Discover the transcript of the interview between Tristan de La Chevasnerie, founder of the Pierrot agency and Théau Ravier on his YouTube channel Samsara! On the program: discovery of the career of Tristan and his employees, SEO and content produced by the Pierrot agency.
Contact Pierrot, web and print writing agency
Presentation of the manager, Tristan de La ChevasnerieThéau : Could you introduce yourself, tell us about your journey up to the time you created your agency and what brought you to where you are today?Tristan : Yes, of course! I am the founder of the Pierrot agency. For the little baseline : the Pierrot agency is the agency that lends you its pen iran whatsapp number data write a word! It is one of the slogans that we are proud of and that also clearly show that the Pierrot agency is first and foremost an agency that will master writing , content and words in general . I created this agency 3 and a half years ago. Today, there are 12 of us in the agency with great progress since its creation.
What academic background should you
take before setting up a web agency?Tristan : I did a literary preparatory course , which is called a rather atypical profile since I did a hypokhâgne khâgne . This training prepares students for the École Normale Supérieure to then become a researcher or a professor of literature or a professor of philosophy. These were exciting years where I explored what I personally liked, reading in particular and also writing .
Then I went to business schoo I joined
ESSEC because there are bridges between literary and business courses. Which shows that a literary person can definitely compete for a business school!
How did you go from literary passion to business school
Tristan : There are bridges because today, you have to know that literary profiles are quite sought after in companies. People don’t necessarily know it buying house b but companies need creative people ! Today, for example, if you take ESSEC, the school I joined, per year, there are 16% of profiles who come from literary prep. That’s huge! Out of a year of a few hundred students.
there are therefore
16% who come from literary courses! These are often people who, at the beginning, are a little lost because they are with people who have done a lot of mathematics, etc. Afterwards, these are people who find themselves or not because there are many who why telegram’s secret chats are a game-changer for privacy take different paths. In any case, this leaves room for quite varied profiles , quite diverse with very different paths. It turns out that as time went on I was getting a little bored, so I did a degree in Modern Literature at the same time. This is what gave me this dual appetite between business and writing/literature.
From freelance to web agency
I was able to work in a large group , particularly in management roles. I was able to experiment with SEO and writing on my own. I was a freelancer at the start, always alongside my activities. I was trained by various consultants in the field of SEO. One day, it turned out that I had the opportunity to set up my own business. So I started out as a freelance writer. Quite quickly, I realized that I had real ambition. I’m not saying that being a freelancer means not having ambition, but I had an ambition to create an agency model and simply write. I had the ambition to change scale. I don’t really like the term “scaler” which is a bit too English, but that was kind of the idea.
The creation of the Pierrot web agency
Théau : In our environments where it remains very human, the “scale” remains limited. I come back to this passage from “I am in business, I have great degrees, so I will be well paid in nice companies” to “I become a freelancer and I launch myself”. For those who are thinking about this question and who have some kind of talent on the side and who would like a new adventure, how do you manage financially at the level of both? Do you cut 50% of your salary or had you already managed to have a recurring client base? How do you manage.
Tristan I did a “moove” which was quite interesting
I didn’t go straight to freelance. I immediately created an SAS . I created my company. I said we were an agency when I was alone. It was a bit like everyone else. When you write, you start out by being all alone. Since I left my company with a mutual termination agreement, I was entitled to ACRE. It’s the State that helps us set up our company for a certain period of time. The State bets a bit on the person who sets up their company and will therefore pay them, for a time, 80% of their salary, which helps with the start of the activity.
The idea is to bet a little on employment.
From the State’s point of view, it’s a pretty good bet because they paid me for a year of unemployment and in the end, that made 10 jobs. So, there’s really something quite interesting. For me, these are really measures that work. Having a country that values entrepreneurship , business creation and ultimately job creation, is really something that is appreciable. I think we’re really lucky in France. I really said to myself.
Théau : OK! So that was three and a half years ago
Tristan : Three and a half years ago, yes. There is a bit of a myth about the entrepreneur who works in his garage. I was in my living room! It is an iron rigor. When you start a business, 90% of the work is commercial . I think that anyone who has created their own business knows that. I discovered a commercial streak that I didn’t necessarily have as a literary person (even if I don’t really like this literary or non-literary distinction), but
How to find your first clients in a writing agency?
Théau : I was going to ask you how you find your first clients? How do you also realize the opportunity of SEO writing ? How do you “price” yourself? Knowing that there is AI at zero euros, there is cheap Madagascar and there is very expensive. How do you approach the subject and the question?
Tristan : When I created the company
3 and a half, 4 years ago, at the time, it was quite different from today since there was not the same need for quality in writing . I arrived saying that Google’s algorithm is moving in a direction that will really favor the quality of content. At the time, there were still a lot of people in Madagascar. There are fewer, but a lot of writing was done offshore.
AI had not exploded like it has today . There was a real niche to be taken on this quality perspective . That’s how I positioned myself from the start by telling myself that what I like is writing and it’s not just placing keywords in content.
