Philippe helps fellow founders to get instant and smarter insights on their cash flow
By: Mike Slaats
Tags: Design, Metrics, Saas Tools, SaaS, Saas Marketing

🏴‍☠️ Meet SaaS Pirate Philippe from RocketChart!

1. Hi 👋What’s your name and your business?

Hello, I’m Philippe, 26 years old, and I’m the cofounder of RocketChart — A real-time cash flow management platform. We are a team of 3 (two software engineers + myself on product & design).We help other fellow founders to get instant and smarter insights on their cash flow. Instead of using laborious spreadsheets or waiting for your accountant’s reports, you can directly connect your bank accounts and continuously track expenses & revenues on our tool. While building the product, many early adopters wanted to categorize business expenses to get a clear picture of what they spend their money on, so we implement it too 🙂

2. Can you tell us more about your background on how you started?

During my graduate studies, I launched many small E-commerce businesses for fun and to experiment. Then, 3 years ago I felt in love with SaaS because of the business model. From January to June 2019, we worked on a staff scheduling software for restaurants. We launched the first version in June but we decided to stop right after because the market didn’t match our company vision: to get restaurants on-board you need a real sales team on the field, but we didn’t want to manage a sales team. So we’ve pivoted on RocketChart in July after validating the idea by posting 2 posts in 2 Facebook groups. More than 400 businesses were interested in using our solution, making these posts among the top commented and liked posts ever on these groups. We knew we were on something big.

3. What does a typical day look like for you?

Each day starts with a big bowl of cereals and 15min of meditation, I absolutely need it to be in the mood. So I wake up at 7.00 and start working around 8.00. As we work remotely, I don’t spend time on public transportation. So I jump on my daily work right after meditation. Usually, my morning tasks have been planned the day before: I immediately know what needs to be done. I generally go for 45min of deep work sessions followed by a short 5min break. I try to plan calls or meetings only in the afternoon to keep my mornings free. At around 16:30, I stop. I either go to the gym or read, waiting for my girlfriend to come home 🤗

I finish the day with 15min of meditation just before sleeping. Meditation sessions in the morning and evening really help me to sleep better and evacuate thoughts. Before having this kind of routine, I used to not set any alarm clock. I woke up whenever I was ready for it (generally around 9:00). Actually, this way I felt really tired during the day. So I changed, and I’m now experimenting the routine I’ve described above. Still experimenting…

4. Which tools are your favorite to work with?

I’m using Adobe XD to design and prototype our platform and website. I’ve tried many tools like Sketch, InVision or Marvel, but I fall in love with the simplicity of Adobe XD. As a remote team, we really need to document everything and over-communicate. Google Drive (Doc and Sheet) is really helpful for this. Our Drive is strictly organized in a way each one of us can easily find documents to work with.

5. What is your favorite app on your phone?

6. What is your favorite book?

To set my 45min deep work session, I use Forest. I used to have struggle staying focused because of all the notifications from Facebook, WhatsApp, Slack, LinkedIn, etc. I tried to turn off notifications but I was still clicking on Whatsapp and Facebook to check if I had messages… It was terrible, I was addicted. Forest beautifully encourages me to stay away from my phone.

I’ve just finished Obviously Awesome from April Dunford. It deals with the question of Product Positioning and suggest a framework to successfully position yours in the market. Actually, this is the most useful and insightful book I have ever read, and it will positively affect RocketChart for sure! But I would also mention Rework by Jason Fried (from Basecamp). His vision is really different from other usual stuffs you can find on building a business.

Even though I don’t agree with everything, it makes you think a lot about the current business culture.