Who ?
Initially, they were two childhood friends who had wanted to start a business together for a long time. Samuel Chénard holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Université Laval and Ian Bussières has a degree in information technology engineering from the École de technologie supérieure (ETS).
Starting in 2021, the two entrepreneurial friends are exploring and experimenting to find a new business idea. “The idea for Palisade came from changes by Apple and Google, which imposed security standards for sending emails,” explains Mr. Bussières.
Palisade was officially founded in October 2023 and the platform went to market in early 2024. Mr. Chénard is now CEO of Palisade and Mr. Bussières, its chief technology officer. The young company also has three full-time employees who are shareholders and “a few dozen customers” in five months, the CEO says.
The product
For the average person, it can be a mystery why some emails end up in the spam folder. Even companies are not always aware of the mechanics of email compliance, which is based on security protocols and essentially depends on a domain name. Essentially, for email managers like Google or Microsoft, it is about ensuring that emails come from legitimate sources.
That’s where Palisade comes in.
“We already knew how complex it would be to implement these protocols,” explains Mr. Bussières. “The complexity is increasing and most companies simply don’t have the knowledge internally to do this effectively. We are truly convinced that people shouldn’t have to do this.”
Companies will often use consultants to help them make their emails compliant. “We said to ourselves: we’re going to make software that automates this,” explains the chief technology officer. “It’s going to cost a lot less and we’re going to be able to do it for everyone.”
Palisade also takes care of diagnostics, to establish what percentage of emails actually make it into customers’ inboxes.
Statistics: Palisade’s intervention increases customer email openings by 40%, and sales generated by those mailings increase by 22%. “There are independent studies that have been done on this,” says the CEO. “It pays off pretty well.”
Palisade services are billed monthly at $99 USD according to the pricing schedule published on the site.
Challenges
The main difficulties were technological, explains Ian Bussières. “It’s not necessarily easy, there are many exceptions.”
It is not always easy to obtain technical information from email services. “There is sometimes a bit of opacity on how they should be configured,” reports Mr. Chénard. “The documentation is not very clear, it is very changeable. Our service aims precisely to remove this opacity.”
The future
No big surprises here: at Palisade, we want to “improve, start getting more customers, improve the machine,” says Mr. Chénard.
“We are really focused on the engine of our machine, we want to do this job well before we start to diversify, to do more things,” adds Mr. Bussières. “We want to do a small range of things, but really, really well.”
In the longer term, Palisade could go so far as to configure all of the communications infrastructures of companies. But not too quickly, reminds the CEO: “This market is really gigantic. What we are trying to do at the moment, there is not really anyone who does that. That is why we are convinced that we really have to put effort into doing it really well.”