244: How a Canadian College Dropout transferred to a Tech Savvy Entrepreneur (Marc Boscher of Unito)

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Background on Marc Boscher of Unito:

Marc Boscher is the Co-Founder and CEO of Unito. Marc and Eryk Warren struck gold when they came up with an unconventional solution to the perpetual business problem of cross-team collaboration. SaaS tool use is on the rise, and Gartner predicts the collaboration tool market to double by 2023. But the massive proliferation of online tools is causing nearly as many headaches as it solves. Over the course of their incubation with Montreal’s Founder Institute program, the three co-founders created Unito: a project and task management “untool.”

Rather than building another project management or collaboration platform, they chose to create collaboration through easy-to-use, two-way integrations. Unito was launched on Oct 31 2016. It featured automatic syncing between Github, a popular developer tool for tracking code changes, and Wrike, a well-known project management tool. Soon after, they connected Asana and Atlassian’s Jira, and have since added Trello, Basecamp, BitBucket, GitLab, HubSpot, and Zendesk to their list of integrations.

Time-Stamped Show Notes:

  • [1:39] Marc is the CEO and Founder of Unito, which is a no-code integration platform. They can allow anyone to connect and integrate the tools they work in every day.
  • [2:55] Austin started the interview with a dad joke.
  • [6:43] More detailed explanation of Unito.
  • [10:35] The tools, documents, and processes of Unito are published and shared on their website called BetterWorkplaceToolkit.com.
  • [11:39] At 19 years old, Marc got involved in his first startup venture.
  • [16:18] Being involved in a startup while going to a university, Marc started failing his classes and eventually dropped out.
  • [18:33] When the startup company went under, it was a great learning experience for Marc and made him realize that he wanted to start his own business.
  • [21:25] After joining two startups, Marc decided to go back to college.
  • [23:17] He went back into the startup arena when he joined a company called Microscience, which provides digital signage for retail.
  • [28:52] Throughout his early startup stint, Marc and his wife set up an agreement or boundaries of expectation to make their relationship work.
  • [30:23] To get their company off the ground, they were bootstrapping and scraping everything from different programs.
  • [31:59] Marc provides some tips and government programs that could help people who are starting their own businesses.
  • [35:54] Founders Institute is where Marc met his other co-founders.
  • [37:19] Marc shares the story of how he was able to start his first company, which became Unito.
  • [40:52] For their first year, they were able to get angel funding, which helped the company grow.
  • [41:44] Marc explains how they created their product.
  • [45:17] They were able to raise half a million Canadian dollars from venture capital.
  • [46:42] Repurposing most of the initial code, Marc and his team were able to transition into an online application.
  • [48:25] The first product version was launched in November 2016 and their first paying customer was from Florida.
  • [49:49] The first name of the company is Cross Check but it has a violent meaning so it had to be changed.
  • [54:38] The right timing and other external factors have to be considered when starting a business.
  • [58:38] Strong company culture and values are extremely important for Marc.
  • [1:02:31] Marc shares some of the biggest challenges of Unito.
  • [1:08:44] Being an entrepreneur, Marc made sure that he didn’t sacrifice his family.
  • [1:09:55] Last words of wisdom from Marc for people who want to start a business.

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Fabulous 4 Questions:

  1. 📖📚 Favorite Books? How to Make Friends & Influence People by Harold Dunlap, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey, Atomic Habits by James Clear
  2. 🙌😎 Favorite Amazon.com purchase? Anything that saves me the time from going to the physical store
  3. 🌱💸 Favorite Tool that's GROWN your Business? Kind of a software tool junkie. It's a long list.
  4. 💭💡 BIGGEST Challenge keeping your Business from GROWING? Hiring both slow and fast at the same time.

Key Point from the Interview:

  • “There’s this eternal optimism in entrepreneurship that is almost a requirement. Like if you’re not an optimist, you won’t do it because starting a business does not make sense on so many aspects, from an expected value perspective. There has to be irrationality and optimism in it or nobody would do it.”

Resources Mentioned:

 

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