Bootstrapping·Guillaume Moubeche, lempire

lempire: From $1K Launch to $26M ARR Profitable SaaS

0:00Loading…

Listen on:

Like this episode?

Get real founder strategies for the AI era. Delivered weekly.

Free weekly newsletter · No spam

Guillaume Moubeche is the founder and CEO of lempire, a suite of products that help B2B businesses grow, including lemlist, lemwarm, Taplio, Tweet Hunter, and lemcal.

Guillaume's entrepreneurial journey began with a painful failure. A t-shirt business he started with his father sold only six shirts, straining their relationship for nearly a year.

Undeterred, Guillaume joined a B2B lead generation agency, where he learned about cold email prospecting. This experience sparked the idea for lemlist.

In 2018, with just $1,000, Guillaume and two technical co-founders launched lemlist. The early days were grueling. They worked tirelessly, with Guillaume often surviving on pasta and isolating himself from doubtful friends and family.

To acquire customers, Guillaume provided free services and traded lemlist accounts for essential tools. He personally helped set up campaigns for early users, going above and beyond to ensure their success.

His persistence and "build in public" strategy paid off. lemlist's revenue grew 30% month-over-month, hitting $1 million ARR in less than two years after launch.

The growth continued at a breakneck pace. By 2021, just three years after launch, lemlist had skyrocketed to $10 million in annual recurring revenue.

This rapid success attracted investor interest, leading to a $30 million cash-out at a $150 million valuation. But the celebration was short-lived.

Shortly after the cash-out, Guillaume's co-founders unexpectedly left. Suddenly, he was alone, managing all aspects of the business, including unfamiliar technical areas.

Despite this setback, Guillaume made a bold move to expand lempire's product suite, acquiring Taplio and Tweet Hunter. Critics called the acquisitions senseless, but Guillaume pushed forward, convinced these tools would create a powerful B2B growth ecosystem.

Today, lempire serves tens of thousands of customers in over 100 countries, generating $26 million in annual recurring revenue with a team of 90 people and they're profitable.

This episode is part of our Bootstrapping series.

Watch the Episode

Book Recommendations

The Alchemist: A Fable About Following Your Dream

by Paulo Coelho

More on Bootstrapping

Adam Fard, UX Pilot

Bootstrapped SaaS: From Agency to $5M ARR in 2 Years

Adam Fard is the founder of UX Pilot, an AI platform that helps product design teams create and ship great user experiences faster. In 2023, Adam was running a successful UX agency when ChatGPT and LLMs started taking off. He began experimenting with ways to apply AI to his team's design processes and built a Figma plugin that helped users work through UX frameworks and activities. Then during a user interview, someone asked a simple question: "I have all these ideas on my canvas, but can I turn them into something visual? Can I create a wireframe?" That question stuck with him. He started looking around to see if any tools could actually generate wireframes from text input. He found a few products claiming to do it. But when he tested them, he realized they were faking it. They were just swapping existing templates and personalizing the copy. None of them could truly generate a layout from scratch. There was a technical reason for that. Creating wireframes with AI was genuinely hard. So Adam started working on it himself. He explored fine-tuning LLMs, hired AI researchers, and tested component-based approaches. He spent four or five months iterating. Slowly, things started working. The outputs became stable enough to use. He added Figma integration so designers could bring wireframes into their existing workflow. Within six or seven months of that original user question, UX Pilot hit $10K MRR. But growth created a new problem. Adam hired too slowly. At $30K MRR, he kept questioning whether this was the ceiling. He added one engineer, waited, added another, waited again. Looking back, he says he should have hired five people at once instead of dragging out the process. Today, UX Pilot generates over $5 million in ARR with a team of 30 and over 15,000 paying subscribers. All bootstrapped. In this episode, you'll learn: - Why Adam initially said he didn't want the product to focus on AI generation, and what changed his mind a few months later - How he validated the wireframe generation opportunity by testing competitors and discovering they were all faking it - What happened when Google suddenly deranked all of UX Pilot's landing pages, and how he recovered - Why talking about product updates in his newsletter drove more engagement than traditional educational content - How focusing narrowly on design (instead of building another no-code tool) became their biggest competitive advantage

James Ashford, GoProposal

Bootstrapped SaaS to 8-Figure Exit (No VC, No Problem)

James Ashford is the founder of GoProposal, a proposal and pricing platform for accountants which he bootstrapped and sold for an 8-figure sum. James didn't have a tech background. He wasn't an accountant. And he'd never built software before. But he noticed something broken: accountants couldn't price their services. They'd guess fees based on what the last client paid. Proposals took days. Deals fell through because people got busy. So he built a simple solution. A digital menu that let any staff member price and close deals in 15 minutes. The first version? A WordPress plugin that cost £4,000 to build. Before writing a single line of code, James did something unusual. He calculated how much money he needed to never work again (£5 million), identified the companies that might acquire his business (Sage, Intuit, Xero), and printed their logos on his wall. This wasn't optimism—it was his bootstrapped SaaS exit strategy from day one. To crack the accounting industry as an outsider, he traded 10% of his software company for 10% of an accounting firm. Instant credibility. Then he wrote a book in two weeks, made it an Amazon bestseller, and used it to build a waitlist of hundreds before launch. His marketing philosophy was simple: market like a celebrity chef. Gordon Ramsay shows you how to cook his recipes for free. You still go to his restaurant. James gave away everything—the methodology, the frameworks, the exact playbook. People still bought the software because they wanted it done faster. The bootstrapped SaaS approach forced creativity. When he realized a single conference cost £25,000, he hired a full-time videographer instead. Twelve months later, the pandemic hit. Competitors who relied on events were stuck. GoProposal dominated online. By the time he sold, GoProposal had over 1,100 customers, a 78 NPS score, and playbooks for every single process in the business. Three potential acquirers approached him within months of each other. The exit price? 8 figures. The multiple? One he still doesn't publicly share because it was "crazy."

Sam Darawish, Everflow

Bootstrapped SaaS to $30M ARR: Why Scarcity Forces Focus

Sam Darawish is the co-founder and CEO of Everflow, a partner-marketing platform that helps companies manage their affiliate programs, influencers, and performance-marketing campaigns. Sam started in online marketing in the early 2000s, working at one of the first affiliate and pay-per-click companies in San Francisco. When the iPhone launched in 2008, he and his two co-founders saw a chance to bring what they had learned from desktop to mobile. They bootstrapped Moola Media, one of the first mobile affiliate networks, and built their own tracking platform because there were no good third-party options for mobile at the time. In 2013, Opera acquired Moola Media for $50 million. During the three-year earn-out, Sam kept hearing the same complaint from marketers: no one liked the existing affiliate-marketing software. When the earn-out ended in 2016, the founders invested a few hundred thousand dollars of their own money into Everflow and did not pay themselves for the first couple of years. The first six to seven months of their bootstrapped SaaS journey were spent talking to potential customers and refining ideas. Then they decided to go all in at Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas, renting a booth with nothing more than screenshots of the product. Two prospects from that conference became their first paying customers—even though one made them sign an agreement to take over the software if the company failed. By early 2018, the bootstrapped SaaS hit $1M ARR with just 10 people and turned profitable. Today, Everflow has grown to nearly $30M ARR with 1,200 customers and 120 team members across San Francisco, Montreal, Amsterdam, and Dubai—all without raising external funding.

←All Episodes