Pierre Gallet

I founded TOTEM, the store you need in your office. Main foundationnal idea was to bring joy in the workplace, and create a good vibe through meeting places where people chitchat. Doing a lot of AI-related stuff previously, I realized how lonely we can feel sometimes in this world. Always behind a screen or on social networks, we should not lose what makes us human. I previously explored this theme in my short movie "D'un mur à l'autre". But rest assured. TOTEM is a tech business. The team created, in 5 years, four different products. 2 mobile app & 2 web application. A mobile app for end-customer to pay for product (it's self served stores), a webapp for companies to set up their store, and we automated a 1500 square meters fulfilment center with our house-build warehouse management system (mobile app for inventory, supply checks, order preparation, and webapp for supply order, product catalog, etc...). We also created a connected cart to prepare boxes of products, with weighting machine & product sizing, achieving 98% order completion rates. A first hardware journey for me. Gosh, that was a lot of tech for a grocery store business that raised +10M€ to fuel its phenomenal growth. I learned a lot.

I helped a team of founders to kick-off Shareable, the new hub for startup and investors. I did market research, product positionning, business plan & pitch deck, and started selling, helping to secure first customers. I definitely learned to sell with this experience, which is a great skill. Also coached a handful of founders in other companies

At the end of my studies at Centrale, I wanted to dive into entrepreneurship, thus I launch a startup with a fellow student. Our goal was to create AI-powered tools for customer service. We did it when chatbot started to be hype, so we focused on automating the first steps of customer service, qualifying or classifying the issue, and answering (if possible) with pre-defined FAQ-style answers. We faced several challenges. I felt that it would be a long road to create a product that fits many customers needs, because of customer service business-specificities. We would end up creating a digital chatbot agency, and that was not the initial ambition. Also, we could only sell to big companies or customer service tools, as small & medium sized company prefers human contact with their customers. I learned that go to market (and distribution strategy) is key, and that product market fit is hard.