Meet Tuts Reader Philippe Rivard

Name:Philippe Rivard

Location:Montreal, Quebec

Topics of Interest:Web Hosting, Cloud, SaaS, Billing Software

Occupation:Entrepreneur

In our series of Tuts+ community stories so far, you've metSouth African graphic artistCatherine Dawes, Brazilian web designerTassia Pellegrini, American creative directorDavid Kehrer, and Malaysian front-end developerAjmal Afif.

Today we're heading north to Canada, to meet web hosting entrepreneurPhilippe Rivard. Read on to find out how he uses Tuts+, and what advice he has for aspiring entrepreneurs.

Philippe's Learning Journey

At first glance, you might wonder why Philippe Rivard needs Tuts+. He's a successful web hosting entrepreneur with 12 years of experience running Hosting Parcel, and his new startup Nukernrecently raised $100,000 in pre-seed funding. Surely he's already enough of an expert?

The thing is, however, thatthere's always something new to learn. He's found that many of his clients asked him tomaintain or update their website, so has used Tuts+ to brush up his HTML and CSS skills.

And recently, when creating Nukern,a billing software as a service for the web hosting industry that'slaunching in July, he had a big decision to make onwhich framework to use. He says:

I came across Laravel and I had to know more about it. Your article about “What’s New in Laravel 5” helped me make a decision on whether we should use this framework to build Nukern or not. We fell in <3 with Laravel.

Since he's benefited so much from online learning, he wants to encourage his employees to do the same. He says he'sthinking about offering a group membership to Tuts+ for everyone working with Nukern.

We believe one can never know enough and would like our employees to keep learning and digging about stuff that they are passionate about.

Advice to Those Just Starting Out

We asked Philippe what advice he'd give to someone who's just starting out, as he was 12 years ago. His first tip:

Reach out to people you admire. More often than not, you will find out that they were just like you at some point. A lot of them want to help their community and people in the same field.

As you'd expect, he also recommends that you "never stop searching and learning." Keep reading and learning about whatever you are passionate about.

And one last thing:

Just put yourself out there. Great things will come from "getting out of the building".

Connect With Philippe

If you'd like to find about more about Philippe's journey, you can connect with him on LinkedIn. You can also read more about his new venture at the Nukern website, at AngelList, or by [email protected].