When Sam Cloutier was a kid he wanted to be an inventor. He would watch hockey on television, for instance and wonder why there wasn’t a chip on the puck or the net to determine when a goal was scored. While someone else beat him to that invention, as he got older he realized what he really wanted was to be an entrepreneur. During high school he developed a successful pasta business, but he soon got bored of it, realizing that entrepreneurship for the sake of entrepreneurship was not terribly exciting – that he wanted to invent a business with purpose.
After some challenges with his mental health as he became an adult, Sam found himself benefitting from both counselling and reading about personal development. One day, his counsellor asked him why he continued to come for counselling since Sam was working out many of his own challenges through journaling.
In that moment, Sam found the purposeful entrepreneurial idea he had been looking for. He began exploring ways to bring the positive experiences he had had in counselling to others, whether they had access to a therapist or not.
He met a student who suggested he would be a great fit for GreenHouse, so he attended a Discovery Lab at GreenHouse that jumpstarted the process, as he met both Business Coach Brendan Wylie-Toal and his business partner, Sebastian Ruan, and began to plan the business building an app that offers daily self-reflective questions for its users to journal about.
The process has moved quickly. By the end of the summer, they will have a functional prototype coded and will be conducting focus groups to determine whether to market the app directly to consumers or to license it to institutions like universities and to therapists.
As far as mentorship and community, GreenHouse has been fantastic. It’s great to work in a place with like-minded people whose businesses are at similar stages of development.
At the same time, like any inventor, Sam sometimes jumps out of the shower to make notes about how he can make this app even better.