The Underdog: He Turned His Last $1,000 Into $150M

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The Underdog: He Turned His Last $1,000 Into $150M

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Dec 17, 2024

This is the story of how Guillaume Moubeche went from being an aspiring entrepreneur with $1,000 left in his bank account, to building a company making $30M/year and is now valued at over $150M.

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🐦 - https://x.com/GuillaumeMbh
🎥 - https://www.youtube.com/@GuillaumeMoubeche

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All right Guillaume what's your story

I come from a background with literally zero money

going from shitty job to shitty job and I had only 1 000 left

It was all my savings

At that time I just felt OK I need to be my own boss

This is Guillaume Moubesh a guy who set out on a mission

mission to become an entrepreneur and make millions online

I've been at it for now if you combine all experiences

close to 10 years

And in the beginning things were tough

After launching the project creating the whole website

and putting it online it was a massive fail

But I didn't give up

I think deep inside I had a voice

that wanted to prove everyone wrong

After years of failure Guillaume finally came across an idea

that would make his dreams come true

There is no way to describe how it feels

when you have a true product market fit

It's like poetry

It's like magic

Everything you do works

You're in a state of bliss

You feel like a superhero and you feel like nothing

can destroy you until

Half of our customers were just saying like what the fuck

There were like public messages on the community

like yesterday I loved Lemlis

Today I fucking hate it

It was the month where we went from 40 month over month

growth rates to

So that was really hard and it was very intense for me

Like I pushed myself close to the limit

This is the story of how Guillaume Moubesh

went from his last 1 000 to a company valued

at over 150 million in just four years

Welcome to The Underdog

I grew up in Paris

Paris Two of my parents are not entrepreneurs

Like they grew up on a farm in the southwest of France

They never had like a lot of money

so they sacrificed quite a lot

so we could get a good education

After high school I went to like university

I needed to work on the side so I could pay for life

I was going like from shitty job to shitty job

and I applied like to the McDonald's

where all my friends you know like got accepted

and they declined

And at that time I really really like felt like

shit fuck you know like everyone can work at McDonald's

and not you

You're really like the worst shit ever

You're doing like uni where you don't even know

if you're going to get a job afterwards

So you start like questioning everything

After struggling to land basic jobs during university

Guillaume realized that the usual path

from school to a nine to five job wasn't for him

So he starts looking for something better

At that time I just felt okay like

I need to be my own boss

I need to live following the rules I want to establish

I don't want to have someone you know

you know who tells me what to do

Working in a like normal company

I feel like your creativity is often very like limited

And I've always been someone creative

I've always felt like I don't belong in a specific category

So I just felt like launching a company

was the coolest thing to do

And I've also loved money to be honest

I've always loved money

I've seen how people you know have been treated

my dad because he didn't have enough money

And I think it's like a great tool that can be used

you know to also do like good things with it

I just decided to grind hard and make this thing work

So I switched to do a master in marketing

During that master I just thought that

I could give back to my dad by launching a business with him

Because I felt like okay now that I know marketing

I'm going to be super rich and make money online

I was just thinking let's do like t shirt business

It doesn't require a lot of money

and we don't have money so it's perfect

You know how to print on fabric and I know how to sell

With his master's in marketing

Guillaume is convinced that his t shirt business

is how he's going to give back to his dad and make it big

He's finally ready to leave the minimum wage jobs behind

and become a successful entrepreneur

And after months of blood sweat and tears

everything was ready

After launching the project creating the whole website

and putting it online it was a massive fail

We only sold like six t shirts

And my plan which seemed to be perfect

which was build a community create a website

sell the t shirt to the community

have tons of word of mouth and become super famous

was totally crushed

My dad was disappointed because the business

was not going you know as planned

and I feel like I was ashamed

I couldn't really like help him out

You know I was also mad at first at my dad

because we couldn't invest more money

But in reality it was my own fault

I was mad at him but the version of me that was mad at him

was a version that was also mad at myself

and I didn't really realize it

After that you know like we didn't talk

for almost like a year and a half

So that was really hard especially because my parents

you know like they love you a lot

You need to do like family stuff

like on Sunday it's very important

And the fact that we didn't really talk

it meant also that I kind of like put my head down

and I was saying like I'm busy with work busy with work

and that became kind of like my go to excuse

Guillaume realizes that making millions online

isn't as easy as it seems

His dream of becoming an entrepreneur

led to a ruined relationship with his family

but he isn't the one to give up this easily

So he starts looking for his next venture

One of my friends was launching a lead generation agency

He asked me like hey

I saw you were grinding on your project

so maybe you want to join forces and help me out

At that time I did not know

what a lead generation agency was

so I was like okay what it is

And he's like okay basically

I'm helping like businesses find their dream customers

So I was like okay that's intriguing

Let me know like how you do it

So this is when I really started

getting into like growth hacking

marketing and sales prospecting

So I did that for about a year

I closed customers all over the world

world and I really became like an expert at sales prospecting

because I was booking meetings

for tens of different companies in different industries

I was kind of a mad scientist

testing like tons of different approaches

After some time I was like okay

I don't want to do like a lead agency

I'd rather have like my own software

because I think as an engineer

I love to have like something that was scalable

Guillaume was craving more than just an agency business

His ambitions were much larger

He wanted to build the next billion dollar startup

and make a bunch of money doing

So he left the agency

and after long nights of searching

he found his next idea

I saw that whenever someone visits your LinkedIn profile

you can see who that person is

So at that time I was like okay that's crazy

because it means that you can basically do the same

on any website

I really thought it was going to change the internet

to be honest

My ambition was to personalize the internet

I went to Russia

where I had hired like a few developers

I didn't have a lot of money

so the developer that I had hired

they were kind of like junior

I think in total I have paid maybe like four or 5 000

Back in the days it was like all my savings

But eventually like LinkedIn changed one line of code

So the entire project yeah went to trash

And then I was like oh fuck it

After moving to Russia spending all of his savings

and having his dream idea crushed by one line of code

Guillaume went back home to France to look for another idea

But this time with no money in his bank account

I had only like 1 000 left

And I didn't want to go work on like shitty jobs

like I did for I don't know six or seven years

to pay like for everything else

My girlfriend I remember she was paying the rent

She didn't believe in me anymore

Like she was asking me like to take a job

My friends you know like they would ask me you know

like to go to the restaurant

And I would lie

I would say like that I was busy

that I already had plans

The plans was basically like me cooking pasta for myself because

because it's cheap you know

know Everyone is thinking like why are you doing this

You have degrees just take a job

And you'll see later if you can become an entrepreneur

But I don't know why I think deep inside

I had a voice that wanted to prove everyone wrong

You know we talk a lot about blue ocean and red ocean

So I started with like this blue ocean idea

because no one won on it

I thought I had like an incredible tech

that was going to change the world

In the end it was like too complex

and it didn't work out

We got blocked etc

So now I was like okay red ocean

we have tons of competitors

But if we have competitors

it means that there is always a product market fit

These guys are making shit tons of money

So all you have to do is to be better

So instead of doing the same as all the platforms

I started focusing you know with Lemlist

with a key differentiator

That was how to make sales more human

and how to add extra layers on personalization

that no other platform could offer

So even though at first I knew all the features

that our competitors had

were a hundred times better than ours

I focused on something that was really tied

to a key problem from our ideal customer profile

but also that was tied

to a real return on investment for them

which is how many meetings can they book

If you can tie any of your software or product or service

to the revenue people are going to make

your product becomes associated with success

This is Guillaume's aha moment

He realizes that a good business idea

is simply taking a proven idea and just making it better

If you're looking for a similar idea

then just do what Guillaume did

Research proven businesses that are making money right now

And you can start doing that

by checking out our 52 Micro SaaS Ideas Deep Dive

In this database you'll get 52 proven Micro SaaS businesses

how much money they make how they found their idea

how they got customers

and tons of other details you'd want to know

Just click the first link in the description

and we'll send it to you over for free

Now back to the story

With 1 000 to his name and the right idea in mind

Guillaume got down to building

And this time he was doing it fast

Our first MVP it was just two weeks of work

I closed basically the first 100 customers

doing live demos and outbound

I did only this

On top of it the first customers I was onboarding

I would tell them you know what

like buy the software subscription

and I will myself write the campaigns for you

And in exchange I would also ask them

if they want to be part of the content

I create as success stories

An unfair advantage I would say that you can have

when you launch a company

is if you're among the target audience

of what you're building

Because if you're using your product daily

and you're using it so much

that it drives you crazy to see all these bugs

and the fucked up things happening

because this is software

and that happens a lot in the beginning

Then I can guarantee that the pace

at which you improve the product is 100 times better

And the growth loop for me was simple

It's like I use my own products

I help people with their campaigns

I create like the best content ever

I push the content into a community

From there I get insights from people

who complain about specific things

I improve the products

I restart using the product

but with the improvements

making success stories about it

with new templates et cetera

and so on and so forth

And this is a growth loop we've used

to really like skyrocket the growth

Lemlis made 600 in its first month

and was growing 40 month over month

Guillaume thought he finally cracked the code

to building a successful business

until he looked closer and noticed something was off

I was like we can't have such a low activation rate

So the activation rate for me was when someone sign up

whether or not do they launch a campaign

And that conversion rate I think it was like at

So I decided to change entirely the product

I redone like all the wireframes

We restarted from scratch

When we put it live

half of our customers were just saying like

what the fuck

They were like public messages on the community

Like yesterday I love Lemlis Today

Today I fucking hate it

And at the time I was like holy shit

what do you do

Do you revert

Or do you wait and see whether or not

not it's gonna give you like a higher activation rate

Guillaume was starting to have doubts

about his decision to change the business overnight

And with his inbox flooded with angry customers

he was starting to get scared

But instead of backing down

he decides to handle the problem head on

I took all the users who were like unhappy

I asked them to come directly like on Zoom calls

I started working until like 4 a m

So I had chat with everyone to understand

understand what they were lacking

I saw that we had removed stuff

that we shouldn't have been removed

So we fixed like a lot of the product during that time

It was a month where we went from 40

month over month growth rate to

But at the end of the month

our activation rate was at like 35 instead of 15

So the next month we grew

I think this time by like 60

because all the unhappy people wanted to churn churn

But eventually like the new one

converted at a much higher pace

After winning a risky bet

to change the business completely

Guillaume and the team were starting to see

the results pay off big time

I think it took us one year to go from zero

to 250 000 ARR annual recurring revenue

Year two it was we reached 1 million

Year three we were like at eight ish

and then three and a half years we're at 10

When you go from one to 10 in

let's say a year and a half

it means that you're growing anywhere

between 15 to 25 month over month

Every month you're like

it's not possible that it's going to happen

But after like six seven eight months

of happening all the time

it becomes like the norm for you

There is no way to describe how it feels

when you have a true product market fit

It's like poetry

It's like magic

Everything you do works

You're in a state of flow

where everything is so easy

that you feel like you've understood

everything about life

that it was a game all along

And you know you're in a state of bliss

You feel like a superhero

and you feel like nothing can destroy

until you reach a plateau

And this is where you realize

or at least this is where I realized

that I hadn't been a great entrepreneur

I learned like the biggest lesson

I think of growing a company

Growing a company is never an exponential curve

It's always an S curve

that can look like an exponential curve

but there is always a plateau

And the only companies that have

like a proper exponential curve

are the one we're planning for the next S curve

After a rapid growth period

Lemless plateaued at around 10 million

ARR

On top of that Guillaume was now on his own

after two of his co founders exited the company

When your co founder leaves

it's definitely weird

because you trusted people for a long time

and now I had to handle

handle like all the technical side of things

which is definitely like not my job

I started having like tech support

product sales marketing

having to manage basically like all of it

So that was really hard

and it was very intense for me

I pushed myself close to the limits

It's hard you know

know when you have like this thing happening

and you feel really like on your own

Guillaume was now by himself

and faced with an overwhelming amount of new challenges

but he still believed Lemless could be more

and he wasn't going to abandon it

after getting this far

With his back against the wall

he was left with one choice to make things work

rebuild the company from scratch

So we had coded the product really quickly

to ship a lot of features

and then you realize that

the way it's been developed

doesn't match the amount of users you have and the scale

So we had to rebuild entirely our architecture

and I think it took me like a year and a half

to deal with all the technical shit

and then be sure that I would become irrelevant

to the growth of the business

That was intense

Guillaume spent a year and a half

rebuilding the company

and trying to get through that plateau

Then he finally came across a strategy

strategy that would change the business forever

When you're doing like a software as a service business

the name of the game is your retention

meaning how long do people stay

when they start paying your service

So we spent a lot of time looking at

okay who are the people

who when they join Lemless

they never turn

I called it like the magnet persona

The magnet persona is the persona

that's going to attract a lot more customers

And if you take for example Apple

their only focus for years was designers

and why designers are a great persona

because designers are cool

So if you have a product that makes people feel

like they are amongst this magnet persona

then it's awesome

And for us in our space

the magnet persona

it's really the sales rep

It's the sales reps because we're a tool

that drives more revenue

And who drives revenue in a company

So for us to have like this magnet persona

was just like game changer

because in people's mind

we became like the sales tools for sales teams

So anyone was a company

who wants to drive more sales

know that they should use Lemless

The magnet persona strategy allowed Lemless

to break through the plateau

But more importantly

it turned Guillaume

into the successful entrepreneur

he had always dreamed of

Yeah so right now we're at 30 million ARR

and 10 million in EBDA

We're about like a hundred people

We have customers in more than a hundred countries

For me when I reached that state

it was weird because I don't like fancy watches

I'm a terrible driver

My holiday it's like going in the mountain

and put my tent be in the nature

I just felt like money would open so many new doors

It would be different et cetera

And then you realize like

you should focus more on the substance

like who you become who you help your values

And that's I think

when the relationship also changed with my parents

because even though I didn't grow up with money

like they taught me like things

things that are so much more important

They taught me about hard

respect being a good person in this world I

I owe them a lot

And when you help them financially

and they realize that they don't have to work

they don't have to worry

and that everything is under control

I think this is the best feeling in the world

to be honest

Right now we're discussing it live on a video

but the reality is like

I've been at it for now

like if you combine all experiences

close to 10 years

So it's an overnight success story that took 10 years

For me it's like

you gotta be patient with the results

but you gotta be impatient with your action

Put yourself out there

do as much thing as possible

Don't be afraid to document

never give up

believe in yourself

and always invest in yourself

Whether it's a new job a new experience

a conference you wanna go to

an event you need to attend

a webinar a video or whatever

Always optimize it for the learning you're gonna get

because the outcome

you will never control it

And the only thing you can control

is how you work on yourself

So if you work on yourself harder

than you work on anything else

I can guarantee that in this life

especially right now with the distraction we have

with social media et cetera

I can guarantee that you will have success

Think of the journey

think of the adventure

because it's all worth it

when you tell it 10 years later

Take action invest in yourself

and enjoy the journey

That's Guillaume's formula for winning as an entrepreneur

The truth is your idea will never be perfect

your skills will never be perfect

and the moment will never be perfect

You just have to start

because if you don't start

then all the dreams you have in your head

will have a 0 chance of coming to life

I hope you guys are all inspired

after watching Guillaume's story

story and I hope it's enough for you

to just take one step of action today

And if you're ready to take that first step today

then you should definitely do that

with the Starter Story Academy

our program to help you find an idea

validate that idea and launch it into the real world

But first I'd love to show you some examples

of really cool SaaS businesses like Guillaume's

started by regular people just like you

making over 10 000 a month

Just head to the first link in the description

description and we're gonna send over our free deep dive

of 52 different micro SaaS business ideas

that are making money today

This is the type of stuff that gets built in the Academy

and I wanna see you do something similar

Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one

Peace

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