Sebastien Provencher

FounderFuel is a top tier mentor-driven accelerator program that provides $50K of seed capital and access to veteran entrepreneurs, angel investors, VCs and senior executives.

I am responsible for growing HomeAdvisor in Canada and developing innovative new products for homeowners and service professionals.

Member of the advisory board at this innovative Social TV startup.

Description:
Manage and convey the product vision, understand the market needs, create the business case, and complete product requirements and roapdmap for the Needium service and the technology behind it. Work closely with the technology team (including freelancers), the sales team and our channel partners to deploy products on time, on scope and on budget. Involved in business development efforts for large channel resellers. Sits on the board of directors.

Selected Accomplishments:
● Created the first social media lead generation service for local advertisers (www.needium.com), generating tens of thousands (and growing) of revenue dollars per month, from $0 a year ago. The Needium technology filters the Twitter API to identify people expressing local needs using Twitter, matches those tweets to a business category and displays them in a Twitter dashboard sold to local merchants. 25M+ local need tweets per day were indexed by our platform in March 2012.
● Helped conclude channel reseller agreements (past & present) including 4 large North America local media companies and a dozen other resellers
● Selected for the DEMO Fall Silicon Valley 2011 startup competition
● Placed 4th at Plug & Play Tech Center competition 2011 in Silicon Valley
● Named one of the 7 Canadian Start-Ups and one of the 5 Montreal Start-Ups to watch in 2011
● Selected for the LeWeb’10 startup competition in Paris
● Regular speaker/panelist at industry conferences

Description:
Lead product management and business development activities for the company. Responsible for many of the day-to-day operations at the company.

Selected Accomplishments:
● Lead market launch of 10 social media products including a social Yellow Pages platform, placeblogging tools, a local Q&A platform, a local activity stream and a real-time local search platform. These were available via an API and were developed for the Web but also for WordPress/Movable Type (via plug-ins), for Facebook (via an app), for Twitter (via a Firefox plug-in), and an iPhone app. All data/activities from those “spokes” were aggregated at the Praized.com hub.
● Reported 2000+ blog plug-ins downloads, 4,000 registered users and 20,000+ network activities
● Signed solid revenue partnerships with Yellow Pages Group and Yellowbook
● Successfully negotiated data licensing agreements with Localeze and Yellow Pages Group
● Played an instrumental role in developing pitch material and business case that enabled us to raise the first $1M of venture capital money (company raised multiple $M in venture capital money during my tenure)
● Finalist in Red Herring’s Canada’s Top 50 Private Technology Company in 2008
● Awarded special jury prize at the Boomerang Interactive Awards (one of Canada’s top interactive awards) in 2008.
● Selected in ReadWriteWeb’s Top 100 companies operating in the real-time Internet.
● Successfully executed a burn-reduction strategy and pivot to enterprise products in Fall 2008. Enterprise customers included Yellow Pages Group and Examiner.com
● Successfully retired the Praized products following pivot to Needium in 2010

Did some consulting work for a few companies including Mamma.com and Call Genie.

Description:
- Involved in the strategic planning and corporate development activities for the Yellow Pages Group's online efforts (YellowPages.ca, PagesJaunes.ca, Canada411.ca, Superpages.ca, CanadaPlus.ca). This network of sites was in the Top 10 most visited in Canada (around 35% reach at the time).
- Involved with evaluating new business opportunities, partnerships and product line extensions.
- Support the executive team by performing a variety of due diligence, developing financial and operations modeling, writing business plans, and performing market and competitive analysis.

Selected Accomplishments:
● Oversaw strategic partnerships with major industry players including Google, WhitePages.com and Findwhat
● Played an instrumental role in formulating Yellow Pages Group’s online strategy in Canada
● Considered a strategic member of the organization

Description:
Oversaw the eDirectory product management team whose responsibilities included P&L for YellowPages.ca and Canada411.ca, the leading Canadian Internet Yellow and White Pages sites. Managed a team of 3 to 6 product managers.

Selected accomplishments:
● Developed YPG’s most successful online advertising product ever (DirectoryPlus) with $200M+ annual revenues
● Propelled YellowPages.ca page views from 7M to 25M/month and Unique visitors from 500K to 3.2M/month
● Rebuilt YellowPages.ca platform from scratch in 4 months, enabling savings of $2M/year
● Successfully streamlined product line and recast strategy around core business
● Successfully launched new sales channels in Western Canada
● Initiated the Proof-of-Value strategy, a key element in future sales efforts
● Considered a strategic member of the organization

Description:
Managed small merchants e-commerce solutions. Responsibilities included product requirements, P&L, vendor relationship and channel support.

Selected Accomplishments:
Created product definition where there was none
● Re-established good relationship with technology vendor, BCE Emergis
● Optimized process with Citibank & Bank of Montreal to ease small merchants' MOTO account acquisition
● Streamlined product offer in order to limit losses
● Negotiated with Bell Canada for creation of major sales channel
● Created vision for future of Canadian local merchant e-commerce
● Killed off product line

- Developed the PC marketing strategy for the US market.
- Successfully launched 5 titles including one of Ubisoft’s biggest PC successes in the USA (at the time).
- Participated in US press tours (San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, etc.).
- Negotiated partnerships deals with major industry partners (including Intel, 3dfx).

One of only 14 students in Canada selected for a summer internship in Brand Management

Developed MegaDome pavilion program structure, one of the principal centers of interest at La Ronde amusement park (a Six Flags property). Managed a team of about 12 employees. (Summer Internship)

- Creation of a new source of revenue for the bookstore using the Internet and e-commerce in 1994
- Creation of a customer loyalty program using membership cards.
- Produced extremely successful PR events.