How Lemlist Reached $23M ARR with 50,000 Customers and Zero Outside Funding (VP Product Kévin Moënne-Loccoz at SaaS Open 2024)

Introduction and Event Context

Nathan Latka

00:00Quick context. This was recorded March twenty eighth and twenty ninth. So a couple weeks ago at my live event, saasopen.com. We had a thousand software CEOs there. If you missed it, we hope to see at the next one, September fifth and sixth in New York City, saasopen.com. But for now, let's jump into the recording.

Lemlist Current Status: $23M ARR, 80 Employees, Zero Funding

Kévin Moënne-Loccoz

00:22>> So we're currently at $23,000,000 in annual recurring revenue with approximately 10,000 free trials per month, a bit over that, with $0 in funding, profitable since day one, with five SaaS products and about 80 employees. And we do this with the five SaaS products that you can see here. So lemlist, lemwarm, lemcal, Taplio and Tweet Hunter. Two of them were actually purchased, but we'll see a bit of that later on. And we do this with a strategy called

The Allbound Strategy: Combining Inbound and Outbound

Kévin Moënne-Loccoz

00:54>> the allbound. So it's a mix of inbound and outbound. And we believe it's one of the best ways for businesses to actually grow their business and eventually turn into big names. So this is why we're creating and obsessing ourselves around how do we help customers build this all bound strategy for their business. With a mix of inbound with the establishment of personal branding on LinkedIn, on Twitter, and then attracting leads with this personal brand plus

50,000 Customers and SMB Focus

Kévin Moënne-Loccoz

01:22>> authority and credibility to then convert way more people down the line with outbound with lemlist and lemwarm. All of this with 50,000 customers worldwide focusing on SMBs, we're not going up markets and we're focusing on bringing as much value as possible as small businesses. The growth up until today was mainly through PLG purely with marketing motions. And today I'm gonna talk you through basically everything that we've done so far to get to this result and what

Building a Memorable Brand and Product Differentiation

Kévin Moënne-Loccoz

01:56>> we're planning on doing next to scale the business even more. So we first started with lemlist, which is our core product with a very simple strategy to build a memorable product focusing on one specific key differentiator, which integrates really well inside of the suite of products that our targets are using on a daily basis. And we've done this through a deep obsession on customers and also keeping an eye out on other market opportunities. And so a

02:31>> lot of people would think of defocus or lack of focus and spreading efforts through basically too many ways, which we know is a risk but we took it anyways and we managed to make some cool stuff with it. So hopefully this can help you with inspiration but also to grow your own business and learn from our learning. So what does it actually look like to build a memorable product? So those are a couple screenshots from many

03:00>> years ago and to illustrate this, it goes a bit further than just a memorable product, it's more a memorable brand. At that time, and it's still the case today, the market is super saturated in sales engagements. You have a ton of actors and a good way that we found to differentiate ourselves is really to create a branding that was completely different from everything else that was existing over there. Where whether it was focusing too much on

03:26>> enterprise or very boring in our eyes maybe, marketing type. So we went on marketing sides to focus on a branding that was way more cool and we integrated it inside of the product with very flashy colors, maybe a bit too flashy at that time, and emojis to make things way more fun and add a bit more spiciness. And the goal behind all of that was pretty simple. When people shared their screen or showed their results on

03:55>> social media, people would instantly

Ultra-Personalization as Core Differentiator

Kévin Moënne-Loccoz

03:59>> recognize lemlist. And that was basically the whole goal of having a product that was more memorable. The key differentiator that we focused on very early on was ultra personalization and the reason behind this is when you want to do sales it's really focusing on creating relationships with people rather than spamming people or just trying to convince people. And so we found that having an ultra personalized approach was doing a lot of the basically results afterwards. And

04:30>> so this is why we focus on ultra personalization from the start with key features like custom images. This is actually a variable. So it's a lead variable. So it's the first name that just is overlapping on an image that is generated before. And then we would also do the same thing for custom Landing Pages. So that was the the key differentiator with the key branding differentiator also. And then we only focused with lemlist on cold email

04:58>> at first. So it was only cold email. So we had to think a bit more broadly about okay sales founders, marketers, what do they actually use or needs to make an outbound successfully? Well that goes through integrations and at that time we were focusing a lot on co marketing efforts with DropContact and Phantom Buster and to sort of create a trio of the ideal tool stack that you need to start with outbound and make success with

Obsessing Over Customers and Learning from Mistakes

Kévin Moënne-Loccoz

05:29>> outbound. The next part was obsessing over customers. Maybe it's something that every company tries to do or claims to do. And a good example is actually what you see on the screen. We've made a lot of mistakes growing the company. One of them being the fact that overnight we changed completely the UX of the product without asking for user feedback, without asking for anybody's opinion really. So we had a big of a backlash at that time,

05:59>> but in the best and worst moments we learned to focus and to really be customer focusing where we did our best and invested a lot of time on fixing mistakes fixing the relationship that we had with customers because at the end of the day that's the main focus that we have and you'll be able to see it afterwards. The next part on keeping an eye out on business opportunities. I have a couple of examples to you,

Community-Driven Products: Lemwarm and Lempod

Kévin Moënne-Loccoz

06:29>> two right now and one at the end. The first one is creating a whole product generating today $2,000,000 in annual recurring revenue, just based on a community discussion that we had within our Facebook group, within the community that we built. And we actually created this product because we identified a lot of users in our community, whether they were users of lemlist or not, that were having issues with the spam folder. If you hit the spam folder,

06:56>> your prospects will not see your message and if they do they won't trust it. So the goal here was how do we create the best products to ensure that people don't land in the spam folder and get more results with their outbound motion using lemlist. The second opportunity that we seized is less linked to the all bound strategy that I showed you at the beginning, which was creating a pod for LinkedIn. A lot of people were

07:21>> struggling to have engagements on LinkedIn and to basically succeed. Well at that time we saw this opportunity to create a Pod where it would fake and create artificial engagement with your post to get even more traction and more visibility for your business. We sold that business when it was doing 600 ks in annual recurring revenue, and it was right before LinkedIn completely went against the Pods and were very aggressive against them. I don't recommend using pods

Marketing Strategy: Blog Content, Community, and Courses

Kévin Moënne-Loccoz

07:52>> anymore, even if Lempod is still active from the company that purchased it. But that is one side of the coin. The other side was the marketing aspect. It was a very strong combo between the product and marketing side. On the marketing side, we focused from day one, and it's still the focus today, on how do we bring the most value as possible to our users, even if we're not expert in the fields. A good example of

08:22>> that, contrary to the previous speaker, we focus on blog articles, not because we were good at SEO, we sucked at SEO, but what we did is focus it focus sorry, on how do we create the most actionable guides. I'm gonna scroll to the next slide afterwards so you don't get dizzy, but how do we create the most actionable guides for people to success succeed sorry with cold outreach. So we made those they were not SEO optimized

08:48>> at all, but got a ton of re shares because no one in the industry were actually giving that level of detail that people needed to start off with Outreach. The second part was building a community. We built a community of 20,000 salespeople, all focusing on how do we help people on the individual level to succeed with their outbound Motions. And that was actually a very powerful lever to distribute Assets, new updates on the products, but also

09:18>> new resources that we would create to bring even more value to our users. And then eventually we decided to invest in courses, and at that time that was when we were doing $5,000,000 in ARR. And at that time we had a very strong focus and it's still the case on media. We had a team of up to 10 people in the video team out of a 100 out of 80 to a 100 people and that was

09:47>> a significant investment compared to most of the SaaS companies that you see. Even at the beginning of the company, think it was the second or the third employee was someone in the video team. We didn't hire a salesperson until $1,000,000 or $2,000,000 in ARR. We ended up selling close to 200 ks worth of courses within ten days, so it was two launches of five days each. This is a glimpse of the strategy that we use, it's

Course Launches, Product Hunt, and Template Communities

Kévin Moënne-Loccoz

10:13>> pretty simple funnel. Very inspired by the work of Russell Brunson, where you attract a lot of people to a live webinar, you give them value, and then you promise them even more value in the course, where we'd bring an irresistible offer with a lot of bonuses, and a lot of, of course, scarcity with the price. And then we make it we made it a 100% free because at that time we sort of did we took a

10:37>> step back and we thought, are we in the business of selling courses or are we in the business of selling software and providing amazing value completely for free for people? So we of course shifted to how about we give everything for free. So we gave all the courses for free. This is one of the three courses that we have to date with about 20 k plus students going through it. Product Hunt launches, you've probably already done

11:01>> them from your past promotions with your own SaaS products. At the time it was way more impactful and helped us a lot. We did of course way more launches than the three that you have here on the screen. But as we do more Product Hunt launches, the impact unfortunately go is going down, and it's not as effective as it was before. But at the time it was a pretty nice source of distribution. The template section differs

11:28>> also from what other companies are used to doing. What we did it was more of a template community aspect where it was actual real templates sent via email or via LinkedIn messages to prospects with exactly the right stats that those campaigns had, because we had access to the campaign so we didn't rely on that. And this had a lot of traction also, whether it was on LinkedIn or other platforms where we distributed this resource. And speaking

Personal Branding and Podcast Interviews

Kévin Moënne-Loccoz

11:56>> of LinkedIn, a big part of our strategy, which is currently still the case, is personal branding. It started with our CEO and then it got duplicated for most of the people internally within the team. So we have today between six and ten accounts posting on a regular basis on LinkedIn, getting a lot of views, lot of engagements, which means a lot of sign ups and a lot of visibility when we have a product updates, new resources

12:22>> that we wanna showcase to our different target audiences. And then we leverage our personal branding, all of our assets like the Community, personal branding, the sort of brand that we were able to create to interview over 70 plus industry leaders. The goal here with it was really on a psychological aspect to really position ourselves right next to people who are already known in the industry already have a name for themselves and to basically be able to

12:51>> have this assimilation effect that people have naturally when they talk to people and see what's happening on social media. And this led to a lot of social media and media in general and podcasts interviews we did. I put 300 but we're unsure about the number. This is a sign of how many we've done especially our Founder. We took all the time we needed to do a lot of interviews. At the beginning it was a lot of

Mini Tools and Engineering as Marketing

Kévin Moënne-Loccoz

13:21>> us reaching out to podcasters, to media to get featured with what's in it for you, why should you feature us. And then bit by bit the snowball got started and we got invited to a lot of events. This one is an example, we were invited here, we didn't try to come up here, but it's a pleasure to be here with you. And then most recently we've been focusing on mini tools, so more engineering as marketing, where

13:47>> we would give a glimpse of value in exchange for nothing except an email, and then push people down the funnel to even more value using our core products. And then we shifted. We shifted more for scale with three big principles. The first one is how do we make things crazy simple? Because as you know, when you're starting a business, you're scaling it, you add new features, you fail with features, you learn new stuff, and it just

Simplification, Multi-Channel Expansion, and All-in-One Platform

Kévin Moënne-Loccoz

14:14>> becomes everything just becomes more complex for people. So it's a big focus for us to go razor, razor simple for people, especially for beginners, but also very simple and useful for advanced users, so that advanced and power users would still fall in love with our products. The second thing is adding more channels. We've seen it with our own marketing campaigns that if you spread your eggs into multiple baskets, you're gonna get way more results, especially with

14:43>> platforms that are very trendy like LinkedIn. And then the last part is the all in one, which one of the speaker earlier was talking about is creating a platform instead of a niche is basically the next step into how do you enlarge in your revenue, and how do you enlarge in the usage of your product. So what does it look like? In terms of simplifying, something that I did is I copied Growth.Design, I took their

15:08>> sort of identity and stuff, and created this only for internal purposes to show developers, to show designers the real business need behind simplifying first experiences when coming to a new product. So I really recommend this exercise if you're having issues with talking through your team to actually simplifying your product, showing the business impact of onboarding for example.

15:34>> And so I put here a couple of examples, they seem maybe simple, but it makes a lot of difference like for example, simplifying forms, putting OAuth, adding way more social proof with testimonials. Here we had some UX depth where we had like different places to access settings which was very complex for people. We just simplified it with a very cool inspiration you all know called Notion with user settings and then workspace settings. And then we did

16:04>> a step further in terms of this is a good actually example of how do we create a simple design that also works for more advanced users. And so here we had before a fixed type of reporting, where users didn't have any sort of liberty into what their reporting looked like. We shifted to, and this is live already, to a widget system, the same way you would have on your iPhone. You can drag and drop widgets, resize

16:29>> them, delete them and create custom dashboards. The advantage of this is the widgets you cannot change the events behind the X and Y axis. And this was on the technical side of things way faster for us to ship and we want to add a new widget. We just add a new widget to collection of widgets. And so advanced users are super happy because they can create personalized dashboards for their clients and on the basic lever user

16:55>> type level it's super easy to use. And then in terms of channels I mentioned it already, we switched from email only to LinkedIn, cold calling, we're working still on new channels to add to the Suite. And then on the all in one platform, it was a big investment in data where now you can find leads inside of lemlist. It's leads based on LinkedIn, we just applied our own filters, we cleaned all of the fake profiles and

17:23>> profiles who are not active. And we also tested all of the tools on the market to find emails and find lead generation in general and to combine them together with a waterfall enrichment directly for users. And so if you think of the flow of users they would need to first find leads, find their contact information create the sequences send them AB tests learn with reports and then it just goes back to the beginning. And so now

Acquiring Taplio and Tweet Hunter

Kévin Moënne-Loccoz

17:49>> we can finally cover the all in one aspect of a funnel when you want to do outbound perspective. The last opportunity that we seized recently was also the most expensive. We bought a business called Taplio and Tweet Hunter. So it's two different products to do the inbound side of things of the outbound strategy. And this company actually grew very fast recently, it's I think doing close to $6,000,000 in revenue when we acquired it, it was doing

18:18>> less than 1,000,000 and two growth levers was first personal branding, but this time paying influencers to do the to do the personal branding instead of us being ourselves the influencer internally. And the second thing was the mini tools that I was mentioning for lemlist. They work a lot for Taplio and Tweet Hunter. And it's the same sort of focuses that we have on Lemlist now to scale the products on Taplio and Tweet Hunter is how do

18:45>> we simplify things. To give you a quick example, Taplio is probably the go to product that you should have in mind when you think of Feature Factory. Because every new feature that was added is a new tab on the navigation, which adds a lot of complexity to the product, unnecessary complexity. So we're currently in the transition of how do we make things 10 times more simple for people. And then the big focus that we have still

19:13>> at the moment and still moving forward is how do we integrate this suite of products. Think of it as a HubSpot with different types of products, but instead of it being all in under one branding and adding a lot of confusing for example on the pricing pages and stuff, it's individual products with different brands. Well the key here is how do we integrate all of that and focus more on cross selling. And then all of that

Turning Down $20M and $30M Investment Proposals

Kévin Moënne-Loccoz

19:39>> of course attracted a lot of investors attention where we had a $20,000,000 investment proposal that we turned down, before turning down a $30,000,000 investment, simply because we don't need the funds, we're profitable since day one, we have between thirty five and forty five percent of EBITDA margins, And we don't need a board or investors to force us into a specific direction. We're very tied to independency and doing what works the best for the markets and for

20:15>> the users. And thank you. I know that twenty minutes is a bit short, but at least I opened some topics if you want to talk about them. Feel free to have a chat afterwards. And if you want to keep in touch, you can scan the QR code to connect on LinkedIn. And with that being said, if you wanna talk about sales, marketing, or products, I'm super interested in knowing what you guys have been doing in your

20:38>> companies, and enjoy the rest of the events. Thank you so much.

20:43>> Awesome. Thanks so much, Kevin.

Nathan Latka

20:47Awesome.

20:48Hey, folks. If we haven't met yet, my name is Nathan Latka. I launched and sold my first software company back in 2015 and went on to write a book about it, which you guys made a Wall Street Journal bestseller purchasing over 30,000 copies. Thank you so much for that. After the book, I launched this show and one went on to create founderpath.com. I raised a large fund to do non dilutive deals with b to b software

21:14founders. So far, we've invested in over 400 software founders totaling $150,000,000 Here in 2024, we're doing three to four new deals per week. So if you're looking for capital and don't wanna give up equity, go sign up at founderpath.com for free to get your offer.