Turning $1,000 into $28M ARR at lemlist
Plus, why lemlist's COO is betting on a reverse trial for their next phase of growth
👋 Hi, it’s Kyle Poyar and welcome to Growth Unhinged, my weekly newsletter exploring the hidden playbooks behind the fastest-growing startups.
lemlist stands out for a lot of reasons. They’ve grown from $0 to $28M ARR in six years — all bootstrapped. Guillaume Moubeche started the business with just $1,000 (how many folks can say that?!). And they keep evolving, recently launching a reverse trial to improve free-to-paid conversion and drive toward ubiquity. COO Charles Tenot joins the newsletter to unpack their journey and exactly what happened after implementing the reverse trial. Keep reading, then dive into my full Zero to One startup series.
In 2018, Guillaume Moubeche, frustrated with existing prospecting tools, decided to create a better solution. After an unsuccessful attempt to outsource its development in Russia, he invested his last $1,000 to start lemlist despite the crowded market.
lemlist's unique selling point was its ability to personalize cold outreach at scale. In outreach, success isn't determined by the number of emails sent but by the quality of the message. lemlist allowed users to include personalized images in their cold emails, helping them stand out and addressing the common challenge of low response rates.
One year after the launch, lemlist reached $200K ARR, and growth took off. In 2020, we achieved the first $1M in ARR. Just 3.5 years after the launch, the company was valued at $150M.
Today, lemlist is part of lempire: a multi-product company (with lemlist being its most popular product offering multi-channel outreach) with customers in 100+ countries and a team of 90+ people. We are fully bootstrapped with 40% EBITDA and 30% year-over-year growth, proving that to build a profitable SaaS, you don’t necessarily need to raise funds.
This success has been possible thanks to the “build in public” strategy that Guillaume adopted from day one. He has been documenting everything he’s done across social media, building an audience of more than 500,000 followers in total.
Let’s break down what exactly worked for each milestone because growing from $0 to $200K isn’t the same as growing from $1M to $10M.
From launch to product-market fit: Building a name in communities
Many founders underestimate Facebook, Reddit, and Slack communities, but these platforms teem with potential customers whose pain points your product can solve.
By actively participating and answering people’s queries about cold emails and prospecting, Guillaume started building his expertise and eventually became synonymous with solutions to users’ problems. It takes time, but it’s a powerful step that helps build trust.
He found early adopters of lemlist in a sales prospecting community on Facebook. Jon, the creator of this community, told him he was okay with sharing his new tool, as people were always on the lookout for new sales automation software that could provide better results. This one post generated almost 300 sign-ups for the beta.
Users loved the email personalization. lemlist was easy to use and offered self-service in contrast to the gated main players (Salesloft and Outreach). The low-friction onboarding experience accelerated adoption and growth, allowing people to set up their email campaigns without advanced sales knowledge.
From PMF to $10M ARR: Finding a $0 growth loop
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