This content was originally published on Sprouter.

Most people picture the stereotypical entrepreneur as a college kid writing code in his or her dorm room. Unbounce founder Rick Perreault was about as far as you could get from that stereotype when he started his latest venture. “Being 40 and going back to living like a student, and convincing five other senior professionals to do the same is hard,” he says. While he says he always had it in him, he didn’t specifically know he wanted to be an entrepreneur until much later in his career. Perreault held several senior management positions before becoming an entrepreneur in a few years ago. ”I don’t even think I ever used the word before I started Unbounce, and I certainly couldn’t spell it properly,” he says.

Perreault’s first business was Fanyard, a crowdsourced football matchup predictor. He says it was educational as he got to make some common big mistakes which he subsequently avoided with Unbounce. “The project was a classic example of ‘this sounds like a cool idea, lets build it,’” he says. “A big takeaway was that had I spoken to potential users before we started development, we may not have even built the app in the first place, or we would at least have done more than one pivot along the way.”