"Lastly, the most important thing is to remain consistent."
Buckle up for this interview with this French entrepreneur disrupting the way SAAS (Software as a service) companies are led and share success.
We first connected on LinkedIn, where we both shared our experiences running companies with multinational teams. What struck me was the exceptional value Guillaume Moubeche and his team provides within their LinkedIn posts.
This motivated me to read his book, “The 150 Million Secret,” which is filled with practical insights. Guillaume is an exceptional executioner, who turned Lemlist into an essential for anyone in the business of growth hacking and lead generation.
But that’s not all – this maverick businessman has set their sights on a bold goal of leading every one of their 100 employees to the millionaire benchmark, as they build a “Lempire.”
So, let’s get to know this exceptional entrepreneur more as we explore the journey from Lemlist to Lemfinity and beyond.
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Table of Contents
Making all of your employees millionaires is an ambitious project, how did you come up with the idea?
Guillaume Moubeche: In 2018, I took a huge leap of faith: I invested $1000, which was all the money I had at the time, into one single idea.
3.5 years later, my company was valued at $150M and I became a multimillionaire by selling a part of it. But I realized that it didn’t make me feel truly accomplished. To me, being a millionaire is pointless if you don’t use that “power” to make a positive impact on the lives of those around you.
I guess that my company, lempire, does make a positive impact on the lives of our audience, our community, and our clients by working hard every day to help people & businesses grow. We do that every day through the free content we create, the events we organize and the software products we offer.
I truly appreciate all the passion, dedication and hard work my employees put into the company and to fulfill our mission each and every day. lempire wouldn’t be what it is today if it wasn’t for them, and that’s why I want to give something back to each and every member of the team.
I often tell my team that if you work for lempire, it’s because you don’t just want to make a living, you want to make a life. By launching this project of making every employee a millionaire over the next 3-5 years, I hope I’m doing my part to help everyone in the company do so.
Before diving into how you’re going to make that happen, can you tell us a bit about your background?
Guillaume Moubeche: Sure! I’m 31 years old and I’m from France. Ever since I was little, I was good at one thing… doing things I wasn’t supposed to do.
People told me…
- …not to eat too much, because I was too chubby (which was true)
- …not to play basketball because I wasn’t tall enough (technically also true)
- …not to grow a moustache because I can’t pull it off (can’t argue with that one)
- …not to put too much pressure on my dad for our t-shirt business (I did that, too…)
- …not to bootstrap my startup because “it’s not a real startup if you don’t raise any funds” and certainly not to refuse a $30M investment (still did all of that too – and I’d do it again)
The thing is that all of these things made me become the person I am today. I’ve learned that with the right strategy, consistency, and hard work, you can achieve anything you want.
I still have dessert after every meal, I still love playing basketball, I’m closer to my dad than ever before and I’ve built a multi-million dollar business without raising any funds.
The only thing I regret is the moustache – but at least it gives me creative Christmas card material for life.
Making all of my employees millionaires might sound crazy and something that’s never heard of – but why would that mean that it shouldn’t be done?
Fair enough! How are you planning on getting there?
Guillaume Moubeche: I guess it does seem like a pretty lofty ambition, but I have a strategy I’m convinced about. Basically, I gave shares to everyone in the company at the beginning of 2023.
I organized a Zoom call with the whole team to announce it and to explain the project to them and what it takes to turn everyone into a millionaire in the next years. In short: we need to turn lempire into a billion-dollar company.
How are you going to turn your company into a billion-dollar one? So many startups die trying.
Guillaume Moubeche: Essentially, we have two options:
- Generating enough revenue so that private investors will want to acquire your company
- Going public and doing an IPO (initial public offering), which is basically when everyone can buy stocks from your company once you become a publicly traded company
If we want to get acquired for at least 1 billion dollars by a private company, we need to reach between $80M-$100M in ARR. I did some research to see how much revenue comparable B2B SaaS companies that got acquired at $1B+ generated:
- Salesloft got acquired by Vista for $2.2B at just below $100M in ARR
- Pipedrive got acquired by Vista as well, for $1.5B at just below $80M in ARR.
If we choose to go public, there’s a general rule of thumb for software companies: they’re usually able to IPO (go public) when they reach $100M in ARR
To sum up, whichever option we’ll choose, we need to achieve around $100M in ARR. To get there, we need to keep a YoY growth rate between 50-80% over the next 3-5 years and, if we go public, aim for a multiple between 15x-30x.
A lot of start-ups are getting huge valuations and end up failing, though. Why would lempire be any different?
Guillaume Moubeche: While most startup founders focus on the valuation at which they raised, I always focused a lot more on the terms at which we sold some shares in our company. When we got valued at $150m – we had just crossed $10m in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) which meant that we had a 15x multiple.
While we had offers valuing us at 30x the revenue I decided that it was not smart for the long-term vision of the company to have this kind of valuation. The higher your valuation is, the harder it is for you to make your investors happy in the long run as you will have to live up to their expectations.
On top of that, we’ve been profitable from day 1 which technically means that we have an infinite runway and it allows me to be fully in control of the company. We’ve made it to almost $20M in ARR without raising any funds so far and I know that we have the right team, strategy, and hustle to get to $100M in the next 5 years.
The fact that we bootstrapped lempire makes it a very healthy company and increases our chances of succeeding.
Why did you never raise funds in the first place?
Guillaume Moubeche: Profitability is the most sustainable way to grow a business. I started the company with only $1,000 and we were profitable from day one. I invested every single dollar our customers were paying into lempire’s growth.
We never took loans or raised funds because we believed that constraints force creativity. Our biggest competitors raised 100s of millions of dollars, so we had to do things differently (and without money 😅)
By being bootstrapped, we also keep full ownership of the company and can make decisions without any external pressure. We were never obligated to investors and never had to worry about meeting investor expectations.
That means we have more control over our company’s direction and can also be creative and take risks without worrying about outside influence.
By being profitable and growing sustainably, our valuation has increased without any dilution of ownership. We sold only 20% of our shares for $30M, keeping 80% ownership of the company as it continues to grow.
Can you elaborate on the mindset part?
Guillaume Moubeche: Basically, bootstrapping my company has taught me that there are no shortcuts in life and that failure is part of success. I’ve made tons of mistakes along the way, have felt discouraged and scared, but I’ve learned that when you stay consistent in your efforts and focus on the journey instead of the goal, you can achieve anything.
Bootstrapping has also taught me to be smart in my investments, because you simply don’t have a lot of money, at least in the beginning. It means you have to learn to detach yourself quickly from projects that are simply not profitable enough and invest in projects with a higher opportunity for growth. Even though we’re very healthy and profitable, we continue to function like this today because it works.
Not having endless amounts of money to spend on hiring also forces you to adopt a “doer mindset” and get things done yourself. Whenever we start a new project, we do it the “bootstrapped way” as much as possible, partly because it’s how we’ve always done it and partly because it helps our team evolve constantly and invest money in other opportunities with a higher ROI.
When you bootstrap your company, you have to prioritize execution over strategic planning. It means that done is better than perfect and has actually helped accelerate lempire’s growth because we quickly saw what worked and what didn’t.
Lastly, the most important thing is to remain consistent. There are simply no shortcuts and bootstrapping your company teaches you that. It’s about hard work and being consistent with it, one step at a time.
How are you planning on taking lempire from a million- to a billion-dollar company, concretely?
Guillaume Moubeche: I asked myself that exact same question (obviously 😅) and decided to go straight to the source: I reached out to founders & CEOs who succeeded in growing billion-dollar companies and asked them for their advice. Here are the 3 main points that stood out to me:
- Find a repeatable way to generate revenue
- Triple down on what’s working
- Build a kickass team → we already have a kickass team that’s ready to scale 😇
What about lempire’s repeatable way to generate revenue?
Guillaume Moubeche: Essentially, building a successful B2B business is either about helping people make more money or helping them save time. In our case, lempire helps people generate more revenue.
When you sell a product or a service, you personally believe that you can help your prospect solve a specific problem they’re encountering. But for them to let you help them, they first have to trust you.
I believe that sales is a transfer of belief across a ladder of trust: the ladder is composed of 3 elements: credibility, messaging & targeting. If any of the 3 sides is missing, the ladder collapses and trust is broken, which means you won’t be able to help your prospect solve their problem.
Here’s what I mean when I talk about the three sides of the ladder of trust:
Targeting: you need to make sure that the people you contact are impacted enough by the problem you’re solving so that they’ll be willing to pay for it. That means you have to make sure you do great, in-depth discovery and define your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile).
Credibility: if there’s nothing out there to prove that you’re capable of solving the problem you’re pitching to your prospects, chances are high that your prospects won’t believe you have what it takes to actually help them solve their problem. You need to establish credibility for yourself, to show that you have what it takes.
There are hundreds of ways to do that, for example by building your personal brand, creating a newsletter or a podcast, documenting your learnings publicly… The important thing is that you find a way to show that you’re an expert in your field, instead of just telling people you are.
The channel you choose depends on your personal preferences and also on where your target audience hangs out.
Messaging: when I talk about messaging, it can be anything from email, to cold-calling, to sending cookies to your prospects. Depending on your industry, brand identity, your ICP and creativity, it can take on many different forms.
Essentially, messaging is how you convey the value of your product or service in a way that stands out to your prospect. In your messaging, you need to make sure that you convey two points:
- Minimize time & effort to achieve the desired result: highlight that you know exactly what problem your prospect is trying to solve and that you know how they can get there in less time, with less effort.
- Maximize the “dream outcome” & the perceived likelihood of achievement: always answer the question “what’s in it for your prospect” in your messaging and show them that you’re the best person to help them get there, for example by sharing links to your online resources or numbers to prove your previous achievements. Just make sure they can be easily verified so that it doesn’t look like bait.
Once you know how to sell, you can then focus on scaling.
Is AI going to play a role in that?
Guillaume Moubeche: 100%! We can’t ignore the fact that it took ChatGPT only 5 days to reach 1 million users, whereas it took companies like Google and Facebook years to get there.
We’re well aware of the power and importance AI has and are already working on projects that will leverage AI to help fulfill our mission to help people and businesses grow… but that’s all I can say for now 😇
Do you have a plan to scale?
Guillaume Moubeche: Definitely! It’s all about tripling down on what’s working – basically the second piece of advice I got from the founders I connected with. Here’s what we’ll triple down on:
- We’ve been growing our business by “eating our own dog food” – which means we’ve always used our own products to grow. It’s the best way to put yourself in your customers’ shoes and to identify problems and opportunities.
- We’ve documented everything we’ve been through and everything we’ve done since day 1 – all of the ups, downs, failures, falls, and learnings. When you document things, you don’t only build credibility for yourself and your company, but you also become a true master in your field.
- Thanks to that, we’ve built a strong audience and community (one of the strongest sales communities in the world), that represents the cornerstone of our company. It gives you amazing insight into your ICPs needs and struggles and helps identify new opportunities.
- We gave everything we could to others for free (actionable content). We’ve always stayed true to our mission, which is helping people and businesses grow. That means sharing everything we learn with anyone who wants to grow and influencing them to do the same so they can get awesome results. It’s helped us build our credibility in the market and reduce churn.
By tripling down on that we can achieve infinite scaleability without having to hire thousands of people, and that’s how we’ll get lempire from a million- to a billion-dollar company and make our current and future employees millionaires.
Jerome Knyszewski, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Guillaume Moubeche for taking the time to do this interview and share his knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Guillaume Moubeche or his company, you can do it through his – Instagram
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