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July 04, 2024 - 07:55

Francois Pouzet, Content Creator for Entrepreneurs: "Having a large community allows you to do things or generate business"

by Andrea Herrera

“Since I was a kid, I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I always tried to do one thing or another. In my family, there was no one who was an entrepreneur or a business person; there was no one to ask. But curiously, I had this bug in my head that I wanted to be an entrepreneur... no matter what,” recalls Francois Pouzet, co-founder of Float Chile, the first flotation center in Chile, about the start of his journey as an entrepreneur.

“I was intrigued, for example, that there was no university for entrepreneurship. And that was the beginning. Then... It took about ten years until I finally started my YouTube channel,” says Pouzet.

“In fact, one of the pieces of advice I always give to people who want to start a business is to take one step every day in the direction they want to go. It doesn’t matter if it’s a tiny step, but take a step, so each day you can advance towards that direction you want to go.” Francois Pouzet to Entreprenerd

After this learning process and his training as a high-performance athlete, he finally managed to start a business with a friend who was also a high-performance scholarship athlete. However, this business did not prosper because they did not dedicate 100% of their time to it.

“Was it all trial and error? Yes, for me, this was not a failure. I know there’s this cliché that says to be successful you have to fail. I don’t want to relate it to that, although yes, it has a lot to do with it, that saying is very true. But for me, it wasn’t a failure because, as I said before, I had the mentality that in everything I did... I learned something. I knew it was the only way to understand how to do business.”

FLOAT: THE POINT OF FLOTATION

Pouzet recalls that by 2018 he was still searching and learning about business until a university friend proposed the idea of creating Float, a flotation center.

“I didn’t think twice and said let’s study this obviously and I finally ended up quitting my job to do this project. As I said before, when we did ‘Hiit’ we failed because we didn’t dedicate the necessary time to it. Therefore, here I knew I had to quit my job. There was no doubt, no questioning about it. I was convinced that the only way was quitting, dedicating 100%.”

And of course, because Float is also very much related to sports. “Float consists of capsules filled with water and lots of salt. It is completely dark and silent. The salt makes you float effortlessly. These are the capsules. So, this allows you to rest deeply, meditate, relax, and relieve physical pain,” explains Pouzet.

This type of center was very popular in the United States, a format widely used by high-performance athletes in the NBA, NFL, and other leagues.

“So, when I saw that this was something very related to sports and for me, as we discussed earlier, sports is my passion, one of my passions.” That’s how Float brought him to his breaking point.

SOCIAL MEDIA: A CONTENT CREATOR IS BORN

A year before creating Float, Pouzet recalls that he had created a trekking Instagram account (Trekking en Chile). After seeing a football Instagram account with more than 10,000 followers, he wondered how they managed to get so many followers.

That’s how he started uploading photos of trekking, hills, national parks, and the places he had visited. “I started doing it without understanding anything about social media and quickly that account reached 10,000 followers, 20,000, 30,000, 50,000, 100,000, 120,000, and today it has 160,000 followers.”

“I discovered the potential of social media. I realized that brands started contacting me for exchanges, to give me products in exchange for advertising, and I discovered a world completely unknown to me, fascinating. I discovered that if you managed to build a community, well, and this is actually very related to my YouTube channel.”

“With what was my YouTube channel, I later discovered that there was something very interesting. Imagine you can build a community from scratch just by having a phone and internet. If you do it right, you can have a large community. This is completely free, you don’t have to pay to use Instagram and having a large community allows you to do things, you can generate business.”

This led him to take his experience to Float’s social media and contact Pancho Saavedra to experience flotation, which resulted in their Instagram gaining over 7,000 followers and the phone not stopping ringing.

“I became obsessed with reaching out to journalists, journalists who could tell the story of Float. And I also started a search, my experts in finding journalists, contacting them, and convincing them to tell my story. And we also achieved a lot of reports in all the written media in the country.

“I discovered how to sell something, how to sell a story in summary so that it serves someone who is watching it and not just tell something entertaining. What I learned is that you have to deliver the story ready to the media. But the story ready from the point of view of what will interest the audience to hear or read.”

All this experience led him to become the content creator he is today, interviewing entrepreneurs who tell their own stories. It has been four years, and his community has become one of the most important in the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Check out the full interview.

You can also listen to it on Spotify or Apple Podcast