Ross Andrew Paquette, Maropost
He Aimed for $500K a Year. He Built a $50M Company.
Ross Paquette is the founder and CEO of Maropost, a commerce and marketing platform he has bootstrapped to around $50 million in ARR with roughly 300 people and 5,000 customers. He started it in 2011 out of his apartment while still working full time selling Oracle ERP software into the construction industry. The plan was small. Ten customers paying $50,000 a year, about $500,000, and more free time. Ross had spent a few years selling marketing automation and knew the service in that market was poor, so his pitch was simple: 24-hour live chat and a five-minute response time, which in practice meant him. Three or four former customers signed almost immediately. Two of them paid around $10,000 a month. The early build nearly sank it. His developer would disappear for days, and the platform would go down with nobody available to fix it. Ross describes standing on a departing plane holding his phone in the air to hold the signal, maybe ten or fifteen times. His mother suggested he post the job somewhere. The first person who replied on oDesk rebuilt the platform in two or three weeks and is his CTO today. Then it caught. In 28 months the business went from $300,000 to $27 million with six or seven people, largely because Ross was personally closing brands like Rolling Stone and Mercedes off conference floors. He took a secondary round around 2016, gave up about 25 percent, and roughly three years later wrote a $37 million check to buy the investors out. He also gets into why seven or eight experienced sales leaders failed at Maropost, what he hires for now instead, and why he says he would not show up to work if he owned less than ten percent of his own company.
