Elliot Boucher is the co-founder of Edusign, a B2B2C SaaS making over 1 million dollars in annual recurring revenue.
At 23 years old Elliot already launched multiple businesses. His first business was selling marble at 7 years old. He professionalized with e-commerce stores at 15 years old and incorporated his first company at 18. Elliot built multiple e-commerce stores making over 1 million dollars per year. He also created online courses sold to more than 25,000 students about digital marketing, no-code automation and e-commerce. His most recent project is Edusign, a digital attendance sheet, e-signature and online survey system for Education. Edusign is used by over 600,000 students and was featured in magazines such as Forbes.
Elliot is passionate about marketing, product and customer experience. He thrive to create an organization where the customer experience is at the forefront. Elliot is the host of the podcast Formation Innovation, which feature interviews from experts and entrepreneurs in the Education sector in France.
In his spare time, Elliot enjoys skiing, snowboarding and surfing and does it whenever he can. He also enjoys a good book and can give you some to read if you ask him.
Where did the idea for Edusign come from?
After losing multiple attendance sheets during our master, Dylan and I decided to fix the issue. We created a small prototype to digitize the attendance sheets. After a few weeks of testing, we realized that the opportunity was much bigger than we thought. Therefore, we tried to build a real SaaS that would fit the need of any schools or training organizations.
What does your typical day look like and how do you make it productive?
I generally work between 10 to 14 hours per day. I start around 9am and get rid of as many small tasks as I can in the morning. I always have quick meetings with my team to provide support in case there is someone blocked or there is an urgency.
Quick lunch in front of the computer, I know it’s bad !
In the afternoon, I have days with a lot of calls and some without any. Depending that, I adjust the rest of my day.
I stop working around 8pm to have some family time and eat.
After that, I finish some ongoing tasks, or starts small ones to end the day well.
In the morning, or before going to bed, I list 1 to 3 “big” goals for the day and try to achieve that no matter what.
How do you bring ideas to life?
I always start small. When I want to bring an idea to life, I keep the big picture in mind but focus on the first reachable problem. By doing that I can get quick results and keep iterating until I have a more complete solution. For example, we started Edusign with one signature solution for the attendance sheet. Now we have 6 solutions to sign attendance, documents and send online surveys as well.
What’s one trend that excites you?
Web3 is definitely something that excites me. I believe that we won’t see the “metaverse” come to a reality anytime soon. However, I’m confident that web3 principles will be part of our daily life very soon. The fintech and edtech industries are particularly interesting and exciting!
What is one habit of yours that makes you more productive as an entrepreneur?
Inbox zero. I don’t understand how someone receiving more than 20 emails a day can’t like it. It saves me a lot of time, and more importantly, remove mental charge.
What advice would you give your younger self?
Be humble, you know nothing. I still need to remind myself that today !
Tell us something that’s true that almost nobody agrees with you on.
You can succeed at anything by doing 5 to 10 minutes tasks only. People think that they need to focus for a very long period of time. In reality, it is just about doing the first 5 minutes.
As an entrepreneur, what is the one thing you do over and over and recommend everyone else do?
Break big ideas into atomic pieces. I’m exhausted before the first step when I see the mountain to climb. However, sure, I can walk a step or two.
What is one strategy that has helped you grow your business?
We invested in SEO early on, even before having a product. It still helps us to this day to attract many clients.
What is one failure you had as an entrepreneur, and how did you overcome it?
I had many failures. In fact, so many that I couldn’t list them all. However, the trick is to know that failure don’t last long and successful project do. I focused on what I hope would work next and never looked back.
What is one business idea that you’re willing to give away to our readers?
Outbound as a service. I believe it’s incredibly hard to find a good agency or to do the job ourselves. If you can have a pay per lead service, it can work. “your success is my success” model can be productized as well, just look at Stripe.
What is the best $100 you recently spent? What and why?
I bought a kindle. I always had a book in my backpack and having 100 books in my pocket is great.
What is one piece of software or a web service that helps you be productive?
ClickUp. I organize everything in ClickUp for the marketing and product. It allows me to write documents, lists, organize sprint and share information easily with my team and with externals when needed.
What is the one book that you recommend our community should read and why?
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft from Stephen King, a great book to improve your writing.
What is your favorite quote?
“Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Albert Einstein
Key Learnings:
- Break projects down into small achievable steps.
- Forget failure, focus on the next step.
- Invest in SEO early
Mario Schulzke is the Founder of ideamensch, which he started a decade ago to learn from entrepreneurs and give them a platform for their ideas.