Interview With Emeric Ernoult: How He Built Agorapulse From Idea To $5M ARR

1. Patience. If you are an entrepreneur, you must wait a long time, always more time than expected.

2. Persistence. Don't confuse these two terms. Patience is to learn to wait, not necessarily do anything but accept that you need to wait. Try again and again, and it is eventually gonna work. You must be driven so hard that whatever happens, you'll eventually get to something.

3. VC Funding is NOT for everyone. Check Emeric's post to find 9 reasons why not to raise VC money for your startup.

4. Remote is NOT a fantasy land. Choosing remote is an utterly challenging path:

— In 2009, we started to build bespoke applications for Facebook, it was what the market was asking for. But we quickly realized that this was a service business and that was not the business we wanted to build. As we saw a need in the market for Facebook apps and no solution to get them at an affordable cost, we decided to industrialize the apps we had built and offered them in a self-service / low-cost way. Our apps went for $15k a piece to $49/month!

— I would have launched another business. I don't know how to do anything else than building businesses...

— Taking an idea and building it from the ground up to $5M ARR. The achievement I'm the most proud about.

— Spend as much time as possible testing your idea. Do as much customer discovery as possible before you start building anything. The worst thing that can happen to an idea is to build it, invest a year of your life into it and all your savings just to realize that nobody needs it.

— There are only two tips here: first, you have to constantly re-evaluate your priorities and your team's priorities. There's not "set and forget" priorities, you have to step back, Take a hard look at your business and constantly reassess what you and your team are doing. It's a mindset and a process. A good rule of thumb is to do that weekly for the coming week's small goals and quarterly for the quarter's big goals

Second, you have to keep your priorities simple and limited. Having too many complex priorities is a sure way to fail. Force yourself to simplicity and to a limited number of priorities. Ideally, one person should only have one big priority at any given time.

— A remote environment is very challenging for a product team. When you're building a product at a fast pace, have everyone in the same room as often as possible is definitely a plus.

Marketing and support can operate in a remote environment more easily. However, big time zone differences will remain a challenge.

— First, if you're in a shitty shape, chances are you will not be very efficient at work. More importantly, taking care of yourself allows you to "last" longer. Remember, this is a marathon, not a sprint. If you exhaust yourself in the first 100 meters, there's no way you'll be able to sustain the 40km run you'll have to do to succeed.

Taking time off to exercize and take care of yourself also helps with the need to focus and set priorities!

— Your social presence is part of your voice, and when you're small, your voice matters. As a small company, you, the founder, will be your company's voice, and people will see you as the company. This is a strength as people prefer to talk to people rather than organizations. Social media is among the best ways to build that tone of voice and show the human side of your business.

— The content people share the most are stories. People love stories. They love it even more when they are personal. If your social presence can be built around your story, you're guaranteed to touch people and make them interested. Try to think about the stories you want to tell. Share less, but focus on the storytelling.

— This is a "technical" question. If I tell you yes or no, my answer may be right today but will be wrong six months from now. Don't focus on the tricks. Focus on the stories you can tell. If your stories can be shared in videos, live or recorded, do it. If not, don't chase the latest shiny object. It doesn't matter long-term.

— I do! The two features that I love the most:

• The clarity in our inboxes. Agorapulse makes it easy not to let any incoming message slip through the cracks. I love how simple it is to reply to all incoming messages and how good it feels when emptying your inbox.
  
  
• The ability to customize the content I publish to each social network and repeat my evergreen posts automatically. We've nailed this feature.
  

I also love our mobile app :-)