The Story
Guillaume Moubeche grew up in Paris with parents who came from a farm in southwest France with no money. They sacrificed everything so he could get a good education. During university, he worked shitty job after shitty job to pay for life - he even got rejected from McDonald's when all his friends got accepted.
That rejection lit a fire in him. He decided he needed to be his own boss, live by his own rules, and prove everyone wrong.
His first venture was a t-shirt business with his dad. After months of work creating the website and building a community, they sold exactly 6 t-shirts. The failure was so painful that Guillaume and his dad didn't speak for a year and a half.
Next, he joined a friend's lead generation agency where he became an expert at sales prospecting. But he wanted something scalable - his own software. He moved to Russia with his last $4-5K to hire junior developers for a LinkedIn visitor tracking tool. Then LinkedIn changed one line of code and the entire project went to trash.
Back in France with only $1,000 left, his girlfriend was paying rent and asking him to get a job. His friends would invite him to restaurants and he'd lie, saying he was busy - the "plans" were cooking pasta alone because it was cheap.
But Guillaume had a voice inside that wanted to prove everyone wrong. He pivoted from "blue ocean" ideas to "red ocean" - if competitors exist and make money, there's product-market fit. All you have to do is be better. He built Lemlist, focusing on one key differentiator: making sales more human through personalization that no other platform offered.
Key Insights
The Red Ocean Strategy
- •Blue ocean (no competitors) = too complex, risky
- •Red ocean (many competitors) = proven product-market fit
- •"These guys are making shit tons of money. All you have to do is be better."
- •Focus on ONE key differentiator tied to customer ROI
The Growth Loop
- •Use your own product daily
- •Help customers with their campaigns
- •Create success stories and content
- •Push content into community
- •Get insights from complaints
- •Improve the product
- •Repeat with new templates and improvements
The Risky Pivot
- •Activation rate was only 15% (people signing up but not launching campaigns)
- •Decided to rebuild the entire product from scratch
- •Half of customers publicly said "Yesterday I loved Lemlist, today I fucking hate it"
- •Instead of reverting, Guillaume got on Zoom calls with every unhappy user until 4am
- •Fixed issues based on feedback
- •Growth dropped from 40% to 0% that month
- •But activation rate jumped from 15% to 35%
- •Next month grew 60% because new users converted at much higher rates
The Magnet Persona
- •When growth plateaued at $10M ARR, Guillaume discovered the "magnet persona"
- •Find the persona that never churns and attracts other customers
- •Apple's magnet persona was designers (designers are cool)
- •Lemlist's magnet persona was sales reps (they drive revenue)
- •Becoming "the sales tool for sales teams" was a game changer
The Journey Timeline
- •Year 1: $0 to $250K ARR
- •Year 2: $250K to $1M ARR
- •Year 3: $1M to $8M ARR
- •Year 3.5: $10M ARR (plateau)
- •After rebuilding: $30M ARR, $10M EBITDA
Business Numbers
- •$30M ARR (annual recurring revenue)
- •$10M EBITDA (profit)
- •~100 employees
- •Customers in 100+ countries
- •$150M+ valuation
- •First MVP built in 2 weeks
- •First 100 customers closed through live demos and outbound
The Unfair Advantage
- •Be among the target audience of what you're building
- •If you use your product daily and bugs drive you crazy, you'll improve it 100x faster
- •Guillaume personally wrote campaigns for early customers in exchange for success stories
What Product-Market Fit Feels Like
- •"It's like poetry. It's like magic."
- •"Everything you do works"
- •"You're in a state of bliss"
- •"You feel like a superhero"
- •Growing 15-25% month over month for 6-8 months straight
- •"It becomes the norm for you"
Key Advice
- •"Be patient with results, but impatient with action"
- •Always optimize for learning, not outcomes
- •Work on yourself harder than anything else
- •Document your journey, never give up
- •The outcome you can never control - only how you work on yourself
- •"It's an overnight success story that took 10 years"
Resources
- •Twitter: https://x.com/GuillaumeMbh
- •Lemlist: https://www.lemlist.com/