Get Inside Unbounce

Subscribe

Unbounce is Expanding to Montreal!

unbounce montreal lp

If you haven’t heard already, the rumours are true. In March, Unbounce will be establishing a presence on the East Coast of Canada, in Montreal. We are making our first big leap into uncharted territory, expansion into another city. We’ll start there with part of our growing Marketing team, and have immediate plans to establish a Customer Success team presence there as well. Since making the decision though, I’ve been asked a few times “Rick, why another city?” so I thought I’d share the reasons we’re excited to have our first satellite office in Montreal.

Vancouver is home and will always be Unbounce HQ, but there are lots of good reasons to look east to Montreal for expansion:

  1. It’s in Canada. That’s a big consideration at our stage due to taxation issues with having a US presence.

  2. It’s in the Eastern Time Zone where half of US and Canada’s population live and as a result, half of our opportunity.

  3. We will be able to provide support to our customers in Europe during business hours. 8 AM in Montreal is 1PM in London, 2PM in Berlin (I think I got this right).

  4. Our most amazing Director of Marketing, Georgiana Laudi is from Montreal and has a history and network to build on.

  5. Our main investors are based in Montreal. It will be a great opportunity to build a stronger relationship with JS, Alan, John and the rest of the Real Ventures crew.

  6. Some of my peers wanting to escape the Vancouver talent crunch are all looking at Toronto, so we’re going to zig while they zag.

  7. Montreal does not (yet) have the competitive pressures for talent that we have here in Vancouver. We are not only competing with the rest of the tech community here for prized top talent, we are competing with giants like Facebook, Amazon, Salesforce now.

  8. Montreal has a huge and thriving startup community. Two of Canada’s top tech focused VC firms are based there as well as the well respected FounderFuel Accelerator. Someone once said to me “pick any city across Canada, you’d be really lucky to get 50-100 people to a tech startup event”, in Montreal, you’ll consistently get 100s. That’s pretty cool.

  9. Montreal is close to many other great cities on the East Coast. It’s a 1.25hr flight to New York City or Halifax, just over an hour to Toronto or Boston (or a 6 and 5 hour drive respectively). If we want to pop in our nation’s capital, the Ottawa tech community is a short 45m flight.

  10. Finally, Montreal is awesome. It’s Canada’s second biggest city with nearly 4 million people living in it’s metropolitan area.  It has an amazing mix of cultures, lots of history and a very reasonable cost of living for a city it’s size.

I have no doubt that we will have challenges, we’ll be separated by about 4500 kilometres (or 2800 miles) and 3 time zones.

Maintaining a great company culture will be something I’ll be razor focused on, and I’m excited about the opportunity ahead of us.

This will be our training for future presence in places like London, Berlin, Sydney, San Paulo, Tokyo and Austin, the recently self-declared conversion capital of the world.

That said…

Join Us on April 3rd in Montreal!

Join us in Montreal on Thursday, April 3rd for an Open House and Startup Lessons Learned. I’ll be there, and I’d love to connect with you.

[Check out the event details here]

-Rick Perreault
CEO and Co-founder
@rickperreault