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THIS IS MY STORY

The short version:

I am an entrepreneur and Head of Studio at Forum Ventures. We build 8 AI companies per year by rapidly validating concepts, talking to customers, creating prototypes, and bringing in founders to build with.

Previously, I started Broca, an AI copywriting software. Before that, I worked with dozens of software startups to help them identify their best growth channels and scale up in a data-driven and systematic manner.

I’m also not fond of writing about myself in the third person.

The long version:

I graduated in 2010 with a degree in engineering. The first part of this story is going to sound familiar, so I’ll skim through it. I used to work a well-paid, corporate job as a management consultant at Deloitte. I realized it wasn’t what I wanted to do, so I quit and left the comfort of my home in Canada to explore the world and figure out what I wanted to do.

Pretty standard so far, right? At this point, you probably expect that I went to Thailand and then wrote a blog about starting a lifestyle business with pictures of myself living life on some beach. Well, that’s not quite what happened. Oh, there are beaches involved, but not until much later.

My first stop after quitting in 2012 was Chile. The government had a program called Startup Chile, where they invited entrepreneurs to move there to start a business with $40,000 in funding. My friends and I were picked amongst thousands of other teams, largely due to this epic promo video.

As you can see from the video, we were trying to build a social network for travelers. We eventually realized that it was a lot more complicated than we initially estimated, and building a social network from scratch with a distributed team across 3 continents wasn’t possible with the resources we had. That meant pivoting.

Failures: 1. Successes: 0.

Being in South America, we could see that most small tour operators over there struggled with bringing in new customers. Many of them offered excellent adventures, but they didn’t have a website, and if they did they didn’t know how to market it.

So we partnered with a select group of tour operators across Chile and launched a site that listed their tours. The idea was to market the site to travelers, allow them to book tours on the site, and then take a cut off the top while letting the tour operators handle the execution.

That’s my co-founder talking about the idea, while I stood by. I’m pretty sure I had a few words to say too but they seem to have been edited out!

While it was a solid idea, and it solved a real problem (today you know it as Airbnb Experiences), we ran out of funding before we could even launch. Eventually, my partners and I decided to shut down operations and go our own ways.

I had started freelancing at this point to sustain myself. Writing comes naturally to me, so I did content marketing for companies like Flippa. However, I hadn’t let go of the dream of building a company, so I joined the Startup Leadership Program in Singapore to give my travel idea another shot. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to secure a long-term visa, and had to leave after 3 months (which is 2 months and 29 days too long for anyone to stay in Singapore anyway).

Failures: 2. Successes: 0.

Thailand had always been on my mind, not for the beaches but for the Muay Thai camps, and that became my next logical destination. At this point, I was making enough money from freelancing that I could afford a few months to focus on traveling and trying new things.

The 3 months I spent in Phuket, learning martial arts and becoming fitter than I’d ever dreamt of, were some of my best days. I’d spend all day training and all evening freelancing, and when the time came to leave I had come to believe that I could achieve anything.

Tiger muay thai in Phuket

The guy in the top-left corner was my trainer.

I also tried starting a protein bar business in Thailand, servicing all the Muay Thai camps and their customers. There was a market there, but importing the bars from the USA took a long time and cut my margins a lot. To scale it up, I’d have to import in bulk which meant getting a business license, something I wasn’t eligible for on account of not being a citizen.

Failures: 3. Successes: 0.

I then moved on to Vietnam, where I met other entrepreneurs who were creating businesses online. Playtime was over and, with their help, I started to focus on my freelancing and business ideas. I cut down my service offerings, started to specialize in content marketing, and increased my prices, while experimenting with other revenue models, like eCommerce.

This time, I started a motivational poster business selling posters in bulk to gyms around the world. I made a few big sales and I could probably have expanded that more and made a decent living from it. After all, you only need to make a couple of thousand dollars each month to live like a king in Vietnam.

However, my heart wasn’t in it, and I felt the tug of home after two years on the road. I was doing well as a freelance marketer but I knew if I wanted to build a real startup, and not just a lifestyle business, I needed more experience. So I shut the poster store down and returned to my home in Canada.

Failures: 4. Successes: 0.

Back in Canada, I focused on attracting more clients for my freelance marketing business. The combination of being in the same time zone as my clients, along with a refined sales process and my past experiences lead me to land some interesting new clients, including a promising Vancouver-based eCommerce platform startup called LemonStand.

lemonstand office

In 2019, LemonStand was acquired by Mailchimp! A well-deserved success for the team who toiled away all those years.

After a successful project, I was invited to join the LemonStand team full-time as the first marketer. Through content marketing and experiments in other growth channels, I helped quadruple the customer base in one year.

Failures: 4. Successes: 1.

After a year at LemonStand, I met Greg Smith, founder of Thinkific, an online course platform. What was initially meant to be an attempt at landing a new consulting client eventually became a job offer. Thinkific was in a rapidly growing industry and market share was up for grabs. They had a small team of 8 highly passionate people and brought me on as the VP of Growth.

I applied my experiences and expertise at finding new growth channels to the company and things took off immediately. As we found channels that worked, like paid, partnerships and content, we started hiring for them. My marketing team grew, as did the whole company.

At the end of my first year, there were around 40 people in the company and our revenues had grown 10X! Two years later it was 80 people and 20X.

In late 2017, after almost two years at the company, I felt it was time for me to step back into entrepreneurship. It was a tough decision to make. We’d built an amazing team, and I’d played a part in hiring many of them, so it was like leaving my family. But the company was at a good place and there was no better time for me to strike out again.

thinkific team

In 2021, Thinkific would go on to IPO for $1B on the Toronto Stock Exchange!

Failures: 4. Successes: 2.

Thinkific’s rapid growth made it a local success story and other Vancouver startups approached me for help with their growth after I left. I worked with other startups like Procurify, Lumen5, and Optix, all of which went on to raise further funding.

I also expanded my consulting across North America, helping dozens of SAAS companies like Typeform, ReCharge, Olark, and many more with their growth strategy. Through 2018, my work with these companies continued and they, in turn, referred me to more clients.

My new work from home lifestyle also meant I could focus on my fitness and take the time to explore other interests. One of those was AI. I started to dabble with machine learning and got interested in the growing field of NLP. Could AI automate marketing?

Failures: 4. Successes: 3.

Then, in the fall of 2018, something interesting happened. One of my clients, Bonsai, introduced me to a company called Gorgias, based out of SF. I’d always been fascinated with Silicon Valley and this was my chance to see SF for the first time and grow my network there.

Besides, Gorgias was an AI company, using NLP to automate customer support. I helped them set up the foundations for their marketing and growth. We ran an online summit, set up an affiliate network, created automated cold email campaigns, built out new content, launched ads, and more.

While I could have stayed on in a full-time capacity, I decided not to. Entrepreneurship was calling to me again, now that I was in the heart of Startup Land. But first, I needed to infiltrate the Valley.

Tiki night with the Gorgias team. One year later, they would go on to raise a few million $$$ more and triple in size.

Failures: 4. Successes: 4.

The more time I spent in SF, the better I understood its inner workings. The unending cycles of raise money, hire quickly, grow rapidly, and become a unicorn or die trying were exhilarating. You either worked at a VC firm or a startup, and it was really easy to connect with investors and founders.

Using LinkedIn and Twitter, I grew my network rapidly. Plus, there’s always something happening in SF – happy hours, funding parties, milestone parties, and other startup events. I met famous investors, founders of unicorn startups, and some of the smartest people I know.

All of this lead to an abundance of opportunities in SF. I worked with startups like Plato, Eden, ClickUp, and more. I ran workshops, got invited to speak on stage, and started mentoring startups via accelerators like Acceleprise (now called Forum) and other VC firms.

Most importantly, I made a ton of great friends!

My first ever Twitter meetup!

Failures: 4. Successes: 5.

In 2020, when the pandemic hit, it was time to move back to Vancouver. Consulting clients vanished overnight, which meant it was time to start something new.

My interest in AI and NLP had grown and I had come across this small startup called OpenAI that had built an AI model called GPT-2. It wasn’t very good at writing long sentences and paragraphs but if limited to, say, the length of a Google Ad, it was not bad at all!

And so Broca was born. It would start a platform that integrated into your Google Ads, picked the top performing ones, and then generate new variations to test. Over time ad performance would increase.

The first version of Broca didn’t have any AI. I wanted to test out the product before doing the heavy lifting of hosting GPT-2 and providing inference on it, so it worked just as described above except it was me sitting on the backend writing ad copy variations for my first 10 beta users.

And then GPT-3 launched. I was already on the waitlist and was one of the first to get access. All I had to do was plug the API in and automate the ad writing. In July of 2020, I became one of the first to launch a GPT-3 powered company.

Of course, ad copy was the lowest hanging fruit, and dozens of others launched something very similar in the following weeks – CopyAI, Copysmith, Jasper (fka Jarvis fka ConversionAI), and so on.

I’d made the mistake of soft launching Broca, building up a waitlist, and letting in a few companies at a time to use the product for free. I’d been playing with NLP for so long that it wasn’t magical to me anymore.

But it was magical, and my competitors knew that. They opened signups, threw up pricing plans, and the magic helped them go viral on Twitter. They went on to generate revenue and raise millions in funding while I was still iterating behind closed doors.

In the spring of 2021, after graduating from Forum VC’s excellent accelerator program, we finally publicly launched, this time with a brand new product that was quite different from the rest. Remember my first startup in Chile? Yeah, I brought my cofounder from that company on, and he brought a couple of engineers with him.

So, we had a team, a differentiated product, some money in the bank, and we were generating revenue.

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