How to Scale to $30M ARR Bootstrapped through Content and Brand

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 gonna be a fun conversation.

Yeah, I think like we started the lempire with lemlist in 2018. So lemlist 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, you know, to start expanding the product line. So right now lempire is 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 like, we’ve been like fully bootstrapped. So we will end up the year close to like twenty nine million in ARR with 10,000,000 in EBITDA. So it allows us to have a lot of like flexibility in what we wanna do and how we wanna do it. It’s pretty cool.

You have two ways to to approach it. It’s like basically blue ocean versus like red ocean strategy. When I first started, I thought that, you know, like 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 the 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. So it wasn’t really by decision at first.

First thing, we didn’t have money. So I started the lemlist 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 worth of my time, which was definitely a mistake. But typically, you know, like I see too many founders cause right now I’ve invested like in around like 20 startups. I mean, with lempire, also cashed out $30,000,000 so made money along the way, etcetera.

But I see that too many founders, you know, are afraid to do like sales because they believe that sales is a job like anyone can do, etcetera. 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 like a top talent, It’s about sales whenever you need to make your first dollars and understand like what people are really buying, what specifically they are buying. So the fact that I couldn’t raise, I spent the first eighteen months where I was doing pretty much like everything.

So I would do like customer support, I would do like all the sales demos, I would also do like the marketing and websites, so I would write content and I kind of started building, I would say like a very efficient customer acquisition engine, if I can call it that way. And to sum it up, because our products, when you are in a very competitive market, you need to define clearly who your persona is going to be. We started entering the market with the low end of SMBs, so mostly like founders, so people who can basically act quick and we’re looking for the most innovative solution to have an edge.

And by entering that market, what I would do is I would eat my own dog food, so use lemlist to do sales prospecting. Then, know, when I was in meetings with these founders, they would say, oh, I’m not sure if cold email actually works. So I I would say, how the hell are we having this conversation right now? And then they would say through cold emails, and I was like, exactly. So I I would close deals in that manner. I would test like different approaches, different industries in my sales prospecting, and every campaign that would work really well, I would write content about it.

The content was actually unique because no one at the time was actually sharing the actual sales prospecting messages that they would be sending. So that would help our user understand what’s working and what’s not. And at the same time, was also because prior to launching lemlist, had a lead generation agency. So I was already like running tons of sales prospecting campaigns. And at that time, 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 leveraged our own customers stories to create a community And from that community, you know, I got insights on how to get the a better product, improve the product, and then go again, you know, like start again eating my own dog food and testing, like, the new features, seeing whether or not they bring more or better results and so on and so forth.

Creating content is basically the same as pushing a super heavy ball. There is a miss where he’s like pushing this heavy, heavy rock on top of the mountain. On his end, it always go back. But for us, it’s like you push, 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 rates, so 100 customers.

And for a year, almost zero customers were coming from the content, like, or very little. And after that, the content started like picking up. And then lemlist became like a company where that was really like driven through inbound. Basically, became like outbound representatives with the next years when we reached like millions in revenue, it was maybe 20 or 30% outbound and 70% inbound.

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. There is always this thing, and for me it was the same, know, like when when you have to sell something that is obviously like not as good as competition because they’ve been working on it for like five years, you know? Like so so it’s how do you find that unique selling point that’s gonna make the conversion easier?

And I think it’s kind of like it requires like a lot of trial and errors because you’re gonna 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 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 like continue digging, continue talking to them to understand what is the main problem that you are solving.

I think you shouldn’t call someone design partner if they don’t spend anything, you know. Like, it’s 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. Like it doesn’t work out, it’s not gonna serve you, you know, in life. Like 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 some things that I call like the magnet persona.

So for me, and this is something people also like 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, you take Apple, for example, computers back in the days, they were like really like for geeks and then, you know, it became like something that every company would add, etcetera. 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, you know.

So it was really like, how can we define, like, within the sales teams, the personas that’s gonna be the most attractive.

So for us, it was actually like repositioning what sales is truly about. And for me, if you want the equation of sales, sales= timing x 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. It’s if you trust someone averagely, you just don’t trust them and you’re just too polite to say it.

So so the goal was like, on this principle, we believe that sales is all about relationship because sales is about, you know, like helping someone solve a very specific problem, and we want people to understand that sales is really about helping, that sales can be cool, and that sales reps should be enabled to have the right product to help them meet someone that needs help, know. And by focusing really like on that persona and bringing the cool factor and the relationship factor into sales, we basically tied our solution with relationship and with revenue.

Meaning, like, if you build relationship, obviously you’re gonna make more sales. If you make more sales, lemlist is basically your go to tool because the ROI is is easy to calculate.

We started lemlist first line of code January 2018. We started selling the product in April, so it took us like three months to have really like first paying customers. Then in December 2018, we had a 100 customers. And I would say that year to year, so April to April, we were at 250 k ARR. So $250,000. Then after that, we we we grew very quickly to, like, a 1,000,000, and then to 10,000,000. It was three and a half years in total.

One is 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 like customer 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 gonna 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 launched 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 wanna 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 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 like so many people like 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, etcetera, 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, you know, like, a lot of the bugs and a lot of the things we try to improve.

But when I looked one month after that, because I still believed at the time that it was the right solution, I still believed that the one you know who 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 a lot of people, know, like they were talking to me on the chat and then they say like, I want to speak to a manager. And I was like, I’m the CEO, you know, like, but they believe the company was like 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, sorry, 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.

What did you change to say activation from 10 to 40? Initially, the way it was built, you had to create like different templates, you had to create a list, you had to create like 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, know, like first you build all the building blocks and you are very well structured, and then later on you combine it, you make tests and it’s much easier for you to do it. But in reality, 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 like much easier for people to go from a to z, and it changed pretty much everything at that time.

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, you know, like they’re not gonna use it in the same way, then maybe it makes sense, you know, that your 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, think you should really go through it with the right tools so you can use like, I don’t know, like a hot jar or Mixpanel or whatever just to track like 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 like a engineering background founder, you’re gonna say, oh, okay, I’m using all these tools and finding my answers myself, but this is not the best way. The best way for me, it’s 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, know, like it’s your right, like someone signed up to your project, they didn’t like it, it’s your right to understand why, you know, like you’re an entrepreneur, you have your mission, you should be like driven, you know, like 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 talked for five minutes. Kenneth,

Pricing is really hard. What I can say is overall, as your product, and this is like maybe a good rule for every founder, as your product evolves and as you’re bringing more value, your price should increase. And this is a rule that you should have. I think like our growth has been driven also by price increase at some point, and it’s quite helpful. So don’t hide behind like, oh, until the next feature or whatever, like increase your price every year at least, know. And then it’s also important to see where your market is heading, know, like we’re in a phase with a lot of uncertainty.

I think economically also people are a bit like more strict on what do they want to spend. I think a lot of people are suffering in this market, not so much because their price is too high. I just believe it’s that people are realizing that if they’re not using a tool, they shouldn’t pay for it. And if you look at the amount of enterprise accounts who’ve been sold onto 1,500 license or user or seats or however you want to call it, and actually only like 15 people are using it.

Yes, it’s normal that the CFO comes in and say, maybe we shouldn’t pay, you know, that price. For pricing, I would do like two aspects. One, it’s like increase price regularly if you’re still delivering like a lot of value. And the second thing is look at your markets because sometimes like pricing is is changing and evolving in a market, and you need also to adapt to what’s happening. Can I

The second product is a product we actually sold and it was I think a year and a half after lemlist. So what revenue are we at there, like 500 k? I

Yeah. That’s that’s a that’s a very good question. Focus is my enemy. I’m I’m more like mister chaos, but it took me years of psychotherapy to realize it.

I don’t think it as as something really bad, to be honest. Because if you had say that in 2018, in a market where you have sales lost outreach, were around for three, four years, and then hundreds of other competitors who have raised tens of millions, that a French company out of Paris would have thousands of customers in The US be international, grow to 28,000,000 in ARR and 10,000,000 in EBITDA in like six and a half years, yes, this is totally unrealistic. It’s against the odds. So I think sometimes you truly need to dream big and be realistic if you want to achieve something that very few have done in the past.

When has being unrealistic hurt you? I think I got cocky eventually or too confident. What hit me hard was growth is not exponential. When you have like an exponential growth, it’s actually not mathematically, it’s never truly an exponential. It’s always a s curve. And the companies that maintain, you know, that and that make it looks like an exponential are the one that were smart enough to plan for the next x curve. And we weren’t.

And we weren’t because eventually I got too cocky and I was so confident that everything we would do, that our top up funnel and that our market was so big, that no matter the core problem we had from the wrong targeting and the high churn of certain segments, no matter what we would do, we would always find more and more customer. The bucket can be leaking, but if your top of funnel is always bigger, there is no issue. And this is when I got cocky, this is when it hurt us, And this is where we faced like a plateau.

What happens specifically? What happens is your company from a day to another start plateauing. You don’t see this two digit month over month growth rates. You don’t understand why. You’re thinking that you’re doing something wrong. You’re trying to find what’s not working, and you don’t understand. You don’t understand no matter what you do because when you are very driven by inbound, by content, by all of these things, you don’t track. You don’t track what brings what. Because, you know, like there is a quote by Gary Vee that I like that says, what’s the ROI of your mom?

And what it means, you know, it’s like, obviously your mom, she gave everything for you, you know, like she was maybe she gave you like the extra confidence. My mom is Italian, so obviously, like she loves me a lot, etcetera. So it’s like, she gave me like extra confidence, she gave me love, she gave me like a lot of things. And how exactly do you measure that ROI in your life? It’s almost impossible. For me, marketing is the same. For VC backed companies, when you go and you are like at a board meeting, obviously you have to show that your marketing efforts are bringing revenue.

So what do most VC backed companies do? They spend money and marketing money on ads, SEO, where you can track the conversion of articles, even though that’s inaccurate. You try to build a model that gives you like the attribution that is also inaccurate, but everyone is fine with it because it looks good on slides. All of that, what we don’t realize is the amount of money it requires to build that tracking team, to build that data team, to have like all these conversation with people on what should we do, should we continue, should we do x y z, and my approach to business is much more simple.

For me, it’s like it has always been about, are we proud of the content that we deliver? Is this bringing enough value for our users to be helpful in the problem that they are trying to solve? And if the answer is yes, then we continue to do it. So when you have this mindset, obviously when something is not working anymore, it’s very, very hard because you’re kind of like shooting in the dark. You don’t know what’s working, what’s not working. And for us, that was very tricky.

And what we had to do at the time was start understanding the core metrics for us. And that’s why, you know, I mentioned churn a bit earlier. It was understanding what is the persona that is not churning, meaning what is the persona we’re bringing the most value to. And that persona were actually like sales team over like four people. So when a sales team has more than four people, we realized that the net retention was over 100% monthly. Whereas when it’s like a founder or a marketer or like the first employee of a startup, the churn can be up to like 15% monthly.

Because, obviously, these guys, by definition, sometimes their business doesn’t work, sometimes they can’t find customers, sometimes x y z reason happen. I

Yeah, I 100% agree. I think like the best companies for me are the ones, you know, who have like a very specific use case, and that’s where we’re heading right now. It’s like we know that from, let’s say, 40 from from sorry, four sales rep to a 100 sales rep, we know that we’re the best tools on the market and we’re building it right now. You know, it’s like we’re doing everything to build that for the current economy.

At the time, I think we were around, like, 13 or 14,000,000 in annual recurring revenue.

Yeah. So so I always receive because the thing is like I’ve been building in public since day one, I share like revenue metrics, etc, and obviously that attracts some investors. But when you’re high in EBITDA, like I had to learn about what secondary meant and what cash out meant. Because for me, at the time, the only thing I saw was like fundraising, meaning you take money and you put it in your company’s bank account and then you spend it to hire more people, etcetera. But I felt like it was not the solution for us.

I don’t think that hiring more is always the answer to growing faster, and actually I think sometimes it’s the opposite. I’ve seen too many times, you know, like you hire too quickly, you hire the wrong people, you can’t keep like a high level, you know, like a and and a high talent density and eventually like but in some cases, it’s it’s really helpful, but in our case, it wasn’t the right timing. So I had another investor approaching us and talking about cash out and secondary. And in that end, I was like, okay.

Tell me more. And it’s basically when the money goes directly to the founder, and I think this is really awesome.

The only thing I know, once we started making a lot of profits, before we acquired another business, So we had like some cash in the bank that we use for M and A, but we use it like for a different purpose. We started spending more on hiring, and I remember in six months at the time, we doubled the team almost. And we were maybe from 30 to 60 people. I realized how bad hiring could really kill your company. And for me, I have this feeling where when you feel the pressure to hire more, to spend faster, etcetera, if you’re not skilled enough, it’s gonna be like really, really bad for your company and it can kill it.

And in full transparency, I wasn’t good enough at hiring for me to be able to handle like a fundraising.

One, you should hire people who have done it already. Literally, like, because bootstrapped mindset, you know, it it gives kind of the underdog vibe. So from the start, I kept this underdog mindset. Like, I’m gonna only find underdogs, the talent that no one knew they existed, and I’m gonna show them that we’re the Avengers and we’re gonna like, you know, like be the fucking rock stars, no resume, no scores, like a lot of great, lot of talent, and that works to a certain extent. But when you really wanna scale your company and scale it like faster, having people who have done it in other companies, who have seen what rapid scale is really, really helpful.

Second thing, pay people and create a package where people are extremely well paid for their role, etcetera. And the reason you should do it is because hiring is extremely emotional. Get attached to people, have it’s something that everyone, you know, wants, like, scorecard and try to make it as an engineer, like, okay. How many points do they have for this skill, etcetera? This is bullshit. Hiring, you know, it’s like it’s the same. You know? At school, we teach you that there are only, like, $5.05 cents.

You know? It’s like a touch, sight, taste, hearing, and taste or whatever. But actually, intuition is the sense that everyone should build. Your intuition, your gut feeling, this is like the strongest moment, the strongest things, know, and in hiring, you should always trust it. So for me, whenever you know you have someone with a really good package that you are paying extremely well, the reason it’s helpful is because if they don’t deliver, it’s super easy for you to let them go fast and find someone who could.

And really like paying someone maybe like 20% more than what they are offered usually help you find the 10x profile. Why

Maybe that’s my relationship with money, but it’s like everyone, you know, like you’re in a company, so it’s basically a capitalistic model where every person needs to bring something to the table. And if they don’t deliver and if they can’t give a certain ROI on their salary, then it’s easy, you know, like, to just say it’s it’s not an investment anymore, it’s a cost, and it’s a cost that can be, you know, like, just just, like, should be different, know, it it should be an investment and not a cost.

Yeah. What are the biggest hiring mistakes that you made that you look back on now? One thing that I think would have helped me is like after an interview, myself, do I see myself working for ten years with that person? Like, do I like their energy or like this kind of things? I think it’s super important. And sometimes it’s not even that people don’t have the right skills, it’s not even that they’re not going to be great at their job. If you don’t get on well with someone, your job is not going to be as fun and to be honest, it’s so tedious, like you shouldn’t you shouldn’t make these hires.

Do you do one on ones? I used to. Now I’m not I’m not so much in the in the operational anymore. This is kind of actually you you come at a at a moment where this is a transition phase for me but yeah.

I I think it’s difficult, you know, like, to predict because your mistakes are like light that only lights your own path. I don’t know if this is the quote, but you know what I mean, you know, it’s like your learnings are your own. So sometimes you just gotta go through, you know, the mistakes and having someone else give you insights on something might not really like, you have to choose, you have to pick your battles. So for us, what we believe was like, it’s not a personal issue, it’s a product issue, and we have a strong roadmap to fix it.

So let’s go, let’s iterate, and then we realized that it was not the that wasn’t the case, you know.

Yeah. So the company was worth a 150,000,000. My two co founder left, and we each took, like, 10,000,000. So now I own about, like, 70% of the business. I cashed out $10,000,000 personally, and I’m, like, the solo founder left since around, like, four years now.

Yeah. It’s it’s crazy to be honest. Like, I was feeling so grateful, like, about it because it’s for me, money, you know, it’s like it has always been like a stress, like lacking of money and this kind of thing. It’s the fear of lacking of money is something I realized that will never go away just because it’s so deep, you know, into like how I raise rates, like looking at every item price in the supermarket, not going on holiday with my parents, like these kind of things.

But what I realized is like money can buy like freedom, and freedom is what I like the most. So I’m not someone, you know, who spends like a crazy amount of monies on Lamborghini, etcetera, like I love the simple things, like I love to go hiking with a tent on holiday, like this is my kind of vibe, but having the freedom to do whatever I want, go whenever, wherever I want, etcetera, this is like priceless. I think the best thing, you know, it’s like, one, when you get that much money, you realize that if you’re not totally dumb, that money can help you live your entire life without ever working again, which kind of gave me more ambition.

Know, like it’s now that I’ve done this, I feel like I can do something much bigger, I can take bigger risks, and I can be more ambitious for the company. And the second best thing is like, how can you help your parents retire? For me, was like the best feeling in the world. Know, like I asked me, did you buy yourself crazy, something crazy, etcetera? And I was like, no, but I helped my parents retire and I give them money, and this feels like just awesome, you know.

Yeah. This is not the plan because okay. I I think people see chairman as a and in most cases, this is a case, like someone who just, like, lay back and don’t do shit and just, like, come to the board meeting and it’s just like giving his vision on strategy and the calls he had. On my end is just that I need to focus on the things that I feel I’m the best at and for me this is like the top up funnel. So it’s you know like the conferences, it’s like the creating contents, whether it’s webinars, whether it’s like attracting like a different type of audience.

And I think like the CEO is more like the person who’s gonna operate on the day to day and needs to be like in the trenches. And because I hired someone who’s like extremely talented and skilled at that role for eighteen months now, I feel like this is a time for him to have that role because he’s definitely better than me. So it’s really, you know, not about like me just like stepping down and just being away from the business, etcetera, but it’s I see you’re smiling.

You don’t believe me.

Yeah. It’s it’s a good question. I think in any case, like, I wanna give it a try and see, you know, like, how it goes.

If you want inspiration, read. If you want clarity, write. So my goal is to always have an easy way to capture ideas, whether it’s recording, taking notes, and all these kind of things. And then after that, I just put all my ideas in one place and then I rank them. And I think an idea is kind of like plant and a little seed. Before it becomes like a tree or a plant, it needs time, know, it needs like the right soil, it needs like the right condition, the right environment.

So for me, all ideas are great, are all my seeds, but sometimes, you know, like I will decide to put more focus and attention on one and sometimes I need time to develop them. So the way I do it is I would write just ideas all over the place and sometimes I just spend time on my ideas and I start writing about them and get the inspiration. And I do something that’s typically pretty weird for people where people like focus, but as I say, I’m Mr.

Chaos. Let’s say I want to write like a LinkedIn post. Whenever I’m writing like a LinkedIn post, can write maybe like, I don’t know, 15 or 20 posts in an hour. And the way I’m going to do it is I’m not going to write one post at a time. I’m going to write like three or four posts at the same time.

So I can write one sentence for one that gives me an idea for the third one and the first one at the same time, and then which is quite weird, but I think this is how my brain works in general, it’s like I like to do like multiple things at the same time and I always switch and go back to one and everything builds up in parallel, but I like it especially when it comes to creating and writing and whether it’s video or writing content because while I wrote something, I feel like it gives me time to assess the idea a little bit later, and I’m not just like, you know, like smashing my head against the wall on one single thing.

Do you

Yeah. I think it’s super important to repurpose your content. When you’re a content creator, you usually create content because you like to teach and you like to learn. You started your podcast because you love to learn new things and no?

And then it became kind of like this, of course, like you have the fun aspect of meeting new people, but I think you’re always learning things and it’s exciting. And for me, you know, like this is a thing, it’s like content creators, because they are learning always new things, they’re usually afraid to reuse content that worked well. But if it works well, it’s for a reason. So when something works well, I usually like, even my LinkedIn posts, sometimes I take the same post and I just rewrite it and again and again and again and again, and I’m gonna post it multiple times and every time it’s gonna be a hit.

And then you know you can do it like on a reel or a TikTok and see whether or not it’s working well and step by step like this you can repurpose what’s working, reusing it and learning more and more about your audience. Do you find if it works on one platform, it works

when I take it to even Twitter, not really. No. On Twitter, if your name is is not Elon Musk, it’s hard to get rich these days. Your

more room for us. No. In full transparency, it’s like, I think, like, putting yourself out there and creating content will help your business a 100%. It will help your business because it will help you build trust. With more trust, it means slower sales, like faster sales cycle, more leads, and more revenue down the line. As a founder, it’s also a great way, you know, to meet a lot of interesting people, because the truth is there are millions of businesses who have great stories to tell, but you’ve never heard about them because they don’t document anything, they don’t write anything, and when these businesses reach out, you’re like, who are you?

And I think content is the easiest way to show, hey, this is what I’m doing. If you think that I’m interesting, if you think that I’m someone worth talking after you watch my videos or my content, then let’s chat. And this is the easiest way to have like a window at someone’s brain. And right now, when I do like a sales prospecting, or when I just like outbound someone for an intro, for a message, for just a networking call, The reply rate is huge, which means that every single year I’m meeting like smarter, more interesting people and so on and so forth, which helps me grow, which helps me become like a better version of myself.

And this is unique. As a founder, creating content helps you become a better founder. I I remember. We we just raised

Congrats. Yeah. I saw that. Congrats. So

I think as long as you are, like, happy with the content you’re making, it’s fine. I don’t think that all my content is great, but my perception is that I’m getting better. I’m always getting better. I don’t aim for perfection, I always aim for progress. And the only way I’m gonna be great at something is by sucking at it at first. I’ve came across all the haters in the world, and for me it’s like extremely like, you know, like it’s super hard, like from a confidence perspective when you have people like shitting on you, like it’s super hard.

But I think it also builds your character and it builds that down the line, you should do things for yourself. And content, I think it’s the best investment you can make because it’s an investment on yourself. Or Moubeche would say is like SN me 500 instead of S and P 500, you know, and it’s it’s true. I

I think this is like a two sided problem. One, people who worry about it usually have trust issue. You know? It’s it’s the same thing that if they date someone that is, like, a higher number than they are, that they’re gonna say, oh, she’s gonna dump me or whatever. Like, this is a trust issue. It’s it’s not something, you know, like, you can deal with unless you go to a therapist and you start working on it. But the the reason why people leave a company, you know, it’s not because they just get like a better salary elsewhere, know, like it’s multitude of different factors.

And your role as a founder is to make sure that the person in your team are maximizing their potential, learning new things, and also are in the right place. And sometimes the right place means that they need to be elsewhere and in another company, and you should always cheer for them when they decide to move on. And then the second thing is like, maybe they’re leveraging like your company to build a brand and then like do something else. Yes, but why is that a problem? Because while they are building their brands, they bring also a lot of positive leads to the business.

Right now, just to give you an example, we reach about 10,000,000 people every quarter on LinkedIn without spending a single dollar on ads just through our networks. And that’s like millions of dollars in revenue every year. Technically, I’m happy that I have trained everyone in the team to build a personal brand. I’m happy that I’ve created all these trainings and coaching program just to explain how to people how to do it. And some of them have left. And when people go to their LinkedIn profile, the thing they will see is that they they were at lempire eventually, you know, and this is still, good for the brand, good for what we do.

What

I think like what I wish I knew when I got started is that it takes time. Because usually people want instant virality, and I think right now everyone who spent a bit of time on TikTok had luck eventually and got one reels that got millions, etc. But if you want to build something in the long term, you need consistency and you need time. I got discouraged several times on Instagram reels, like where I stopped eventually, etc, like in the early days, and I shouldn’t. I came back at it with another strategy that was based on output and not outcome.

So this is an approach that I like. I call it like the one hundred day rule, but essentially it’s like the output is what you control, because you can control that you’re going to post one video per day, or that you’re going to post one LinkedIn post per day, but you can’t control the outcome, meaning like how many followers you’re going to get, how many like views you’re going to get. So by just focusing on the output, I was like, okay, now I’m going to go for one hundred days.

And no matter what happens, I don’t even look at the follower count. And you just do it. Whenever you do this for one hundred days, once you realize that you are getting better each day, which basically helps you build also a bit more confidence. Second, you start liking it, because at first you suck and now you suck a bit less, so you start enjoying it a bit more, and then in the long run, you will see some results. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to become a superstar straight away, but you will start seeing some results and you start having some conversation.

Something I’ve done also with my head of sales is I’ve been writing all these LinkedIn posts for like I basically wrote around two months worth of content, and it generated really good meetings, really good deals step by step, you know. So it’s like

That’s insane. Insane stats.

Can you just tell me what happened? I really wanted to do an Ironman in 2024. So I started training in January. Lots of ups and downs of the Ironman training, but I was really aiming for an actual, like, really good time during the Ironman. And one week before the race, was doing my last bike training. And eventually, like, a car came, just smashed my back. And, yeah, my bike was, like, cut in half. The car was also like really broken because it felt like a deer went on the side of the car, but the deer was me.

I broke my ribs. I had like ligaments in my shoulder that were torn away. And obviously I couldn’t race, but I finished an Ironman recently in California, so it took me like a bit more than four months to recover, but having a race in mind was really like the driver for me to recover a lot faster. I

Do you agree with me? I wanna say yes because, like, I’m an entrepreneur. We do a lot of sports. I think, like, endurance training and entrepreneurship has a lot of things in common because as you said, you know, it’s like it’s a mind game. You know? Like, endurance, it’s from the Latin, I think, like, is like harden. And I think this is what happens, you know, it’s like you you get harder and harder as you train because you have all these battles with your mind telling you, you know, that you can’t do more, that you should stop, that it’s not worth continuing.

These discussions I have with my brain when I trained for many hours are exactly the ones that I had back in the days when I had failed like two businesses before lemlist.

I had like no money left, my girlfriend at the time was paying the rent, we were living in like 28 meter square, it was really like a shitty environment and everyone was telling me like, why don’t you take a real job, like why don’t you and this conversation you know, I had them with myself also like why I mean, I should stop, I should do something else, I should and then, you know, it’s about like, how do you find the strengths and the discipline to just work on something step by step, look for your progress, focus on the things you can control, you know, it’s like stoicism is similar to this.

Are you still with that girlfriend? No. She got she lost

I would do a simple exercise. Let’s assume they all have iPhone. You open your phone settings and you go in screen time, and then you tell me whether or not you have time. Know, like it’s everyone’s if you look at your phone, you’re spending like two, three, four, sometimes five hours on your phone every day and then people tell you that they don’t have time. It’s about like the discipline, it’s about like self love because you know like there is a definition of discipline that says it’s the purest form of self love And I love it because it’s basically like sacrificing a current state for the future self.

And life, know, is is all about that, know, it’s all about like what decision are you making right now that can help you build like a better lifestyle, having like live longer, and all of these things, know, like they take energy and they it’s a battle. We we live in an era where it’s so easy to get distracted, but it’s also so easy to build an online business. And for me, the ones who train their muscles for discipline are the ones who are gonna really like crush the game.

We’re definitely like, I don’t like too much talking about like weak and strong, etc, but I definitely feel that there are so many weak minds out there, like, many people who would just like

Yeah, that’s insane. I agree. I think it’s just like sometimes like people they love, you know, to have this very complacent version of you need to be chill, you need to be like to be caring, etcetera. And yes, it’s good, but you know, like, growth by definition is uncomfortable. What do you

I’m not sure if it’s if it’s an issue or not because I train a lot, but I love sweets and I love dessert. I know, like, sugar is not something, like, that I I should eat as much, but I do eat like shit tons of sugar. Like I love dessert. Like I’m really really bad at it. Like if I don’t eat a dessert after each meal, I’m sad. Like I’m literally.

Yeah.

At lunchtime, I eat very often, like, poke bowls. So it’s like rice edamame, so like little beans, then it’s like carrots, tomatoes, and then a protein, it can be like chicken or like salmon or anything. So this is basically like what I eat daily, and I’m happy with it. And then I also eat a lot of pasta and meat, like pasta and meatballs, like this is for me. Cook this myself, but I really love it. And it’s easy. It gets me all the calories, proteins and carbohydrates that I need for training.

So it’s yeah. Can I ask you, are you married? No. Not married. No kids. None that I know of.

It’s a good question. I think, like, I am really happy in my life. I feel like I have an intentional life. I’ve been forced to ask myself questions about life that few people are forced to ask themselves because I think we still live in a world where money is kind of like chains to freedom because you have to work, you have to make money, you know, to, I don’t know, just live simply. And and I broke this chains, you know, when I kind of, like, became financially independent and took, like, a lot of cash.

But at that time, you know, you ask yourself, like, what’s the meaning of life? What’s your mission? Where are you put on earth? And you go more towards like spirituality. And it’s something, you know, that I struggled with. I was, you know, asking myself like, why do I do what I do, do I really love it, am I in the right place, etc. And I think like when I reflected on everything, I feel like I’m so intentional about my life, I really love it and I really love it, you know, it’s like I work with a team I love, I’m always learning new things, which I think is super important.

I take care of my body and my health. I have like really good friends. What’s missing is like the love of my life and a family, but something I’m I’m planning for, but otherwise, I’m happier. Well, now you’re chairman. You

do this.

I believe that traditional media are totally like manipulating the way we think. Yeah. Very few people realize it because we we were all raised, you know, with, I think, our parents, like, watching TV and and these kind of things. And eventually, we feel that this is the only truth, but down the line, I just feel like and and especially, you know, in the in The US, like, recently with the election and everything, I think we’ve realized, like, a lot of things can be manipulated. We should be careful with the media.

You said

would you say it is? It’s very clear, and I’ve got, like, nightmares just thinking about it. But it’s buying Bitcoin in 2008, 2009, to be honest, like I should have done it. Like, this is a decision I should Did have you look at it? It’s something that I identified like very early. For some reason, I felt like, yes, this is this is definitely the future. I understood how, like, money works, like how what was money, like the essence of money, essence of trust, inflation, and all these kind of things.

Everything made sense, but I didn’t invest because I wasn’t investing in anything, And I didn’t have money, but it’s not an excuse, know, even if I had bought like a $100. Do you you have Bitcoin today? Yes. A lot. Well done. Yeah. I’ve been buying Bitcoins for the last three years like heavily. Now it’s it’s been a good year for me on on that. Tell me, what would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? This is something about like school in general, you know, because like, I feel like schools, we never ask ourselves like why exactly like schools have been built, because we believe, you know, like that in the middle age people that had the exact same school, etc.

When you look at movies, this is how they represent it, know, like everyone’s learning, you have teachers, etc. But it’s totally untrue. Like schools, they were truly built like in the 1900s and for a reason that was simple, we needed to have like little robots that were employees for a big corporation and we need people, you know, to fit in a box. So if I knew I couldn’t fail, I would build like a totally new education system that pushes people towards finding like their true passion and what they’re good at and not just fit in a box where we want to take them you know.

What have you changed your mind on in the last twelve months? Yeah, you need to train slowly to go fast. This is important because typically I’ve always been like I’ve done sports my entire life, I’ve always been very competitive, I’ve done a lot of basketball at like a good level, etcetera. When I started training for endurance, the trainings, you know, it’s like you train and after that, like you need to build the foundation and the power of your heart. And to build the power of your heart, you know, you have different heart rate zone and you need to spend a lot of time in a low heart rate zone, which doesn’t feel like you’re actually exercising.

So it’s like you run basically like slowly. But for me, when I was doing this, was like, this is not training, you know, like, if I don’t feel sore, if I don’t go faster, like, it doesn’t feel like training. But because you’re doing so much volume, down the line, this build up a lot of strength and a lot of speed. Are

Yeah. Don’t don’t listen to that. Don’t

Yeah, of course. I have, like, a relationship with pain that is that is very, like, uncommon, I would say. But it’s some people, like, when they feel pain, they believe, you know, that it’s a moment to stop and for me I feel like this is a moment you know I’m growing and there is this quote I like which is pain is weakness leaving the body and this is how I perceive it you know every time it hurts I feel like yeah I’m getting stronger so it’s positive in my mind.

I love that quote. What’s your favorite consumer brand and why them? Apple, I think what they’re doing is just is just insane. I love this graph where you see like AirPods revenue versus any software company and you see that just the AirPods are making like more revenues than any software currently on the market.

Like most people, I think I would say like OpenAI, just so I know like what they’re cooking at the moment, like where they’re at in terms of like new models, knowing like I would go there and I would say, okay, like what’s the actual plan that Sam told you? Because this guy is like, so like I don’t trust him like a second. He’s been changing his mind like so many times. He’s such a like, you know, like he came to the Senate and started saying like, I don’t make money out of OpenAI.

I’ve made enough money in the past. This is a nonprofit. And then like, just after it’s like, now it’s for profit. Actually, you were paid by Microsoft in the meantime while you were, like, CEO, but through, like, another company structure. And now your entire team is gone out of nowhere because they tried to fire you. There are some shits happening there, and I wanna know, like, what’s happening. I wanna know the truth. What concerns you most in the world today? There is no nuance anymore. In the attention war we live in, it’s all about being as polarized as as possible.

You know, it’s either black or white. Gray doesn’t exist. So it’s like you either like a pro x or pro y. You’re either like against that person or pro that person. And I think like humanity right now, because of social media and the fact that, you know, like super short form contents are the one that works the best, We lack of depth, we lack of nuance, and we keep taking, you know, like bits and bits of content out of the context. I just feel like it’s killing slowly, like, humanity in general.

You know? It’s like that that scares me a lot, the fact that everyone needs enemies.

always pay off, but you should enjoy working hard for yourself. Because, like, my mom typically, like, she grew up on a farm. Like, had to take care of her, like, brother and sister. Her dad, like, tried to kill himself many times. Her mom died, like she has like the toughest like life ever. They immigrated like from Italy to France, like had like lots of shits happening and she couldn’t like study yet, know, like she worked super hard, she was the first in the office working for like a tax office, but not making like a lot of money.

She was really, really working hard, but not being rewarded for it because she was potentially doing too much work for others, etcetera. But eventually, you know, like, when I asked her, okay, like, you didn’t make any money, like, you worked really hard, do you regret it? Like, do you regret not doing something else? And then she said, no, you know, it’s like she works hard for herself. She works hard because she likes when the job is well done. And if you always work hard to get something in return, you don’t get it always, you know, and it it shouldn’t be like it’s something that’s out of your control, you know.

So so sometimes I just feel like when I look at what I want to do and how I want to do it, I don’t truly care, you know, if if something happens from it. As long as I’m happy, you know, with with the effort I’m putting in, then, you know, I think it’s a good decision. 10,000,000 always does help, doesn’t it? Let’s be honest. It