Charles Tenot

CEO @lemlist & lempire. I share what I learn as the CEO of a profitable SaaS growing to $40M to $100M+. Follow me to learn from the journey.

I love Tech, Sales, Marketing and Leadership. 

I share my learnings and thinking on LinkedIn, don't hesitate to follow & interact.

COO / General Manager

Growing lempire from 20M$ to 100M$ while generating 35%+ EBITDA

lempire products: lemlist, lemwarm, Taplio, Tweet Hunter, lemcal - more to come

I have no idea what my kids' life will look like with all this AI. 
But one thing I'm sure of: they need to understand that you can build things that other people use.

So I started vibe coding apps with them.

Last week, we built a cookie spot rating app to find the best spots in Paris.

This weekend, we made a Harry Potter sorting hat quiz (the "Sorting Hat" test).

Each one took about 30 minutes. 
And they're better than most apps you'd find online for the same thing.

I don't know what jobs will exist in 10 years. 
I don't know what skills will matter most.

But kids who grow up thinking "I can build this" will be in a better place than kids who just think "I can use this."

PS: sorry the test is in French

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CEO @ lemlist & lempire

I just watched our PM build a complete feature in 2 hours.

No dev involved.

He used Claude Code to create a working mockup, test all the edge cases, then generated the PRD from the code.

This is how our entire Product team works now.

Here's the process:
→ They download the full codebase locally.
→ They use Claude Code with custom skills we built for coding best practices.
→ They vibe code their features.
→ Build the interface.
→ Test the flows.
→ Catch edge cases nobody thought of.
→ Then they use AI to generate the PRD from the working prototype.

What they deliver to Engineering:
→ A fully functional mockup that devs can test
→ A detailed PRD with user stories already mapped out

This reduces conception cycle by over 50%.

Better product decisions because they can interact with the actual feature.
Fewer bugs because edge cases are caught early.
Less confusion between Product and Tech.

Most Product teams are still writing specs and hoping devs understand.
We're shipping working prototypes before the first planning meeting.

This is what all Product teams will do in the future.

Curious to hear from other Product teams: how are you using AI in your process?

Help needed: if you are looking for a Senior Finance profile, my life partner, Violaine, is available now.

After spending 3 years building a network of kindergarten for children with neuro developmental disorders, she is now available for something new.

Why I recommend her, even though I'm clearly biased:

→ Worked with top Private Equity firms globally
Always recommended afterwards

→ Hybrid experience with Senior Finance roles (M&A, Reporting) and 3 years of entrepreneurship where she ran notably finance for their 50 people business.
She can be both strategic & hands-on, she's not the "ivory tower" CFO.

 → Amazing analytical skills, she notably worked on complex problems in manufacturing, much more complex than SaaS.

 → Great business sense, easy-going, high work ethics

What she's looking for:
→ CFO or Finance Director-level
→ Interim or part-time
→ Open to full time with flexible work location
→ Start date from March 9th

Don't hesitate to like or comment to help me get more reach, thanks a lot 🙏

→ Phone: +33 6 69 25 57 26
→ Email: vsaintromas@gmail.com

As a CEO, I'm almost never a decision maker, yet very few salespeople understand this.

I still get cold called, emailed, 10x per day.

But even when the approach is solid, the best I can do is forward it to someone on my team. 

And most of the time, I won't even do this. 
Just because I don't want to make my team think I have evaluated the solution and I recommend it, and ultimately I'm not the one who makes decisions for teams.

Teams make their own decisions.

The CEO role is about creating alignment, building the best team, and challenge them when needed. 

But I'm not the one who will say "we should buy this."

If your outbound strategy is targeting CEOs, it probably works up to a certain point. 
But past 100 employees, it might not be the best approach, unless you are actually selling to CEOs, but I can count on my hand the number of things that I decide to buy myself.

The person who feels the pain, evaluates the tools, and makes the call is almost never the CEO.  It's the C-Level, the VP or Head Of. 

My advice: don't waste your time on the wrong target.
Map your buying process, find the person who feels the pain, evaluates the options, and owns the budget.
Then spend your time preparing a great outreach for them.

Really happy to see lemlist ranked #1 software in France on G2.

Not because of the ranking itself but because of what it took to get here.

The last few months have been the strongest innovation pace we've ever had. 

And all of it comes from listening to our 20,000+ customers every single day.

Sales is still one of the hardest jobs in most companies. 
No product has made it easy yet. Including ours.

But that's exactly why we keep building.
Let's keep going.

Big up to the team ❤️

I read Cognism "Top 21 GTM Tools" blog post.

Clay wasn't in it. 
lemlist wasn't in it. 
Apollo wasn't in it. 
Salesloft wasn't in it. 
Outreach wasn't in it.
Gong wasn't in it.

The biggest names in GTM. 

All missing from a "top GTM tools" list.

That's not an accident.

When a company publishes a "best tools" list, they're not trying to help you. 

They're running a content play.

The rules are simple: 
→ Include tools that don't compete with you 
→ Include tools that make you look good by association 
→ Never mention the ones that could actually take your customers

So here's the irony.

If you're ON a competitor's "top tools" list, it means they don't see you as a threat.

If you're NOT on it, it means you're the one they're worried about.

Next time you read a "best tools" listicle, don't look at who's on it.
Look at who's missing. ✌️

Yesterday we ran a webinar about how ElevenLabs runs Go-To-Market at 330M$ ARR. 

Over 1,500 people registered. If you missed it and want the recording just drop a comment and I'll DM it.

Here's my human summary of what Jonathan Chemouny shared after 1 year there.

About ElevenLabs GTM:

→ 330M ARR, +300M in 2 years. Just valued at 11B.
→ Only 400 people. Close to 1M ARR per employee.
→ GTM team is about 100 people.
→ Org is SDR + AE but they call everyone "GTM." 
Limited titles, limited hierarchy.
→ They maximize distributed ownership per country and region. 
They hire founder-like profiles who run their region like CEOs.
→ Top performers come from Finance, even Product backgrounds (👋 Oscar Lanzendorf)
→ Their sales close an average of 20X their OTE 
(source: Carles Reina podcast at 20VC, link in comment)
→ They grew outbound from 5% to 46% of revenue in one year. 
Outbound lets them better target ideal customers and segments.
→ Average deal size ranges from 30K/year to millions for Enterprise.
→ Outbound sales cycle is slightly longer than inbound but average deal size is higher.
→ They receive thousands of inbound leads daily and built an AI agent that answers prospects 24/7.
→ Everyone does outbound, even if you're hired as a potential GM-level.

What enables their incredible success:
→ Very high hiring bar. 4 interviews, harsh panels.
→ They hire for smarts, not experience. 
They don't want people who come with playbooks. 
They want people who can build playbooks.
→ They use AI a lot but will never run things 100% AI. 
Humans think of a creative way to approach an account and craft the message. AI handles things like voice notes or AI-generated video.
→ They meet prospects and customers in-person a lot. 
Jon believes humans should do things AI can't, like building real relationships.
→ LinkedIn and WhatsApp are their primary outbound channels. Quality before quantity.
→ They don't monitor activity metrics. 
They track the number of meetings done with prospects.

And of course, they have an insanely strong product.

I hope you find this valuable. 

If you have a company or GTM person we should invite next, don't hesitate to share.

---

Bonus: we created an agent that was fed on Jon's knowledge and our webinar prep document, I'll share the link with the recording.

cc thanks Rémi Kokabi, Domitille de Saint-Exupéry Rafael Ornia Mitchell

This guy has been in Sales for 20+ years. He helped build Intercom, Lattice, and now ElevenLabs. 

Next week, he'll be sharing his tactics to book meetings in 2026, and how ElevenLabs has been growing by +300M$ ARR in 2 years.

Here are few things I can tell you as a teaser:

→ How they increased the share of outbound from 5% to 30% in 12 months, and how their around 100 reps use lemlist

→ ElevenLabs is hiring "GTM" people. No title, no hierarchy, background mostly from VC or former founders

→ They give a lot of ownership to their sales team, who act almost as local CEOs working in pairs with Product to adapt to local markets

→ They mostly rely on full-cycle Sales handling both Inbound & Outbound. 
He'll explain why they decided not to specialize

→ Jon still does a lot of outbound himself, he built a few very creative tactics notably using AI in his messages. He will share a full breakdown of those that work best

This is certainly the most exciting Webinar we've run in months for anyone on a Sales team, so don't tell me you can't find 45 mins to get all these learnings. 

Link in the comments

And big thanks Jonathan Chemouny for unpacking so much value 🙏
cc Stan Massueras 💙

Intercom

Lattice

ElevenLabs

lemlist

GTM Europe at ElevenLabs

GTM Europe @ElevenLabs

ElevenLabs just closed a $500M round at an $11B valuation. 

They went from $0 to $330M ARR in 3 years (this number will be outdated tomorrow).

Next week, Jonathan, GTM @ElevenLabs is opening the playbook with me.

Here's what makes their approach different.

→ While most companies shifted to async everything, Jonathan gives his SDRs a travel budget to meet prospects in person.

→ While most companies hire junior SDRs to book meetings, he hires ex-AEs to do value selling.

→ While most companies stick to email and LinkedIn, his team uses WhatsApp and AI voice notes to stand out.

→ And while most companies run on gut feeling, Jonathan has an obsessive A/B testing culture where every conviction is forged on the field.

This session is going to be a gold mine on how to build efficient GTM motions in 2026.  
How often can you learn from a real systems that took a company from zero to $330M ARR, and scaled outbound from 5% to 30% of closed deals?

We'll break down:
→ How SDRs evolved from meeting bookers to revenue drivers
→ The inbound vs outbound split and why it matters
→ The key metrics Jonathan tracks daily and how he coaches his team
→ How they use their own product to increase meeting rates
→ Why context beats static lists every time
→ and of course, how they are using lemlist 😈

This is for growth leaders, sales ops, SDR managers, and founders who want to scale revenue the right way.

A 45-minute interactive session with the opportunity to ask live questions directly.
Plus the actual templates and playbooks.

---
I'm excited about this one because it's rare to get this level of access to a company moving this fast.

February 18th.
9 AM PT / 6 AM CET

Link to register in comments.

You can beat 99% of companies by doing a few things well:

→ Set one clear vision and don't change it every 3 months 
→ Say "no" to everything that doesn't contribute to the strategy 
→ Remove low performers after weeks, not years 
→ Use your own product 
→ Talk to customers 
→ Keep reporting light 
→ Lead every meeting from the customer's standpoint

It looks simple written down like this.

But most companies don't have an execution problem. 
They just keep adding layers, processes, and distractions on top of it.

The companies that win aren't doing anything secret. 
They're just not getting in their own way.

I asked someone at ElevenLabs what makes their culture different. 
Their answer helped me understand how they went from 30M to 330M ARR in less than 2 years.

Yanek Brinkmann, one of their GTM team, told me:

"It's the closest you can get to doing your own business while still being in a job."

I've always believed that someone who works like they're running their own business has 10X more impact than someone who's just doing their job.

The difference is ownership. Real accountability. 

The kind you only get from people who actually care.

You'll get more from someone less experienced with insane grit than from someone senior who's just collecting a paycheck.

ElevenLabs understood this. 

And they still operate like that at 400 people.

Imagine 100 GTM people with a founder mindset.
→ Clear ownership on their region. 
→ Working directly with Product to adapt when needed. 
→ Flat org. No titles.

Their reps close 20X their OTE. The industry average struggles to hit 5X.

But this only works if you actually distribute ownership and responsibility. 
Not just talk about it.

I'm convinced this is how world-class companies are built now. 
And they will crush big groups with pyramidal organizations.

➡️ Later today, we're sharing more about ElevenLabs's playbook with Jonathan Chemouny. 

Already 1,350 people registered. You can still take your spot, it's free value.
No recording. We want people live and contributing.

Link in comment.

I have data-backed proof that spray & pray doesn't work.

It comes from 350M+ emails and 4.5M LinkedIn messages sent with lemlist over the past months.

This chart represents our 20,000+ customers.

From pre-revenue founders to companies with 300M$+ in ARR and 100+ sales reps.

How to read it:
→ Horizontal axis: our 10 deciles of customers, from the 10% with the worst results to the 10% with the best
→ Each bar: the volume of messages sent
→ Vertical axis (line): the average reply rate

What we see:
There's a clear negative correlation between volume and reply rate.
The fewer messages teams send, the higher their reply rate.

In detail:
→ The first group shows that the bottom 10% aren't sending enough messages, or just lack adoption. They'll probably churn unless they use lemcoach.
→ Then across the other 9 deciles, each one has lower volume and a higher reply rate than the previous one.

If this doesn't show you that it's better to do less but better, I don't know what will.

Spoiler: it's not the spray & pray "AI SDR Agent" that will solve this.

Slack, Figma, Notion, Dropbox, Datadog. They all started PLG. 
None of them stayed PLG. Here's why:

PLG is great for small customers. 

Low CAC, high scalability, self-serve magic. 

But as your product improves, you start attracting bigger companies. 
And enterprise buyers don't convert on PLG products. 
They need help. They need sales.

This is where PLG + Sales-Assisted comes in. 

And I'm convinced it's the ultimate state for SaaS:
→ PLG for small customers. Low CAC, fully self-serve, scales beautifully.
→ Sales-assisted for larger customers. You can segment by geo, industry, company size and organize your team around it.

This combination maximizes conversion across every customer segment.

Since we added a sales motion at lemlist, our growth has never been stronger. 

We grew +70% last year. PLG + Sales-Assisted together.

But here's the hard part:

In PLG, everything is streamlined: credit card payment, automated provisioning and payment retries.

But when sales gets involved, you start dealing with:
→ Custom quotes
→ Custom terms and legal discussions
→ Discounts and approval workflows
→ Custom billing terms and payment methods

You go from a scalable model to a non-scalable model overnight. 

And that's where most companies struggle.

The good news is that with the right tech, you can now build scalable systems even for sales-assisted motions.

On March 11, I'm co-hosting an event in Paris with Lucas Bédout (CEO at Hyperline) and the Business Operations Network to dig into exactly this. 

How to build a hybrid revenue engine that scales.

Free for BON members. 

Link to register in comments.

cc Victoria Dalleau 🙏

Nothing prevents you from sending 10 follow-ups. 
And yes, you'll get more replies.  But it's doing invisible harm to your outreach.

If you look at reply rates by number of follow-ups, the pattern is clear. 
Each follow-up increases your chance of getting a reply. Even a little.

But the incremental gain drops fast. 
After 4 follow-ups, you're barely moving the needle.

And here's what most people miss.

Every extra follow-up increases the chance your leads mark you as spam. 

Not by replying. 
By hitting that little spam button because they're annoyed.

When that happens, it hits your domain and email reputation. 
Your emails start landing in spam more often. 
Not just for that lead. For everyone.

This is the classic trap where short-term gains quietly destroy long-term results.

More follow-ups today = Fewer emails delivered tomorrow.

I have been a CRO with 150+ people and I can tell you that sales coaching is broken because of 3 things:

1/ Managers are never able to see more than 10% of calls from their reps.

2/ Managers are biased, like any human, and I have seen decent performers be treated as low performers because of a poor fit with their manager.

3/ Managers have different methods and preferences, which creates lack of consistency across sales orgs about what good looks like.

And this creates massive frustration.

Reps lose trust in leadership.

Leaders make bad decisions about who to promote or fire.

Good people leave.

And this leads to revenue loss and drop in talent density.

But today, AI can help fixing this.

At lemlist, we now record and transcript all our calls.

Every single one gets evaluated against the same criteria.

We use the SPICED methodology, so AI automatically evaluates all qualification criteria. 

All with Claap.

Things like: Did they surface the impact of the problem? Did they qualify budget properly? Did they ask about decision makers?

Every rep gets a score for each call across all these criteria, linked to actual moments in their calls they can review.

This allows us to significantly improve fairness and consistency.

Feedback is now trusted way more than before.

Because it's based on 100% of their work, not a random sample.

And managers can finally coach with data instead of gut feeling.

AI isn't replacing sales managers. It's making them way more effective.

Sales training just got an upgrade.

Claap

6 examples why short-term growth almost always comes at the expense of long-term growth:

→ Hiring the least worst candidate because you need someone now vs. waiting for the best even if it takes 6 more months. 
Impact compounds. An A-player generates 100X more value than a B-player.

→ Sending 10 follow-ups to squeeze out more replies vs. stopping at 4. 
Each extra follow-up barely moves the needle but increases spam reports. 
Your domain reputation takes the hit and deliverability drops for everyone.

→ Blasting your entire TAM in one month to hit pipeline targets vs. working accounts in waves. 
You get a short spike, then you've burned your brand with every account.

→ Cutting product investment to boost short-term margins or hire more Sales. Customers don't leave immediately. 
They leave 12 months later when a competitor ships what you didn't.

→ Discounting to close a deal before quarter end vs. holding your price. 
You hit this quarter's number, but you've trained the buyer to expect discounts. Next renewal, they push harder. 
They talk to their friends. 
And your average deal size erodes across the whole pipeline.

→ Not promoting a great rep with manager potential because they're bringing in short-term revenue. 
They'll leave 6 months later. And you'll end up hiring someone less good.

Every one of these looks like the right call in the moment. The cost just shows up later.

That said, there are moments where you need to move fast and accept some debt. 

The interesting part is knowing when you're making a conscious trade-off vs. when you're just not seeing the long-term cost.

As a CEO, when people agree with me too easily, I don't take it as a compliment. I take it as something to question.

Things I don't expect from people in the team:

→ Telling I'm right
→ Liking my LinkedIn posts
→ Being overly positive on my ideas and initiatives
→ Nodding in meetings
→ Sugarcoating bad news
→ Using my notes / inputs as is without re-working them
... and certainly not telling me I'm smart, or giving any compliment

Here's what I actually value:
→ Saying what you think
→ Thinking on your own before defaulting to the group
→ Coming to me when you disagree or don't understand, especially when it's uncomfortable
→ Bringing problems early and as they are
→ Having a point of view and defending it

I recently listened to a podcast from an experienced CEO who said his biggest mistake was surrounding himself with people who gave him compliments but weren't truly competent at their jobs.

The best people I've worked with were never those who constantly agreed with me, they were the one who made me change my mind.

This week, a bot fixed its first production bug at lemlist. 

Here's what happened:

A user double-clicked a delete button. That sent two requests at the same time.  The API returned a 409 conflict error.

Our bot detected it in the logs, investigated the root cause, traced the code path, wrote the fix, and submitted a pull request with the right reviewers assigned.

Total human involvement: reviewing and merging the PR.

In the meantime, we also had 3 features shipped to production by... Product Managers.

A year ago, we never thought this would happen so fast.

I was talking to a friend, a developer with 20+ years of experience.
He told me his workflow has completely changed.

Before, he spent most of his time in "flow." Going from one coding step to the next.
Now, he spends more time thinking about the overall architecture. 
Then he works with AI to develop the different parts. Then he reviews the code. Makes sure the logic is right.


And yet, we're still hiring developers.

Because our bet is that the job isn't disappearing. It's shifting. 
And good developers will always be a scarce resource required to build great products.

You could argue AI will improve so fast it won't need developers at all.

My gut says you'll always need people who understand systems deeply enough to work with AI.

But we'll see. What's your take?

Sending a LinkedIn message in a sequence increases email reply rate by 38%. 
And no, that's not a typo. I'm talking about email replies. 

LinkedIn reply rates are averaging 15%, vs. 1-3% for emails (up to 15X higher)

But here's what we found across 35M leads:

When you add LinkedIn steps to an email sequence, your emails start getting more replies too.

The prospect sees your name on LinkedIn. 
Maybe they check your profile.
Maybe they read your message.

Then your email lands, and you're not a stranger anymore.

That familiarity is worth +38% on your email reply rate.
This data is coming from 35M leads that we analyzed at lemlist.

This is pure facts that multi-channel is the right way to do outbound today, and why we build lemlist to include as many channels as possible.

---

Most outbound teams find out about deliverability issues weeks too late. 

By then, the damage is done, your pipeline is already melting.

Then what I call the "circle of short pipeline" starts:
→ Reps have fewer deals
→ They desperately want to close the ones that are open
→ They start looking desperate
→ Prospects feel it
→ They ghost you
→ You lose deals you could have won
→ CRM reason: "no decision"

This is why fixing deliverability issues fast is critical.

But the problem is getting visibility on what's actually happening. 

Deliverability depends on multiple factors: technical setup, domain and email reputation, copy, data quality, bounce rates, and more.

This is why we just shipped the Deliverability Hub in lemlist.

One place to see everything:
→ Delivered vs. spam for warm-up emails
→ Delivered vs. bounced for outreach emails
→ Deliverability scores by mailbox and domain
→ Reputation issues spotted early, before they tank your results
→ Filters by timeframe, mailbox, and provider

No more guessing. No more juggling. 
Everything is in one place.

We already have great feedbacks about it, kudos to the team 🔥

Fractional CFO | Helping Founders Scale Beyond $2M ARR with Strategic Finance & OKRs | Founder @ FounderFirst

There's a point where you just can't wing it anymore.

Usually around $2M ARR.

When growth is real, but messy. When the business works (but the numbers don't fully add up). When pricing gets risky, hiring gets heavy, and suddenly every "quick decision" starts showing up in your burn.

That's where I come in.

I step in as your Fractional CFO to help turn momentum into structure.

We build pricing, capital allocation, operating constraints, and targets the team actually runs on.

Over the last decade, I've worked with 20+ early and growth-stage companies, both VC-backed and bootstrapped, across SaaS, fintech, edtech, and agencies. I've helped scale revenue from $500K to $20M, grow teams from 10 to 200+, and build finance and ops foundations from scratch.

I've been in the room for pivots, layoffs, down rounds, near-bankruptcies, and exits - not as an observer, but owning the financial logic behind what happened next.

In 2024, I founded FounderFirst to go deeper with this work, helping teams build finance that actually supports growth, long before they're ready for a full-time CFO. Since then, we've partnered with 70+ founder-led startups and SMBs, including leading accelerators and venture studios.

That's the professional story. Here's the real one.

I grew up in Dimitrovgrad, Bulgaria - no English, no tech exposure, no obvious path.

At 17, I taught myself English.
At 19, I earned a scholarship to study in the U.S.

I arrived with a suitcase, less than $300, and no backup plan, and did whatever scrappy thing it took to stay afloat.

Eventually, I found my way into startups. The chaos, the ownership, the pressure, for the first time, I felt like I fit.

What started as survival became a decade of building behind the scenes.

Now I bring all of it - the scrappiness, the strategy, and the systems - to founders who are ready for real financial leadership.

When I'm not deep in spreadsheets or board decks, you'll find me hiking a national park or nose-deep in a book. (Always open to recommendations.)

If the next set of decisions actually matters, let's talk: https://bit.ly/3NEYTqT

Mariya Valeva

Jeff Bezos always left one chair empty in Amazon meetings.
That chair was for the most important person in the room:
the customer.

Not as a gimmick.
Not as a story to tell on podcasts.
But as a forcing function.
Every strategy discussion.
Every product decision.
Every uncomfortable trade-off.

All of it had to start with one question:
“How does this serve the customer?”
That empty chair is a reminder most companies forget once they start scaling.
Amazon didn’t.

Bezos built the company around four principles that sound simple, but are brutally hard to live by:

1. Customer obsession
Not competitor obsession. Not internal politics.
The customer always came first, even when it hurt in the short term.

2. Long-term thinking
Bezos was willing to look “wrong” for years if it meant being right for decades.
Short-term pain was the price of long-term advantage.

3. Relentless innovation
“If it’s not broken, break it anyway.”
Amazon didn’t wait for disruption - it created it, often cannibalizing its own successes before someone else could.

4. High standards
“Good enough” was never good enough.
Because standards, once lowered, almost never come back up.

The lesson isn’t to copy Amazon.
It’s to steal the discipline.

Ask yourself:
- Who is the “empty chair” in your leadership meetings?
- What gets optimized when no one is watching?
- Are your decisions serving today’s comfort or tomorrow’s customer?

Culture isn’t what you say you value.
It’s what your decisions protect when trade-offs appear.
And the empty chair makes sure you never forget that.

*video credits: simplyougrow insta

Fractional CFO for B2B SaaS ($2M+ ARR) | Founder @FounderFirst

He slept on a friend’s couch for 2.5 years.
Sold his furniture.
Burned through his savings.
Watched his company almost die, more than once.
And yet, he built one of the most addictive products in history.

This is the story of Riccardo Zacconi.
An Italian immigrant who left home, moved across Europe, landed in Sweden and bet everything on an idea no one was taking seriously at the time: casual mobile games.

Before Candy Crush, there was chaos.
After the dot-com crash, his company (then called Midasplayer) was weeks away from shutting down.
Investors had disappeared.
Cash flow was fragile.
At one point, a payment provider threatened to cut off 50% of their revenue overnight.
That wasn’t a growth problem.
That was an existential one.
Most founders would have quit.
Zacconi didn’t.

He and his team kept building.
Not one product.
Not ten.
Over 200 games.
Most failed financially.
Some barely covered costs.
A few generated enough cash to keep the lights on.
This wasn’t “innovation for fun.”
It was financial triage.

King couldn’t afford to chase vanity metrics.
Every game had to answer hard questions:
- Does it monetize?
- Does it retain?
- Does it pay for the team building it?
They learned unit economics the hard way, by almost running out of money.

By 2005, something rare happened:
King became profitable.
That single fact changed everything.
Profitability meant:
- No dependency on investor moods
- No reckless burn
- No false sense of security
It bought them time, the most undervalued asset in startups.
Time to refine monetization.
Time to master retention curves.
Time to understand what actually scales without killing the business.

In 2011, Bubble Witch Saga crossed 1M daily active users, with real revenue behind it.
In 2012, Candy Crush Saga launched.
Not as a gamble, but as the result of a decade of financial discipline.

The outcome:
• 300M+ players worldwide
• One of the highest-grossing mobile games ever
• King IPO’d in 2014
• Acquired by Activision Blizzard in 2016 for $5.9B

What looks like an overnight success was actually 10+ years of survival math:
- protecting cash
- controlling burn
- learning when to say no
- staying alive long enough for “yes” to matter

This is the part immigrant founders understand early:
You don’t get infinite runway.
You don’t get bailout rounds.
You don’t get to be sloppy with money.
You either build something that sustains itself, or you’re done.

Empires aren’t built at the exit.
They’re built in the years when the only KPI that matters is not dying.
And almost no one sees those years.

Steve Jobs didn’t save Apple with more features.
He saved it with people.

When he returned in 1997, Apple was close to bankruptcy.
Too many managers.
Too many mediocre projects.
Too much noise.

So he did something most leaders are afraid of:
He cut ruthlessly.
Because B-players cost more than no players at all.

Jobs’ rule was simple and brutal:
Only hire people you’d gladly work for if roles were reversed.
No egos.
No passengers.
No “good enough.”
He believed small, elite teams beat large average ones every single time.
That’s why core product teams stayed under 100 people - with overlapping skills, extreme ownership, and zero excuses.

And the bar wasn’t just talent.
It was commitment.
“We’re here to put a dent in the universe.”
That level of belief is uncomfortable.
It repels people who want safety.
And it attracts people who want impact.
The result?
iMac.
iPod.
iPhone.
iPad.
Not incremental improvements - entire industries reinvented.

Fast forward to today:
Apple’s market cap sits north of $4 trillion.

The real lesson isn’t about tech.
It’s about leadership.
Great teams don’t come from hiring fast.
They come from hiring intentionally.
And most scaling problems I see today?
They’re not strategy problems.
They’re people problems disguised as growth.

Small teams.
Clear standards.
Shared obsession with the mission.
That’s how you build something that lasts.
Great teams don’t just build products.
They change the world.

*video credits: multiprenur insta

16 restaurants closed.
456 people without a job.
And the business was still making £190m.

That’s what happened to TGIF’s UK business.
But this wasn’t a sudden January collapse.
It was a structural failure that finally became visible.

On the outside, nothing looked dramatic.
The brand was still there.
Customers were still walking in.
Revenue hadn’t fallen off a cliff.
But somewhere between Christmas trading and year-end numbers, the decision had already been made..

→ The warning sign wasn’t decline. It was “fine.”
TGIF UK revenue was only down ~3% YoY.
In hospitality, that’s not stability.
That’s erosion hiding in plain sight.
Flat revenue in an inflationary year quietly destroys margin.

→ Costs rose where flexibility didn’t exist
UK casual dining absorbed:
- 8–10%+ labour inflation
- Energy costs that reset permanently higher
- Business rates and rents locked into long leases
These aren’t costs you can “optimize” away.
They compound whether sales grow or not.

→ Pricing power lagged reality
TGIF UK couldn’t raise prices fast enough without losing volume.
So instead of passing costs on, margins absorbed the shock - month after month.
Nothing broke loudly.
It just kept getting tighter.

→ The estate was built for a different world
Many UK locations were legacy bets:
- Pre-Covid footfall assumptions
- Shopping centres and edge-of-town sites
- High fixed rent relative to sales
Some sites weren’t underperforming.
They were structurally wrong.
Those 16 closures weren’t sudden failures - they were the tail that had been dragging the whole business down.

→ Debt removed time
The UK operator was carrying ~£25–30m of net debt.
That meant:
- Free cash went to survival, not reinvention
- Refurbs slowed
- Systems aged
- Optionality disappeared
Debt doesn’t kill businesses.
It kills waiting.

→ Now, let’s move to the US business
Same brand. Same menu. Same logo.
Very different outcome.
In the US, TGIF had already shifted risk outward:
- Heavier franchising
- Fewer corporate leases
- More royalty-based income
- Less balance-sheet exposure
When costs rose, pain was fragmented across franchisees.
In the UK, it pooled centrally.
That’s why the US survived.
Not because it was healthier, but because it was structured to absorb failure.

→ January forced the reset
By early 2026, there was no gradual fix left.
So the solution wasn’t a turnaround plan.
It was a pre-pack administration:
- 16 loss-making sites closed
- Estate reduced to 33 restaurants
- 456 jobs lost, ~1,384 preserved
- Business reset under the global TGIF brand owner

This wasn’t brand failure.
It was financial triage.

Brands don’t fail evenly.
They fail where rigidity meets leverage,
and geography decides where the damage shows up first.

If your revenue went flat tomorrow,
would you know which part of your business would break,
or would you find out in January?

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