A Madness that’s seeking a Business Model

Some of TheMIN membership came across XPR last year as we were scanning for travel experience companies for corporate development. The founder behind XPR (an active North American hobby-sharing, leisure, and travel experience company) is Ottawa-native Joelle Parenteau. We caught up with her over email this month.

Reviewing some of her startups and ideas, you discover that madness is a good word describing the way Parenteau does things. Looking for a way to connect with her, we found t-shirt-selling websites, central-purchasing businesses, and then XPR. All founded or co-founded by her. This type of energy and ability to risk failure is an excellent attribute of a founder.

Many founders have that often-talked-about reality distortion field, that way of framing what they see around themselves and what their customer wants. The best founders match this with inspiring those around them to fulfill on that promise. If you want to introduce something new or have a customer look at a solution in a different way, you need to employ this field. In speaking with Parenteau, she displays this ability to convince.

In XPR, Parenteau seeks to give “access to world-class icons and ultra-rare experiences.” Taking a rather rational step she decided to pass on Ottawa as the location for this startup. “What better place to start,” she says, “than the Entertainment Capital of the World itself: Las Vegas. From playing poker with the pros to fight night with world champions, exclusive chef’s tables and race days with NASCAR pros.” Looking at it from the investor point of view, this makes a lot of sense. This is where your pool of experience junkies is going to reside.

Before launching XPR 2.0 in Vegas, Parenteau tested the concept on a smaller scale in Ottawa where she managed to create and offer experiences that even now are not being offered by competitors: knife forging, racing military Humvees in a private quarry, sniper training, llama walking, axe making and more.

As we saw in trying to contact her, Parenteau hasn’t been in the experience industry only. Her elevator pitch for her previous startup Epic Perks is, “combined and leveraged the collective buying of small businesses to give them first-time access to the preferred rates typically reserved for large corporations.” She ultimately closed a partnership with Canada Post which would see her program offered to over 250,000 of their small business customers.

There is something similar in central purchasing and experience selling: a two-sided marketplace. Most investors shy away from marketplaces. Why wouldn’t they, as the founder you have to find the buyer AND the seller AND join them up. But having an established marketplace is the business top companies are in: Amazon doesn’t write any books but finds booksellers and book buyers, Apple doesn’t write a lot of apps or author music but finds music authors and music buyers, Google doesn’t make websites but it finds website creators and website consumers. All these companies see being a middle-agent in the market as the best spot to be in. Parenteau has managed to convince investors too. XPR has had combined seed and angel investments to the $500,000 level from several sources including the founders of Shopify and a C-level exec at Tweed.

When it comes to fundraising Parenteau’s approach is, again, somewhat unorthodox. When asked how she pitches investors, she answers “I don’t”. Perplexed we ask how then she managed to raise half a million dollars. That’s when she explains that she never overtly asks to pitch anyone, instead “I just talk to people about what I’m doing” and some of those people love the idea so much they ask her if she’s fundraising. Some of these investors are contacts she’s known for a while who’ve followed her progress for years – others she met at a poker game. That’s just how she rolls.

As an Angel group, we always think about an exit.  We asked Parenteau to name some sources of Series A funding she would like to have.  Perplexed with such a silly question,  “I guess that depends on who I end up talking to. I won’t know until I meet them. I look for cool fun people who really get the value of accessing unique life experiences. The ones who really understand our mission I don’t have to sell – they themselves have experiences they dream of doing, and our whole purpose is to make these impossible things, possible. Already we’ve made some pretty incredible experiences happen for our investors, that in of itself is incredibly rewarding.”

On advice for founders: “Be really picky with your investors. I learned that the hard way by accepting an investor that turned out to be a huge hassle. Fortunately, I managed to get another investor to buy him out so we were lucky to not have to deal with him, but be very careful who you take money from. Also, don’t focus only on fundraising, build your business and make shit happen and the fundraising should then happen organically. I’m also a big fan of building sustainable business models as quickly as possible versus relying on multiple rounds of funding to stay alive. We raise as little as possible and stay frugal as possible because I believe this is a forcing function in honing the business model early on.”

When asked what she found as some good digital hangouts for her ideas she said LinkedIn, “because it shows the ‘degrees of separation’ with my current network, and since I have a pretty big network, it gives me access to a lot of very interesting people. I use it to randomly message people I’d love to work with and share our story – I don’t pitch them, I just tell them what we’re doing and ask if they want to talk. I’ve had many great conversations and made amazing contacts this way.”  For Gust and Angel.co, “no – because I don’t believe in chasing investors.”

There is an investing adage that the odds are better for a second-time founder. Add to that a driven founder with a solid network and just the right amount of funding, it’s easy to see Joelle Parenteau is well on her way to success.

Joelle Parenteau can be reached by email at jo@xprvegas.com. If you want to read more of her adventures you can check out her Medium articles.