YouSaid · the spoken record

Guillaume Moubeche

lines on the record: 71
first: 2024-12-13
most recent: 2024-12-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Pricing is really hard. What I can say is overall as your product, and this is like maybe a good rule for every funder, as your product evolves and as your brain”
2024-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How to Scale to $30M ARR Bootstrapped through Content and Brand | The Ultimate Equation to Success in Sales and Why Most Founders Suck at Sales | Why You Should Overpay People and What That Means with Guillaume Moubeche @ Lempire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The right tools so you can use like, I don't know, like a hot jar or mixed panel or whatever just to track all the events and understand what people are doing and how they're doing it. And I think this is the most important because especially if you're an engineering background founder, you're going to say, okay, I'm using all these tools and finding my answers myself. But this is not the best way. The best way for me is like call people and if they don't answer, call again and again and again until you get to a point. And it's fine. It's your right. Like someone sign up to your project. They didn't like it. It's your right to understand why. You know, like you're an entrepreneur, you're like, you have your mission. You should be like driven. It's super important. And for me, I think people just are just afraid to talk. And sometimes when they're afraid to talk, you know, like they just don't get to the bottom of it and they make assumptions that would have been proven wrong just if they had picked up the phone and talk for five minutes.”
2024-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How to Scale to $30M ARR Bootstrapped through Content and Brand | The Ultimate Equation to Success in Sales and Why Most Founders Suck at Sales | Why You Should Overpay People and What That Means with Guillaume Moubeche @ Lempire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Activation rate and churn, for me, it's like two topics that you need to approach by considering two different routes, I would say. The first route is, is it a marketing and acquisition problem? Because typically if I'm selling like for sales and my product is meant for sales, but the only people I'm attracting are marketers and they're not going to use it in the same way, then maybe it makes sense that you're activation rate is super low or that your churn is super high. So that's like the first thing is am I attracting the right customers? I think this is a question you should truly ask yourself. And then if you are and if these are the customers you want to attract, then the question you should ask yourself is why is the activation rate so low? Is it because the problem is not pressing enough? Is it because of our software UX? And for that I think you should really go through it with”
2024-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How to Scale to $30M ARR Bootstrapped through Content and Brand | The Ultimate Equation to Success in Sales and Why Most Founders Suck at Sales | Why You Should Overpay People and What That Means with Guillaume Moubeche @ Lempire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Initially, the way it was built, you had to create different templates. You had to create a list. You had to create a lot of different things in different areas. And once you had created everything, then you had to combine everything into a campaign. But if you wanted to create a campaign and had not creating anything before, you couldn't. And that's why people were pissed off because they did not understand that you had to be like, it was basically kind of like an engineer product, you know, like first you build all the building blocks and you are very well structured. And this is, and then later on you combine it, you make tests, and it's much easier for you to do it. But in reality, people, they want, you know, like you should take them by the hand and say, this is step one, then this is step two, this is logical, and step three and so on and so forth. So that's what we did. We entirely rebuilt the campaign creation, making it much easier for people to go from A to Z. And it changed pretty much everything at that time.”
2024-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How to Scale to $30M ARR Bootstrapped through Content and Brand | The Ultimate Equation to Success in Sales and Why Most Founders Suck at Sales | Why You Should Overpay People and What That Means with Guillaume Moubeche @ Lempire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of people were talking to me on the chat and then they say, I want to speak to a manager. And I was like, I'm the CEO. But they believe the company was much bigger than we were. And it was just crazy how people would react. But a month and a half later, when I look back at the activation with the new product and the new design and the new UX story, we were actually from 10%, we went to close to like 45% and increased that month basically like the months where we had 50% churn. I think we were at basically like no growth at all because the acquisition kind of like brought it back to like zero and the months afterwards we were at a gross rate of like 40% or something like that.”
2024-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How to Scale to $30M ARR Bootstrapped through Content and Brand | The Ultimate Equation to Success in Sales and Why Most Founders Suck at Sales | Why You Should Overpay People and What That Means with Guillaume Moubeche @ Lempire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From scratch, the entire flow to creating campaign. I remember pushing the new project in production. It was a Friday night. And I woke up Saturday. And on the community we had, there were so many people swearing at us, like the support. It was insane the amount of messages. And people hated it. They hated the new interface. A lot of stuff were missing, et cetera. So it was crazy. We had the highest churn. Yeah, I think the churn that month was close to like 50%. So that was like huge. We fixed a lot of the bugs and a lot of the things we tried to improve. But when I looked one month after that, because I still believe that the time that it was the right solution, I still believe that the one, you know, which churned didn't use the product as it was meant to be, and they were using it for different use cases. So at that time, you know, it's quite harsh because”
2024-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How to Scale to $30M ARR Bootstrapped through Content and Brand | The Ultimate Equation to Success in Sales and Why Most Founders Suck at Sales | Why You Should Overpay People and What That Means with Guillaume Moubeche @ Lempire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One is really like something. It was quite harsh, but there are also some funny parts in it. Eventually, you know, I was really looking at how many visitors do we have, how many customers are activated from the signups, and how many are paying. So activation for us, it's basically like that one metric that you try to find in your software that's going to tell you whether or not people see the value of what you've built. So for us, activation rate was how many people who signed up actually launch a sales prospecting campaign. And that number was like really crap at first. It was like something like 10%. So I tried to interview people, but it was super hard because once people are unhappy with your product in self-service, obviously they don't want to talk to you. So I was like, okay, trying to search. And eventually I was like, we need to redesign entirely the product. So we decided to redesign.”
2024-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How to Scale to $30M ARR Bootstrapped through Content and Brand | The Ultimate Equation to Success in Sales and Why Most Founders Suck at Sales | Why You Should Overpay People and What That Means with Guillaume Moubeche @ Lempire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We started Lem List first line of code January 2018. We started selling the product in April, so it took us like three months to have really first paying customers. Then in December 2018, we had 100 customers. And I would say that year to year, so April to April, we were at 250k ARR. So 250,000. Then after that, we grew very quickly to like a million and then to 10 million, it was three and a half years in total.”
2024-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How to Scale to $30M ARR Bootstrapped through Content and Brand | The Ultimate Equation to Success in Sales and Why Most Founders Suck at Sales | Why You Should Overpay People and What That Means with Guillaume Moubeche @ Lempire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, for us, it was actually repositioning what sales is truly about. And for me, if you want the equation of sales, sales is equal timing times trust. Timing and trust is either equal to zero or one because it's either the right moment or it's not. And it's either I trust you or I don't. There is not like I trust you averagely. No, if you trust someone averagely, you just don't trust them and you're just too polite to say it.”
2024-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How to Scale to $30M ARR Bootstrapped through Content and Brand | The Ultimate Equation to Success in Sales and Why Most Founders Suck at Sales | Why You Should Overpay People and What That Means with Guillaume Moubeche @ Lempire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Etc. But Apple, they focused on designers. But why is it like a really awesome person at designers? Because a designer by definition is cool. And everyone wants to be cool. So if your persona is cool and if you're saying like Apple is for designer, what it means is like Apple is cool. And now everyone's using iPhone. Everyone's on Mac and you have even studies that shows that you actually feel, I think it's like 30% more creative when you're on a MacBook versus a fucking PC. So I'm like, this is the power of a magnet persona. So whenever you are like for us typically to bring it back to software, it's what is the target audience for us in our space that is linked to prospection and sales. So it was really like, how can we define like within the sales teams the persona that's going to be the most attractive?”
2024-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How to Scale to $30M ARR Bootstrapped through Content and Brand | The Ultimate Equation to Success in Sales and Why Most Founders Suck at Sales | Why You Should Overpay People and What That Means with Guillaume Moubeche @ Lempire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think you shouldn't call someone design partner if they don't spend anything, you know, like it's not a design partner, it's like it's your grandmother being nice with you and telling you that you are like the most handsome person in the world, you know? It doesn't work out. It's not going to serve you in life. Sometimes you need just a ground check, you know. And I think design partners are obviously like great because it's important to have feedback from key customers more than key customers I would focus on something that I called like the magnet persona. So for me and this is something people also forget whenever they are like building a product. It's what's your magnet persona? And the magnet persona is basically the persona that will attract everyone around. So typically if you take Apple, for example, computers back in the days, they were like really like for gigs and then it became like something that every company would add.”
2024-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How to Scale to $30M ARR Bootstrapped through Content and Brand | The Ultimate Equation to Success in Sales and Why Most Founders Suck at Sales | Why You Should Overpay People and What That Means with Guillaume Moubeche @ Lempire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Behind. We have this product roadmap behind like we're doing this and this, but I think the biggest mistake is not trying to sell. And if someone is not paying whether your product is ready or not, if they're not paying, it means that something is wrong. It means that the problem is not painful enough and that you should continue digging, continue talking to them to understand what is the main problem that you are solving.”
2024-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How to Scale to $30M ARR Bootstrapped through Content and Brand | The Ultimate Equation to Success in Sales and Why Most Founders Suck at Sales | Why You Should Overpay People and What That Means with Guillaume Moubeche @ Lempire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think people are afraid to do sales prospecting. Like they are afraid to put themselves out there. They're afraid to sell. So I think the biggest mistake is one being afraid that you're not going to sell, being afraid that your product is not ready. You know, like there is always this thing. And for me, it was the same, you know, like when you have to sell something that is obviously not as good as competition because they've been working on it for like five years, you know? So it's how do you find that unique selling point that's going to make the conversion easier? And I think it's kind of like it requires like a lot of trial and errors because you're going to believe that people are buying your product for X, Y, or Z. But in the end, it can be something totally different. So I think like people are by definition afraid of rejection. And what they love is to kind of like hide behind processes.”
2024-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How to Scale to $30M ARR Bootstrapped through Content and Brand | The Ultimate Equation to Success in Sales and Why Most Founders Suck at Sales | Why You Should Overpay People and What That Means with Guillaume Moubeche @ Lempire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Creating content is basically the same as pushing a super heavy ball. There is a miss where it's like pushing this heavy, heavy rock on top of the mountain. On his end, it always goes back. But for us, you know, it's like you push, it takes you a lot of effort. And the effort for me was like creating content and doing sales prospecting. So I would say like the first year, I closed around like 100 customers myself, which is equal to around like 300 demos. So 300 demos, I had like basically like 33% conversion rate. So 100 customers. And for a year, almost zero customers were coming from the content, like very little. And after that, the content started picking up. And then Lemlist became like a company where that was really driven through inbounds. Basically, it became like outbound represented with the next years when we”
2024-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How to Scale to $30M ARR Bootstrapped through Content and Brand | The Ultimate Equation to Success in Sales and Why Most Founders Suck at Sales | Why You Should Overpay People and What That Means with Guillaume Moubeche @ Lempire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Prior to launching Lemlist, I had a lead generation agency, so I was already running tons of sales prospecting campaigns. And at that time, I was basically onboarding customers and telling them, as long as I can do your sales prospecting campaigns for you, you will let me use the content that we create together with your own results and sales prospecting messages. And they were fine with it. So I also leverage our own customers' stories to create a community. And from that community, you know, I got insights on how to get a better product, improve the product, and then go again, you know, like start again eating my own dog food and testing the new features, seeing whether or not they bring more or better results and so on and so forth.”
2024-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How to Scale to $30M ARR Bootstrapped through Content and Brand | The Ultimate Equation to Success in Sales and Why Most Founders Suck at Sales | Why You Should Overpay People and What That Means with Guillaume Moubeche @ Lempire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What people are really buying, what specifically they are buying. So the fact that I couldn't raise, I spent the first 18 months where I was doing pretty much like everything. So I would do like a custom.”
2024-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How to Scale to $30M ARR Bootstrapped through Content and Brand | The Ultimate Equation to Success in Sales and Why Most Founders Suck at Sales | Why You Should Overpay People and What That Means with Guillaume Moubeche @ Lempire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First thing, we didn't have money, so I started the LEM list with only $1,000, so I couldn't hire anyone. The things that I would have done with money is obviously like hire people to do all the things that as a founder I felt like were not worse of my time, which was definitely a mistake. But typically, you know, like I see too many founders, because right now I've invested in around like 20 startups. I mean, with Lampire, I also cashed out $30 million, so made money along the way, et cetera. But I see that too many founders, you know, are afraid to do sales because they believe that, you know, like sales is a job like anyone can do, et cetera. But actually, sales is the most important skills you need to learn as a founder because everything is about sales. It's about sales when you want to hire a top talent. It's about sales whenever you need to make your first dollars and understand.”
2024-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How to Scale to $30M ARR Bootstrapped through Content and Brand | The Ultimate Equation to Success in Sales and Why Most Founders Suck at Sales | Why You Should Overpay People and What That Means with Guillaume Moubeche @ Lempire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have two ways to approach it. It's like basically blue ocean versus like red ocean strategy. When I first started, I thought that you had to be unique to succeed in a market and you had to be like the first mover in order to really succeed. But later on, I realized that once a market is crowded, it means the product market fit already exists. It might not exist with your own product, but if you try and succeed in being better than competition, you can win big. So I think for me, it's just a different kind of bet that you're making from the start. And I remember that when I first started, some people say that they are prog bootstrapper and they were like hardcore bootstrapper from the start. And if I said that, I would be simply lying when I first started. I wanted to raise fund. I just got rejected so many times that eventually, you know, like I became a bootstrapper.”
2024-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How to Scale to $30M ARR Bootstrapped through Content and Brand | The Ultimate Equation to Success in Sales and Why Most Founders Suck at Sales | Why You Should Overpay People and What That Means with Guillaume Moubeche @ Lempire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think we started Lempire with Lem List in 2018. So LEM List is a sales engagement platform. Our biggest differentiator was essentially the personalization part. It was a very crowded market when we first got started. As we kept growing and having more product market fit, I felt like it was time a bit for us to start expanding the product line. So right now Empire is a suite of like five tools that helps B2B businesses turn into big names. So we help them with customer acquisition from all sides. I would say that it's been a hell of a ride, you know, with a lot of ups and downs, but the good thing is we've been like fully bootstrapped. So we will end up the year close to like 29 million in ARR with 10 million in EBITDA. So it allows us to have a lot of flexibility. What we want to do and how we want to do it is pretty cool.”
2024-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How to Scale to $30M ARR Bootstrapped through Content and Brand | The Ultimate Equation to Success in Sales and Why Most Founders Suck at Sales | Why You Should Overpay People and What That Means with Guillaume Moubeche @ Lempire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thanks a lot for having me. To be honest, I'm super excited to be on the podcast. Big fan of everything you've done. So I'm sure it's going to be a fun conversation.”
2024-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How to Scale to $30M ARR Bootstrapped through Content and Brand | The Ultimate Equation to Success in Sales and Why Most Founders Suck at Sales | Why You Should Overpay People and What That Means with Guillaume Moubeche @ Lempire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I first started, I thought that you had to be unique to succeed in a market and you had to be like the first mover in order to really succeed. But later on, I realized once a market is crowded, it means the product market fit already exists. If they're not paying, it means that something is wrong. If you want the equation of sales, sales is equal timing times trust. Timing and trust is either equal to zero or one.”
2024-12-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: How to Scale to $30M ARR Bootstrapped through Content and Brand | The Ultimate Equation to Success in Sales and Why Most Founders Suck at Sales | Why You Should Overpay People and What That Means with Guillaume Moubeche @ Lempire · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source