Tips to Grow a Successful Tech Startup with Thibaut Machet, PlayPlay’s CEO

Hi, Shane, nice to meet you.

Yeah, thanks. So maybe you can hear that from my accent, not even maybe, but for sure, you can hear that I’m French. So I grew up in France, more specifically, in the Alps mountains. So let’s say South East of France, basically in the mountains.

Yeah. So I’m from a small family—just my parents and my brother. It was a nice, normal childhood—very calm. I played football like every other kid in France, and I did ski like everyone in my mountains. That’s it.

Yes, a lot of times he was protecting me. Sometimes I was a little provocative or mischievous at school, and he was the big brother helping me when I got into trouble.

What can I tell you? I can tell you that my father is an entrepreneur, and I guess my interest in entrepreneurship came from him. He was in a totally different industry—construction. It’s not where I ended up working, but I was very excited to see him being on his own, building his company, and taking his own decisions. So, like a lot of entrepreneurs, I was inspired by my father.

Yeah, she was working in the, let’s say, tech industry, but it was the early days of tech. So yes, they were both working.

Exactly.

So now we are in Paris. I moved there for my first jobs, basically, and obviously, when I started PlayPlay, I stayed in Paris. We were not, at that time, in the world of full remote and COVID. So if you want to attract the best talent in France, especially you, most of the time, you start from Paris. France is very, let’s say, a centralized country. So Paris, wait for maybe more than half of the economy in France. So this is where, this is where I live. My wife also worked in the cinema industry, which is, I think, also based in Paris. So in a way, we are locked now in Paris, but we’re very happy we had the chance to move to a very small town near Paris, in the house now. So, because we have two kids, so we needed more space, and Paris is so packed that we couldn’t stay there, so for six months now, we are in a small, small house near Paris.

I went to a business school in Lyon. So Lyon is one of the biggest cities in France, and close to my city, the Coronavirus, my city in the arts, mountains, and yes, I did this business school, which was, let’s say, very general studying all things to find a job after that in finance. And also had some first courses of entrepreneurship, which also started to convince me that that was probably my way.

Was mostly on marketing. Yeah, mostly marketing. And, like I told you, entrepreneurship.

No, no, just say that, to me, what’s missing the most in business schools today is actually business courses, especially the job of sales, because in French, we say “la commerce” or really business school, but years after years, some courses about making business have just disappeared. It’s funny because I’ve had this discussion several times with entrepreneurs and salespeople. We no longer learn how to sell things in business schools, and what I see now running a tech company is that sales is still at the very heart of everything we do. Sales people are some of the most valuable people in the company and selling things is such a science and such difficult work that you don’t learn anymore. So now we see in France, new types of schools that are around sales and that try to put the emphasis on selling things, because the classic business school that we have today are focusing more on finance and marketing, on these very valuable things, but no more on how to sell things. You see what I mean?

Yeah, so after college, I worked in the media industry for a few years, for six, seven years, started at Canal Plus, which is the major pay TV broadcaster in France, and then quickly went to Eurosport, which is the Sports TV channel in Europe, is now part of Discovery Communication, so an American company, and it was a lot of fun, because I was passionate about sports and I was passionate about digital stuff, and there at Eurosport, I was in the middle of both working on the social media, working on editorial stuff and product stuff. At that time, Eurosport was a great TV channel, but was working on being a great digital asset too. They had your spot.com they had your sport player, and they were really booming on digital things. And I would, I was this junior guy in the middle of everything, working on it. And I really learned a lot during six years.

Now, we are close to 100 now.

Yeah. So I think I never wanted to do a tech company in a way. I just wanted to be an entrepreneur. I’ve launched my first company when back during my college, it was a small one, a small project, and I was a student, so it was very early, but I really loved running my thing and trying to do both the strategy and the operational side, and it was just so exciting. Then I’ve done this six years in a more, let’s say, corporate company, but where my role could be very versatile, and that was, we were very hands on. So I was enjoying a lot, but at the same time I was thinking about going back to entrepreneurship, and I was like, 26, 27, 28, and I was not feeling all, but was feeling about, will I start again my company? Because that was my goal in life, to be an entrepreneur. And it was not about launching a big tech company. It was more about running my own project and trying to, you know, have a salary and run it by my own. And so, yeah, when I went, when I was searching, I found the timing was good because I thought it was the end of a cycle at your spot. At the same time, I started to have what I thought was good idea, so I took the opportunity and started it. But at the very beginning, and I can, I can then tell more details if you want, but at the very beginning, the idea was not to be a startup or not to scale up, it was to be a project, a project, and my idea was to hire, or with my funders, work with the best people I know and the one I admired the most, and make enough money to be happy together. So I was thinking about being a group of 5 to 10 people. I did not know if that would be an agency or tech company or a product, just working together, having fun, being creative, being passionate in an industry that we love, which is content and digital, and that was my goal, and then it went faster than we expected, and we just realized that our project could become big. And then my decision was to say, what could be my ambition now, because there is some potential, and you have to choose if you want to keep your ambition small, or if you want to take the opportunity and try and make something big. And with my co-founders, we’ve decided to take the second option, try to make something big.

Yeah, it’s very classic, but most of the time, the best reason to start a company is that you feel a pain. You know the story. And as Director of Social Media at Eurosport at the end of my time there, I was working with several community managers, editors, and journalists, and we had millions of fans and followers on every social platform. We could see that these people were starving for video. We could see that video was literally booming. We know that media companies and publishers are usually early adopters of content trends, and so we saw video booming five or six years ago in the publishing industry. We could see that people wanted more videos, but at the same time, we realized that we weren’t able to provide this video. And if we wanted to create, let’s say, the top five goals of tonight’s game, our fans wanted them a minute after the game ended. The video team could do it in 24 hours, or ask for a two-day delay. You see, there was a pain. There was a big friction in the video creation process. And when we asked our editors, “Can you do the video faster?” they said, “Yeah, if I work for four hours, I can maybe do a first draft, and you’ll ask, ‘Can you do it in 20 minutes?’” It’s impossible. So that was the original idea. The idea was to help editors or journalists create videos more easily, to feed their fans, mostly on Facebook at that time and on Twitter, which were the biggest platforms. That was the idea because this product didn’t exist back then.

Yeah, so this is usually how ambition grows. It is because we quickly realized that the small market we had in mind, which was publishers, was actually much bigger, and we had to have inbound leads like people contacting us from first publishers and then other industries. And when we receive an email from the biggest bank in France asking for a demo, and when you show the product and they say, “This is exactly what we need,” you realize that video is no more for the early adopters, which are media companies and publishers, but for any company. My role at PlayPlay was to hear that and to say, “Okay, now we need our market, which has just been multiplied by 10. Let’s address this market.”

So the biggest challenge is most of the time in the early days when you don’t have, so I am not a tech guy myself, and none of my co-founders were tech people. So when you do a product which is based on tech and you are not a tech person, this is very, very difficult. And I wanted to go fast, so I didn’t want to spend months to find the good founder and assess people, and I couldn’t hire someone at the time, so with my savings, I paid, I financed the very first MVP. And this, with this MVP, I managed to find my first clients, who were very kind to pay for this very first product. And, you know, this is the moment where everything is very stretched, because when you have one client and you ask, “Are you okay to pay for the first year upfront, you get some money? Let’s say 10, 10k, 10,000 euros or dollars, and then you put it, you give it to your agency, because I worked with an tech agency, and you build and you have to choose one feature, because with 10k you can do one feature. And so at that period, what is very interesting for me is that you could only buy build one feature after the other. So you have to take the best decisions, because if you take two or three wrong decisions in your features roadmap. So it was about selling our product very quickly. I think that was the biggest success for PlayPlay is that each time we had some feature, each time we had a product, we were selling it. We were not building something that maybe will interest someone someday. It was like putting this in the hands of people and say, “Can you pay please for this?” And they say, “Yes, we pay building the products with this money.” So that was the way we’ve done it.

Yeah, so I think the most important thing is to really choose a project that you are passionate about. It may seem cheesy, but it’s so true. Because if you are interested in the problem that you are solving, you’ll be relevant. You’ll be on point. So when you make decisions, they will have a good chance of being right, because you are an expert, let’s say, in this industry. You really understand what you are working on. I’ve worked on PlayPlay and the product for the first two or three years. Now we have a product team, but I was really passionate about video and content, so I could feel the pain of the users because I was a user myself. So this is the most important part. And then, the second most important thing is to work with great people. This is very obvious, but if I look at the team I have now, or especially if I look at the first 10 people, the first 20 people I hired, if they had been different, we wouldn’t be here. The first people you hire for your product team are so important. The first people you hire for your people team are crucial, because the people team will hire more people. Obviously, salespeople are so important. We say in France that we have great engineers, but we don’t know how to sell the product. I think at PlayPlay, we had both: strong engineering and strong sales. It’s all about people, all about people. And maybe the third thing, which is linked to the first one, is listening to your users. I think that was something we did great in the first few years, and now we do it more scientifically—the way we listen to results. But in the first two years, it was really about sitting with my clients and just talking, asking, “What do you think? What would you like? Would you pay more for this?” And then, in the end, you choose what you want to do. You don’t always have to listen and say, “Oh, they want this, let’s code this.” It’s not about that. It’s just about being sure that what you decide to build is relevant for your users, in general, on average. You optimize everything you build for your users. Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah. And I think being this way, like cash efficient, is a way to make sure that your decisions are taken wisely. And it is so easy to raise capital and to find money before you start selling that when you ended up having, like, $1 million, let’s say, before launching your product, then you may end up building something that you think is very valuable, and you have time and you have resources, but then when you ship it and you try to sell it, that doesn’t work, and it’s too late. If you start with a small amount of money and a small product, you are sure that the first million you will invest in your product is really on the spot.