Founder @ lemlist

My name is Guillaume Moubeche but everybody calls me "G."

Here's more about me:

- Founded 2 businesses: One valued at $150M+ after 4 years, the other one sold at $600k ARR. 

- Grew a suite of SaaS without funding from $0-$45M ARR and $15M+ in EBITDA (products include: lemlist, lemwarm, taplio, tweethunter, lemcal, Claap)

- Invested millions of dollars in 25+ companies

- Acquired 2 companies in 8-figure deals

- Authored a book - "The $150M Secret"

- Featured in 200+ media outlets

- Host of "BILLIONS" where I interview the people behind billion dollar companies

I write content about what I learn ✌️

2018: You’ve already failed 3 businesses are you sure you don’t want to take a “real” job?

2019: lemlist's market is way too competitive, you’ll get crushed eventually…

2020: It’s not because you’re growing 2 digits Month over Month that you have product market fit…

2021: The $150M valuation you got was simply because of the current market trend

2022: I don’t know why you’d acquire a company like Taplio it doesn’t make any sense

2024: Congrats on the $23M in ARR but I don’t think your market is big enough for you to grow more…

2025: $45M in ARR and $15M in EBITDA is insane! Love what you’re doing!

Now: Are you guys still hiring?

“If people are doubting how far you can go, go so far that you can’t hear them anymore”

Guillaume Moubeche

👋 I'm G., and here's my story in a nutshell:

- Founded 2 businesses: one sold at $600k ARR, the other valued at $150M+
- Authored a book - "The $150M Secret"
- Featured in 200+ media outlets

📈 $0-$40M ARR in 7 yrs without funding with lempire (lemlist, lemwarm, taplio, tweethunter, lemcal)

💸 Sharing my learnings on Profit-led Growth: the only resource you need to grow a profitable SaaS business

What you'll get by following me:

🚀 Actionable tips to grow a profitable SaaS business

🔥 Transparent & actionable advice, no fluff

💼 Exclusive updates on lempire’s growth

I’ll be posting business growth tips and tricks - so hit that “Follow” button!

Peace, love & profit ✌️

G.

Founder @ lemlist (0 to $150m valuation in 4 years) | Investor | Host of @ BILLIONS

9 advice I wish I had received before bootstrapping my startup to $45M in ARR and $15M in EBITDA

1- Stop comparing yourself to others
I’ve met people who skyrocketed to $1M in ARR in 1 month and then plateaued… 
While others struggled for 7 years to reach their first $1M in ARR and then skyrocketed to $10M in less than 2 years.
Each journey is different.

2- Everything compounds
Little actions can compound BIG times over time. 
That works with sales and marketing but also with toxic behaviors. 
So make sure to watch for both as they can either kill your company or make it skyrocket 🚀

3- Growth is a S-curve. If you don’t plan for it - you’ll plateau
Getting initial traction is extremely hard. 
But I thought that once we had reached product market fit, it would be a walk in the park… 
In reality, it’s not.
You always need to find new ways to find customers. Otherwise, you’ll plateau.

4- Love the game
Don’t hate competitors. Business is not a “war”.
You win a lot more when you enjoy the ride and meet cool people along the way.
Business is a game, and it should be fun. If it’s not, change the rules.

5- What took you here won’t take you there…
Doing more of the same thing is great, BUT only for a certain time. If you don’t try and experiment ruthlessly, you’ll get stuck. Innovation is the key to continuous fast growth.

6- Don’t compete, be unique
Peter Thiel said, “Competition is for losers”. 
And the best way to have 0 competition is to be unique. 
To be unique, be yourself, be passionate about the problem you solve, and help as many people as you can.

7- Document everything from day 1
Everyone believes that Marco Polo discovered the Silk Road. 
He didn’t. 
BUT, he was the first to document it. 
The more you document your journey, the more people will connect with you and trust you.

8- If it doesn’t kill you, don’t overreact
I used to see every single problem or bump in the road as the end of the world.
In the end, if you switch your mindset to a solution-centric approach, you’ll see that there isn’t any problem in the world that can’t be solved.

9- Education is the best marketing
I’ve realized that building a SaaS to solve a problem is not enough. 
Education is far more important and can be a huge driver for growth (acquisition + retention). 
If you show people how to solve their problem and it works - then paying for your product or service will be a no-brainer.

Hope that helps ✌️

Arthur Waller sold his first company to Booking.com in his twenties, and instead of retiring, he came back to build Pennylane.

Today, they raised at a $4,2Bn valuation but that's not the most impressive...

I had a chat with Arthur and he told me things he never talks about:

- like the exact structure of when he sold his first company (and how much money he actually got)

- Why he gave more than $30m in cash to his employees via secondary deals (and what happens afterwards)

- How do they split equity between the 7 co-founders (and the struggle that can come with it)

- How they managed to raise a seed round with almost no dilution

- Why and when you should take cash out as a founder (and also how much)

- The secret sauce of Pennylane explosive growth

And a lot more... With full transparency 😍

I'll put the link to this new BILLIONS episode in the comments!

Enjoy ❤️

10 brutal truths, most people will not want to talk about:

1- Offering “Remote work” is not a luxury, it's a necessity. Flexibility is the new norm.

2- The most successful people often ignore advice. They follow their intuition and learn from their own mistakes.

3- The LinkedIn "open to work" badge is a bad hiring signal.

4- Your college degree is not a guarantee for success. Real-world skills and networking are far more valuable.

5- AI is taking jobs, not just making people more productive. Companies want profits, AI can increase it by replacing jobs.

6- Personal branding is more important than your company's brand. People connect with people, not logos.

7- LinkedIn will give you “entrepreneur depression”. You will think that if you don’t make a million dollar overnight you’re a loser.

8- Your quality of life decreases when you screen time goes up

9- There is no such thing as a "self-made" entrepreneur. Every successful person had someone believing in themselves at some point.

10- Outbound sales is the most underrated, and way too often overlooked skills by entrepreneurs. Master it and you’ll build the life you want.

The worst and most popular way of building a startup:

1- Build an MVP without understanding what problem you’re solving and for who

2- Buy an article on TechCrunch to announce the launch

3- Close a few enterprise deals because your besties work there

4- Raise funds

5- Buy another article on TechCrunch to announce you’re “out of beta”

5- Hire more sales

6- Realise that you don’t have product/market fit

7- Fire the sales team

8- Go to your board meeting every quarter promising that the next feature will drive “big growth”

9- Run out of cash

10- “Exit” the company for $0 after 5 years

11- Call yourself an exit SaaS founder for “undisclosed amount of money”

12- Become a LinkedIn influencer

The best way to build a startup:

1- Find the problem you’re truly passionate about

2- Talk to 20+ people having this problem

3- Find that ONE thing that can solve it for them

4- Have people pay as soon as you’ve launched the BETA

5- Build in public from day 1 to spend to build a strong audience (it costs $0)

6- Keep a lean and agile team

7- Be profit-focused to make sure to understand the unit economics of your business

8- Scale at your own pace

Build to last ✌️

At 18, Harry Stebbings started a podcast in his bedroom. 

Today, he manages $400M and has invested in several unicorns.

Not because he went to Stanford. 

Not because he worked at Goldman. 

Because he turned a microphone into the world's best deal flow machine.

I asked him what most VCs would never answer:
- Which deals did he pass on that became a unicorn later
- The exact moment he realized content was better than an MBA for deal access
- How interviewing 800+ founders taught him the one trait all billion $ founders share

What struck me most about Harry:

He's interviewed every legendary VC. 

Studied every playbook. 

Then ignored them all and built his own.

The Twenty Minute VC became the place where Sequoia partners and first-time founders all waited their turn to talk.

Now those founders come back to him with their next companies. 

Now, he also writes bigger checks than the VCs he used to interview.

Our full conversation is now live - link in comments 👇

If you're building anything, you need to hear how storytelling can become your best source of capital.

If you want to get hired in an early-stage startup (less than 10 people), DO NOT send your resume to the CEO

Instead, do this:

Send the CEO an email including:

1- What you want to do at the startup
—> “I want to write content to help more people learn about how to do sales prospecting”

2- Explain WHY
—> “I feel like "content" is not something you’ve invested heavily into so far, and from my research, there are around 200,000 people searching about these topics each month”

3- Explain WHY “YOU”
—> “I’ve learned a lot about SEO, and I know how to write articles that rank on the first page of Google like {{example}}”

That’s it - you’re now part of the 1% of candidates who stand out!

No need to have attended the best schools or have any degree tbh.

Startups are always looking for doers and people who can deliver results, and if you've never had a job before or want to change job, do this 👇

Learn valuable skills online (SEO, Copywriting, Sales etc...) apply these skills, and get results.

-> If you're learning SEO, create an article that will rank on a topic you like with a free blog.

-> If you learn sales, book a meeting with someone you admire

-> If you learn "copywriting", start writing content on LinkedIn on this topic

Tl,dr: Show, don't tell.

-> Simple, yet soooo rare (And I've received 10s of thousands of applications in the last years...)

P.S: Weekends are usually the best time to send that email 😉

How I used to define success:
- Being busy all the time
- Shiny objects
- Hustle 24/7
- Wearing suits

How I define success now:
- Sleeping 8 hours
- Working on projects I'm passionate about
- Being surrounded by people I love
- Exercising daily
- Having no recurring meetings

True freedom and success come from controlling your time and who you spend it with ❤️

5 steps to being a top performer in your company:

1- Meet your deadlines. 
--> Reliability will make you stand out.

2- Be positive. 
--> Keeping a high energy level in the team is what will allow going through tough times.

3- Ask for help when you need it. 
--> Speed is one of the key success drivers of a startup, don’t get stuck.

4- Be solution driven. 
--> If you bring up a problem, always come up with a potential solution.

5- Be transparent and don’t hide stuff. 
--> If you made a mistake, own it. Your CEO has made more of them so it’s OK he’ll understand.

✌️

“I remember him when he first started and I was one of the first to support him”

When you become “successful” everyone who’s met you once in their life will say something like that,

but here’s the truth 👇

That person probably never supported you in the first place…

And most people will not support you along the way.

Even people who you call “friends”.

Let me tell you a story 👇

When I launched lemlist I remember a friend asking me how did our launch on Product Hunt go?

I told him the whole story and then I asked him how did he know about it?

He told me that he saw my post on LinkedIn

After checking my post, I realized that he didn’t like or comment the post…

And that happened to me a few times…

Should I change friends?

Probably… 🤣

But after talking to other of my entrepreneur friends, I realized that they don’t get too much support from their friends as well.

It seems that it’s much easier for people to like a video of a cute puppy on instagram than supporting a friend who’s launching their business.

In my opinion, people don’t do it for the following reasons:

1) Seeing you taking risks is a reminder that they’re not taking any

2) Supporting you means vouching for you when they might not understand exactly what you do

3) Seing you succeed is a reminder that they might have taken the wrong route

In any case if you need support from your friends —> ask for it.

And if your friends are launching or growing their business, like and comment their posts.

It will take you 20s of your time but it will mean the world to them.

✌️

14 Brutal truths you need to hear as a CEO:

1- You don’t have a “working from home” issue, you have a trust issue.

2- What you call “process” is usually unnecessary bureaucracy that slows down decision-making and reduces creativity.

3- Prioritizing short-term profits over employee well-being is a recipe for long-term disaster.

4- The worst time to offer a raise is when someone has already handed in their notice.

5- If your entry-level job requires experience... then it’s not an "entry-level" job. It’s a normal job paid poorly.

6- Most meetings are useless especially if everyone's secretly checking their email under the table.

7- Employee retention isn't just about salary; it's about respect, recognition, and opportunities for growth.

9- People don’t just quit jobs, they quit managers.

10- Company values on the wall mean nothing if they're not reflected in everyday actions.

11- Replacing someone will cost you more than to pay them what they were worth in the first place.

12- Trust isn't built through surveillance; it's built through transparency and mutual respect.

13- Your "urgent" tasks aren't as urgent as you think; learn to prioritize effectively.

14- Empty promises of promotions and raises will lead to resentment, not loyalty.

Remember:
If your team is your #1 priority,
They’ll make your business theirs.

✌️

7 truths that will save your startup (or kill it faster):

1) "If everyone likes your product, no one loves it." 
--> Better to have 100 obsessed users than 10,000 who will forget you exist.

2) "Fire fast or suffer forever." 
--> That person you're 'giving another chance' for the 5th times? They're killing your company.

3) "Revenue before features. Always." 
--> Startups with perfect products can die. Startups with profit live.

4) "Your price is your brand." 
--> Charge $10 = support nightmare. Charge $1000 = strategic partner.

5) "Every overnight success took many years." 
--> Year 1-2: Nobody cares. 
--> Year 2-3: Something clicks. 
-->Year 4: "How'd you grow so fast?"

6) "Your "TODO" list is lying to you." 
--> If it's been there 30+ days, delete it. It's already dead.

7) "Winners ship daily. Losers ship perfectly." 
--> The speed at which you can iterate will determine how fast you can grow.

I’ve talked to 50+ VC-backed startup founders, and you’d be amazed at how many people “didn’t know the rules of the game” when they raised their first round…

I’ve also invested money as a LP (Limited Partner) in a few VC funds to better understand the ins and outs.

So, here’s a quick recap of the “golden rules” for everyone who’s thinking about raising.

VC or Venture Capital is a form of private equity and a type of financing for startup companies with long-term growth potential.

VCs usually manage the money of their LPs, promising to return 3 to 5 times the investment over 7 years.

To make it simple: If you give them $100k, they will give you back $300k in 7 years (or at least that’s what you hope for when investing).

To invest in companies, VCs have to raise funds from their LPs.

But how exactly do they raise funds?

Well, exactly like entrepreneurs, they need to convince investors.

And the best way to do so is to have an impressive track record (this is important for later), either because they’ve worked in other funds before or thanks to their network.

Once they’ve raised a fund, they usually invest it over 18 to 24 months.

This is where it becomes interesting…

Remember, LPs will only get a return on their investment in 5 to 7 years.

But one fund is usually invested over 18 months.

So what’s happening during that gap time?

Well, VCs usually raise another fund.

And another one every 18 months…

But how can they build a track record if they usually want to exit after 5 to 7 years (as they promised their LPs?)

Well, they usually give a "valuation" to their portfolio.

And for them to show that their portfolio value is growing, they need two things:

1- They need startups to raise another round at a higher valuation

2- They need a liquidity event to exit (startup is getting acquired - an IPO or selling to other investors)

And that’s where most founders get confused…

There’s a simple reason why VCs pressure founders to spend the money they’ve raised “fast” OR raise another round…

VCs play a “portfolio” game where their portfolio must be growing so they can raise another round.

When founders play an “all-in” game.

VCs want you to take the maximum risks possible because they are fine losing 7 times out of 10.

But as a founder, are you fine taking that level of risk knowing that you could be in control and have a lot more chance to succeed if you decide to take a bit more time to achieve your ambitious goals?

Having invested millions in startups directly, I usually advise founders to have a clear path to profitability before you run out of cash, no matter what investors might tell you.

This means you can take risks with the money you raised while still knowing you're in control.

That gives you both optionality, unlimited lifetime and leverage for your next (potential) round. 

P.S: I have nothing against the VC-backed route. I just feel like it’s important to know which game you’re playing 💪

In the last years, I’ve invested millions of $ in 25+ startups

And here’s my #1 learning 👇

You can be broke even if your business is making tons of money

For years I’ve seen people flexing on the internet about their revenue numbers
But when you dig deep into a company's financials, you realize that many companies (especially the ones that raised a lot of money in 2020-2022) will never build a sustainable business.

I’ve seen founders repeating every quarter that they will make their unit economics works.

But if all you’ve known is that it’s OK to acquire a customer for $100 when its LTV is $50 THEN you’re driving your company into a wall…

And spoiler alert, NO, your customer acquisition cost will not drastically decrease out of nowhere just because of “scale” (it’s often the opposite)

I know that everyone feels like they’re at war with their competitor and that it’s all about the “winner takes all” mentality…

But from a pure down-to-earth perspective reflecting on my experience, it’s not the case.

Often markets are big enough for several players.

And the ones that outlast the rest are often the profitable ones.

It’s your role as a founder to control the profitability of your business because if you don’t, you’ll simply lose everything you’ve been working for for so many years…

✌️

People think that because a competitor has 500 features, then you’ll never be able to compete…

They’re wrong.

It’s your biggest advantage.

After investing in 25+ startups from different industries, here's the pattern:

Every market leader eventually forgets why customers chose them. 

They add. 

They optimize. 

They enterprise-ify. 

They abandon the 90% who just wanted something that worked.

Remember:

Stripe didn't reinvent payments
--> they made them work in 7 lines of code

Notion didn't revolutionize productivity
--> they made it less painful

Claap didn’t transform call recordings
--> they replaced the tedious work of filling your CRM after a sales call…

Red ocean strategy: Find where everyone's overbuilding. 

Then build half of it. 

Beautifully.

Revolutionary? No. 

Profitable? Yes.

What won’t make your startup successful:

- Your $5k logo designed by an “award-winning agency”
- The PR firm you paid $15k to get your article in Forbes
- The pitch deck you spent three weeks perfecting before you had a single user
- Buying more swag so your team feels part of a "family"

What will?
- Finding a real problem to solve
- Shipping a solution fast
- Doing outbound  
- Charging money on day 1

Remember:
Uber didn’t start with a brand bible.

Stripe’s first homepage looked like it was built in a dorm room (because it was).

Airbnb started with air mattresses.

You don’t need sleek. You need signal.

You don’t need polish. You need payment.

Fix one problem.

For one type of person.

With one sharp offer.

That’s the game.

Not branding. Not funding.

Just pain, solution, and a price tag.

Simple, not easy...

Viktoriya S.

I've invested millions of $$$ in 25+ companies in the last years, coming from a pure bootstrapped background.

Here's what I'm seeing with VC-backed companies in the AI era:

1- Win Bigger or Lose Faster
The VC game was already binary. Now it's extreme.
A $30M exit? Great for a bootstrapper.
For a VC-backed AI company that raised $50M+ to pay for compute and talent? Catastrophic.
The bar moved from "unicorn or bust" to "decacorn or irrelevant."

2- The AI Gold Rush Created New Delusions
2021 was "growth at all costs."
2024-2025 became "AI in the pitch deck at all costs."
I've seen founders rebrand existing products as "AI-powered" to raise.
Others burn through $10M in compute before finding product-market fit.
The investors who got burned in 2022-2023 are now making the same mistakes with "AI" instead of "growth."

3- Moats Evaporated Overnight
Your competitive advantage used to last years.
Now it lasts months.
What took a team of 10 engineers six months to build in 2022 can be replicated by one founder with Claude/ChatGPT in two weeks.
VC-backed companies that raised on their "proprietary technology" are discovering they're just expensive wrappers around OpenAI or Anthropic.

4- The Compute Arms Race Nobody Talks About
High growth was overrated.
High compute spend is the new trap.
VCs funded companies that spent $500K/month on GPUs before having $100K/month in revenue.
The unit economics don't matter if you're "building the future."
Until the money runs out. Then it matters a lot.

5- The Wrong Metrics, Again
Instead of obsessing over ARR growth to raise the next round, founders now obsess over "AI metrics" that mean nothing:
- Number of AI features shipped
- Tokens processed
- "AI-generated revenue"
Meanwhile, the fundamentals —> can you acquire customers profitably, do they stay, do they pay more over time etc… are still ignored.

The AI era gave bootstrapped founders superpowers (build faster, leaner teams, better products) while some VC-backed founders are playing a game that can be extremely dangerous (but also with a much bigger reward).

9 things I wish a friend had told me about being an entrepreneur 👇

1- Being an entrepreneur is a game where you set your own rules
For some people, success is about raising the most money and getting PR.
For others, it’s about building an awesome team of people they love working with…
Don’t compare yourself to others - play your own game.

2- Treat your energy with the most care
Energy vampires are real.
You must avoid them at all costs.
When hiring, only hire people who you could work with for 10+ years.

3- It’s all about sales
Whether you need to sell your product to your first customer.
Whether you need to sell the vision to your team.
Whether you want to sell the job to a potential hire.
Whether you want to exit and sell the company.
It’s all about sales.
Whether you like it or not.
So if you want to do good, you gotta practice early 💪

4- If it feels way too hard, maybe it’s time for a change
I’m a hardcore grinder, and I don’t really believe in balance. (not saying that’s for everyone, though)
BUT if eventually, it feels way too hard, for way too long. Maybe it’s time to change.
I’ve seen way too many super-smart people working on shit that didn’t make sense for years simply because they “wanted to prove everyone else wrong”

5- Always be hiring
Some of the best people I’ve hired are people I’ve met 2-3 years prior to hiring them...
I always make sure to have people I would love working with in the pipe for every key role in my company.

6- Plan for the S-curve
I thought that once you reached product market fit, growth would be exponential forever.
In reality, growth is a S-curve.
This means that eventually, you’ll plateau if you haven’t planned ahead of time.
Because what took you where you are today will not take you where you want to get.

7- Everything compounds
Every small decision can have a HUGE impact over time.
- Having the sense of urgency to ship features faster
- Posting daily on LinkedIn
- Doing the extra mile even if you don’t feel like it
Everything compounds over time 💪

8- Learn to say NO
Focus defines success.
The more you’ll grow, the more opportunities you’ll get.
At first, you want to say YES to everything and everyone.
But the most efficient people are ruthless with their time.

9- Product Market Fit is like a drug
It’s extremely difficult to describe to someone who has never experienced Product Market Fit, but when you do, you know.
Everything is easier during product-market-fit.
Everything is exponential.
All your problems disappear because “growth” solves all problems.
But when it starts to go away - all you crave is to find that feeling again.

✌️

The best strategy comes from asking the best questions.

Here are a few you should avoid, and some that will transform your business:

Not: "How do we beat competitors?" 
But: "What game are only we playing?"

Not: "What features do customers want?" 
But: "What would we build if competitors didn't exist?"

Not: "How do we grow faster?" 
But: "What growth would kill our culture?"

Strategy isn't about being smarter. 

It's about being more focused than others can tolerate.

A few weeks ago I had a chat with one of Europe’s youngest General Partners; Jonathan Userovici from Headline, a global venture firm that spots the next billion-dollar companies before anyone else.

Jonathan’s already backed some of Europe’s fastest-growing unicorns and he’s quietly redefining what it means to invest with both data and instinct.

I wanted to ask him about the behind-the-scenes of fundraising, how he spots future billion-dollar founders, and where the biggest opportunities in AI are.

And of course, we also talked about cash, secondaries, cap tables, and the real economics behind staying hungry once you’re rich on paper.

If you’ve ever wondered how the next generation of billion-dollar investors think, this episode is your blueprint.

I'll put the link in the comments 👇

taplio

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