Life on Mars - A podcast from MarsBased
Life on Mars - A podcast from MarsBased
076 - Building a thriving Shopify agency, with Keyven Ferland (Founder of La Web Shop)
Embark on an entrepreneurial odyssey with Keyven Ferland of La Web Shop and uncover the raw and real narrative of a bootstrapped business's ascent. From the humble beginnings of a solo design freelancer to captaining a burgeoning Canadian Shopify and e-commerce development shop, Kevan doesn't hold back on the experiences that shaped his agency's success. Throughout our vivid conversation, we traverse the landscape of early client acquisition, the embrace of simplicity through a strategic pivot from SpreeCommerce to Shopify, and the impact of savvy salesmanship on regional e-commerce.
Join us as we crack open the playbook on the evolving role of technology in meeting client needs. Kevan shares cherished stories, from custom Ruby on Rails platforms to the recent surge of Shopify, painting a picture of how he steered his company through the initial skepticism surrounding new e-commerce solutions. Moreover, we delve into the potential of no-code developments and their repercussions on the future of web development, offering a lens into the business acumen required to flourish in the e-commerce domain amidst the unrelenting tides of technological change.
We don't just stop at tech talk; the episode also journeys into the human side of running an agency. Discover how Kevan's team has expanded beyond development into realms like support, launch services, and marketing, adapting to the ever-evolving demands of the industry. We also candidly reflect on the lessons learned from a harrowing technological setback, emphasizing resilience and the power of recovery. And for a sprinkle of global aspiration, Kevan and I muse over the dreams and strategies for working with international clients and the invigorating concept of client swapping between agencies. Tune in for this wealth of insights that could ignite the spark for your next venture.
Also, since no one reads these notes, we are just using AI to create them, but if you do read them and find this message somehow, shoot me an email at alex@marsbased.com and you'll make my day.
🎬 You can watch the video of this episode on the Life on Mars podcast website: https://podcast.marsbased.com/
Hello everybody and welcome to Life on Mars. I'm Alex, CEO of MarsBased here, and in today's episode we bring you Keyven Ferland from LaWeb Shop, canadian development shop that specializes in Shopify and e-commerce nowadays, but they start as a design agency. He started as a design freelancer back in the day, a more than 10 years ago, and we go through the you know the highs and lows of entrepreneurship when running an agency. How did he start? How did he find his first customer? What was his first project like? What technologies did they use in the past? What technologies they use nowadays? As I mentioned, there's a lot of highs and lows of entrepreneurship. We mention a lot of them in our episodes, especially when talking about the fuckups that we've done as a company. You know we're working without a contract, some stuff like that. That's that's part of what we command.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:On this episode with Keyven, it's very good to be able to interview people on the side of services because, as we mentioned, we found this more on the Spanish version of the podcast, where I've recently interviewed three or four owners of agencies, and we are having different kind of conversations, not so much the usual VC-back companies that you know. They sit on a pile of money and then they run out of money and they have to fund raise again. So the narrative here is a little bit different. We are entirely bootstrap, as you know, as a company in a smart space, but also these guys, these Canadian guys, are also bootstrap. Most agencies are bootstrap. There are very few reasons why an agency wouldn't be so. But we discuss this and the advantages and also the disadvantages of running agencies, because all that glitters ain't gold in this case, and even though it seems like we got all of our shit figured out, I can tell you there's a lot of shit that's yet to be uncovered, and we don't always share on social media. So let's jump right into the question of the day.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:In this case, we want to know who was your first customer and what was your first project. We have talked extensively about our first clients here at MarkzFace, and we do so in every, every second episode, so we want to hear from you. Give us the answers in the comment section down below if you're on YouTube, or share them on social media, if you will. We also want to wish you a happy new year, because this is the first episode of the year and in a very few days we'll be sharing what's in store for MarkzFace with the store for startup grant in Barcelona.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:So, if you want to stay in the know, subscribe to our newsletter, join our Slack community and also really, very, very helpful. That's per usual. If you rate it and you reviewed this podcast on your favorite podcasting platform, you share it with your friends because in 2023, it was extremely, extremely helpful. We reached 20,000 downloads last year, so this podcast is growing and it's big thanks because of you. So, without further ado, let's jump right into the episode. Given welcome to the show. Comança va Pretty good.
Keyven Ferland:That's all very good. Thank you, Alex.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Good to see you. To give some context to the audience, we had an exploration call because our common friend did the. I introduced us to discuss potential projects in Shopify Ruby on Rails. We are like-minded agencies working. You guys specialize more in Shopify, you're based in Canada and he thought it would be a good idea to chat. Actually, he's been on the podcast as well, so I encourage our listeners to go check that episode out. It's more on the technical side, but today I wanted to give voice to another super interesting company and we've been recording episodes with bootstrap companies agencies. I'm finding this niche to be super interesting for our audience and so welcome again. And maybe you want to introduce what your company does. What does LaWeb Shop do?
Keyven Ferland:So LaWeb Shop is a company founded in 2010,. I was a web designer at first and I just had too many projects to do, so I started hiring people to help me out, and now LaWeb Shop is 26 people. Five themes building websites, e-commerce. We connect platforms and, yeah, we have a small team of marketing for e-commerce companies and brands, and we're having a lot of fun doing it here in Quebec, canada, the French province of Canada.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Politics aside, because we might have another thing in common, because we come from Barcelona, but this is not the topic of the episode. We've got many similarities, but you guys started earlier and so 2010,. I don't know the situation of Canada, but it was pretty rough in Europe. We were in a deep crisis, especially in Spain, and so it was only for the crazy to start a company and to become an entrepreneur. As a matter of fact, we started in 2014, even though we kind of like noodled with a couple of projects in 2000. Late 2011, 2012, didn't kind of become anything, and because we didn't know how to play out with products, we didn't know how to create companies, we just created an agency and we said let's just develop shit for other people. What was your first project like? Do you remember the first project and you got any funny stories with the first projects?
Keyven Ferland:In 2007, I was freelancing doing web design and slicing PSD. In that time. I don't know if you remember, but there was a website where you could hire people to you just like upload your PSD, photoshop and then they send you back the HTML CSS files at that time. So I was doing like the Photoshop files and the slicing part of it. So, and the first project was for a company here that was it was a pretty big retail company here in San Gnezo in Quebec. The company started like in 1980, I think it was a family company. They had like 10 or 12 stores. So it was my first project. It's called matzak matzakca. You guys could see it. They are like pretty big, but it was the first project that I did. I think I sold it for like $5,000 and I did it all by myself, which was like kind of difficult, kind of hard to do because like there was like a lot of things to do.
Keyven Ferland:But yeah, at that time 2007, the first one without like any any CMS behind it just yeah, html CSS and mock-up and design web design. So yeah, because the reason why I started doing freelancing at that time wasn't because I wanted to do it or I wanted to be a digital nomad or something. It was more because, like, I sent out like 20, 25 resume to companies around. They just didn't know what the web designer was doing. So they all asked me back do you do a logo or infography or like any other stuff? I was like no, no, I design websites. And they were like but we don't need web designers for that when they build websites. At the time it was only like programmers or yeah, that's why I went freelancing and after that, yeah, first year was pretty rough, but it started going pretty well after that.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Tell me more, because to me, $5,000, I'm assuming Canadian for first project sounds pretty good if you went solo. I mean I don't know if it's like the, if it was a standard back then or not. Our first project was 700 USD, out of which we only got 200. So it was an awful project. In spite of that, we incorporated it because we wanted to make it legal from the get go, and so we were bleeding money for the first months because we had to incorporate. It was more expensive, we had to pay like 300 euros per month out of taxes and stuff and to keep the company going, but we had only 200 USD in the bank. So it was really stupid. Well, you know it got better afterwards, but did you?
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:have any similar experience at the first project. You know the typical things like oh, this project without contract I did like this guy didn't pay me, or you know this kind of things.
Keyven Ferland:I won't say it comes like every year, once a year, but there's always one tie and that they play the card that they just I don't know they didn't understand or they I don't know so and you start like arguing or sending like emails back and forth and after that you just like, okay, whatever, I mean like these guys probably doing it like a lot of times, so we just like I just moved to something more important. But yeah, I think in the early days, I mean actually, I think it's like, I think it's actually the product. The $5,000 project that I did about for March was like the first big one, but I did one for a university group of students in the psychology. I think it was for $300. But I mean I still have a job at that time, so it was only to buy, to buy booze, I guess.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Well, that's quite a lot of booze, unless you live in Sweden, which amounts to a couple pints only. Well, one of the things that I wanted you to talk more about Shopify, because obviously, I think in 2010, shopify was still not around. So maybe you did. Did you specialize from the very beginning? Like, how did you find the thing that you wanted to specialize on? I'll give you some context, right?
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:So, because we didn't know, and we didn't know any better when we started, we were like we're going to do only one thing and do it pretty fucking well because we're only three people, right, and so we chose to do web development in Ruby and Rails. And so, coincidentally, we started also using Angular, because one of the first projects required a lot of JavaScript or like, yeah, fuck it. React was not a thing and Angular was about to be stable. And so Ruby, my two co-founders they had been working with it in the previous company, so it was an easy choice, right? How was this choice for you guys? How did you kind of narrow down what you wanted to do? How did you find out where was your product market fit?
Keyven Ferland:Yeah, and at that time we specialized in WordPress development. And the reason why I went with WordPress because I don't remember the name of the guy, but once, when I was freelance, a guy from Montreal hired me to do web designs, for he was a web developer and he was building websites with WordPress. At that time, even if WordPress was more a blog CMS, with this project I realized that we were able to do mostly whatever we wanted with the framework and with WordPress. So once I hired Philip, the first web developer at the web shop and Philip's still working with us 13 years later. But yeah, he was. Yeah, it's pretty cool.
Keyven Ferland:Actually, there's a pretty funny story because I'm from Canada so I play hockey a lot, so I went to play on the afternoon. I went playing hockey. It's like you just pay $5 to go play with who, just like people, that goes to the ring and play hockey. So I went there In the room after the game, I start talking with the guy and with the guys in there, and Philip was there. So he was a skateboarder same type as I was, but he told me that he was studying web development and he was searching for a place to work after school, which was a couple of weeks later. So I told him to come by the house because I was still working in my basement at that time. So he came by the house, we talked about what were the project and everything, and that's how it started. For six months he was coming every morning at my house and we were working on my basement with the kids around. It was pretty neat.
Keyven Ferland:But, yeah, so I chose WordPress at that time because I needed something to make sure that we were able to give our clients a CMS to manage our website without adding too much. So that's why we went that way. And the SEO was pretty good because it was a blog platform. So for everyone website that we built, the organic part of the semantic was really neat. So it was good for our clients and I think it was the smart just at that time. And we fastly. We became a WordPress specialized company in Quebec, which helped us out to win a lot of product and contracts after that.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:And Wendy to Shopify enter the scene in your story.
Keyven Ferland:We had a pretty rough experience with some clients in 2013, 2014, where we built a custom e-commerce platform with Ruby on Rails and SpreeCommerce and Solidus. At that time we started with SpreeCommerce and, after that, solidus. It was pretty rough for our clients, for our teams, but we loved the tech, but it was like it cost a lot of money and it was hard to maintain and after launch and everything. So in 2016 or 2017, I don't remember we built our first website with Shopify, because it was like I don't know, it was more, easier and faster to go online for a client and then we could have them to bring more customers and make more revenues. And when I sold the company in 2020 to a retail group here in Quebec, they needed all the other e-commerce websites to be moved to Shopify. So that's where we had a big turnaround, where we probably built like 50, 55 Shopify websites since 2020. So that's where we became a bigger part of our stack.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Funny that you mentioned spree commerce. They didn't want to go into that, but uh, yeah, that was our first. Maybe must have been like the second for a we had Into into commerce, because our first project was also must have been 2015, probably 16, I might be wrong with we Shopify back then, when Shopify was Super static and it was good. He had like the yeah, the APIs were good, but kind like, if you had to change anything from the checkout or some of the critical screens, you couldn't do it. It was super enclosed and it was, you know, hard to modify, right. And and so we, this Germany, this German company, this gold sap tails, which is a company that we had on and off since 2015 they built a platform. They had built a platform MVP that didn't scale, that allowed them or their clients to to create physical and digital books out of what's up conversations, right. So it's an angular app kind of like, you know, drag and drop a graphical editor, you create your books and you add images and whatnot and you just drag and drop shit around. And but we was sitting on top of Shopify and we developed a ton of features that didn't exist in Shopify back then because it was kind of like Multi-store, multi currency, all that in Shopify didn't have it, and so we had to build it, and we build it, and you know afterwards, obviously Shopify did it. We didn't. Oh yeah, we didn't quite specialize in Shopify until like 2020 or 21, because up until then Shopify wasn't that popular.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:I mean, maybe it it ranked number four, number five in the wall, and but in 2014 definitely was number 10, right or number 15, behind all of this you mentioned, behind Magento, be behind Presta shop, behind all of these other options, and so whenever we had a potential lead for a for for project and it was e-commerce, we know it was a battle that was already lost. If we mentioned Shopify, nobody wanted it. Nobody was. Everybody was like what's Shopify? Why is it that expensive If I can't do Magento, or or, or or Presta shop and whatnot? So it was a very uphill battle, seems like you guys, because you were also using WooCommerce, right and and spree commerce. So maybe spree commerce was not very popular though. So how were you? How are you selling this? Maybe WooCommerce was more more more of a standard choice. So, for people who didn't have a clear understanding that maybe they wanted Presta shop or Magento, did you just decline the conversation, or or did you accommodate it, or was your strategy then?
Keyven Ferland:being able to sell my first website at $5,000, like in 2017. I think I'm a pretty good sale man. So I just I just I mean my team were like at the time. Fred Boislin is now working like it's an engineering Shopify, but at that time he was coming out of school and he was a he was pretty passionate about with Ruby on rails and he Is the one in 2013 that that found spree commerce and told me we need to build a e-commerce website with with that technology.
Keyven Ferland:And when I went to the client, I mean in 2013, here in sangnae, which is like five hours north Montreal like it's pretty, it's pretty country, like it, it's, it's a part, I mean like I think there's like 200,000 people like in the city and around. So it's it's, it's pretty small. So the tech, the tech Discussion at that time wasn't like the first thing that the clients wanted to hear. They want to make sure that the, the design, was personalized. They wanted to make sure that you would, it would be easy for them to to manage and and be able to have like people coming to the website. So they were, they were, they were pretty confident on on on my behalf and making sure that Technology that I proposed was was a good one and and I convinced them to to go with with free commerce, it wasn't hard actually.
Keyven Ferland:So we probably, I think, between three third 2013 and 2016, we probably build six to seven e-commerce platform with which be commerce, and I think there are still two of them that are still online right now. So it's a Work well, but I mean, the part where it was difficult is is just that Pre-commerce and solid this after that. If you guys I mean I think you work with it you need someone to always like work on on the code, always work on the, the optimization and for for small businesses, that's a lot of money to to just put on amendments and they want to put money to to get money back. So it was. It was that's the part where it was pretty hard with the clients because they didn't do, they didn't want to to put money like every month to make sure that the code stick clean, that the website go as fast as they wanted to to go, so so that's probably why we, once Shopify became bigger, we, we just it was like just the smart move to to move to Shopify.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Actually so. Is there any you know any reason outside of well technology? Of course you mentioned these, these other two alternatives to Shopify. They were not that great.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:We always found that the, the open source Ruby and rails projects for pre-packaged software, namely CMSs, a commerce's ERPs and stuff like that. They're okay but they're never great. They were never great for enterprise. They were never great for big projects. They were good for small projects, right, and usually was one, two people maintaining them and we tried them all. Like I remember we tried them all.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:We did some Comparisons back back in the day when we were starting the company, because obviously people wanted an alternative to war press and we couldn't find any Like. The closest one we found was locomotive CMS, right, and back back in our time it was not that great. It has become something pretty good over the years, but back in the time it was not that great. Same with the, with the, with the commerce solutions. But luckily Shopify became something like exploded all of a sudden. Shopify was everywhere, became one of the biggest companies on earth and it still hasn't debunked the myth of rails. Doesn't scale like look, because the commerce platform in the world is built with Robion rails and its scales too, but anyways, digressing here. So basically any other reason besides technology and maybe your physical proximity, even though Canada's fucking huge but doesn't help you to get more projects, shopify because you're Canadian and they are Canadian too?
Keyven Ferland:I mean most, most of the most of our clients don't know that Shopify is Canadian. So I don't think it helps. It helps us like a lot, and I mean like Maybe, if I mean there's an office in Montreal where I can, I can go by me like a or ourselves Representative, or the agent that we have at Shopify, I mean they all, they all work like remotely, so Sometimes I don't even know where, where, where they are in the world. So I don't think I don't think it really helped us get more customer now, or or it's easier to convince them it's, it's it just did. The platform is just pretty solid. I mean it's really solid. So it's a.
Keyven Ferland:I mean, every time I launch a Shopify website, I'm pretty jealous of the back office, the admin, the way the reports are coming out, and I mean I think I'm probably gonna build my home e-commerce just to have a couple of sales every week and just having fun with it, and you know it's a pretty fun platform to work with. What are you gonna sell? Probably close, I mean, since when I was like 17, I was working in the stage shop and the board shop, you know. So I was a fan of you know, like the time, welcome dance, all that clothes that I don't know, extreme sports kind of clothes, and I wanted to start my own clothing company with friends at that time, so maybe I'll find a way to just sell t-shirts or something like that.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Maybe how about merch of the company? Because one of the things that my friends always say like ah, what do you get this cool coffee. I mean, we got coffee mugs from the company. We got like hoodies, we got t-shirts, we got a lot of cool shit but we never like, we don't sell it. It's only for our team and for our clients, right? But you know, here's the crazy idea. So maybe we could set up a Shopify section on our website and sell this merch. I don't know, probably it's too much management overhead for the little returns it could bring. But yeah, I agree, I had a lot of fun setting up Shopify.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:We do have one, oh you do have one, you do have one. Does it actually worth the investment or not really Like do people?
Keyven Ferland:buy stuff. It's more about no, no, it's more for our employees. People don't really buy I mean our brand yet because, like, even if we're pretty big in Quebec, we were not like I don't know. I mean it's pretty cool, but I mean it's cool for people who's working there. So, but I mean we had fun building it because, like we the design of it it's pretty cool. So I invite you to go check it out.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:I'll go check it out. I mean, it's a great idea, but it's kind of like that stuff. When they say don't do business with friends, it's usually not because you can damage your relationship, which is obvious. But it's very common that they will always say, yeah, yeah, totally buy whatever like you sell, and then they don't fucking do it. Right, it's very easy to say yes, so don't validate business hypothesis with friends or family, because they always say yes until they have to actually open the wallet, right. So I don't know if you could actually sell something.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Now I'm back to Shopify, though. I'm pretty interested in how you guys tractor this. I don't know if it's a pivot actually, right. So you started doing this design for websites, then you did the spoke applications, then you kind of specialized in e-commerce. For us, for instance, it's something like it's really small in the company. Normally we still stay with the bespoke applications and team augmentation for big corporates. But every now and then, like once, twice a year, we get one or two Shopify projects just because it's built in Ruby on Rails and there's nobody else doing it in Barcelona or maybe there's like a couple other agencies, but they're not either that well-known or great, but it's not a big business line for us. However, we know there's a ton of potential. What would be your advice for people starting up a Shopify agency maybe nowadays, or e-commerce?
Keyven Ferland:The client. They don't really care about what's really the tech behind. What they want is something that's gonna give them revenue, that's gonna be easy to manage and it's gonna be fast. It's gonna be a great experience for the clients and customers. So that's the main focus. So they don't want to like put too much money on building a project and they want like a big ROI.
Keyven Ferland:So Shopify for an e-commerce agency is probably it's the best way to make sure to answer all of these questions and needs for the clients. So and once you start doing that, you start like having the speech and the talk that for the clients it's gonna resonate. For them it's gonna be. They're gonna trust you because they're gonna understand. They're gonna see that you understand the reality. I mean, with the era that we're in right now, I mean like people don't have a lot of money and the money they have, they need to invest it in something that's gonna give them like money back and it's not gonna be like hard to manage, hard to use, and their customer is gonna be happy using it. So that's why Shopify is. I mean it's the way. And for people who start e-commerce agency, they really need to speak the same language as all of these entrepreneurs that I mean it's pretty hard. I mean every most of my clients right now. I thought too. I mean they're looking to go like smaller because the money's not there. The money's just not there.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:There's. You've raised a topic that I really don't agree with. You said clients don't really require certain technologies, they don't care that much about the technology. They want something that gives good ROI On ROI 100%. But clients are really in my opinion, at least in our experience they are too unnecessarily opinionated on technology, even when they're not technical. They come and they say like, oh, I want this, I want that, of course. And when we advise on technology, we said, oh, we're gonna build it I don't know using Nodejs in the backend and view on the front end. They're like, yeah, but I heard React is better and React has got this and that, and then, maybe, why don't you use Python for the backend? I was like, well, you asked me right. But usually it's not very well-founded or very well-grounded opinions. Usually it's like I heard it's hearsay. It's like my cousin told me that Rails doesn't scale. My cousin told me that Angular is dead. How do you deal with these situations in your company?
Keyven Ferland:I always give the choice to the client.
Keyven Ferland:I mean, if they heard that another technology is better and that we don't do it because I mean we're not gonna do every technology we can do that I mean we need to be expert in other niche, you know so I just give them the option to go find some another agency elsewhere that's gonna build tech that they believe in.
Keyven Ferland:But after I told them that I'm going to say that the same thing as I said earlier, I mean the tech is not important right now, because what's really important for them, like the strategy and the objective that they need is to make sure that they get an ROI, that they get something that's going to work for their money, and they need a partner in their project and with the company, and we are the studio to do so.
Keyven Ferland:So we're going to be close to them, we're going to grow with them. So they don't need to care about the tech, because if they be bigger, they probably hire a CDO and the CDO is going to have opinions and going to build teams with the tech that he thinks it's the best one to grow with and he's going to probably stick to it. So that's what I said. I'm going to put my CDO out for them and I'm like that's how my teams are built, that's how we build projects. You have to trust me on that and after that, most of the time, 99% of the time, they say okay, go ahead, I'll trust you.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Maybe it's because of these 20 years in the sector that they hear you more than they hear me, but I'm starting to accumulate great hair here. If you can say it like this, this is also a lot of years in the industry. How do you see the feature of Shopify? I mean they've been through a rough patch, but I mean they had a little bit of a downfall, but when you're that high, even if you fall, you're still very high in comparison with other competitors, right? So of course, they laid off people, they lost value per share and in the stock market and whatnot, but they're still considered as a top notch company, tier one and a reference in not only Ruby and Rails but web development and e-commerce and pretty much everything.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:The product and design in everything. They're just masterminds. Their technical blog posts are excellent, especially when it comes to the last ones. They shared some insight into their DevOps, infrastructure and whatnot is mind fucking blowing. What do you see this is going to be? After we had a boom in e-commerce in 2020 and 2021 because of the pandemic which didn't quite follow up in 22 and now 23 numbers are going down, slowly picking back up now, but I don't know. Do you see we're going to go back to the pandemic levels or this is here to stay and it's plateauing.
Keyven Ferland:I mean, I think since 2015,. I'm pretty sure that the future of web development will be a no-code future, a DIY future. So Shopify I mean we're having fun customizing it, like a lot of fun doing it, but I'm pretty sure that in the future it's going to be a no-code future where the platform will be like so nicely built that you're going to integrate it and connect it with others, but I don't think there's going to be any more web development From that. I think that Shopify is a company that is really. It is in a really good spot because of the quality of all the functionalities and all the last development that they did. The B2B part is getting bigger and better. The App Store is getting really, really nice too. There's really nice functionalities there that you cannot for your client.
Keyven Ferland:Because all of that, I just think that right now it's probably more of a calm period of time or a calm era, but I mean, in three to five years they're going to be number one and they're probably going to integrate AI at some point, where you're just going to give better experience for your clients. I don't think why they shouldn't do it. They're probably going to be the first ones to do so Once they get there, I think it's going to be pretty huge. I don't see any competitor being able to. I don't think Magento, I don't think Big Commerce, whocommerce. I don't see any other competitor, or even Wix or Squarespace, that have e-commerce section or a part of the platform. In my mind, they're freaking number one and they're going to stay for a long time you mentioned.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:I mean what I hear, what I read between the lines in your answer, is that we're fucked. Basically, our companies are doomed because no code is coming. Obviously, we got all of these agents and Verso and all of these companies that on top of no code they can actually build fucking websites and entire development projects automatically. When are we becoming redundant? How will you adapt as a company to this? We're taking a look at all of these. We think it's too early for that and there will still be always clients that want this artisanal touch to the industry that we bring that, maybe the generic software factories and generally companies. They will suffer first because they will lose a lot of share of wallet before we actually find out because we're too small. And then you know, with three, four, five, six, 12 clients at the time, we can sustain. But these companies that have got hundreds of clients, they will go to dozens of clients in a matter of a year or two, and so I think it's too early for us. But I want to know your vision.
Keyven Ferland:In our company we have now five teams. We have one team that build website with the WordPress and Shopify. We have one team that build API and Internet or more like a connect website more closer to application. We have a support for WordPress and after launch team. We have a hosting team and a marketing team. So we make sure that we recover like every part and from there every year I'm looking at my numbers and see if there's a grow or in which team there's a grow, and for the past two years two, three years the grow are in the support, after launch and the marketing team. That's where the bigger growth in our teams are Building website, custom websites, artisanal ones, like you said. We have bigger clients, bigger projects, but we're, like for the last five years, like it's the same numbers of projects that we ate that there's. There's no growth there.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Yeah, the good thing about these kind of projects I mean the pre-packaged software, namely CMSs and e-commerce and similar tools is that they can. There's a huge part of the market is self-service, right, so it's people who just install that software themselves and then they request help. Right, so you can actually service them by creating content on your website, hosting webinars, having these non-loadable PDFs and whatnot, and you will attract them here in an early part of their business, why? But you also get the other ones that actually need the help in the end to end solution right, so they need to conceptualize the application, to design it, then to pick up the best e-commerce solution, installation maintenance and whatnot. So all the end to end solution, as I was mentioning.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:What are you like? Are you going to change your marketing efforts because of that, or are you going to focus more on these? Because I think in two, five years, everybody will more or less be able to install stuff on their own. They'll be less. Help me to do 100% of a project, because it will be so easy, like Shopify could be. You know, it's kind of like WordPress. Pretty much everyone can install WordPress right now just one, two, three buttons. A wizard Shopify too, in a sense, but maybe it's not as popular. Maybe it's perceived as something much more technical than a block or a WordPress right. Are you focusing your marketing efforts on that, or what is your strategy for next year?
Keyven Ferland:Since 2020, we're not calling ourselves an agency, we're calling ourselves a studio because we're like the extension of a client. So because in the future I mean, if I had like another company in any other industry, I'd probably hire, like a designer, a web developer, a copywriter. I mean probably build my own agency in the house because I want people to be able to work on my platform, on my web part of the company, like every day. So, and I don't want to pay too much money to people that don't understand my reality. So I think that from there, I'm pretty sure that there's a lot of companies that moving there. I mean I have clients now that they send us their web design, their markups, they build themselves, they have a designer in house. They're like in the automotive industry they're sending cars, but they still have a web designer. That is pretty good. And we get their markups with Figma or X-Day and I mean it's pretty well done.
Keyven Ferland:So more and more, we need to adapt our companies, our studio, to where our clients are. So that's why our marketing strategies are built that way. So we're the marketing team that you don't have. We're the web development team that you don't have or that you wish you have, and maybe and that's why our support team is pretty good too because a lot of clients they got like this big WordPress website and after the launch, the agency just left them there, like it's a one night stand. You know, though, we're like no, we're going to marry you, we're going to take care of you, so, and they like that. Even if we didn't build a website, we still want to support them and make sure that they get everything done correctly. So I think it's more about being able to adapt to our clients and making sure that we hire and form people the way that our clients evolve in need.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Awesome. So time for the last two questions. One of them is pretty short, but this is a signature question of the podcast. Right, he gets to answer this and it's pretty uncomfortable, but it's the price you have to pay for not preparing for this, because nobody prepares for this podcast. But we want to democratize failure and fuck ups, right? So there's a lot of technical fuck ups in the industry and I've shared tons of them in this podcast. What is the biggest technological fuck up you've done with your company? And quantify it with money. So how much money was lost there? Money was bright and shiny until now, but now you get exposed. They were a spark.
Keyven Ferland:I'm going to go the really honest way and really, as I said, that I sold the company in 2020. Actually, a group just got me out of ship. Really, we were in 2017, we were 32 people. The project that we built in 2017, because I think we went from 13 to 32 people in two years, 2015 to 2017. And the foundation of the agency, they just weren't there. So most of the project that we built at that time, it was pretty bad quality Not enough code review, not enough quality insurance, not enough tests, not enough. We weren't listening to our client and we didn't implicate them in the project as much as we needed at that time. So there was a lot of project that went like I mean that we lost money and we lost money. It's close to a million dollars, so there was a lot of money and that's probably where I got my gray hair and yeah, it was hard. And after 2017, what I did is I said, okay, I need to move back to where I come from, like when we were a small team in 2020, in 2010, sorry, that's where I scaled down the company to eight or nine people. In 2020, in 2029, sorry. So AujourdaSOUND stake I mean 13 people, 32 in two years and two years later back to eight, nine people. But I mean, like we, the dawnfall of it was like extremely stressful Me, on my family, on the employees. There were times where we were able we weren't able to to even give money to our, to our employee, like for five to six, seven weeks. I mean the people, some people left, some people stayed, some people are still working beside me, so, even if it was really hard, but yeah, that's, that's probably the the two biggest and hardest year of my life and hopefully I won't, I won't, I won't see that again or live that again In the 2029,.
Keyven Ferland:I went for a pitch to get a contract where we needed to build two websites Shoso Pop and Tlerafil. It was like in Deshaillon, in Quebec, so it's like three hours north, two hours south of where I live. It was the December 23rd, so just before Christmas. It was a $300,000 contract that I wanted to go get for for organ, for a group and our team and everybody was super excited. It was like, yeah, I mean we, I mean, like I said, we, we didn't have enough money to, to to pay our employees. So I went to Deshaillon but before, when I hit the road. Like 25, 30 minutes after getting on the road, my tire just exploded. So I had to change the tire. Yeah, like it was snowing, it was like it was cold. My girlfriend was with me at the time, so I changed the tire Like it took me. It took me like an hour more to to get there to the meeting and once I get there, I start the meeting.
Keyven Ferland:The pitch I was like, like I said, pretty stressful and I think 15 minutes into it, the, the CEO of the of the group. He looked at me and said are you looking for a job? I was like what? And said, yeah, looking, are you looking for a job? Because I want someone like you in the company that's going to build all of our websites. That's going to be, is going to. You won't talk shit to me. He's going to like, he's going to save me the real thing about what we need. He was tired to to being like to, to to meet all these big agencies that we're selling him like big project, but just for themselves, not not listening to to his need. So we talk, we, we, we talk back in 20, in January 2020, and then, march nine, we signed the papers and we, we moved the team to to that group and March 13th in Quebec the pandemic started. So it was. It was pretty awesome.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:Wow, there'll be. That was definitely a very big emotional roller coaster, right, and I appreciate the honesty. I think the block has episode alone. I the this answer alone has been worth the entire episode. So we very rarely get this level of honesty in this question. We always I mean mostly we get bullshit Like I hired the wrong person. You know there's like everybody hired the wrong person.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:So very rarely we get these very detailed stories and I think that's very, very helpful actually, because it helps to to visualize and to externalize that everybody fucks shit up and we all do, like you know. I mean, the one I was going to tell cannot compare to this one, it doesn't really make sense, but I share on a weekly basis. I share fuck ups I do with the company and so thank you, thank you for doing that. For last question then, very, very, very quick, because I really appreciate your time how can we help you? You've been very helpful to us. So how can we and our community, listeners, subscribers and followers of March base, how can we help you?
Keyven Ferland:I'm not pretty good at asking help most of the time, so it's probably the hardest one. Yeah, I don't know, it's just that we're we're I see ourselves as a small studio in, like five hours north of Montreal. So like we're, you know we're in the country. We're a real resilient team. For like 13, 16 years, I mean my, my, my dream for our team is it would be to to to experience building projects to clients overseas, even even if we are in in, in, like in the mountains in Quebec, like in the north of of it. So so I don't know if we have a chance to, I don't know just just collaborate with the, with other agencies or other companies, just to just to work on some like pretty fun, exciting project overseas with people with different cultures, just for the experience, not for the money, just for the experience.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:It's funny. We will also want clients from overseas. So let's, why don't we swap our clients? And we'll do it for the money? I'm going to be honest, because money is is bigger. Prices are bigger in the US, maybe in Canada, I don't know, but definitely bigger budgets out there than in Europe. But no worries, we could swap clients anytime I'll I'll. I'll send you some details afterwards. We could sign the contract right away. All right, even. Thank you very much. Any, any, any parting words, anything you want to share with us, anything that you got coming up in the company that you want to announce here, or something you want to share. You got 30 seconds of glory.
Keyven Ferland:Oh, thanks. That means like this if you guys want to want to, to buy our, our hoodies or our t-shirts, we are. We even have a hat, so so, yeah, I invite you to to go to our, our e-commerce website and buy all of the and keep installing Shopify.
Àlex Rodríguez Bacardit:All right, thank you very much. You're welcome, merci beaucoup. So thank you so much. I love it. Bye.