Million Dollar Exits Ep.1 with Tibo Louis-Lucas; Lessons from selling TweetHunter and becoming Maker Of The Year

Hello everybody, I'm KP and welcome to Million Dollar Exits, a special segment on my main show, the Build in Public podcast. In this interview series, I sit down with founders who went from an idea to building a business and then eventually selling it for over $1 million, hence the name Million Dollar Exits. This is something I'm very passionate about and curious about at this point in my career. I wanna learn and share all the insights, mindset shifts, lessons, and non-obvious tips that are part of this unique journey with the next wave of founders who wanna take this path as well. So buckle up and get ready to be inspired and informed. Here's a special shout out to our episode sponsor, paralect.com. Billion-dollar ideas come from every possible niche. If you're a busy domain expert in marketing, sales, finances, or healthcare, and don't wanna spend 6 months just to build an MVP, you'll find Paralect super valuable. Paralect is a venture studio built to design, build, and launch a product for you that is ready to sell in under 2 months. Start with no-code or go full-stack right away. Simply focus on growing your early adopter community and build in public, and they'll take care of the rest. Build your million-dollar startup with paralect.com. P-A-R-A-L-E-C-T.com. Today I am super thrilled. I have one heck of a guest today. And I mean, we were just chatting before we hit record about what seems to be a Midas touch that he's got going in the last 2-3 weeks. He had a fantastic exit, great outcome for software company called Tweet Hunter, and just was announced last week or earlier this week that he is the Maker of the Year at Product Hunt. Without further ado, would love to welcome Thibault to the Building Public Podcast. Welcome to the show, Thibault.

Hey, KP, so happy to be here. Thank you very much for having me.

Thibault, your story has been everywhere on Twitter, the Twitterverse in the last 2, 3 weeks, ever since you announced the Tweet Hunters exit and the next chapter post-acquisition. First, I would love to, on behalf of every indie hacker, every bootstrapper, every founder that follows the podcast or listens to my content, I would love to say congratulations. Great outcome. Really happy for you. What's been so amazing for me and so fascinating and fun is to follow along from afar almost every step that you took along the way to get to where you are now. And it felt like the time just flew. I don't know how you felt like it was. You said it was 2 years since you started this, but in my head I thought like it was like 2 months ago you started Tweet Hunter and now suddenly you have an acquisition. But walk us through how you're feeling right now. You know, you must be feeling a mixed bag of emotions or one predominant emotion. Like, what are some— give us a view into your head right now.

So like right now it's It's crazy in my head because there was the acquisition and like I was expecting it. We worked on that for months. And so I knew it was going to happen. But like yesterday, there was this announcement about me being the Maker of the Year by Product Hunt. And Product Hunt is something that is super important for me. It's big. It was a big deal. And this one was totally unexpected. I didn't even know that I was— I have been shortlisted or anything. So I'm like, I was trying to scream this to everyone what I was meeting yesterday. And like most of my family don't even know what is Project Hands. But

right,

you

know what, on this live podcast, I'm gonna show you something. I'm gonna bring you the Golden Kitty that you're gonna hopefully see. I don't know if it's gonna be a different version of this, but this was last year's Golden Kitty that I won for Community Member of the Year.

Yeah, you're gonna love it.

And I was I was in the same shoes just like you. And it's also ironic and somehow philosophically, that's really how I think the universe, the world works, right? You don't care for it. You genuinely just do it for the love of it, for the joy, for the intrinsic motivation, and you just keep on doing it. And then suddenly out of left field, you get the news like that, right? I was in your shoes. I was stunned because I know there were much, much bigger and better and smarter people who were in the lineup for the award last year. And I was like, I didn't even think about it. 'Cause I'm like, that's not— and then when I found the news, I was like, oh, this is crazy. But that also was because genuinely I was not attached to the outcome. And I'm sure you felt the same way, right? 'Cause you're not attached to the outcome. You're just on it already.

I was actually looking at my GitHub history and I think I have pushed code in the last 400 days almost every day. And I feel exactly what you said. It's because you are genuinely interested in what you are doing, it doesn't feel like work, that's making it possible to last. If you're not having fun, it definitely cannot last.

Yeah. Yeah. And also, let me also tell you this. I want to check in with you in 12 months when this will be a part of your gallery in the background and you'll never think about this. It's just what I felt was for 2, 3 days, I was so grateful. I felt a sense of gratitude, especially because I was like, wow, I'm grateful for all the people who voted and all these things. And after that, I just completely moved on to the next thing. And I had really no recollection until somebody mentioned this or when this situation comes up. And I am curious this because this is important for us to all remember, all the founders and entrepreneurs in this journey, the summit that we think, like the peak that exists on the top, like when we get there, that feeling only exists for like 2, 3, 4 days. And after that, you're like, okay, what now? What's next? Have you arrived at that yet or are you still like for now cherishing the summit for now of not just product time, but I'm like acquisition too?

That was a bit the case like today. Like every time I receive a DM or a bug report, like it gets me back to reality and I have to work. I have to make users happy. So yeah, it's happening.

That's it. And so for the folks who may not know much about TweetHunter, the story, can you recap? So the theme that I've been talking about in this podcast, especially with this segment, is idea to exit, right? And any inflection points along the way. So can you walk us through a bunch of inflection points that you can remember from the idea, the aha moment to acquisition?

I had a couple of failures in the past.

Just a couple?

Way more actually.

Way more, right? Yeah, both of us. Yeah.

But there is something that I think is very big is that when you have an idea, you love it so much that you are trying to convince people that that the idea is actually good. And like my first startup typically suffered from that. I don't know if the idea was good or not, but we didn't even care validating it. And something that we wanted to do differently this time was validation from start. And that's why we started this crazy challenge of shipping one new product every week.

Every week? Wow.

Yeah, every week. It was in like 2021, early 2021. I think it lasted about 4 months. And we shipped 10 or 11 products in 4 months. And every time we were looking at only one thing, it was revenue.

Yeah.

If the product was not generating revenue, we just moved on to the next thing. And I think out of the 11 products, 4 actually made revenue, but not enough. And Tweet Hunter was the last one of the 11. And from the very, very beginning, it took off very fast.

You could tell that there was a pull from the market about this as opposed to pushing it?

Yeah, because it was super simple. We tweeted about our projects, but for every other project, when we were not promoting them, the acquisition stopped directly. No word of mouth. For Tweet Hunter, it was a little bit different. We just tweeted about it. We posted on Reddit about it. But even when we were not doing it, it seemed like we still had acquisition. We still had traffic and we still had people subscribing. That was crazy for us. It was the first time it happened. So we decided to work a little bit longer on that. And the week over the week growth had been very big. So I think when we crossed like $1K MRR, about 1 or 2 months after soft launching it, we decided to just stick on it and work on Twitter a little bit more.

Right. So that was one inflection point, the validation, right? And then so What happened after that?

So I was promoting Tweet Hunter. Like I was sending a lot of DMs to a lot of people. And one of them was GK Molina. It's like he's a Twitter ghostwriter working for clients. He didn't have a huge audience at the time. Like I think 30 or 40K Twitter followers. And when I DM'd him, it was, he was like, this is perfect. This SaaS is exactly promoting the technique that I'm teaching in my course. It's

aligned to his philosophy, right? Yeah.

Yeah, this is actually watching great content will make you write great content. And this is exactly what the Tweet Hunter is about. It's a way to find great content on your niche and at the same time trying to write something new, taking inspiration from this great content. So this guy, G. Camarena—

By the way, he's gonna come on the podcast too at a separate date, another night. Nice.

I hope he's gonna say the same thing as I am.

Right. So I'm curious to hear his side of the story of the journey, right? But yeah, keep going. Sorry.

He said, I want equity. I want to be in the products. And we were very surprised, but we said yes. Basically, we built this very specific contract. He didn't have equity, but it was like shares of the products, not the company. And together we worked very closely and we planned the Twitter launch in September 2021. And it went big. Like from just this launch, we went from $3K MRR To like almost 20. Wow. And it was like the beginning of, it was getting big. Like it was, it was actually big. We were planning on paying ourselves. So it was like—

No, was this, sorry, at this point, was this a Twitter launch or was this a Product Hunt launch?

Twitter launch. Twitter only. Yeah. You can really ask GK about it. Like he planned something that was quite solid mailing list before having people to subscribe early to get some advantages. And then the big launch with like a lot of other Twitter influencers talking about the product. So he did very well. And then what we anticipated is like, we should have churn, like we should have people churning out of the product. And the next month should be a big slowdown on the acquisition. But it didn't happen.

Wow.

That's a great sign. Yeah.

Right.

This is, I think this is like the next inflection point is like the word of mouth on these products was super big. And I guess it's also because you have Twitter products, your users are actually building an audience. And if they are successful, they will promote you yourself. And so you will grow. So the product-led growth is quite strong on this.

Right. And then that brings us to the final inflection point where, was it, you said at some point you were paying your salaries as well, correct?

Yeah. I think we started in January. January 2022.

Right. So, and so it grew to, did it grow to $100K MRR? Because I actually, I don't remember because I saw about the $20K, $30K. I think I've seen at that point, but I haven't seen the latest when just before acquisition.

So the thing that we did very good, I think, is, and maybe that's a little bit why I got to Maker of the Year, is we just continued shipping relentlessly. Like we shipped the product hunt launch with a bunch of new features a few months after the Twitter launch. We shipped a Twitter challenge Where during three months people had this challenge of just growing their Twitter and they were totally free. We shipped a lot of very small products, totally free. That was just helping people to grow on Twitter in the hope that they will then convert to Twitter users.

Right.

Lot of new projects, and we shipped this crazy thing where we gave one percent of our company to a bunch of. Twitter influencers without really asking for anything in return. So we made it very easy for them to say yes, and they agreed. And then we hoped that they would promote us, and they did.

Of course, right? Yeah.

And I think that was a very big part of the growth. So it's like shipping a lot of related side projects that would fuel the growth and at the same time gather a lot of very influential and important people. around us that would promote us.

Yeah. And so walk us through, when was the first time you had the idea or the intention to, you know, get acquired? Like, when did that thought first pass your head?

I think that was one of the, like, foundation ideas of the company. Like, from the very, very beginning with my co-founder Thomas, we said like, yeah, let's just try to build one project And sell it in a year. So it actually took 2 years. But the idea is like, we actually, we love building new things. And by building something and trying to sell it in a year, we would just start over the next year and keep going.

You enjoy the 0 to 1 phase. And so you're like, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. And I think we are quite good at it. The thing is what you realize after is that once you did the 0 to 1, You're actually making a lot of more money by doing from one to ten,

right?

Then selling and doing the zero to one again. So we continued a little bit further, and we found this awesome company to be acquired from. It's right. It's great. I don't know if you know the story, but the guy was actually in my in the same school as me. Yeah.

So what's his name?

Guillaume. Guillaume Mubesh.

Yeah, I thought I saw him on some other YouTube video, but does he have a YouTube channel? Correct?

Yeah, he's quite big on YouTube and Instagram.

And he's an indie founder too, right? Like he's a bootstrapped founder too, I think, is it?

Yeah. Bootstrapped, big company right now. Crazy. Like his company Lemlist is doing cold email outreach.

Right, right. Yeah.

And it has nothing to do with personal branding, but he built his entire company through his personal brand,

right?

So we were like an obvious addition to his company because he trusts personal brand to be the way of the future to sell, right? And we are actively promoting this way of selling.

Yeah, it looks like I should chat with him because I believe that too. You know, I think I should bring him on the podcast because I think that is the future, right? It's the creator-led movements around whatever you want to build. And when I mean by creator, I don't mean like just TikTok influencers. I mean You know, people who have not just attention but also trust, and that's personal brand, you know, right? Like a lot of people just have attention. They don't have trust. Like a lot of meme pages, a lot of shit posting pages on Instagram, they just have attention. Like there's 4 million views on some of this shit, but if they drop a t-shirt, there's like 15 people who buy it. But what James Clear has, for example, is both attention and trust, right? When he drops something new, it's going to be like Ryan Hoover has both attention and trust. So I think it's important to build trust as well, which I think is the foundational of personal brand. It's so true.

Like, when you receive a cold DM or cold email, the trust that you have in the guy is actually zero. Like, he has zero. You have seen no proof, nothing, no way to trust the person. So if you knew the guy because he's constantly publishing on LinkedIn or Twitter and he's sharing all his knowledge, the trust is way higher.

The other thing too is I think Personal brand is just think of it. I mean, I've never really realized the power of this, Thibault, until only like last 2, 3 months. I mean, last year maybe is if 3 people in your life when you were younger told you that they like you because you're a giver, right? Because you're a person who wants to give first with no expectations. And you just— that's— they're like, they describe you as the kind of person who is a giver. You know, that's just how they think of you. You just have to bring that mindset and philosophy to the internet across all the things you do, because that's what I've done. I've done nothing different in my content or in how I interact with people. It's just that in real life, I like to be a giver where I just give if I can and don't worry about strings attached. And when you do that on the internet, people are shocked because most people are not like that. Most people are transactional. Like there's this concept of mercenary versus missionary, right? And so most people are mercenaries. They're trying to like close the deal right there. Quick win, quick money. And if you just give without expectation, and I'm seeing this with Alex Hormozi, whose book I'm reading, And he talks about this all the time. He's like, the people who are at the top 1% of personal brands or billionaires or some of these hyper-successful people, they just operate at a time horizon that's like 10, 20 years and they try to cash in in the 19th year. They don't try to cash in in the first year. They just give, like give value. It's okay. So I think that's one other thing. Like I feel a lot of indie makers and indie hackers, I wish that they told me when I was starting out in indiehackers.com when I was 2018, it was very transactional. People were like trying to like, Get the first client, get the first customer, as opposed to let me help you. Can I add value for you? How can I solve your problem for you? You know, like that. This is a different mindset.

And you can you can hear it in like every startup pitch or every call email. All those people they are talking about themselves first.

Yeah, it's all ninety percent is like me, me, me, me, me. How is it better? Yeah, what's this? What's in it for you? Right? What people cares? What's in it for them? So and then so to your point about this, like I mean, I guess I guess we're extending the personal brand discussion, but I think it's worth it because a lot of the times developers, as you know, a lot of developers are anti-social in the sense that they're anti-talking about what they're building or anti-having a big public persona. And I understand because I feel like they're confusing building a personal brand on attention and trust with bullshit fame. Like nobody wants this, you know, TMZ fame. You know, we're not talking about that. We're talking about if you don't know of that person enough number of times, how are you gonna get those doors open, you know. So you have to have some way of adding value to the world consistently that's not just your product, right? Like in your case, what I've seen from you is a lot of what you've done in the last 2 years was not just to promote Tweet Hunter. A lot of what you did, like even the Twitter Growth University or something you guys did, all of that stuff was genuinely like, this is helpful to anybody who may use this, right? And like I saw the TwiMax acquisition too, that was also very On point, very clever, but also very like, that's a great move, right? Like it's not just about Tweet Hunter. I think it's a great move, you know?

Yeah, I felt that. So we were growing quite quickly and I was actually worried about the size of the market itself. And so we had this chat with Thomas about what we should do and how can we think long term. And one thing was actually not only promote Tweet Hunter, but promotes personal branding.

Right.

And in a way that we need to get more people to start building their personal brand because it's a great way to grow a business and not enough people are seeing this right now. So that's why we acquired Twimax to just reach more people and just push this new thing. And that was exactly the point of the Growth Challenge. It's like helping people build something for themselves. It's not just a contest where if you lose, you lose everything because— and you want to go there. Like, in this contest, you cannot lose. Like, if you do not win the prize, you still build something for yourself, like this audience.

Yeah. So then to walk us to the last part where you were approached for strategic acquisition, and what was your thought like at the time? You were like, okay, I know this guy from middle school, seems like Great alignment. And then what happened after that? Like, it was, you know, tell us the rest of the story because there might be some folks who haven't read the thread that you posted.

So just before that, I didn't share it on Twitter, but we paid someone, like we paid someone to help us sell the company. Oh, it didn't work like at all. And

you had like a broker, you had a broker to sell.

I don't think he's bad. I really think he's a good one. And we paid him like quite big money, but every people that he introduced us to was big companies with very old patterns. And I don't think they understand the power of personal brand.

Yeah.

And

it took someone like him to really get it, right? You have to really get it. Yeah,

exactly. Guillaume was perfect. And actually, I reached out to him one year before and at the very beginning, We're just like chatting as startuppers, just sharing feedback, sharing—

French founders. Is he French too?

Yes, he's French.

Yeah.

And so when we got to the sale, we had this talk that I was selling. And at the very beginning, he was just sharing some advices about how to sell. And at one point, I think like he realized that it would be perfect for him. So we started the heavy discussion about the sale. And what was crazy, like the conversation with all the other People was so difficult. It was like very big emails and like you had to think about what you were like, what you were writing. But with Guillaume, it was like just a WhatsApp group and in like in ten days we had pretty much everything covered on the acquisition. Like all the numbers, all the negotiations happened on WhatsApp super fast because we were like same age, same culture, same country, same language. So it went so fast and he was the Like all the others, he asked us to stay like 2 years in business. But compared to all the other companies, staying 2 years and working with him was like totally different perspective.

Right, right. It would be less of a job, more like just doing what you're already doing, you know? Right. Yeah. I think I'm assuming he'll give you that full freedom. Like he just doesn't want to meddle with.

That's exactly why we said yes. He said like, full freedom. He knows that we are entrepreneurs, that we value our freedom super high. So yeah.

Yeah, that's cool. So give us a quick recap on the acquisition details. I don't know how much you can speak about it, but I know you tweeted about the details.

So it's above 8 figures. So like above $10 million. That's the entire deal because TweetCenter and TapYou are quite risky businesses.

Platform risk.

Yeah, exactly. Like big, big platform risk. Most of the money is based on earnouts, both on— most of it is based on performance. So basically we have this goal of going to $10 million ARR to get all the money. But it's not like all or nothing. It's

like step function. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of CEOs' compensation is similar to the, you know, like a lot of public company CEOs, right? When somebody joins Adobe as CEO and the stock At $55, you know, there's like a step function. They have to, you know, grow the stock value and then they get some percentage of whatever shares. So that makes sense. No, so, but it, I mean, it seems like a, I mean, just outside in, looking outside in, seems like an ambitious target though. $10 million ARR. Where are you right now?

I cannot say.

Oh, have you, what was the last public number you posted on Twitter?

I think, I think it was like $1.5 million ARR.

Okay. Okay.

Okay. So

you've crossed the million, and so now the journey is one to ten.

Yeah, exactly.

Man, this is this is fun. And this is a when I when you say million, it's not just tweet hundreds, tweet hundred plus top leader, correct?

Exactly, exactly. Yeah. So it seems ambitious, but the numbers are growing quite quickly right now.

No, now now that I hear what your benchmark was and you shared on Twitter, I think it's not that ambitious now. You know, given that you get us one point five and you guys have great momentum, you clearly. Category leaders, you know, I think there is not any that are like as big as you are. There are some that are like, you know, smaller in the indie world. That's another thing I actually wanted to ask you, Thibault. When you first started out, they were like, it's a crowded space. It was a crowded space. It's still a crowded space. What was your mindset around navigating competitors and competition?

It depends. Like it was a crowded space, but if you look carefully, you have tons of SaaS that are dedicated to posting on social media. And take something like Buffer, you can post on every social media with Buffer. But the market of tools dedicated to Twitter only was quite small.

Right.

And when we started Twit Hunter, we had no idea where it would go. But then we had this talk about LinkedIn and how should we include LinkedIn. One of our competitors like Hypefury was it had this feature of posting on LinkedIn.

Cross-posting? Yeah.

Yes, cross-posting. And we said no, like, no, we would not do it. And we would be a Twitter pure player. And to support LinkedIn, we would create these other products, Tapio.

Oh, Tapio.

Because we wanted to be the best on each social media.

Right.

And what we wanted to do is like having Twitter to be the best tool for Twitter. And at the very moment where you start supporting many social media, you add so many constraints. Yeah. It will make the UX crazy hard to navigate, or you will not use the full capability of each social media.

Yeah. You're probably going to use like 10% of the feature set. Yeah.

That's the case for Buffer. If you want to go deep on Twitter, Buffer is going to be the worst because it offers so, so less compared to 300.

So I like how niched down and focused you were about this, right? You wanted to build the best-in-class product for the niche of Twitter creators, and then you took the mindset and said, let's build the best-in-class for LinkedIn creators. You didn't say let's just build something that works across 5 other channels. Yeah.

And by the way, I really think that there's a huge market if people want to do the same for like Instagram or TikTok. Yeah, it's like it's not covered, but it's so big.

Right. That's crazy. I mean, hopefully you can collect all those stones, like Infinity Stones, you know, and then get to that 10 million or even more. So tell us a little bit about the first chapter, right? The validation chapter. I think a lot of people who listen to this podcast and a lot of people in your network and my network, I feel like they either underestimate validation or they're too attached to one particular idea. That they always wanted to push it to the market. Tell us about sort of what would be like 3 tips you would give for someone who is in the validation phase right now?

I think that the first one would be to just be careful about what you actually value. In my first startup, I was so happy to share at a family dinner that I raised money and that I had hired a team of 10 people. And it's— I felt so important. Sharing this, like my.

This is a rite of passage, by the way. Everybody goes through this headcount. Let me say headcount is the dumbest thing to brag about, right? It's like like Google bragging we have 150k people. Like that's so dumb. Like why would you brag about? And that's why they laid off a lot of people now. So it's like you can't control that anyway. Anyway, go on. Sorry.

But it like it it work. It work to your parents or to people.

Yeah yeah yeah right true right. Oh yeah, he's the boss. He's an entrepreneur managing 10 people. Yeah.

Exactly. So I think that's the first thing to realize. And you have to move on from that to revenue. I really think that revenue should be the main KPI to look at. And when people say that they would buy if, or they will buy when, it's not validation. You need to have them pay now. And that's going to be the real proof that they find value in what What I'm gonna say, uh, sorry, I lost my train of thought. You

said 2. Why didn't you come up with a 3rd tip? Something that was painful for you to learn, but you did, and you were glad that you did learn.

Something that I really want to remind people is that when you look at Tweet Hunter right now, it's a full suite of Twitter products. You can do many things, scheduling, we support all formats. It's big. But when we launched, it was just one feature and only one feature. It was just an input field where you just, you were writing, like you were writing marketing and it would retrieve viral tweets about marketing. That's it. That was the only thing. And people were paying for that, for personalized based on their interest and their writing tone. A feed of viral tweets that they could get inspired from. So most of the time you feel like when you are building products, you need to build everything at once or you would not convince people. I really think that you need to get rid of most of the work and try to ship way faster, like 2 weeks with a very limited set of features. And one very powerful core feature that would differentiate you from everything that's actually on the market.

So I actually, I think that's a very, very strong point that you make there, right? I think a lot of people again overlook that power of having a killer feature, right? What's the one feature people will talk about? I remember when I first tested Tweet Hunter, I had an aha moment when I first like, there was an input box like you said, and I put some building public or something, then I saw like 20 tweets that were generated based on like that keyword. And I was like, wow, they're Doing a Twitter search and bringing, surfacing the highest liked or highest, you know, retweeted tweets with the same keyword. And I thought that was a killer feature to your point, right? My question is, was anybody else doing that?

No.

See, so there's something here. Like, I feel like a lot of the times, even though there are players in the category, you know, which you cannot avoid, there will always be players in the category, you can always create something that doesn't exist in the market. And have a little differentiation on top of that, right?

And that was the time where GPT-3 just came out and a lot of people were rushing on GPT-3 as a completion tool, like a text generation tool.

Right.

And we used it a little bit differently. Like we used it to try to compare tweets and what the users were usually talking about to try to find a match between those tweets. And that's how we managed to get this Twitter search super relevant because it was actually using the new next-gen AI tools, AI APIs to try to find the best tools and the ones that are the closest to what you are usually talking about. So all those new technology, just take a step back and try to look at how people are using it right now and how differently it can be used Because all the people will just jump on the obvious use cases and you might not want that.

Right. So to recap what you said about validation, you know, in that chapter, in that phase, there's 3 tips. One is don't do it for headcounts or some fake KPIs, you know, societal KPIs. Do it for other reasons. Number 2 is that revenue is the only KPI that matters, which I fully agree. And the 3rd thing is build a killer feature. And have a limited scope, right? I think that itself is a huge— if somebody can do these 3, I think that they're already on their way, right? Tell us your journey about from, let's say, the first validation point, maybe first paying customer to $1K MRR. What does that look like? What are some tips or what are some pitfalls to avoid there?

So what was the first thing that I did quickly about quickly after shipping the product was report feedback to Thibault, which was a button that would redirect directly to my Twitter DMs. And that way I was having like, I was having like one user out of 2, I guess, at the very beginning, who was DMing me about their experience on the tool and giving me feedback. And that was actually still the case until like 3 or 4 months ago. Like the support button inside Twicenter were still redirecting to me, to my DMs. Wow.

Lightning-fast feedback loop for you.

Yes. And I was trying to implement user feedback super fast, like to give the best-in-class support and to like give users the feeling that I was listening to them carefully. It worked. I added a lot of new features based on that, and it quickly made us go to $1K MRR.

So while you were in this 0 to 1K MRR phase, how were you paying your bills and other things? Because you're not paying yourself a salary at that point. What were some other ways you managed to stay afloat?

So we have this amazing country, which is France, where we pay a lot of taxes, right? So I benefited from unemployment benefits. I just received money from the state for just not working. So it helps a lot and I feel insanely grateful for that.

Stayed afloat for like 1 year. How long were you on unemployment?

2 years in France.

No way. You were? This is crazy. You were on unemployment for 2 years?

Yeah. So you do not get the full amount of what you previously had as an employee, but you can still get a lot of money from that. But just to moderate that, keep in mind that I will pay a lot of taxes on the sale of Twicenter, which will be way bigger than what I received.

Right. So you're paying your debt back to the great country of France. No, but I think what stuck out for me was not that, you know, how big of a check you were drawing from France, but so much about your humility in accepting and sort of embracing that lifestyle, you know, because you came from what I heard earlier is that with dinner parties and with family, you were like the guy who had 10 people reporting to Right? You had a headcount of ten people. You were a venture-backed founder in that previous chapter. So that must be really humbling to go on. You know, Francis unemployment. Yeah,

it's bigger than this. It's like when you are at school or university, it's like what you hear nonstop is you are in one of the best schools of the country. You will be project manager. You will manage a lot of people, and that's going to be your your career. And that's like I heard this so much that. that when I started with my first startup, the only goal was hiring people, hiring like 10 interns and have them to work and managing that everything was just running smoothly.

Right.

What we did differently this time is like no hire, build myself, and SSV made us go way further. The crazy thing is that on the early stages, you have to move so quickly Like you have to move on from a project to another so quickly that I think it's unsustainable with employees. Like the employees would feel like you have no vision, which is a little bit the case. Like you're just trying to figure out things. And that part is much easier if you build yourself.

Yeah. I feel like, you know, I think it was Naval who said, if there's only 2 real things, 2 real tasks in building a startup. I think if you can build it and if you can sell it, you know, that's enough. You have a startup. So there's either one person whose job is 24 hours building something, shipping stuff, and then if there's some other person who's 24/7, you know, selling or marketing, I think that's a complete team right there. You don't need an army of interns or army of employees initially.

And what was amazing with my co-founder Thomas is that we were both On those both topics. Like we were both building. I was the developer and he's very product and design. And at the same time, he's the marketer, but I'm also selling a lot on Twitter. So we are both very accountable on those both topics.

Right. And you're both very, and I think very compatible too, to each other, right? Like you're not sort of doing redundant things, you know, but you're complementing each other's strengths and skills. And like I've seen his tweets, I've seen your tweets. They're different, right? You're both telling 2 versions of the stories, 2 different stories. The other thing I'll say is a tip for, you know, other founders, you know, is if you can't sell, my hack is just build in public because I think building in public will teach you how to sell even if you don't know traditional sales. Because I never went to a sales course, I never took anything. But because every day I respond to DMs, every day I respond to people's replies and tweets and stuff like that, I learned how to present An offer. I learned how to like you know when I see JK, I feel like oh this is how you write the offer. Oh this is how you have a sense of urgency at the end, right? Like you have to create some of these things, but you if you don't know how to do sales, just build in public because people will teach you. You're forced to learn in public, right? Because you're in the public domain, you know. So yeah, that that's one tip there. And with you, Thibault, I feel like you are particularly good at building in public in my view. You know, I haven't seen much of Thomas. tweets, but I think you were sharing the journey along the way, writing threads, keeping us all in the loop.

And reading in public felt very hard at the very beginning. But the thing is, you don't have to be good to start. You just have to do it and you become good after.

You look at your own tweets now, your threads are so well formatted. You've got all the checks. And when I look at your tweets, Threads now, I'm like he's got the craft now. Early on, I mean you and even me early on we were all like winging it. We were like dumb shit, right? Right. We're just like writing without any formatting.

The thing is like I think most people would give up after three months or six months because they are not good enough yet.

Yeah.

But just the best will just continue even if they are stuck at just one or two likes. But it doesn't matter. You will become good in the end.

Yeah. I mean, it's just reps and sets and iterations. Actually, so this is another topic that I wanted to ask you about because you're the person who has the best seat in this new phenomenon that people are seeing, which is explosion of threads on Twitter. A lot of that I blame you and Tweet Hunter. Just kidding. But what is sort of, how should people think about this? I What's happening is there are people like you and me, we believe in reps and sets, which means we have to keep creating content that works. And over time we get better and better and better. And so we want to be in the domain. I want to be in the arena. I want to create content beyond Twitter. But then there are some people who create 2 or 3 tweets or 2 or 3 threads, and then they look at other people's threads and they don't like them. They're like, oh yeah, this is like a thread boy thread. It's like, oh, this is just— and they're feeling repulsed and they're like, not creating content because of somebody's bad thread. What's your overall take on threads and how should people embrace them if you think they should?

I think Twitter is doing quite a good job at filtering content. And I think Elon changing Twitter will make it even better in a way that it's not a problem that you have a lot more threads. If you see a lot more threads, which is a little bit different. It means that most people are enjoying them, or Twitter will just change the algorithm. If you are suffering from seeing a lot of threads and you don't like them, it means that you are a little bit different from most people, and you might— and you have a lot of ways to tell Twitter you just don't want to see threads anymore. You can mute words. It's quite easy, and I do it For some very specific words. What I mean is that the Twitter algorithm is actually quite good compared to what a lot of people are saying, and it's doing the job at giving you what you want to see.

Right. So just train the algorithm the way you want it to see, huh?

What I mean is that the more threads or the more tweets, the more value is outside. And then it's a question of finding it and sending this value to the right people.

So in terms of Threads as a strategy, what are your tips for someone who's just starting out Twitter? Like someone who just started Twitter, let's say there's an indie developer from Berlin, you know, they're a fantastic developer, but they just have 400 followers on Twitter. They're just starting their journey. Give them a sense of 3 or 4 tips that you would give for them to grow and, you know, build an audience.

My main tip would be to optimize for fun, because if you do it for like 1 or 2 months, it will not work. So you need to find a system that will work on the long term. The second thing is at the very beginning, don't optimize for quality because if you do, you will not ship anything. Optimize for quantity. Just publish a lot of content and then that will give you the keys to understand what's working and what's not working. And then the quality will come. And Third thing I would say is make friends. Like, this is one of the best Twitter strategies ever, is having people who want to support you because you are you, and it makes the journey so much fun. When one of your Twitter friends will reach success, you are so happy for them. And when you have problems, you can reach out to them and ask questions and they will reply. And I have found so many great things thanks to Twitter friends. I have met some of them in real life. One of them introduced me to an awesome group of indie makers in Bali. It's, I think it really made my Bali experience so much better. So yeah, many things can happen from just Twitter friends.

Right. I mean, I think I'll share a lot of that with you as well. My entire career, I think, was catapulted because of Twitter, you know, because of one decision that I took in 2018 casually to be more intentional and build in public on Twitter. Everything changed from then, and I don't think there are other platforms. Maybe there are, but I don't think other platforms are as great for founders, you know, as Twitter is. You know, so in conclusion, what's next for you? What are you most excited about for this year? What are you going to do with all the money? Just kidding. What's what's next for you?

I bought a Lambo. Yeah.

No, I can't wait to see your YouTube channel with with with the Lambo. You know,

on the side. Right.

Yeah. Like Tai Lopez. Yeah.

Yeah. So no—

You should actually tweet from inside the Lambo and say, tweeting from inside the Lambo.

Coding inside.

Right. Coding. That's true.

So during 2 years, I will have this crazy goal about going to $10 million ARR. It's gonna be a crazy journey. I haven't managed products that will go that far ever. So it's gonna be a crazy journey. I will try to share a lot on Twitter about everything that happens, about the nice and the ugly things about the acquisition. I will have to learn how to collaborate more and integrate more with Lemlist because they have a big team and they have so much talent there that we would need to just learn And then after that, I'm pretty sure Lemlist is so cool that I would want to stay there. So I have no plans for after. We'll see.

But never say never. You never know, right? Like, because you enjoy the zero-to-one phase. So after 2 years, who knows, right? But

yeah,

that's awesome, man. You know, once again, congratulations on, you know, such a great success. You fully clearly earned it. And it's so great to see you shine and rise. But the other thing also I want to underline, a lot of people, they just win, you know, and they're happy and they're winning. But I feel like you're not just winning, I felt that you were genuinely like a rising tide that was lifting other boats. You were sharing your lessons, you're celebrating in public, you're doing this interview and like coming on a bunch of podcasts and sharing your stories and lessons. I think it's so awesome to watch that. So kudos on that too.

Super cool. Thank you, KP. Really appreciate it.

Awesome. Cool, man. Have a great rest of the day. All right.

Yeah. Thank you.