Passing The Torch #02: The Entrepreneur Journey, with JP Bisson

Marcos Bravo: Hello everyone, Marcos here and welcome to another episode of our podcast with GrowthMentor. Today I had the pleasure to talk to JP Bisson. JP is the CEO of Geonode, but he has a huge history of creating products and startups. This conversation is full of little tips and tricks, and a lot of good advice that you are going to love. So I’m not going to talk too much about the conversation. I’m just going to let you listen to it. So just go ahead and enjoy.

Marcos Bravo: Welcome back. All right, cool. So we’d sort of literally on air. So how are you doing, brother?

JP Bisson: How’s it going? I’m doing well. Thanks for reaching out.

Marcos Bravo: No, thank you for coming. Because I really wanted to talk. First of all, we did talk a little bit before starting the recording. And I’m very impressed, you’re doing tons of things. And a lot of these things require a lot of time, a lot of effort, and a lot of money. But before we get into all of the struggles as a founder, just tell me a little bit more about you. I know you’re leading Geonode right now plus other projects, but I want to hear from you. So you tell me what’s JP up to these days?

JP Bisson: Sure. We do a lot, and it’s not by design. It’s a bit happenstance that this happens. But now, I mean, we’re definitely focused on Geonode. And that’s what we see as our growth for the foreseeable future. So I had to wind down other projects that were actually profitable or some that were on the way to being profitable. But it’s just, you know, I feel like every time I’ve tried to achieve too many things at the same time, it’s like chasing a bunch of rabbits. You don’t catch any, I know the feels. That’s what’s happening now.

Marcos Bravo: When did you start founding? Like your founding adventure? When was the first time you decided? Well, I’m gonna create my own company.

JP Bisson: I’m pre-like internet. I mean, pre-digital, not pre-internet. But I started when I was 16. I’m also 40, by the way, so I’ve been around the block a couple of times. At 16, it was not an internet business. It was a landscaping business, and we were cutting grass in Ottawa. It was called Shortcuts, Services, Your Lawn’s Best Friend, students owned and operated. And we put ads in classified sites, saying that we handle any kinds of odd jobs, etc. People would call us and just say, “Hey, do you guys do this?” And we would say, “Yeah, we do this.” Then we would call competitors, and see how much they charge, and we were always undercutting.

Marcos Bravo: What was your first sort of digital venture? When did that moment come?

JP Bisson: So the first one was, I started selling beach-style jewelry. I went on an exchange in Thailand, and I supported myself for a year there. I was dead broke coming back. But the idea of going back to Ottawa, and doing a normal job was horrific to me for the summer, so I said to a friend of mine, if you send me some money we’ll buy a huge amount of this because that’s where they make it in Thailand. And we ended up setting up some kiosks in the markets and everything. At the end of that summer, I met a guy who had a kiosk next to mine because we were doing a shopping mall at the time. He was selling teeth whitening products, which were basically a mouthpiece that you would use before Crest White Strips were available. I said, “Well, this kiosk is so busy,” and I wanted to be in business with that guy who was just a bit older and looked like he had everything figured out. I ended up taking his business online, it was called You Smile. But I also did it in shopping malls for a while and ended up becoming 50-50 partners with him. That was like my first touch with the internet and shopping malls. It didn’t work that well because we were underfunding it, and if you’re trying to sell something that people put in their mouth, you need to be able to demo if you’re selling in shopping malls. We couldn’t demo, and secondly, we ran promotions like “Have a White Christmas” for Christmas and stuff like this.

Marcos Bravo: I love when the whole marketing vibe starts coming in. Right, we need to figure out fun ways to fail this.

JP Bisson: Yeah, exactly. No, I mean, I live and breathe that stuff. But there are a lot of failures along the way. That was one of them. It had some lift, but not the lift I wanted. After that, I started this little product called Ortho Fill. I saw that there were some websites selling elastics to close people’s teeth gaps. I started that, but instead of making it a really crappy brand, I gave it a proper brand. We were selling for like $35 with shipping, and I was selling about 20 of them per day. So that was like, and it was basically all profit. So I was in my early 20s, making like five to $700 profit per day with no overhead. I decided to go back to South America because it was the dead of winter in Canada. It just sounded like a better way to spend my time. This was pre-Four Hour Workweek, so when I read The Four Hour Workweek, I was like, oh, there are other people out there that do this. It’s amazing. I love it.

Marcos Bravo: I need to figure that out. I read it a couple of times, to be honest, but I still have not organized myself enough to follow the rules.

JP Bisson: Yeah, I mean, rules are meant to be broken.

Marcos Bravo: Exactly. So let me bring it back to sort of now. I heard from our head of growth. He was like, “Look, you need to talk to JP. He’s a cool dude. He’s doing tons of stuff. And he’s becoming a mentor for something.” So before we talk about the relationship that you eventually created with GrowthMentor, when you become a founder, you want to know everything. You want to show your team or show that you know the path because, after all, you’re the captain, guiding the ship. But eventually, you do find these little moments that just sort of get lost, or you need the extra help. So how, as a founder, do you manage to face that moment?

JP Bisson: There are so many micro-decisions that you need to make while you’re growing a business from inception, all the way through scaling up and beyond. They’re not real bottlenecks that generally prevent everything from working; they’re usually things that hinder the optimized way that you can be running things. So there are all these micro things, and you don’t know what you don’t know. And especially with things moving so quickly. You see, I’m connected with a lot of people already on LinkedIn, etc. So I see things about rev ops, and it’s like, they’re all whole fields that take care of revenue operations, how you should optimize these things. You don’t know these potential levers of growth. So, how I deal with it: Usually, I have some friends that are also founders, so we talk a lot. But now, for the last four years, I’ve been in Portugal. And as you can see, maybe from the background, I’m in the middle of an orange plantation in the middle of Portugal. So the amount of internet or tech entrepreneurs that I speak to on a day-to-day basis is extremely limited. That’s where GrowthMentor came into play. I found it because I have a friend that wanted to build it for the Shopify space. He’s like, “I’m trying to build something like GrowthMentor.” And then I went to see GrowthMentor, and it was interesting. So I signed up, and it basically ticked all the boxes. Not a commercial plug for GrowthMentor, I know it’s for the podcast, but it’s a lot of value for founders. A lot of the decisions that I’ve made or several of the decisions that I’ve made as of late, including focusing entirely on GeoNode, come from some of these conversations that I’ve had on there. So, if you use it properly, it’s very helpful. Sometimes, it’s not just for things that I’m stuck on, but also to talk to other entrepreneurs who have been around the block or have done B2B, which GeoNode is, while I’ve mostly done B2C. I ask them, “What am I missing here? What is it that I’m not doing on a day-to-day that I should be doing?

Marcos Bravo: A little bit of comparing notes? So got it completely? You show me yours?

JP Bisson: It’s exactly comparing notes. You know, because I’ve done business, so many times, I’ve raised money for a previous startup while I was in the Philippines. I’m not like asking these beginner-level questions. So there are also these mentors who like to engage in more complex problems. So it’s also quite engaging both ways, I think.

Marcos Bravo: Because at least in my experience, I mean, I’m part of the mentor, and there were calls that I had no answers to. People were saying, “Look, this is my plan. I have a marketing strategy to go this way in that way. And like what do you think?” To be honest, tested? I like I don’t know. It sounds great. But what can I say? Obviously, if you see something that is extremely wrong, you might be like, Well, no, no, don’t do that. Right. But always is great to get to sit down and write well, oh, that’s what you’re doing. Okay, because this is what I will do. I’m not telling you to do this, but maybe focus on the thing, the values, and that conversation, right? You’re talking to people, one on one people like you.

JP Bisson: And that’s mentorship. I mean, mentorship is not like you’re not looking for a boss or manager to tell you what to do. A mentor points you in a direction that you might have not thought about. Doesn’t tell you to go there. So I also liked that type of relationship with people because it’s like talking to friends, but that friend just happens to be an expert at x that you’re actually struggling with. 

Marcos Bravo: You told me some of your companies? I mean, you had what, like 70 people or more and eventually, some of them, but how do you try to include mentorship into what you do with them? How not just yourself, but how do you sort of embrace mentorship into the company culture? If you do?

JP Bisson: Yeah, I’ve tried to do it with mixed results because I’ve bought a team account. And then it’s kind of like you can bring a horse to water but you can’t make a drink. So for me, I’ve completely integrated like, doing the mentorship calls within my normal work week. There’s not one call that I’ve had where I’ve I’m like, Oh, that was wasted. That was time wasted. Because I’ll know what the person is an expert at. And definitely, they’ll know something that I don’t. So I see always value in doing it. Whereas some people might think that you know, the time that they could be spending working. It’s kind of like the analogy, you spent nine if you had like, an hour to chop down a tree spend 90% of it sharpening the axe. Yeah, so this is kind of like sharpening the axe in my perspective. But to convey that properly to people because it’s kind of a new habit that you’re trying to form. To have this like openness, transparency, to basically just open up the kimono and say, Hey, this is I’m very transparent and all the calls I’m with revenue numbers, everything I saw.

Marcos Bravo: Peers, right? Now, you found a bunch of things. Well, I know about you. And now we’re talking about truly before. What is the main thing that you’ve you feel not only in yourself, but I mean, you talk to a bunch of founders, you’ve related with a lot of other founders too? What do you think is the main thing that founders struggled with in the beginning?

JP Bisson: Usually, they have a solution looking for a problem. So people fall in love with their solution. And they don’t do enough work identifying where the real problem is. So validation should be a step that is never overlooked, and you can’t spend too much time on it. So that one is one that people really fall in love with their solution. And they say, you know, I have this great idea. It’s not like I want to fix this problem. And most of the time the startups that identify the problem, say there’s, it’s a problem, and it’s not being served properly, it’s not getting fixed by anybody in the right way, or it’s an emerging problem because of the intersection of technologies that are combining to create new problems that people are facing, and then they’re not getting served properly. Anyway. So I think that’s the main issue at the beginning.

Marcos Bravo: When you move on, obviously, forward, you create something, you create your brand, you create your company, you have this, let’s say you have the right solution, right? But sometimes the money is not there. How do you usually take the approach with investors? For example, if you want to go and raise money, what are the sorts of tips or tricks that you’ve been learning? Like, this is what they want to hear? Or do you do research before? Who are they like, Do you adapt your pitch to what they want to hear? Like, what are the ways that you found that they were great, or at least well, at least to get something written when talking to investors?

JP Bisson: Sure. I mean, I want to not talk to investors any more. So like, I’m bootstrapping everything now. And I’ve made money exiting and stuff. So I have raised money in the past, from different venture capital firms. I think it depends on the stage of the company. And the more if you’re working on something that’s actually getting stronger by the day, and you’re going to reach some form of product market fit, potentially profitability, with the cash that you have, you have to defer raising money as much as possible. Because you’re differentiating yourselves in such big, incremental ways, with some of these milestones, that might be a couple of months away. So in terms of the perspective of when to raise money, I would be critical of that. In terms of what people want to hear, you know, I mean, it’s the size of the market, the size of the opportunity, are you the right team to actually execute this vision? How clear is the vision? How well structured the founding team is, by what I mean by this, is there a technical co-founder, if it’s a technical problem that you’re trying to solve? No technical co-founder, then you might be rotating through lead developers a little bit too much because there’s not going to be that buy-in, etc, and sometimes to go and get stuff in a startup. So yeah, then afterward is now there are different investors that are focused on different obvious stages, but also different industries. So it’s just to try to do your groundwork of identifying that match.

Marcos Bravo: I really want to know more about Geonode because I checked the website before our talk because I knew about Truly. As you said, Geonode is a B2B initiative, right? What are you really focusing on?

JP Bisson: Yeah, sure. So Geonode came to be because of Truly. Truly was my big vision, which I wanted to create this fair review platform where we would analyze reviews from everywhere on the internet for products, pass them through sentiment analysis algorithms, and then actually rank products based on what people love the most, surface fake reviews so that we could take those out of the equation and then with other algorithms show the pros and cons. Take out the features so that we can do a lot of analysis using AI. So that would save people a lot of time; the vision was very valid. But to do this, and to get all these reviews, etc, we had to build a lot of scraping technology. And we were spending a lot of money on proxies, and stuff. And it got me curious about the industry, and then we decided to start building our own internally, and we turned that into a brand. Just, actually, it was a little bit opportunistic, because we saw that the market was growing really quickly, etc. And I looked at the competitors, one, the pricing was really expensive. And two, it was badly served from a user experience perspective, like an industry that’s really behind the scenes, a lot of people build price comparison, data analytics, SEO technology, everything on top of proxies, data collection, etc. So I saw that there was a big angle to play there with doing something that’s a lot more user-friendly, a lot more marketing oriented, etc, which I found that the companies were failing at that. So then what happened is Geonode started making a lot more money than Truly, like a lot more and a lot quicker and a lot more easily. Truly, it was an uphill battle from the onset. You know, so at one point, people were trying to speak reason into me, because, my wife was telling me that I should jump over and focus but, you know.

Marcos Bravo: They do that a lot. The wives will forgive you.

JP Bisson: Yeah, big time. That was kind of when I came to my senses. To source the proxies ethically, we launched an app called RE Pocket. We have over 150,000 signups. With this app, you can install it on your phone or your computer, and we will buy back the unused bandwidth from your plan. So if you have 100 or 200 gigabytes in your home internet plan or unlimited, we buy back the unused bandwidth to subsidize the cost of having your internet connection.

Marcos Bravo: I was at Web Summit. If I had known you before, man.

JP Bisson: I went to Web Summit, a conference last November, and saw this app called Pinyon. It’s an app in Brazil for micro-tasks in the real world. They have millions of users in Brazil, and sometimes the government will pay them to do beach cleanup. The idea is that if you’re geographically close to the beach, you might make a couple of dollars to go to the beach and do some cleanup. You need to unlock the challenge with your GPS on your phone, and then you need to validate it by taking a picture of the trash you’ve collected. It’s a whole validation process. It opened my mind that RE Pocket could become an app for people to earn money in many different ways, like an app that you can make money passively in your pocket, with micro-tasking for everything. Unlike Fiverr, you don’t need to apply or market yourself. There are many companies that are willing to pay for tasks like this. For instance, Uber in Brazil uses this app to do a price comparison between Uber and Lyft. They ask users to open the app at a certain time for Uber and for Lyft, take a screenshot, upload it, and they will pay for that. This allows Uber to do price matching analysis without infringing on terms and services. We were getting signups with very little marketing on RE Pocket, and here I was struggling with Truly and it just was not lifting. I started on GrowthMentor just because I couldn’t figure it out, and my ego was taking a shot for sure. That’s what turned me to this, and now we’re rebranding and changing the design of RE Pocket to be more fun. We have big prospects for that, and we’ve separated the two Slack channels for the two companies. I’m all about focus now.

Marcos Bravo: That’s cool. What really caught my attention is when you were talking about Geonode. The solution existed, but you just added the element of better marketing and a better user experience to take the market.

JP Bisson: We have one unique selling point, which is we’ve launched an unlimited data plan. It’s like the whole industry was like cell phone and internet plans before, where you buy a certain amount of gigabytes. Then people came up with unlimited plans, which for 98% of users is unlimited, but for that extra 2%, there’s a fair use policy if you’re torrenting 24/7. We did the same, and that’s what gives us all the growth that we’ve had lately. There are a lot of things you have to do like traffic modeling and determining a fair use policy threshold, and you have to have access to cheap bandwidth, which we do because of RE Pocket. We’re going to focus a lot on that. With better UX in many industries, better UI, and a big focus on conversion, if you have a lot of new users coming to the market, they’ll choose you because they don’t have many points of reference. If you’re giving all the right signals, you’ll look like the company to deal with. In proxies, it’s not exactly the case because it’s a service that sits in the background. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it, and you build your infrastructure on top, like an electricity company. For you to change electricity companies, a company would have to come and give you something substantially differentiated or better to justify. So that’s the struggle. My business partner is full-time on sales, building a sales team and working with agencies that we pay per meeting they set with decision-makers like CTOs of big companies.

Marcos Bravo: I remember back in 2001, I was backpacking in New Zealand, and I got a job trying to get companies to switch from one electricity company to another. People would ask, “Why should I?” It’s quite a stretch. People get too comfortable, so you really have to make a difference. Even if it’s not unlimited per se, you don’t want limitations in general. The fact that it’s not a worry you have to have makes it more attractive.

JP Bisson: Exactly, bandwidth just becomes a problem you don’t have to worry about anymore. It feels like a solved problem.

Marcos Bravo: This conversation has been amazing, but I want to close it with a question I always ask. What would you say to the founder who is struggling with problems? What would be the best way to look for help, ask the right questions, and go to the right people? What would you recommend?

JP Bisson: You’re not alone. One, two, I think there’s a wealth of knowledge in ChatGPT that is not used for help. I actually use ChatGPT now as an extension of my mind. I gave it our full business scenario, and I start asking away at it, and then I just keep going down the same thread, and the insights that come out of it unlock some pearls of ideas. Then I asked it, “What are non-obvious ideas? How could we be different?” It’s actually pretty good at coming up with very creative things. It’s just crazy the amount of knowledge that it was fed. I think all of us are not even yet understand how powerful it is. GrowthMentor, for sure. I mean, find mentors. GrowthMentor is a cool platform because a lot of people are willing to do it for free. You pay for the monthly price, which is negligible compared to the number of free calls and the insights that come out of that. But remember, you’re not alone. Don’t make calls with a GrowthMentor or any of the learnings online as an excuse for not taking action. Watching motivational videos or listening to podcasts may feel like work, but it’s not. You should be working on your startup as hard and as often as possible. Real work will feel like work at the beginning. You start to enjoy the struggle, and it’s not meant to be easy. If it was easy, everybody would be doing it. If it’s hard, potentially, you’re doing something right. If it’s too easy, there’s no value that you’re creating. For those of you who are listening to this, thank you. Feel free to reach out to me. I’ve been around the block, and I’d be willing to help as well.

Marcos Bravo: I really want to stay with that last phrase. If it’s too easy, it’s probably not worth it.

JP Bisson: It’s probably not worth it. That’s why I’m not a real believer in crypto as an investment vehicle, more of a lottery ticket. If you press somebody properly and ask them what’s the actual value here, it’s not the fact that somebody will buy it more expensive. That’s like the name of a Ponzi.

Marcos Bravo: I can do a whole podcast series about it, but I’m not gonna get into that right now. Man, I just want to thank you so much for this conversation. There are a lot of really amazing nuggets in there, not only for new people or early entrepreneurs but for everybody. I’m taking a lot from this episode. Thanks a lot for this call, and I know you’re important. I’ll be seeing you over there, man. I’ll come and visit and eat some oranges. 

JP Bisson: Adios, man. 

Marcos Bravo: Thank you.

Marcos Bravo: So as you can see, this conversation was out of this world. I loved it. JP is an amazing person. Michelle, our community manager at GrowthMentor, gave me the idea of doing a soup. So welcome to the soup. In this soup, I’m going to try to put together all the things that I’m taking with me after this conversation. The first thing is, you need to have an entrepreneurial soul if you want to get into this startup journey. You don’t need to be afraid of asking for help. You’re never going to have all the answers. So go ahead, make your failsafe, and go and ask for help when you need to. Also, when choosing a mentor, don’t think your mentor is going to provide you with all of the answers. The mentor is there sometimes just to compare notes, just to listen, just to say, “Yeah, that’s the way you should do it.” One of the other things that I really love is when JP mentioned that if it feels easy, it probably doesn’t have a big impact. That’s something I’m definitely remembering for my own future. And the last thing, which is the way we closed the conversation, was about you’re not alone. This journey is not unique journey. It’s unique for each one of you guys, I guess. But there are so many common things that people are going through when they get into the startup world. So you’re not alone in this. Don’t feel that things that happen to you are awful just because they’re happening at that moment. Try to go and ask for help, so you can get a different perspective. Someone else is going to come and say, “Well, I’ve been through that. So let me tell you my story.” Again, this soup was to sort of capture all the things that I learned, and I hope that you enjoy it the same way that I did. I just want to say goodbye and thank you one more time for joining us today. Don’t forget to follow our podcasts, sign up, and subscribe to our YouTube channel as well. Don’t forget to follow us on every social media platform that we have with GrowthMentor, find us on LinkedIn, and let’s have a conversation. So once again, thank you so much for joining us today. My name is Marcos, and I will see you next time. Cheers.