When Maropost was first founded in 2011, it was a one-man operation. Ross Andrew Paquette had bootlegged Maropost entirely from the safety of his apartment, all while working as a sales executive at a company called Campaigner.
Six years later, Maropost became an international business valued at $160M and dubbed as one of the fastest-growing technology companies in North America by Deloitte. And now, a full decade later, with 175 employees in its name and multiple offices around the world, the company has officially reached $45M in annual gross revenue!
What is the secret to Maropost’s success? Let’s find out as we review their first decade (including quotes and original startup advice from Ross Andrew Paquette himself)!
The First Five Years of Maropost!
Maropost, when Ross Andrew Paquette had first developed the idea, was to be an email platform that would rival the lackluster options available at the time:
“I was involved in the email marketing industry as a sales executive for a company called ‘Campaigner’ back then. And, working there, I realized just how… deficient and undeserving the industry was at the time.” – Ross Andrew Paquette
He goes on to point out that all the SaaS and email marketing tools that he had encountered had “poor deliverability” and “even worse customer service.” As such, Maropost was born:
“To be perfectly honest, I didn’t have any intention of starting my own business back then. And, even when I decided to later on—after meeting a developer that was able to bring to life and improve upon what I envisioned—I only saw it as an opportunity to run a lifestyle business. At most, I was expecting around ten customers that I could give all my attention to.” – Ross Andrew Paquette
He couldn’t be any more wrong about where his plans ended, however. Somehow, without intending to, Ross had struck gold:
“To start with, it was just me, my CTO (who is still working with us today), and one other person. That was it. We avoided the pitfalls that I saw other platforms making at the time and did everything we could to continue developing our platform. Adding more and more features and improving its functionality every chance that we could get…
Before we knew it though, we had garnered enough attention to jump from $300,000 in revenue to $3.3M in revenue. And somehow, four years down-the-line, relying solely on our clients spreading their love for our product through word of mouth, we were able to become a $25M revenue company!” – Ross Andrew Paquette
It’s certainly not the most traditional startup story. After all, you don’t often hear success stories like this that don’t rely on overnight stardom brought about by stroke-of-luck marketing. Never mind the fact that Maropost was not even pro-marketing in the first place!
Maropost Behind-the-Scenes | 10 Years Later
Nowadays, much-departed from its humble beginnings as a simple email marketing platform, you can use Maropost as an intuitive, cloud-based marketing automation tool for simplifying multi-channel customer engagement without so much as breaking a sweat.
Senior Director of Maropost, Jacopo Mauri, even dubs the platform as a “marketing monster” that has helped over 10,000 marketers create personalized and highly-engaging campaigns across all relevant channels (including SMS, social media, mobile, and the web.)
But that’s not to say that they didn’t face any challenges. Ross Andrew Paquette often warns of avoiding “investors who are only in it for the money” — after a bad experience with investors that threatened to shake the values that made Maropost so successful.
He also cautions early startup owners to pay close attention to their hiring decisions after having experienced a stall in Maropost’s otherwise relentlessly rapid growth-rate due to hiring missteps during their first few years as a startup.
These tips come from experience. And, ten years down-the-line, Maropost stands strong because of those experiences (both the good and the bad). Perhaps, it is also why…
When I asked Ross Andrew Paquette if there was anything he wanted to tell his younger and more inexperienced self, he had only this to say: “Be bold, everything else is just noise.”