How Lempire Built a $28M ARR SaaS

The deepest dive on the most interesting company in SaaS is here: Lempire. The story of the company, how they build product, how they grow, and their market position. Let's dive in.

Did you know there’s a company that has grown entirely in public to $28M in ARR and $10M in EBITDA 6 years?

That’s Lemlist.

Along the way, they’ve dominated every social media platform and put on a masterclass in profit-led growth.

Today, we’re presenting you the web’s deepest ever deep dive on them.

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Today’s Post

Words: 6,681 | Est. Reading Time: 30 mins

I’ve interviewed the CEO, COO, Head of Product, a designer, and PM. I’ve also interviewed 5 Lemlist customers. Here’s everything you need to know about SaaS’ most interesting company:

1. The Story of Lempire

2. How Lempire Builds Product

3. How Lempire Grows

4. It's Market Position

This is 6 months of work, so I hope you enjoy!

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1. The Story of Lempire

People have always been looking for ways to improve their sales and outreach processes.

In recent years, we've seen a flood of new products: Outreach, SalesLoft, Instantly, Apollo.io (where I was VP of Product), and many more.

Standing out amidst all that competition, Lemlist has become synonymous with personalized cold outreach that actually is delivered.

The $150M+ valued company (2021) has built a product that now caters to millions of users and generates an ARR of $28M as of writing.

But Lemlist's journey hasn't been without its challenges. This is the story.

Chapter 1 - From a Failed Startup

The story begins in Paris, France.

In 2018, Guillaume Moubeche took a leap of faith.

Guillaume in Paris.

His previous startup, focused on lead generation, had done well. But he wanted to build a product. So he invested his money into a unicorn, do everything product.

It didn’t work. It was too ambitious of a vision.

With all that money down the drain, Guillaume was down to his last $1000 saved for the product business.

So, he took his last $1,000, and put it into building an MVP of Lemlist.

The idea?

I was like back to basics. What was I doing when I was running this lead gen agency and struggling with?

And I realized that the promise of email automation or cold outbound in general was put yourselves on autopilot.

But the reality was very different.

You had to personalize your emails, you had to make sure that the deliverability was great... And none of the tools were actually taking care of it.

—Guillaume Moubeche, CEO and Founder

With his expertise in marketing and lead generation, Guillaume was able to take the product to #1 Product of the Day on ProductHunt at launch.

In 2018, ProductHunt was still a big deal (it didn’t face the problems it has now).

Lemlist was well on it way to success.

Chapter 2 - Finding Position-Market Fit

Guillaume’s more narrow product Lemlist had nailed two vectors of differentiation that drive it to this day:

1. Personalization

2. Deliverability

These are prescient because he could build them into the MVP, but also invest in them as durable product areas over time.

Let’s break each down (so you can find your own).

Vector 1 - The Personalization Use Case

The first particular powerful vector is image personalization in cold emails.

In 2018, the main competitors for cold outreach were tools like Mailshake and Woodpecker. Lemlist was similarly priced but offered unique personalization features.

Sales professionals and marketers loved it. As its normal sweet spot, Lemlist was best at building for those who needed to stand out in crowded inboxes.

This helped Lemlist carve out a clear niche in cold outreach.

Personalization also proved to be a fairly sticky way to enter companies - and would provide fuel for the company's eventual vision of becoming a full-fledged sales engagement platform.

Vector 2 - Deliverability at the Forefront

Email providers use spam filters that analyze the content of an email, its links, and sender reputation.

If an email is flagged, it may be blocked from delivery, or it could be sent straight to the spam folder without appearing in the main inbox.

So in cold email outreach efforts, deliverability really matters.

Lemlist put all the technical stuff like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC that influence email deliverability at the forefront of the product.

Right from the marketing through to when you open the product, actually create campaigns, and then measure them, Lemlist keeps you aware.

Check out their YouTube video from 2018 for instance:

This combination of marketing + product approach worked.

Personalization and deliverability would prove to be very prescient vectors to invest in for an outreach tool.

Why? There were vectors that:

1. The leading tools at the time did very poorly, and

2. Would remain important to outbound marketers forever

By the end of 2018, it was clear the product had the ever elusive position-market fit.

Chapter 3 - Advancing the Product and Marketing Motions

With PMF in hand, the team moved to growing via innovative product and marketing channels.

In this period, two stand out.

Product Innovation - Redoing Onboarding

The first was to completely redo the onboarding of Lemlist.

Guillaume had a crucial insight when giving demos to folks of the product:

The reality is like the tool was built in the way I would organize campaigns for agencies so it's easier to scale.

But people did not think like this at all.

So everyone was confused.

—Guillaume Moubeche, CEO and Founder

So instead of work with what they had. They totally threw everything out and restarted from the grounds up.

They implemented a much more advanced funnel where the only step that you could take was the next step.

By doing this, everything changed:

• Activation rate went up 4x to 35% of signed up users starting a campaign

• But it was also the highest churn month ever on Lemlist

Inadvertently during the redesign, they had hidden a bunch of features people wanted like templates.

But the team worked fast and in 24 hours fixed most of the complaints.

The result was that they nailed one of the most important parts of PLG early on: onboarding and activation.

Marketing Innovation - The AppSumo Channel

The second innovation, on the marketing side, was embracing the AppSumo channel.

If you’ve only seen AppSumo founder Noah Kagan on Social Media, you may not understand the channel. So, let’s explain it for a second:

• You license your product for life

• It’s usually a discount

• They help you get customers

So it’s a little tricky because users are lifetime. Before a bootstrapped startup, it’s nice. In two weeks, the team generated $175,000 in revenue.

It was a great way to get revenue quickly. And the most valuable part?

The product impact from feedback:

The most important thing was having all the feedback and be able to create the community from it.

[Sales Automation] is a very competitive market.

If you want to enter fast a competitive market, it's good to have a strong user base that's going to continuously give you feedback.

—Guillaume Moubeche, CEO and Founder of Lempire

But it wasn’t just the channel that had an impact on the young company. It was also the support.

AppSumo CEO (and friend of the newsletter) Ayman Al-Abdullah had a profound impact on the team.

Guillaume and Ayman in Austin.

He paid to fly out Guillaume to Austin, Texas for a week. They had a videographer record the whole trip. They taught Guillaume the early seedlings of videography which would become the basis for his amazing social presence now:

• 225K on Instagram

• 37K on YouTube

• 141K on TikTok

In addition, Ayman believed in Guillaume. I love the story he tells:

I remember Ayman asking me, “Hey, what's your goal for the next 18 months?”

And then I say, yeah, in 18 months, I would love to be at $1 million in annual recurring revenue.

And then he looked at me and he's like, why not 10?

—Guillaume Moubeche, CEO and Founder of Lempire

They spent time then breaking down the path to $10M in ARR from Lemlist.

This forced Guillaume to be more forward thinking and was a key driver for him to be more ambitious.

Just having someone believing in me, I think was huge in the early days. And it gave me enough confidence and strength to pursue the mission.

—Guillaume Moubeche, CEO and Founder of Lempire

The combination of product and marketing innovation in this era led to the product outperforming even Guillaume’s expectations:

When I started Lemlist, I had no ambition to create a huge rapidly growing company. I just wanted to pay the bills and hangout with my girlfriend.

—Guillaume Moubeche, CEO and Founder

But the company was destined for much bigger things.

Chapter 4 - Building Out a Profit-Led Growth Engine

As Covid rocked the world in 2020 and 2021, Lemlist absolutely took off.

The combination of content- and product-led growth were perfectly time for the era.

When the story was all told and done, the company went from $1M ARR in 2019 to a whopping $20M in 2022.

The company used this growing revenue to become profitable, and build a profit-led growth engine.

The Founder Cash Out

Francois Lecroart and Cianney Lecroart, the other two founders at Lemlist, on both sides of Guillaume.

In 2021, in a move of very smart market timing, when the private tech valuation bubble was at its absolute peak, the founders also cashed out.

They sold 20% of their shares for $30M. It was life-changing, and meant they never had to worry about money again.

Unfortunately for Guillaume, the other founders took the not worrying about money to heart.

And they left.

On the day I learned that my two co-founders were leaving, I had to switch my brain to survival mode.

—Guillaume Moubeche, Lempire CEO and Founder

Scaling the Leadership Team

This led Guillaume to need to scale his leadership team.

So he hired key folks like:

• Charles Tenot, who has led as COO

• Mickael Faivre-Macon, who is the current CTO

• Kevin Moenne-Loccoz, who has led the evolution of Lemlist's product offering

(All three of whom I’ve interviewed for this piece. )

Notice who those folks are not: sales leaders. These are product and operations leaders.

Throughout this period, 90% of the company’s revenue came from inbound PLG as a result of their content marketing efforts.

There was no freemium plan so users came on a free trial.

But it was the basis for a massive 20x in 3 years.

Chapter 5 - From Lemlist to Lempire

In 2023, Lempire made bold moves to expand its product suite and market reach.

The company acquired two significant players in the social media growth space (both made by friends of the newsletter, Andy Mewborn and Thibault Louis-Lucas):

• Taplio - A LinkedIn automation and growth tool

• TweetHunter - A Twitter growth and management platform

These acquisitions weren't just about adding new products. They represented a strategic expansion into new markets.

A user might start with Lemlist for email outreach, then adopt Lemwarm for deliverability, and later add Taplio for LinkedIn growth.

Each addition makes the entire suite more valuable.

— Charles Tenot, COO

These acquisitions position Lempire as a more comprehensive player in the sales and marketing technology landscape.

From cold email outreach to social media growth, Lempire now offers a full suite of tools for modern sales and marketing professionals.

It's a far cry from the single-product company that started with Guillaume's last $1,000 in 2018.

But the vision remains the same: empowering sales and marketing teams with the best tools for personalized, scalable outreach across all channels.

Chapter 6 - Lemlist Today

Now with more than 90 employees, the company has gone from startup to scale-up.

Despite that, only 10% of those employees are in sales. It has stayed true to its product-led growth motion.

This is the typical march for PLG SaaS companies: Hire great product leaders in key segments to double down.

It has an ARR of around ~$28M.

Lemlist has clearly "made it." The question is not "if" it will go public, but "when."

But how did it actually get there from a Product POV? Read on for all the details…