Guillaume Moubeche
Appearances
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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 the 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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
And then to 10 million, it was three and a half years in total.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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 like customers are activated from the signups and how many are paying.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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 launched a sales prospecting campaign. And that number was like really crap at first. It was like something like 10%.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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 from scratch the entire flow to creating like campaign.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
I remember pushing the new project like in production, like 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 And people hated it. They hated the new interface. A lot of stuff were missing, etc. So it was crazy. We had the highest churn.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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 believe that the one who churned didn't use the product as it was meant to be.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
And they were using it for different use cases. So at that time, it's quite harsh because a lot of people, they 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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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 month where we had 50% churn, I think we were basically like no growth at all because the acquisition kind of like... brought it back to zero.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
And the months afterwards, we were at a growth rate of 40% or something like that. What did you change to take Activation from 10% to 40%? 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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
But if you wanted to create a campaign and had not created 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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
Activation rate and churn. For me, it's like two topics that you need to approach first. 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 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,
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
then maybe it makes sense 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?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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 the right tools. So you can use like, I don't know, like a hot jar or mix panel or whatever, just to track like all the events and understand what people are doing and how they're doing it.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
And I think this is the most important because especially if you're like... 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 to 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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
Someone sign up to your project. They didn't like it. It's your right to understand why you're an entrepreneur. You have your mission. You should be 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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
And they make assumptions that would have been proven wrong just if they had pick up the phone and talk for five minutes.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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 and and i think like our growth has been uh has been driven also by price increase at some point and it's it's quite helpful so don't hide behind like until the next feature or whatever like increase your price every year at least you know and then
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
It's also important to see where your market is heading. You 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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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 like the amount of enterprise accounts who've been sold onto 1500 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 that price.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
So 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 market because sometimes like pricing is changing and evolving in a market and you need also to adapt to what's happening.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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 500K?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
Yeah, that's a very good question. Focus is my enemy. I'm more like Mr. Chaos, but it took me years of psychotherapy to realize it.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
I don't think it as something really bad, to be honest, because if you had to say that in 2018, in a market where you have sales loft outreach were around for three, four years, and then hundreds of other competitors who have raised like tens of millions, that a French company out of Paris would have like thousands of customers in the U.S. be international worldwide.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
grow to like 28 million in AR and 10 million in EBDA 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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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, and that make it look like an exponential are the ones that were smart enough to plan for the next X curve. And we weren't.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
And we weren't because eventually I got too cocky and I was so confident that everything we would do, that our top of 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 customers.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
Like 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 happened 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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
You don't understand why you're like thinking that you're doing something wrong. You're trying to to find, you know, like 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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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, et cetera. So it's like, she gave me like extra confidence. She gave me love.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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 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
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
is the amount of money it requires to build that tracking team, to build that data team, to have like all this 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...
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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 100 sales rep. We know that we're the best tools on the market and we're building it right now.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
You know, it's like we're we're doing everything to build that for the current economy.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
At the time, I think we were on like 13 or 14 million in annual recurring revenue.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
Yeah, so I always receive because the thing is like I've been building in public since day one. So 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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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, etc., 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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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 high talent density and eventually like... But... In some cases, 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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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 Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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&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 like maybe like from 30 to 60 people.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
I realized how bad hiring could really kill your company. And for me, you know, I have this feeling where when you feel the pressure to hire more, to spend faster, et cetera, if you're not skilled enough, it's going to 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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
One, you should hire people who have done it already. Literally, like because bootstrap mindset, you know, it gives kind of the underdog vibe. So from the start, I kept this underdog mindset, like I'm going to only find underdogs, the talent that no one knew they existed. And I'm going to show them that we're the Avengers and we're going to like, you know, like be the fucking rock stars.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
No resume, no schools, like a lot of grit, a lot of talent. And that works to a certain extent. But when you really want to 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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
Second thing, pay people and create a package where people are extremely well paid for their, you know, like their role, et cetera. And the reason you should do it is because hiring is extremely emotional. You know, like you get attached to people, you get, you know, like you have a It's something that everyone, you know, wants like scorecard and try to make it as an engineer.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
Like, okay, how many points do they have for this skill, et cetera? 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 five, five 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 is
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
This is like the strongest moment, the strongest things, you 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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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And really like paying someone maybe like 20% more than what they are offered usually help you find the 10x profile.
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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 not an investment anymore. It's a cost.
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And it's a cost that can be, you know, like just should be different. You know, 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, asking myself, do I see myself working for 10 years with that person?
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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 make these hires. Do you do one-on-ones? I used to.
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Now I'm not so much in the operational anymore. This is kind of actually you come at a moment where this is a transition phase for me, but yeah.
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I think it's difficult to predict because your mistakes are like a light that only light your own path. I don't know if this is the quote, but you know what I mean. It's like your learnings are your own. So sometimes you just got to go through 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.
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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 wasn't the case, you know.
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Yeah. So the company was worth $150 million. My two co-founders left and we each took like $10 million. So now I own about like 70% of the business. I cashed out $10 million personally. And I'm like the solo founder left since around like four years now.
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Yeah, it's crazy, to be honest. I was feeling so grateful about it because for me, money, it has always been like a stress, like lacking of money and this kind of thing. The fear of lacking of money is something I realized that will never go away.
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Uh, just because it's so deep, you know, in the, into like, uh, how I rise raised, like looking at every, every item price in the supermarket, uh, not going on holiday with my parents, like these kinds of things. But what I realized is like, uh, money can buy like freedom and freedom is what I like the most.
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So I'm not someone, you know, who spends like a crazy amount of monies on Lamborghini, etc. 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, etc. This is like priceless.
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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 like live your entire life without ever working again, which kind of like gave me more ambition. You know, like it's not that I've done this. I feel like I can do something much bigger.
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I can take like bigger risk 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, that was like the best feeling in the world. You know, like everyone asked me, did you buy yourself crazy, something crazy, et cetera? And I was like, no, but I helped my parents retire and I give them money.
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And this feels like just awesome, you know?
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Yeah, this is not the plan because, OK, I think people see chairman as 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 is 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 of funnel.
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So it's, you know, like the conferences, it's like the creating content, 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.
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And because I hired someone who's like extremely talented and skilled at that role for 18 months now, I feel like this is a time for him to have that role because it'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, et cetera. But I see you're smiling. You don't believe me.
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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.
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Yeah, it's a good question. I think in any case, I want to give it a try and see how it goes.
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Timing and trust is either equal to zero or one.
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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 kinds 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 a plant and a little seed. Before it becomes like a tree or a plant, it needs time.
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You know, it needs like the right soil. It needs like the right condition, the right environment. So for me, like 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.
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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, I can write maybe like, I don't know, 15 or 20 posts in an hour.
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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 a...
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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.
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And I'm not just like, you know, like smashing my head against the wall on one single thing.
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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.
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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 the thing, it's like a 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.
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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 going to post it multiple times and every time it's going to be a hit. And then, you know, you can do it like a on a reel or a TikTok and see whether or not it's working well.
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Yeah, I think like we started 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 to start expanding the product line.
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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 on all platforms?
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But then when I take it to even Twitter, not really. No, on Twitter, if your name is not Elon Musk, it's hard to get rich these days.
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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 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.
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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?
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And I think like 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,
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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. So as a founder, creating content helps you become a better founder.
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Congrats. Yeah, I saw that. Congrats. Thank you.
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I think as long as you are 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 going to be great at something is by sucking at it at first. I've came across all the haters in the world.
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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.
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Or Mozi who says like, SN me 500 instead of SN PSI 500, you know, and it's, It's true.
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I think this is like a two-sided problem. One, people who worry about it usually have trust issues. You know, it's the same thing that if they date someone that is like a higher number than they are, that they're going to say, oh, she's going to dump me or whatever. Like this is a trust issue.
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So right now, Empire is a suite of 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 29 million in ARR with 10 million in EBDA.
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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 reason why people leave a company, you know, it's a Not because they just get like a better salary elsewhere, you know, like it's a multitude of different factors.
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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.
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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 like their brands, they bring also a lot of like positive leads to the business right now.
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Like just to give you an example, we reach about like 10 million people every quarter on LinkedIn without spending a single dollar on ads just through like 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.
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I'm happy that I've created all these trainings and coaching programs just to explain 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 were at Lempire eventually. And this is still good for the brand, good for what we do. And
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I think like what I wish I knew when I got started is that it takes time because usually like people want instant virality. And I think right now, like everyone, you know, who spent a bit of time on TikTok, you know, had luck eventually and got like one reels that got like millions, et cetera. But if you want to build something in the long term, you need consistency and you need time.
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I got discouraged several times on Instagram reels, like where I stopped eventually, et cetera, 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.
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I call it like the 100 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 views you're going to get.
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So by just focusing on the output, I was like, okay, now I'm going to go for 100 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 100 days, Once you realize that you are getting better each day, which basically helps you like build also a bit more confidence.
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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.
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Something I've done also with my head of sales is I've been writing all these LinkedIn posts. I basically wrote around two months worth of content and it generated really good meetings, really good deals, step by step.
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That's insane. Insane stats.
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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 a really good time during the Ironman. And one week before the race, I was doing my last bike training and And eventually a car came, just smashed my back. And yeah, my bike was cut in half.
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So it allows us to have a lot of like flexibility in what we want to do and how we want to do it. It's pretty cool.
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The car was also 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.
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But having a race in mind was really like the driver for me to recover a lot faster.
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Do you agree with me? I want to 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 in Durare, which is like endurance. And I think this is what happens.
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You know, it's like 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. And this happens. Discussions I have with my brain when I train for many hours are exactly the ones that I had back in the days when I had failed like two businesses before Lemlist.
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I had like no money left. My girlfriend at the time was paying the rent. We were living in like 28 meters 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 shouldn't.
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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 lost count. No.
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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. You know, like it's that... Everyone, 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.
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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 yeah. Life, you know, is all about that.
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You 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, you know, like they take energy and it's a battle. We live in an era where it's so easy to get distracted, but it's also so easy to build an online business.
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And for me, the ones who train their muscles for discipline are the ones who are going to 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 so many people who just like, I think it's so easy to actually win today, because most people are so weak.
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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, et cetera. And yes, it's good. But, you know, like growth by definition is uncomfortable.
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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 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.
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I'm not sure 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 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 like sad.
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Yeah.
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At lunchtime, I eat very often like...
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poke bowls so it's like a 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 meats like pasta and meatballs like this is for me I 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
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Can I ask you, are you married? No, not married. No kids. None that I know of.
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It's a good question. I think like, um, 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, uh, few people, uh,
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are forced to ask themselves because uh i think we still live in a world where money is kind of like uh chains to freedom because uh you have to work you have to uh make money you know to uh i don't know just live simply uh and uh and i broke these chains you know when i kind of like became a financially independent and took like a lot of cash.
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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, et cetera?
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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.
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What's missing is like the love of my life and a family, but something I'm planning. Four, but otherwise I'm happy, yeah.
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I believe that traditional media are totally like manipulating the way we think. Yeah, very few people realize it because we were all raised, you know, with I think our parents like watching TV and these kind of things. And Eventually, we feel that this is the only truth.
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But down the line, I just feel like 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.
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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 have made. Did 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.
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I understood how like money works, like how what was money, like the essence of money, the 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. You know, even if I had bought like 100 bucks. Do you have Bitcoin today? Yes, a lot. Well done.
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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 proud bootstrapper and they were like hardcore bootstrapper from the start. And if I said that, I would be simply lying.
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I've been buying Bitcoins for the last three years, like heavily. So now it's been a good year for me. 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 why exactly schools have been built. Because we believe that in the middle age, people had the exact same school, etc.
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When you look at movies, this is how they represent it. 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 need to have like little robots that were employees for a big corporation. And we need people, you know, to fit in a box.
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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 12 months? Yeah, you need to train slowly to go fast.
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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, etc. when I started training for endurance, the trainings, you know, it's like, uh, you train.
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And after that, like, uh, you, 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, uh, heart rate zone and you need to spend a lot of time in a, 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, I was like,
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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.
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Yeah, don't listen to that.
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Yeah, of course. I have like a relationship with pain 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. This is how I perceive it.
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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 insane. I love this graph where you see like AirPods revenue versus any software company.
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And you see that just the AirPods are making like more revenues than any software currently on the market.
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Like most people, I think I would say like open AI, just so I know like what they're cooking at the moment, like where they at in terms of like new models, knowing like I would go there and I would say, okay, like what's actual, 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.
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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 when you were like CEO, but through like another company structure.
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When I first started, I wanted to raise funds. 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.
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And now your entire team is gone out of nowhere because they tried to fire you. There are some shits happening there. And I want to know like what's happening. I want to 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 possible. You know, it's either black or white. Gray doesn't exist.
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So it's like you're 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.
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I just feel like it's killing slowly like humanity in general. You know, it's like that scares me a lot. The fact that everyone needs enemies.
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Hard work doesn't always pay off, but you should enjoy working hard for yourself because like my mom typically like she grew up on a farm, like she had to take care of her like brother and sister or dad, like try to kill himself many times. Her mom died like she has like the the toughest like life ever. They immigrated from Italy to France, had lots of shit happening and she couldn't study.
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Yet, she worked super hard. She was the first in the office working for a tax office, but not making 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, etc., But eventually, you know, like when I ask her, OK, like you didn't make any money, like you worked really hard. Do you regret it?
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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 shouldn't be like it's something that's out of your control, you know.
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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 something happens from it. As long as I'm happy, you know, with the effort I'm putting in, then, you know, I think it's a good decision. 10 million always does help though, doesn't it?
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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.
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but typically, you know, like I see too many founders because right now I've invested like in, in around like 20 startups. We, I mean, with, 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 like sales, because they believe that sales is a job like anyone can do, etc.
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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 what people are really buying, what specifically they are buying. So the fact that I couldn't raise
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I spent the first 18 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, you know, like...
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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, you know, entering the market with the low end of SMBs. So mostly like founders. So people, we 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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
So use Lemlist to do sales prospecting. Then when I was in meetings with these founders, they would say, oh, I'm not sure if cold email actually works. So 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 would close deals in that manner.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
I would test 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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
And at the same time, I was also because... Prior to launching Lemlist, I had a lead generation agency, so I was already running tons of sales prospecting campaigns.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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 like the new features, seeing whether or not they bring more or better results and so on and so forth.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
Creating content is basically the same as pushing a super heavy ball. There is a myth where he's pushing this heavy, heavy rock on top of the mountain. On his end, it always goes back. But for us, it takes you a lot of effort. And the effort for me was creating content and doing sales prospecting.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
So I would say the first year I closed around 100 customers myself, which is equal to around 300 demos. So 300 demos, I had basically 33% conversion rate, so 100 customers. And for a year, almost zero customers were coming from the content 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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
Basically, it became like outbound represented with the next years when we reached like millions in revenue. It was maybe 20 or 30 percent outbound and 70 percent inbound.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
I think people are afraid to do sales prospecting. Like they are afraid, you know, to put themselves out there. They're afraid to sell. So I think like the, the biggest mistake is, uh, one being afraid, like, uh, that's 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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
When you have to sell something that is obviously not as good as competition because they've been working on it for five years. So it's how do you find that unique selling point that's going to make the conversion easier?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
How do you feel about design partners? I think you shouldn't call someone design partner if they don't spend, uh, anything, you know, like it's a, it's not a design partner. It's like, uh, it's, 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's a, It doesn't work out.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
It's not going to 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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
So for me, and this is something people also forget whenever they are 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 geeks. And then, you know, it became like something that every company would add, etc.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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 you're a person high school, 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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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 like 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?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
So it was really like, how can we define like within the sales teams, the persona that's going to be the most attractive?
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
So for us, it was actually like 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, it's...
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
If you stress someone averagely, you just don't trust them and you're just too polite to say it. So the goal was like, okay, 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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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, you 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.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
Meaning like if you build relationship, obviously you're going to make more sales. If you make more sales, Lemlist is basically your go-to tool because the ROI is easy to calculate.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
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 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.