that were popular in the US and building something for the German market. And Germany, even though it’s right in the middle of Europe, is a large, kind of self-contained market. And there are lots of companies built in Germany that just serve Germany, whereas here in Canada, that’s not the case.

Historically, Canadian customers didn’t buy software unless the Americans bought it first. And there wasn’t strong domestic funding. You could argue maybe there still isn’t. And so we inevitably had to go to the US for funding. My only concern really is our proximity to the US.

And now, particularly in the context of horizontal AI, which is like a capex game, and you’ve got Meta paying stupid amounts of money for AI talent. Like, that playing field isn’t level, so how do we win in that playing field? But all of that to say there’s such amazing goodness here, and clearly, really big companies being built.

You know, what I wonder and I’d love your thoughts on, why don’t we have more Shopify? Like, why is Shopify so exceptional? Why does it stand out so much?

Marie Chevrier:

I think that it’s a bit of what I just said, but I think there might be another point there, which is that I think we have to increase our appetite for risk. Like, you hear often the difference in how a Canadian founder versus a US founder might speak. So, I think that leads well into accepting failure. I think if we could feel like, okay, I can take a massive swing, I can build a business that has a global impact, I can build a business that changes commerce. Not me, Shopify.

Mark MacLeod:

Yes. Look out, Tobi, Marie’s coming for you.

Marie Chevrier:

So, I think we need a little bit more of that. And I think it might not be an overnight thing, but by celebrating the successes, celebrating the big swings, that’ll help.

Mark MacLeod:

By the way, going back to this award thing that you’re doing in all these different cities, I love that your criteria is traction. Because if I stereotype, this is a complete generalization, and all the Canadian entrepreneurs listening will hate me, but I would say Canadians earnestly build great product and do a bad job of selling product.

Whereas Americans may or may not build great product, but man, they’ll sell the shit out of what they’ve got. Like, just super aggressive, and distribution is really where all the value is created at the end of the day.

Marie Chevrier:

I couldn’t agree more. And I will tell you my biggest pet peeve because I get the chance to speak with a lot of early-stage founders nowadays through this and through some accelerators I support, and we ask in these meetings sometimes how many customers have you talked to? And in fact, in one accelerator, we have a customer discovery, and in a period of eight weeks, we just ask the companies to fill 40 interviews, talk to 40 customers.

And many don’t. Many find excuses like, oh, I can’t, I’m busy, we’re releasing this, or we’re doing that, and my feedback is there’s literally nothing else you should do. Don’t release the feature. Speak to the customer. You might not even release this feature after.

So, I think that’s bang on. Like, we need to focus on commercialization and stop building. Not that everybody is, but if you’re in the early days, just find your first 20 customers. My first demo to a customer was a Photoshop file. I didn’t even have a developer, and I sold the customer on this Photoshop file. Then I went to find a developer, and I told him I could launch in 90 days, and I wasn’t ready in 90 days. We launched in 180 days, and they still paid the bill. So, talk to customers.

Mark MacLeod:

Amazing. Such great advice. The basics. You know, so gotta hammer that in.

Last question, Marie. And I only thought of this afterwards, so I didn’t send this in advance, but last year I gave a keynote at the Peerscale annual general meeting, and at the time I heard that there were rumblings that TechTO and PeerScale were coming together, and now you’ve acquired them or merged or whatever it is.

And if I were to generalize, TechTO is very focused on the early-stage ecosystem, folks who might be thinking about just what many consider to be the default path. I’m going to raise venture, I’m going to go for it. PeerScale, a more growth stage. Either folks who are bootstrapped, or maybe just kind of were bootstrapped and then did private equity deals.

So, I’m curious what you’ve seen just now that you’re spending time in that ecosystem as well, what are your observations about that? Because it’s a very different world.

Marie Chevrier:

Yeah, well, so what’s really amazing is Peerscale’s been around for 20 years. It’s a network of executives, CEOs, COOs, and CTOs of tech companies. 50% of the companies, or a bit of a majority, are bootstrapped, and the rest would be venture-backed. The average company in that network is $30 million in revenue, and we have several that are in the hundreds of millions.

So, this group is really special. These are serial founders, well-experienced founders who know how to build really big businesses. And basically, the vision of bringing these two together is that this allows us to create a really full circle ecosystem. You can imagine how the PeerScale community are amazing mentors to the earlier-stage companies. You could also imagine how the TechTO community is a great talent pipeline, also a really great graduation class from Peerscale.

So, it’s been really magical. Completely different needs. So, we find that if in the very early stages our events and perhaps some of our programming for TechTO make a ton of sense. Like, you might want to get access to our templates and resources or come to our events. But when you get to $3 million in revenue, you’ve taken some capital or you haven’t, but you have a board of directors, and you have a big team.

At that point, you’re probably not attending as many events. You want focused, productive time with people who can help you. And what we found is that peers are usually the people who can help you the most because they are going through very similar things. So, the format is roundtable dinners monthly with a peer group of 8 to 13 max, I would say. And you meet with the same group every month.

So, some people call it the YPO of tech, basically, our software. So, a very similar kind of cadence. And it’s a very special place. And quarterly, we get to meet as a full membership, so that people from other tables get a chance to meet each other. And then annually, we have the retreat, which you participated in. So, really special space.

And I think if you’re a founder who maybe doesn’t have as many founder friends who are in the same stage, we would love to chat with you because it’s hard. I was part of a peer group, and at some point, you outgrow your peers or they outgrow you. And so it’s good to kind of be able to find a network that you can graduate into different tables and stuff.

Mark MacLeod:

For sure. Well, I really see the logic, that’s for sure. And you know, the members, I’m surprised they didn’t boot me out of the room for this because they were very actively discussing the merits of, hey, should we do this? And I’m there, I could have been like live-tweeting the entire thing. But, anyway, the strategy seemed very clear to me.

But I’ll say, maybe to end on this note, I only coach CEOs, and I only coach CEOs who have raised capital, often a ton of capital. So they have huge expectations. Every single one of my CEOs has a peer group. It could be something formal, like a PeerScale. It could be something like they’re just cobbled together with people they know.

But only other CEOs truly know what CEOs are going through. So I would say, and I know Peerscale, it’s not just CEOs, but peer groups are so powerful.

Marie Chevrier:

That’s awesome.

Mark MacLeod:

Love it. Well, Marie, thank you so much for making the time. Really, really enjoyed our discussion.

Marie Chevrier:

Same. Thank you.

Hey, thanks for listening to the Startup CEO Show. If you’d like to connect with me, be sure to visit my website at markmacLeod.me, or follow me on LinkedIn at The Mark MacLeod, or X account @markmacleod_, and if you want to tune in again next week, be sure to subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. We’ll see you next time!