Build fast, launch fast, fail fast ⏩ | Thibault Louis-Lucas

Having a big team will make me look good on family dinner, which is awesome. It's awesome to say that you are managing 15 people on a daily basis, but it's really not what's bringing value in the end. And that's ego fueling. In the end of the day, what you need to do is just sell. It's sell product. Like people giving you money for your product is the ultimate validation that you are doing something useful.

This week's Millennial Master is Thibault Louis-Lucas. A serial entrepreneur who turned setbacks into stepping stones. From his early ventures and failures to the breakthrough success and multi-million acquisition, Thibault has perfected the art of solving real problems and building products with impact. In this episode, Thibault shares his journey of rapid iteration, finding product-market fit, and scaling startups with unconventional strategies. He shares how he launched 11 products in 4 months, navigated platform challenges, and used personal branding to grow his businesses. You'll also get his insights into the power of distribution, the future of AI, and how building in public is invaluable for any aspiring founder. This episode is brought to you by Offware. Gym memberships, gift cards, free coffee, and Pizza Fridays. Well, these staff perks just don't cut it anymore.

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Thibault, welcome to Millennial Masters. How are you?

I'm very good, thank you. Happy to be here.

Great to have you. So let's start from the beginning in your entrepreneurial journey. You, your first one was an app to motivate kids to do chores, right? How did you come up with the idea and what was it like getting your first business off the ground?

I think it's like, it's not a surprise that it was a failure because I think the process behind this, uh, this startup was like, we were desperate to find an idea and we went way too far into what I would say is something that is super appealing. Like everyone else around you would say it's a great idea. It's an amazing project. Go for it. But like, never, never ever we got a true market validation from a user that this was a good idea. And so it was just like a, I think a dumb idea from a few students who wouldn't like who wanted to create a startup. Does that make sense to you?

I understand. I've been in the startup game myself, and I'm also familiar with failure. And I think that the most talented entrepreneurs take a few tries before they hit their big success. And I know that's the case for you. And then after Pistache, you started another company also aimed at kids, right? But this time it was teaching kids to code, and you also went big on that.

Yeah, I think the The main idea behind it was like, I wanted so bad to succeed that I— and at school you hear constantly the fact that you need to raise money, you need to hire huge teams. So that's what you do when you are like on the ground. I failed at my first startup, so I was thinking, okay, so I need to raise more money, I need to hire a bigger team, and I need more ambitious projects. And that's exactly what I did with this second project. Like, uh, I tried to create a video game and a video game studio behind it to create something that would a little bit compete with AAA games in the way, like in the attention span of kids in order to try to teach them how to code. And we got users, like we, we built a pretty good game, I think, but we were lacking something that is like the, like the the basics. We lacked revenue. So we had free players, a lot of free players. That was enough for us to just keep going because we thought that it was an interesting basis, but it was not. Like, if people do not convert to paid users, you don't have a real product. Like, you don't have a real business.

So you raised money from investors for this company. How much did you raise at the time?

I think on this project, something like 4, 100, 1,000.

And your team, how big was your team? Did you front load and hired everybody at the beginning?

I think the peak size was like 15 or 20 people. So it was the issue when you are trying to create a video game and is that you need a lot of people, like you need artists, you need game developers, you need game designers, you need, you need the backend guy, you need a frontend guy. You need so many people. And I think it was very wrong to just assume that I could go into this industry without knowing. I think I knew pretty much zero about how to create a good game. And we managed to do something pretty cool already. It was a good game. Like we had very hardcore players. On our game, but we're missing so many important steps. We did so many mistakes. It's a shame.

Looking back now, what were the learnings you had from those mistakes and how did you apply them in what you did next?

I think what's the number one thing that is working now for me and didn't work in the past is that I think I need to become an expert in understanding the issue that I'm trying to solve. And right now I'm doing that by trying to solve my own problems. And so I know a lot about them. I know a lot about my problems, but back then I was trying to solve problems that I don't really understand. Like you think you understand them, but the degree of understanding that you have is very, very, very low level. You have, you are not going to the deep core need of your audience because most of the time It's not what they tell you.

And that's how you got into your big success with Tweet Hunter, right? You were looking for inspiration for viral tweets to help you distribute your product. Is that my correct understanding from your story?

Yes. What we did is a little bit differently. We just, we had two failures and each failure we went through them in two years, so that's pretty much 4 years in total. And the main thing, I think, when we started again is if we need to fail again, it needs to be in 2 weeks and not in 2 years. And so we started this process of trying to ship a new product every week or so until something actually sticks and until we get revenue. So we would look at revenue and revenue only to consider that the product is working and not some like vanity metrics like engagements or free users and things like that. And we would ship product after product like this for, I think we did it for like 4 months. Tweetenter was the 11th product that we shipped at that time. And from the very start, it took off. Like it was working very well. Like it was bringing real value to users, including myself. We can talk a little bit about the process that got us into Tweetenter, but basically I was the first user of Tweetntr, and it was helping me on a daily basis to grow a Twitter audience.

And that's what some would call the founder product fit. And that, that was your first founder product fit where you identified with the problem you were trying to solve and you were your own solution's power user.

Yeah, exactly. The thing is, at every new product that we were launching, we quickly realized that there was two acquisition channels that was bringing in the most of the users, and it was Reddit and Twitter. And Reddit was very hard to tackle. Like it's a platform that's very hard to systemize. Like it's very hard to find a recipe on how to be successful on Reddit. But Twitter, there are many things that you can automate that works and that works again and again. And so that's what we did. Like we, we created the first product for Twitter. It was a GPT-3 based tweet generator. It didn't work so much because GPT-3 was not good enough at the time. We iterated from that. We used GPT-3 in another way to clusterize, to categorize contents. It led to another product which worked like so-so. And then we got to, to Twitter. Because I absolutely wanted to go viral again and again on Twitter and using old and viral tweets and reproposing them is something that works quite well. And so I created it for me in the first place. And then when we got users into these products, they find it quite useful.

So how did you get users into this product? I know you employed quite an interesting and rather unusual strategy to work with influencers to, to grow Tweet Hunter, um, and spread the word about what it does compared to, say, big companies spending hundreds and thousands and millions of dollars on marketing and advertising? You took a very different route.

Yeah, and that was an accident. It was not something that we thought about deeply, but what happened is we reached out to many people on Twitter, like big names because we wanted them to use Tweet Hunter. And one of them got super interested in the products. He was basically selling a course that was promoting the exact technique that we are putting into place into Tweet Hunter. And so he had this awesome reaction where he said, okay, I love it. I want to be in. And this guy, he didn't only wanted to use the products,, but wanted to be part of the team and, and at the co-founder level. And so that was super surprising. We thought about it a lot. That was not the plan, but we did it. Like we, we gave, uh, to this guy up to 25% of the product. And we didn't really regret it. Like it was a super helpful and fruitful partnership. Just, just to give you an idea, uh, we worked with this guy in the next, like in the following months after the partnership. And in September 2021, when we did launch on Twitter, like we executed something that he had in mind, like his launch plan, we went in just 3 weeks from $3K in monthly revenue to more than $50K in monthly revenue. That was the start of starting getting big on Twitter.

And that was before Elon Musk. Bought Twitter, correct?

Exactly. Yeah.

How did things change once he turned it into X?

At the very, very beginning, things didn't change that much. I don't know if you remember, but there was a lot of drama. There was this time where he said he would buy it, but then he said, uh, actually, no, I will not. It went through, I think, like 6 to 12 months. Where nothing super impactful happened to us. During that time, we got acquired. We got acquired at a time where things were pretty much stable. But then in like in March 2023, after we got acquired, they got super aggressive with pricing. They just announced that the price of the Twitter API would go from $0 to $42K per month., which is like insane. Most of the Twitch products just died that day.

They just, just a lot of Twitter products died that month. Yeah, absolutely.

Which for the Rare product that can afford it is a pretty interesting situation, like to, to, to navigate that. There was, um, there was one issue with that is they did it in so aggressive way that they just They just told us that we would have something like 30 days to get into their enterprise plan. But actually, like after 3 days, they cut everything, everyone off their platform. And during a few days, we couldn't send tweets, we couldn't do anything on the Twitter API. So that was very hard to navigate. But what we did there is we got lucky and acquired a few Twitter products. Which like strengthens our positioning. This, this price increase is like, it's, it's, it's a death sentence for small products, but for existing products with quite high revenue, it's actually a huge moat. It gets very hard for new players to get into the space because they would have to, to pay for this insane fee from day zero, even if they do not have revenue.

But you were lucky at that point because you had the revenue that support even a £42,000 a month API.

Um, yeah, exactly.

Um, tell me about the experience of, uh, getting acquired. How, how did that come about? Did you search for people to acquire your business or were you approached, uh, to, to be acquired?

We did search. The, the plan was get to 10K per month in revenue, and try to sell for pretty much a million and start over, uh, just the day after. It didn't really go that way because, uh, we grew way more than $10K per month. Uh, I think when we sold, we were something like $130K per month. Something that we didn't anticipate is all the buyers out there, they were asking us to stay 2 years in business. With the acquisition and 2 years was huge. Like was really not the plan.

Um, because you wanted to start something else, but you also needed to, to stay in that business.

Yeah. And we got, they were, they were, they were asking for that because the, the business was incredibly risky. Elon Musk was there, he was changing the rules already. Um, things, uh, could just go sideways. Like the, this guy is like super unpredictable. And then at the same time, like we got like a sister product, which is Taplio, the equivalent of Twitter, but for LinkedIn. And this product was just starting to bring revenue, but it was not compliant with the LinkedIn rules. So the two things together, it was very hard, but very risky to acquire us. And the company who got interested in us, one company from the US, one company from India, it was hard for us to even consider working with them for 2 years without like knowing absolutely nothing about, about them, like their culture. Until we, we found this French company. Like, I, I used to know the founder. He was actually in the same, uh, same class as me in middle school. So we were like 13 years old, and he was a user of TopHeel. He was like a customer. So he, he knew the product pretty well, and it was, it was a strong match because because it was like a very small team, 50 people, same age, same culture, same country, same language. And it worked out. We found a way to create this deal where only 20% of the amount of the acquisition amount would be paid upfront because of how risky the business is. But then 80% of the acquisition amount could be unlocked with revenue milestones over the next 2 years. And yeah, very happy that we did it.

It's quite an unusual deal. A lot of the startups that you hear getting acquired in the US, et cetera, you typically tend to see them getting acquired upfront and not the founders don't usually stay on for as long, but because you managed to get acquired by what turned out to be a school friend, how were the 2 years still building the business and growing it while also building towards getting bought out of the business?

What I really appreciated is how this guy understood that we were entrepreneurs as well, as we, we need, we absolutely need this independence to, to build things and to be successful. And so during the 2 years, we had all the freedom that we wanted to execute the plan and to, to grow. And so that's why it went very smoothly. The issue is that is give us a lot of freedom, um, makes it very hard for teams to collaborate together. Because there is no oversee of what we were doing. There is no, there was no like strong bridges between our teams to collaborate. So we, we mostly succeed. Like we unlocked 5 out of 6 of the revenue milestones. We grew from 1.5 million per year to 8 million per year in less than 2 years. But at the same time, I think that I don't know how, but by working together a little bit more, we could have achieved a little bit more like higher higher growth, which is very hard because we wanted this freedom.

And you already X'd it. So with that in mind, what, what are some of the growth paths and levers that startups, especially digital startups, can, can pull to grow 7 times in a year? What worked for you?

What, what worked very well for us is two main things is social media and personal branding. That's the first, like being active, building in public, sharing everything about how we grew, what we did, sharing user stories, success stories. This worked very well. And the second thing is SEO and being constantly building new, publishing new pages, new tools that would rank on Google. In the end, this, it compounds and lets you like just create more and more traffic over time. This works very well. And I don't think startups are considering SEO enough. That just right now, the trendy thing is talking about what you do on Twitter, and it works pretty well, but it kind of gets saturated. So considering SEO more is, I think, the way to go.

Let's talk a bit about personal branding, because that's something that other founders on Millennial Masters have shared with me, but they also, they also had different reflections. They said it worked to help them scale, but it also made it difficult for them after they reached a certain scale. So from your experience with personal branding, that certainly worked to scale. Was it, what was your bigger platform, Twitter or LinkedIn? You obviously have big followings on both, thanks to both of the products that you previously developed?

Yeah, so Twitter has always been my first platform. This is the platform that's where I spend my time just scrolling, talking with people, DMing. Really, really liked it here. I did a lot of LinkedIn when we were building Taplio. What's interesting on LinkedIn is people are like, you have many salespeople on LinkedIn and salespeople are amazing because they just buy quickly. If you can just prove that you can give them value, they would be super willing to try. And if your product is shit, like they'll just go away and just forget about it. But at least you get a shot. And that's what I really liked about LinkedIn. Overall, it seems like buying power is a little bit higher on LinkedIn. People are more willing to try your products. There's less scam and less, less very low quality users. Which you have a lot on Twitter. But in the end, I don't know if you've heard about that, but because of my involvement in Taplio, I got my account suspended. So I lost my—

that's one of the downsides of personal branding and being so closely tied to the business, even though that happened. But let's— tell me, tell me your perspective on, on that story and how it happened.

But that's— so the story is I created Taplio. As I said earlier, it's not fully compliant with LinkedIn, which is safe for users. It's definitely not an issue for users, but as the main developer and the founder of Wrio, they, after 3 years, they understood that I was involved in this product and they just wanted to cut me off because it was very hard for them to block the product. It was very, very hard because of like how we are using a Chrome extension, which they cannot fully control. So they decided to just cut me off, even if when they did, I was not involved in the product anymore. Like I've had already left, but they just didn't care and they just wanted to, they just wanted a guinea pig, I guess.

So how did you get your account back?

I didn't, it's still suspended, which is, which is an amazing reminder that you do not own your followers. You do not own your, um, like your accounts, it can just get suspended at any time. What you truly own is a newsletter subscriber base, or I guess a podcast audience, which I understand why you use it.

But I wanted to, before we get into your newsletter, cause you have a very popular newsletter as well. I wanted to ask you about X because we have, we've seen a recent case and we're talking now in December 2023, we've seen a recent case where Elon Musk Musk argued that he's not willing to allow the Infowars Twitter account and Alex Jones' Twitter accounts to be bought by The Onion and controlled by The Onion, saying that they do not have the rights to that audience and those accounts. So there's, there's a similar danger on, on Twitter under Elon Musk as well, and similarly on any other platform, social media platform.

Yeah, exactly. And to be honest, I understand his points. Like it's, I wouldn't say I agree, but that's interesting. But that's the kind of thing that you can do with newsletter. You can sell a newsletter without anyone being able to block you because you fully own the newsletter subscriber base. So that's why I'm building right now.

And you're also a, um, user of your own newsletter system as a founder. Yeah. But you got that through, if I'm correct, acquiring a system before you started using it. So you went from being acquired to acquiring another business and then turning that into your new product. Can you run me through the thought process of that journey?

That's a pretty fun story. Like I had a lot of I don't know if it's funny for like other people than me, but it was pretty fun to navigate that because there was this, this blog platform that I really loved. It's called feather.so. It's a blog platform that's pretty unique because it turns your Notion docs into a blog. So it makes it very easy for people to write a blog because you only write on Notion. It's easy to collaborate with people to get your blog posts reviewed, and then Feather would just convert those pages into a blog. And so I was in the process of acquiring that product, which by the way is my biggest acquisition so far. Like I've done more than 10, but way smaller.

Can you give us a ballpark of the acquisition sum?

I can, I can tell you the number. It's $250,000. $250,000. Yeah. Uh, which is like just my personal money, which is the biggest risk I ever took. And so while I was in this process, something quite unexpected happened is that I just received an email from Beehive, the newsletter platform that I was using, telling me that they would just raise their prices and I would, I would have to pay 2.5x more from what I was paying. And I was just shocked at this email because I, on my own products, I have raised the price many times and every single time, almost every single time I did two things. First of all is like the price raise went from like 10% to 30%, not 2.5x. And we usually grandfathered users, meaning if you subscribe before, you keep paying the same price. Which is not what Beehive did.

So to clarify for people listening and watching, Beehive is a Substack competitor, and Substack is free to use, but takes a 10% or total 13% cut of your subscription revenues or remains free to use if you don't have any paid plans. While on Beehive, you don't pay a percentage of your revenues, but you have a flat fee that is based on the number of subscribers you have. Which with each tier can, can go up. And that's, that's the one you hit when you had to go 2.5 times over because you moved on to the next subscription tier.

Yeah. And two things happened in my mind is first thing is I was shocked that I would be paying that much. It seems a little bit crazy for a newsletter platform. And at the same time, I was seeing here an opportunity to have a little bit of fun. On Twitter and to just like call them out asking about to like, what's this shit about? And I did that and I got some—

From your big following or to your big following?

Yeah. And I got some traction. And so it started make me think about if there was some space for building my own newsletter platform. And what happened here is pretty much at the same time, I found this other product that was meant to send newsletters and emails from Notion. And so I reached out to the, to the guy and asking if he was willing to sell and he did, and the acquisition happened. And so I quickly closed this acquisition and worked a lot on merging the two products, like was merge feather.so, the, the blog platform, plus this other tool to send, to send newsletters and emails and added all the capabilities, all the newsletter capabilities in Feather. And so it took way more time than I thought. It's actually super challenging to send newsletters, but we actually got pretty successful with that. And I'm now using my own products instead of Beehive. I'm using Feather to send my daily newsletter to, to 137,000 people.

And for, for people to, to understand, how much would Feather charge for this service to send to 100,000 people compared to Beehive?

I think on Beehive you would need to pay something like like $500 per month, if I'm not mistaken, maybe a little bit less than that. And I think on Feather, it will be just half the price. But the main issue with, um, with Beehive is they bill you per subscriber.

Yeah.

So as soon as you have like 1K followers, you need to pay $250 per month, even if you send like one newsletter per month. And what's amazing with Feather is Feather is pretty good for entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, like small founders and those people that don't have time to send one newsletter per week or per day. And so if they use Beehive, they will need to pay a lot of money just because they have a high subscriber base. Whereas on Feather, you basically pay per cent. And so you get something that's more, much more cheaper, much more appropriate to what you are doing. It's just not the same target audience.

And it's a different revenue model, I guess. It stands out from the Substack model, the Beehive model, and even the Mailchimp model, which is based on how big your list is, plus how many sends you do in a month from there. So to crystallize what you've just said, social media, the following you're building there, you don't own it and you can lose it on a whim if somebody at that social network doesn't agree with what you're doing. So you need to build your own newsletter and/or podcast. But isn't there a danger that services both like Substack or Beehive could also lock you out of your own emails?

It's possible. So while I was building and like maintaining Feather, I got locked out from my Beehive accounts, but what I did there is, first of all, they allowed me to download all my subscribers. So they didn't just like rip me off. But just before that, I have already had this idea that it could happen. And so I already did download all my subscribers, which most of those platforms allow to do. Like I would, I would really not use a newsletter platform. That do not allow you to export all your subscribers. And because, because most of them do, any new player in the space will probably have to support this feature.

Most of the major ones do support that. So just to, just to be fair to all of them, Substack and Beehive do, but you, you did have to be careful. Was it because they wouldn't let you use your account anymore? So you had to download your subscribers?

Yeah, they noticed that I was actually integrating the newsletter feature in Feather and And I was, I was sending half, uh, half the newsletter with Feather, half the newsletter with Beehive, and I was comparing the, um, the open rate, the click rates to just build a better product. They understood that I was doing that, and so they just cut me out.

And that was because you were building in public, and that's another one of your concepts that you are well known for and have been doing very openly on both LinkedIn up until your recent block, but still doing on Twitter to a certain extent. Tell me about that concept. How did you come about it? A lot of people like to keep their stats really close to their chest and not share too much.

The main concept is what you will share is probably not a secret because if you are not sharing it, it's very likely that someone else will share this same tip, this same hack, but not from you, meaning you do not get the credits if someone else is doing it. If you are getting the credits and if you are the guy sharing the tips, you get something that is amazing today, which is trust. And by doing that, by sharing value every day on Twitter, by just sharing tips, by sharing true numbers, what happens is people start trusting you, trusting that you deliver quality products, that you behave nicely with customers, that you do not scam people. And, and this has the very interesting effect that people start sharing feedback. People just want you to be successful. So they buy your products because it's coming from you. They just try your new stuff. They help you, they promote your stuff. They would be happy to just plug your new product into their newsletter. So many things like that's happening to me, uh, just because, um, because like very, like a lot of people are very nice. Just that, that's it.

Are they also very nice because you have a huge Twitter following? What's, what's your Twitter following at the moment?

It's more than 130K on Twitter. But the thing is, when I started Twitter, it was definitely not the case. It was just, I think I had like 1,000 followers and I think 99% of those were just like bots or dormant people. So when I started, I was just every day sharing the stuff that I was finding useful and my account grew from that. Twitter tour was not successful because of my Twitter audience. I built my Twitter audience Thanks to sharing nice stuff while I was building Tweet Hunter. It's the other way around. I think like anyone can start now. The very interesting things with the Twitter algorithm right now is that people, if they share very interesting stuff, can have a huge reach even without a big audience. That's very true right now. Like the new Twitter algorithm is not rewarding followers. It's rewarding interesting content.

Let's talk about Twitter. We discussed about how the API price change has been crucial in a way and help you build a moat around Tweet Hunter, and that certainly helped in Tweet Hunter scaling revenue 7x and leading to a successful exit. But especially after the American election, X is getting a bad rep and they there's multiple reports that people are flocking to the Bluesky, Mastodon, and other similar alternatives. Is Twitter dead or dying?

That's— it's really up to who you are listening, I guess. I'm trying Bluesky at the moment. It's very fun. Like you have— what happened on Twitter is that it got so systemized. What's working on Twitter has been shared so many times That it's pretty much like everyone out there has the recipe on making a good tweet or the recipe on making a good thread. And so that's pretty much everything that you get on your feed. I'm having a lot of fun right now on Bluesky because it feels like the good old days from Twitter. Like you get a bunch of people, no bots, just having genuine conversations about interesting things. So I have no idea because what you described, that's like the fact that everything that is wrong about Twitter exists because Twitter is very successful in my opinion. And so if Twitter happened to be dying, I'm pretty sure that all those things that you described will quickly move to other platforms and Twitter might just be the old Twitter again. So the issue is that no one has true numbers about traffic, daily users, and any of those.

Do you, do you think Mark Zuckerberg and Meta managed to do a decent Twitter alternative with Threads? What do you think?

No, I don't think so.

What do you think of Threads?

I don't think so. When I, like, when I see how Threads is being pushed in the Instagram timeline, like how aggressive they are in doing so. I really think that their active users is just pumped this way. I don't think it's a true alternative. And I don't, I think Twitter is, had been successful because it was this huge marketplace for ideas. It was the way to share public information. And because it was like, because free speech was actually something pretty big and it's even better right now. And I think that's why politicians post there. I don't see that happening on Threads. I don't, I don't think there is a chance of that happening on there. Bluesky might be.

We know all Meta properties suppress political content altogether, and on Threads it's being discouraged from, from that perspective. So which social network do you think will prevail in, in 5 years' time, or will still be around in 5 years' time?

I have no idea about Bluesky. It's so new that no one knows if it's just a fad or not. I do think that Twitter will still be around, that we, I think we hugely underestimate the huge network mode that they have. Like the fact that everyone is there, like all politicians, all news, all AI news, they grow through, through Twitter in the first place. So I definitely think that it's going to remain the main platform. LinkedIn is, is huge already. And I do not see LinkedIn going down. So I would, I would still bet on LinkedIn and Twitter, X, and I have no idea about Bluesky.

Let's talk about AI. You mentioned how you implemented it in the earliest versions of Tweet Hunter with GPT-3. 3.5 came along. Now we have 4, 4.0, 4.0.1. What's been the biggest change that AI has brought onto the landscape from an entrepreneurial point of view?

I think that, that's a good question. Then it basically, it created a shift that's so big that the old products were just simply not good enough anymore. The shift it created made the new products with a proper implementation of AI good enough to compete with the old super well-integrated product that existed before. And they did it by, they did it while creating this trend that building costs are slowly going to zero. And this, this created change that we truly do not understand enough right now. Imagine if anyone can create Slack competitor tomorrow with just a few prompts, like like so many things could be happening, like so many products can get out there. Imagine if like you do not need developers at all to create products. So where is the value then if it's not in the product itself? What many people see is that the value will be in distribution, in your capability to distribute an existing product and to create a nice storytelling about it and to educate people. On how to use product properly. That's a huge shift and I have no idea if, how big this will be, but I'm just, I'm preparing myself for that.

You mentioned education and I want to link it to something else you said in a different podcast and I wanted to ask you about it. So you had formal education, university, then you've learned a lot, I'm assuming, through informal education, YouTube videos and all that era. But now we have the AI coding and help, and with even several no-code platforms coming up, is there a danger that the products that are being created in this way are more leaky in terms of security, personal information, and other key points that regular tech businesses have to be very stringent about?

I've seen this comment from a guy saying, that AI right now has been trained on most of the GitHub repositories and what you can see on Stack Overflow, which is a nice representation of the, like the middle developer, the common developer. So you get an AI that is pretty much the common developer, which Chip calls as the common developer and doing the common mistakes. And that's, that's true that. When I am using AI in my code, I will tell it what to do, like what to build. And if the overall thing looks good, I will just say, okay, accept. It will just bring the code in my codebase. And I will not go through each line and make sure that everything is 100% correct. So it's super true that it can create security leaks, bugs, and many other things. At the same time, we will probably have very advanced tools. Like I expect logs solution tools like Sentry, which are able to detect bugs and security leaks, to use AI as well to be much better at identifying issues, bugs on your code on an automated basis. I've seen this, these tools, which are amazing. Where they basically just run on autopilot analyzing your codebase at every moment and opening GitHub PRs for you, which means basically it's pretty much like you have a developer which will try to fix a bug on itself and just suggesting something for you to approve to then go into production. So many things are happening. It's so hard to keep up.

I like to keep tips practical on Millennial Masters. So what are the key AI products that you use that you think most entrepreneurs should definitely have a go at?

The main one, the one that I spend like hours on every day is Cursor. Cursor.so. It's, it has the same base as Visual Studio Code, which was one of the most famous code editors, but it has AI so well integrated in multiple ways that you can just, you can just tell the AI what to build, what to code, and it will do it. Just asking if it's good enough. For you. And if it's not, you can just say, yeah, it is a little bit where I want to go, but just fix this and do that in another way. And it will do it, which is super powerful.

And outside of coding for personal productivity, do you, do you use AI?

Yeah, I use, so I use the default ChatGPT desktop app, which is pretty good in my opinion. And I was, I was, I use something else, which is TypingMind. TypingMind is a nice layer on LLMs, which means it can connect to GPT-4o, but also to Claude AI models. But it can, what's very powerful there is that you can create folders for each project and for each project you can add like something like meta prompts. So telling the AI what the project is about so that every time you ask something to the AI, it will know the context of these projects. Which is something that I really appreciate. It gives you then much higher quality responses.

Have you tried Google's solution with AI? I know we mentioned SEO and this is linked to the future of the web in a way. What do you think of Google's AI models?

Yeah, I use Gemini in my code for some very specific features, but I'm not using them as a customer product.

Do you think AI search such as GPT search and/or the AI overviews from Google are the future of the web? Will people still search in the old keywords way or we're getting done with the links and the outbound?

What I mean, what I think is you will probably not search anymore for what's the weather here or is, well, like who is the current president of the United States? You will probably not search for that. But you will probably search for, um, download a video from a LinkedIn post or create a cartoon video. Because if you are looking for a tool, Google search will generally send you to the correct tool and you will get exactly what you need very fast, which LLMs do not do right now.

That's because they don't have the most up-to-date information as Google does for now. So for general questions, you will not necessarily use Google in the same way, but for finding products and tools, Google will remain key. Do you think Google needs to be broken up like the, especially since American judges now found a It has a monopoly in both search and advertising, and they're recommending to take out Chrome as well as possibly Android from Google and Alphabet.

I definitely don't think it needs to be broken up. I do not really know the internals of this case. I have no idea. I do not know the American law enough to like give an opinion on it, on if it's a monopoly or not, and if there is a harm being done on the customer or not. But my personal opinion is that the average guy like me gets more value from Google if everything is just one company and everything is correctly connected.

Speaking of monopolies and big companies, America is doing very well at it. They, they have the majority of the tech companies. And in the past couple of months, at least, there's been a bigger discussion going on about how the, how Europe is falling behind. It doesn't have any tech giants. It doesn't have major AI capabilities. And a lot of the talent and capital is either coming from or is mainly attracted to the US. How do you think Europe can catch up with the US and remain competitive globally? And I'm asking you, of course, as as a Frenchman based in France?

That's so hard to answer. Like, honestly, if I knew the answer, I would probably be president or something like that. But I guess the obvious answer is less regulation, like letting people like me do their job and like cut taxes, give us the playground to build. But I know this is likely not going to happen because that's really not what the common guy wants here. Like, it's— this is, this is like in France, actually, this is not even on the table because of all the political mess that we have now. So I, I don't see this happening. And I saw this tweet from, I don't know who, but I saw this tweet that Europe could follow the same trend as Japan did in the last 40 years. I don't see why it wouldn't happen. Honestly, I think it's a pretty nice analogy and I have no idea how to stop it. It's like this guy promoting something like he called Make Europe Great Again. The issue is that it's a direct analogy of the Trump movement and like I disagree with so many things behind that. But what's interesting, What's interesting there is how these movements would want to like give again space for builders and makers to build their own thing. And we can see it right now that in every new major space, we are falling behind. And I'm talking about AI, self-driving, robotics, space. We're just, just not there.

And you don't see a particular fix for it as it stands.

The things that I see, I have no clue. Like, I do not see any state in Europe going into that direction. We are going the opposite way. We are still going the opposite way. Like, we are still, like, we are desperate for adding more regulation. And I understand why, like, with climate change, inequalities, I understand why we want to go that way, but it has this incredible side effect of just killing our economy. And people don't know what, like when we say we are killing the economy, they understand it like, yeah, that's not an issue, right? The big rich guys are gonna lose their money. Why is it a problem? And they don't understand that it would mean less education for our kids, less medical assistance, and so many things.

I'm moving on a bit out of the tech space.

Did I lose you here?

No, it's just because I'm worried of time. And I want to talk more about the entrepreneur and your journey as well. And yes, building and scaling a business, even from my experience, can be chaotic, can take so much of your time, and you can easily get lost in it. So do you have any habits or routines that help you stay grounded and productive when it's so easy to get distracted and just day into your work?

I think I know myself a little bit. So what I do is I will try to tackle the hardest task of my day every morning, meaning that that's going to be the first thing that I will try to do on my laptop every morning. I guess most people will start by just checking emails, checking DMs, stuff like that. I would actually just get my coffee and just start coding right away or start writing. If that's the things I need to do right now. And I will, I will try, I will try to like do it in at least 2 hours without any distraction so that I actually build stuff. And that's, that's, I think a very different mindset from what I had like 10 years ago where I was just trying to keep up with everything, like answering every emails, answering to everything. Right now today, I will really, I really try to ship something. What I mean by ship is build something and send it to the world, like publishing something, something that someone out there can see or experience, and that could just bring him value.

So how do you disconnect from your work?

I think that's my main problem, is that I usually don't disconnect. That's why my wife and I are constantly fighting over that. I don't disconnect enough.

That's something I can understand and resonate with, but that also means that running startups, scaling businesses, it comes with sacrifices. What's been the biggest sacrifice you've had to make to be where you are today?

Probably going through 4 or 5 years of failing startups, I guess, and being willing to just start again. I think that's the hardest. Like during 4 years, I earned a very low salary and I was just, we had a few successes, but overall it was product failures.

And with that in mind, what's the best advice you'd give someone just starting in their entrepreneurial journey or considering quitting their job and starting a product or wanting to become an entrepreneur? In 2025?

I would, I think I would say two things. The first thing is your first idea is probably going to fail, but you still need to build it and to go through it so that your second or your third idea will eventually succeed. And to drastically increase the likelihood of each of one to be successful, I would really start building something for yourself first, because you are an expert on your own problems. Like building a good product is is in the first place a true understanding of the problem that you are solving.

And one thing I, I have on Millennial Masters is, is a book club, and I tend to ask everybody I, I interview what books have inspired you in life and in business that you would recommend to others.

I think the, like, the, the book that had the most effect on me probably Atomic Habits. It's— I, I'm probably not super original there, but Atomic Habits from James Clear is the book that not only told me that I could change in a drastic way with the small, tiny habits, but I think the most important takeaway from the book is how to implement a new habit. And it's, it's very good. Like the tips, they are very good.

So what new habits have you implemented? Yes, James Clear's book is the first one that I had on the Millennial Masters Book Club. It has certainly been mentioned by several others, but what new habits have you been able to implement thanks to his systems?

Reading, working out multiple times a week, writing my tweets in the morning with my coffee, things like that.

And is there one piece of advice that you would give your younger self? If you could?

The one thing is, um, maybe if I was talking to a 15, uh, or a 20-year-old version of myself, I would just say that having a big team will make me look good on family dinner, which is awesome. It's, it's awesome to say that you are managing 15 people on a daily basis, but it's really not what's bringing value in the end, and that's That's ego fueling. In the end of the day, what you need to do is just sell. It's sell product. Like people giving you money for your product is the ultimate validation that you are doing something useful.

And now you have been managing your teams remotely, haven't you? What's the learning from managing teams remotely? What's the secret to developing a product and working with people Spread out.

One thing that I'm doing, I think, different than most people is I don't have employees. Like I'm only, when you say my team, it's not really my team. It's, I have 4 different products right now. For each one of those products, I have been partnering up with one very skilled maker, like who owns share of the product. So I'm not managing the person. He's a self, uh, self-aware, self, uh, self-managed person. Who I'm working with to find some kind of success. And I think that we are going more and more into this direction of less management because the guy you manage can be replaced by AI these days. If he wants motivation and that peak involvement, equity share is, is the must.

And how do you find these people to, to partner with? What qualities are you looking for? That was one of the other questions I typically have on my list because a lot of people have co-founders in a way, and you have product builders from what you described.

So I have a unique process to find these. Like I use Twitter mainly.

Okay.

And I have, I think I'm successful enough on Twitter so that I can cherry-pick the people who are coming to me and that I I do not hesitate to run multiple experiments at the same time with multiple people, meaning that I will be honest about it. I will say, I have 5 people competing for this position. I want to run a 2-week trial. You're going to be paid that much. If after the 2 weeks we had the best collaboration, we understood each other very well, and you built the best thing, I will go with you. And it's very weird for the guy who receives that, but if you are super honest about this process and sharing honestly about how many other people are following this, it works very well. And I do think that an interview process is worth pretty much zero compared to a true trial period where you actually collaborate together.

And you, you mentioned that in the trial period, people get paid for the collaboration, but afterwards they just get a profit share or a revenue share?

Yeah, something like this, like equity share or revenue share, like something.

And to wrap up our discussion, what would be a parting lesson that you would advise other founders to avoid when, when looking for collaborators? What's a red flag?

I think what I tell myself is when I see a red flag, I don't know, I don't know like exactly what's a red flag, but when I see a red flag, it will just get bigger and bigger over time. It's very rare that I see something going wrong and then it's getting better after. So every time I see something going wrong, it's just getting worse and worse.

So when you see the red flag, you'll see it growing, and that's when you need to pull back.

Yeah, exactly.

Amazing.

It's been such an insightful conversation with you, Theobald. Uh, I, um, I wish you all the success in your journey with your next product. And I'm certainly looking now at Feather. It's looking very interesting for creators.

Thank you very much, Daniel Ionescu. It was awesome talking to you.

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