Thread by @GuillaumeMbh

Each employee of my company will be a millionaire in the next 5 years.

4 years back, I started it with $1000.

It's now valued at $150M and does $20M in ARR.💰

The story of how I built lemlist (& lempire)! 🧵

I founded 2 SaaS companies & became a millionaire at 29!

• Sold Lempod in 2020 - it did $600K in ARR.
• Currently growing Lemlist - does $20M in ARR & is valued at $150M.

But 5 yrs ago, I didn't know SHIT about running a business.

My parents were not rich and wanted me to study science since childhood.

I listened - did Masters's in Chemical Engineering.

My career GOAL was to do research in drug discovery🔬🧪

Soon, I was working for the largest consumer goods company on the planet - P&G.

Did 50% of work in R&D and 50% of work in marketing. Later, I also worked for a French company called Hermes.

B/w Sep'15 and May'16: My best friend & I traveled the world with almost no money.

On our list were: 3 continents & 18 countries.🌍

We did it all🏕

- Couchsurfing App stays
- Finding hosts on Facebook
- Working at farms
- Did teaching jobs in return for food & stays

After the trip, it was time to up-skill👨🏻‍🎓

I knew that I had to LEARN the art of selling if I ever want to start a business.

I went for Masters in Marketing at HEC Paris.

Soon, I launched my 1st business with my Dad. He knew how to print on fabrics.

So we launched a T-Shirt brand: Paris reste un rêve.

5 months in, we had sold 6 t-shirts and I felt like a failure...

But a friend from my master's asked me to start a lead generation agency with him.

This is when I realized I could actually make real money online.

One day - While working on email outreach for B2B Clients, I was trying multiple tools for personalized emails for clients.

But all of them were slow, complicated & freaking awful!

This is where I found the gap!

Sales is a personalized process and the email conversion is 2X better if mail is personalized for the client.

I got the idea for lemlist. Went on to create the beta version ASAP.

But what the HELL did lemlist do?

1st outreach email platform that created personalized images automatically for cold emails.

Helps in "exponentially" increasing the reply rate and close rate.

We validated our company in 2 ways:

1. Product Hunt:

A real test to see whether or not your product brings something different to the table

We ended up #1 product of the day🚀

• Thousands of new visitors
• Hundreds of new users & feedback
• Hundreds of newsletter signups

2. AppSumo Lifetime Deal

Appsumo is a huge community of entrepreneurs & small business owners.

Someone from Appsumo reached out to promote lemlist in their community.

I thought, why not?

After 2 weeks- the results👇

• 3304 new users
• $161,896 in sales
• 3.27% refund rate

I highly RECOMMEND it to other founders!

Appsumo community is filled with early adopters and tech-savvy founders.

We got a lot:

• Sales & FAQ experience
• Amazing reviews & feedbacks
• A proper technical roadmap for the next months
• Great relationships with early users

B/w June'19 and Dec'19, we saw the BIGGEST growth📈

This is where I understood the compounding effect. By 2019, we had $1M in ARR. And we kept on growing.

This $1M grew into $2.5M in just 5 months.🤯

And 13 months later, we reached the crazy milestone of $10M in ARR

Here are the "4 strategies" that worked for lemlist👇

Strategy 1: Built a community📺

We did everything we could to be help lemlisters all over the world!

-Created “lemlist Family” on Facebook
-Made a YT Channel
-Wrote Blogs
-Wrote on LinkedIn

Our aim was to be "super-close" to our users for instant updates.

One of Lemlist's important features - The Email Warmup was suggested by a community member Vaibhav.

We built it and it was a huge success.

Strategy 2: Building A Personal Brand

My team & I invested "heavily" in our personal brands for credibility.

We started sharing more about how we managed to grow so fast in order to help even more our community.

Each month, we reach 20M people on LinkedIn organically

In fact, One of my articles got featured in a Medium blog with 40K followers called Noteworthy.

On Instagram- I have 168K followers who consume the helpful content I post!

Some of my Instagram reels reached millions of people🤯.

I am sharing my perspectives on mistakes that prevent anyone from reaching their goals.

One trick is to Write & Repurpose Great Content📝

This might sound pretty easy yet most companies forget about it.

Transformed one video into 10 & write posts or carousels about it on LinkedIn or blogs on Medium.

My personal YT Channel has 19K subs & Lemlist has 9K subs.

Strategy 3: Creating a 100% personalized client onboarding📩

In order to make every single lemlister feel welcomed - we created an onboarding sequence using lemlist, including videos and personalized images.

It improved:

- Our activation rate
- Conversion rate

Strategy 4: Keep prospecting

In a time of crisis, only the best salespeople strive!💪

This was our strategy:

1. Start with value & offering tips
2. Book a meeting & build relationships

With below👇personalized email follow-up - Nadja booked more than 10 demos each week📞

We are on the MISSION of becoming the best sales automation platform ever created.

Along with lemlist, we are also growing other digital products under the umbrella brand of lempire.

In 2021, we sold 20% of their shares for $30M and I became a multi-millionaire.

We bootstrapped from $1000 to here.

Now my focus is to help my team achieve their "millionaire goal" by 2028.

🙏 If you enjoyed this thread and found it useful, don't forget to like and retweet it.

Follow me @GuillaumeMbh for more threads around business & startups.

And if you want to see how I plan to make my team achieve their millionaire goal, I recorded a full video about it: