Luis Camacho
Welcome to the SaaS AdLab Podcast, where we interview the stories of SaaS company founders, entrepreneurs and CEOs. My name is Luis. I’m the owner and founder of Fantôm Agency, a digital marketing agency specializing in scaling SaaS companies. And today, we have the pleasure of interviewing Guillaume Moubeche, the founder and CEO of Lemlist. Thank you so much for being on the podcast today. It’s a pleasure having you and learning more about your company Lemliss and what you’ve been able to do for very saturated market, to be honest.
Luis Camacho
And there’s a lot of things out there. And I do want to mention before we got into it was very kind to provide anyone that to listen to the podcast with a discount for 30 percent off your first three months and this is going to be available for two weeks. And the code is going to be in the description. It’s going to be LEMLISTLOVESFANTOM, all caps. So make sure you check that out. And why don’t you tell us a little bit more about yourself.
Guillaume Moubeche
Yeah. Thanks for having me. So happy to be here. So my name is Guillaume. I’m French, as you probably can listen from the accent. We’re based in Paris between like two incubators. One is the one from my former business school and the other one is the one from Zendesk. So a pretty well known SaaS companies. We actually like workwise also on specific features on Lemlist.
Luis Camacho
That’s awesome. And how did you get into the SaaS business? What what was the first thing that really caught your attention or was it that you were trying to solve as a problem?
Guillaume Moubeche
So, yeah, so basically initially I had like a growth agency and we were basically doing acquisition for B2B companies and some B2B SaaS as well. And we are doing a lot of email outreach. And what I realized is that all the tools out there were really like all the same. First of all, I found that the user interface and user experience for most tools were really complicated. The platforms were a bit slow and so on. And I was like, this is not possible, you know, like in twenty eighteen, like I mean, we need to find something about that.
Guillaume Moubeche
And one trick we used when we were doing email outreach was actually to use like images and sometimes like personalized images. And we had like pretty amazing results where we had actually like up to like two times more replies. We I started like basically working with two other guys, two brothers who basically have grown like two tech guys, basically grow like a lot of companies. So I think they have like they worked maybe on like, I don’t know, five or six projects.
Guillaume Moubeche
And in the end, like, we started working together and we saw that it was like working pretty well. So our vision was really like, OK, is there. We launched really quickly and we test as fast as possible. So what a better way to London going on protectant and we launched there ended up no one got like hundreds of users and it has only been one month when we launched on product. And so I think like so many users and so many feedback was really amazing.
Guillaume Moubeche
And from there, you know, like we we basically started scaling, scaling and scaling. And it’s going pretty well.
Luis Camacho
So far, so good. Congratulations. And what were some of the we talked about this before we started. Right. And you mentioned that people like to to make sales with the friends, and that really hit home for me and essentially. What does Lemlist do to to showcase the fact that we’re not just reaching out to robots or anything like that? These are people that like to be treated with with respect and kindness. And so how is Lemlist doing that for for people that are currently using e-mail and things like that? So how is Lemlist.
Guillaume Moubeche
So basically what we realized, because we’re really interested, like we know we are in started celebrated market, so our goal was also like I mean and is also to always look at what’s going on. You know, we’re really focused on our product, but we like to see, like, what other platforms are doing as well. And what we realized is that if you look at sales, you would see that people are always mentioning about like leads, qualified leads, marketing, qualified leads.
Guillaume Moubeche
And actually, if you look at the sales funnel, you consider people kind of moneybags. You know, like the closer they get to the point where they become like a potential customer, the higher their value increase. But by doing that is you are actually totally the you know, the humanizing sell. And for us, it’s really important to have this human relationship make people understand that they’re reaching out to potential friends, as you said. So it’s basically to help them get in a mindset where they’re not going to be spamming.
Guillaume Moubeche
That’s where they’re spending more time on personalization. And that’s actually why we build entirely. Lemonis The word personalization where you can actually decide to personalize each message even though you still get a lot of information. And that’s why also we’ve decided to change entirely the wording on the platform. So now there is no recipient’s little prospect. It’s only called but is to be as in B2B as well, you know, but still, because you want to do business with friends and you want to do business with people, you know that you consider that you bring value to you.
Guillaume Moubeche
And and that’s really what I like about B2B, actually.
Luis Camacho
Absolutely. And I think relationships are a huge part of it. I know in the time that I’ve been in business, I don’t I don’t think I’ve ever seen a relationship on a B2B standpoint that if you’re not close, usually, I mean, they might stay, but it’s not going to be a great relationship. And whenever they see a new product, they’re going to go to the new one just because there’s no relationship, there’s no friendship or anything keeping them with you.
Luis Camacho
And that’s one of the biggest points, especially with Lemonis. I think that you hit very, very well is the fact that you are building relationships, you’re not building a list of leads that have a lifetime value or whatever it might be. Right. So you’re actually creating relationships with these people. And I think that’s awesome. Now, you did mention that you were on product hunt and you scaled super fast. So what were some of the issues that you encountered when doing that?
Luis Camacho
Obviously, you know, growth is great, but with growth comes a lot of other problems as well. And why don’t you tell us a little bit more about what were some of those issues that other SaaSsed founders, my experience that could learn from something maybe that happened to you or something that you saw that was coming? And how did you approach that so that it didn’t end up in a bad way?
Guillaume Moubeche
Yeah. So actually, like after protectant, as I was mentioning, we had a lot of users and we were still in beta at the time. And what we decided also is to launch on a platform called Upstream, where in essence you offer like a specific deal to a lot of people for a limited time. And we grew basically with with let’s say you move from a couple of hundred up to more than five thousand customers and. Yeah. And in such a short amount of time, you know, with a lot of agency entrepreneurs, startup Assamese, which is definitely our target in the end.
Guillaume Moubeche
But the thing is, like when you launch on such platforms, you realize that you’re attracted such a wide variety of different persons that in the end you’re going to have people asking you for very different things. Like some people would like to use your tool for very specific usage and you would need to modify your tool to match up to the big risks I saw when you’re scaling fast and because to give you like our company where you’re like, I’m talking a lot to my users, like most of the time I’m either a messenger because people are on Facebook or and LinkedIn or directly on the chat room as relationship building.
Luis Camacho
You’re creating customers, which is awesome.
Guillaume Moubeche
Yeah, definitely. And I like doing this because I like to understand how the user a product, what the problem, what the issue is. And that’s also why we’re making like really such an easy to use like tool. And the thing is, the problem when you have such a variety of different typology of customers is that sometimes you can focus not on the right targets and you would make changes that would actually be a bit negative for most of users.
Guillaume Moubeche
But like in the end, like so in the end, I would say that when building a space like I really. What I mean, what we’re really good at is the products, and I’m lucky because, like, my sister is really experienced on that and that’s really, really good idea. But the the the risk was really like to take too many feedback’s and try to make something too complicated, I think, like one. What’s mean the danger of most us is trying to be to do everything and make it everything.
Guillaume Moubeche
Yeah, exactly. Like to make your customers happy. Sometimes you just you just have to say no. And even if it’s difficult, you need to say no and say, OK, this is my product. In the end, this is where I want to take it and what I’m going to do to take my product, where I want to know, because otherwise, you know, like we have a product that is really like self-service, like people, they come, they pay and, you know, like if they have a problem, they know where to find me.
Guillaume Moubeche
And so really quickly on the chat, and even though we have like a real like as I said, you know, it’s like thousands of customers in the end, you know, like most people can use it without talking to me. You know, there are videos of tutorials and so on. We try to make everything friendly. We also have a community on Facebook which is growing. It’s like most of our user out there. But there are like maybe like twelve hundred people on Facebook.
Guillaume Moubeche
So asking questions. I’m also trying to bring a lot of value to my user by broadcasting one email template for which where I analyze it and I explain like how to use it, why is it working, how can you create it and so on, just to always try to to bring community to the to bring value to the community. That’s awesome.
Luis Camacho
And you touched on something that I actually wanted to talk about, especially with scaling super fast, like you did essentially with user onboarding sometimes. And you did this while you were in beta. So did you already have all the all the tutorials on how to use a product when you had the thousands of users come in? Or is that something that hits you and you didn’t even know?
Guillaume Moubeche
Yeah, that’s a signal we had, like so many requests, like same for the the like the help help section, if you like. We had to build it then. It was like we had no choice other way. We would have probably died, you know, so many questions and so on and a tool that I really like. And that is it’s actually called room saloom allows you to. Yeah. I mean, it’s so nice, you know, like even on Stuporous when I’m doing support, sometimes I just like recording myself.
Guillaume Moubeche
So how to do it. It takes like 30 seconds or a minute to create a video. And then it’s so much clearer than spending the time to take screenshot, put the arrows and stuff like this all the way. I could just put a video and everyone like likes to watch videos. So it’s pretty easy, straightforward and helpful. Lumis Awesome.
Luis Camacho
If if anyone doesn’t know what that is and you need to show people how to do things that require a lot of emails, make sure to check out Lewine. Obviously, we give them a little shout out on here. But it’s a great it’s a great tool with that being said and onboarding and creating things like that on the fly because you didn’t have those in place, what would you recommend for someone that is in beta and maybe doesn’t necessarily have feedback from people so they don’t even know.
Luis Camacho
Right, that they’re going to have those types of questions. How should it approaches between, like the. Yeah, like, I mean, to be honest, like I think it’s it’s not really worth building, like a lot of help questioned and so on, like RFQ before you actually have users to me, like, you should actually spend time with your users. And if you see that they don’t understand something when using the product, then like build a question about that, like an answer about that.
Guillaume Moubeche
And I mean, being, you know, like too much in advance, I think it’s a bit useless, but because sometimes you’re going to create content that no one would read. So what’s the point? Know. And what do you think about content marketing and putting things out?
Luis Camacho
I actually got a couple of Facebook ads after I went on your website and I thought they were great about doing content marketing to get people at the very top of the funnel. Right. So you’re not essentially you don’t want to get them like, hey, try our product today, go by like you’re actually providing value and essentially like some of the things that you mention, like they could go right and try them on whatever tool they’re using. And maybe it might be more manual work because you’ve systemised everything where it’s pretty much automated, like the personalization, things like that.
Luis Camacho
But if they really wanted to take a very non scalable approach, they could do it on their own. But you are providing value in those videos. So essentially, what is it that you’re trying to accomplish with as far as content marketing goes?
Guillaume Moubeche
Yeah, to be honest, I think content marketing, it’s something you have to have on the site, like all the time. Like, first of all, I think writing really helps you put your ideas out there and also structure everything the right way to me. There are so many founders who are really knowledgeable about specific industry, but never rights like content teams. But they are doing a good job because right now, to be honest, like it’s simple, like when I know something or when I know a topic or when I want to talk about a topic, I just write an article about it.
Guillaume Moubeche
And that’s where, you know, it put it can put you, you know, as an expert on a specific domain, like in a few months. And which happened to me, you know, like because I got like interviews and so on about old emails. And it goes pretty fast, you know, in the end, like it’s it’s something, you know, that every founders should do as a side. And also, you know, when people ask questions like my first articles were pretty technical and also kind of fun and I was talking about email deliverability, like, how do you set up all the technical things for your suite for how to basically check your IP addresses as they’ve been blacklisted, how to get waitlisted, all these type of things, making them a bit fun and basically making them as simple as possible so your grandmother could answer.
Guillaume Moubeche
And that’s like, no, but seriously, that’s that’s really like something that’s a great way to put it.
Luis Camacho
I mean, yeah, yeah. That’s that’s that’s the best way to put it. Could not make it simpler than that. Right. So. Yeah, exactly.
Luis Camacho
That’s awesome. And then when you talking about, you know, a saturated industry and having a ton of players out there, have you and you did mention that you look at what other people are doing and how do you how do you manage to to make sure that you’re always innovating and always coming out with new products that maybe someone isn’t already working on?
Luis Camacho
Obviously, like there’s a lot of people, you know, and there’s probably tools out there that you might not know of that are going to come out of nowhere. And you have something revolutionary that might take everything and just.
Luis Camacho
You get interest rates, so so you to. To be honest, I think it’s there are two things when growing a company, one branding to me something you need to start from day one, I would advise and what’s working really well for us. It’s basically like I do what I like. So when I’m creating content, I like that. When I’m talking to my user, I like that. And if someone doesn’t like it and doesn’t like the way I’m talking, the way I’m putting emojis everywhere, the way I’m saying love all the time to my users, sending cards and stuff, it’s fine.
Guillaume Moubeche
That’s just who I am. But I want to be with people kind of like me as my user, or we share the same mindset. And I think that’s like basically what would create the brand. In the end, it’s making your brand likable and making your product likeable. So whenever because like right now what we have at first we were looking at other tools and so on, but now our own users are actually doing market research for us. When someone has brought like something super innovative, we have people recording their free trial on our competitors that really like this tool.
Guillaume Moubeche
And I really like what they’re doing. Look what we can do. And we’re like, oh, OK, that can be a great idea. You know, in the end, we have like so many people, you know, who actually like us, like they prefer using us, obviously. I mean, not obviously, but that’s what happened in the end. So they are like really like happy to share and be part. I think you really need to include your users.
Guillaume Moubeche
Yeah, that’s part of part of the evolution of your process. Explained when when you do want to do something, just explain it like people are not stupid. Like if you say no to someone is not going to be saying like, OK, I’m going to turn that’s over. Right. You’re going to say, OK, I understand. I mean, you make your point like it makes sense explaining to people when you’re say, you know, it’s like so nice because in the end you see that I mean, OK, like, we’re not kids.
Guillaume Moubeche
If we say someone tell us. No, like, we’re not going to start crying and go away, you know, right now that’s I would say that includes, you know, really your user inside your and you start the evolution and the story with actually what make people stick and what people recommend, you know, definitely.
Luis Camacho
And that’s that’s great. I’ve never heard of anyone doing something like that to other companies. So that means you’ve definitely done a really good job of creating relationships with your customers and really bringing a community together. I think that’s really what it takes nowadays to create a good brand. And a good company is having something of value.
Luis Camacho
And that’s a lot of a lot of what people miss out there, only out there chasing. You know, I just want to get as many users as possible to start seeing, like, my numbers in the bank account increase and whatever. Right. And I think actually wanting to create something where people like to spend time and they enjoy it, whether it’s talking to you or talking to other users of the same product, I think it’s extremely important. And you mentioned having a Facebook page and things like that.
Luis Camacho
And one of the cool things about Facebook groups are one of the things about that is that anyone can ask any questions and someone has already been using the product for maybe six months ahead of them. So they’ve learned a lot of things. And you don’t even have to hop in and answer those questions like they’re pretty much helping each other out and.
Guillaume Moubeche
Exactly. Yes, something like that.
Luis Camacho
And and you did mention churn. So what are you doing to currently try to keep it as low as possible?
Guillaume Moubeche
So for churn, like, my goal is really like to produce content because I think like I mean, to me, B2B is very simple. It’s all about Aroy using a tool that bringing myself like more money and I’m happy with it. Then I’ll keep, you know, the people who are churning from list are people were basically not seeing a great airline. And if they’re not seeing a great they’re why they are like different hypothesis. But one can be they’re not successful because they don’t know how to do it.
Guillaume Moubeche
They don’t know how to write quality emails. They don’t know how many steps they need to put. They don’t know like and my goal is really like to push some good content to make people successful that educate people on what exactly. Exactly to educate as much as possible and just to basically find the people stay longer, wanted to just like get it, get better and so on.
Luis Camacho
Yeah, that’s great. That’s awesome. And as far as actually getting feedback from people you mentioned, obviously these people are coming to you with feedback on their own. They’re asking questions, asking you features and things like that.
Luis Camacho
But are you doing anything that is more of a broadcast kind of approach where you’re actually asking people if there’s someone out there looking for the are they currently missing any features on the product or to rated maybe even share with their friends and so on? You mean like regarding roadmap, like sharing ideas on, yeah, something like that, or maybe like an ice core where they tell you like how likely am I to actually share this with my friends and recommend it to someone else?
Guillaume Moubeche
Yeah, like we started, like, doing some NPF thing. But I mean, we’re still setting this up, like at the moment, I think, because we actually have like a very easy one to one conversation on the chat. People directly tell us like what they like or what they dislike. Sometimes we even have like a love message when we send newsletter, people saying, oh, I really love that. Like, I’m super happy. Thanks for sharing this type of thing.
Guillaume Moubeche
So for us, that feel like a good feel, you know, like for creativity to get more, for example and so on. That’s awesome.
Luis Camacho
That’s super awesome. And if you had a little bit closer to the to the 30 minutes, if you had a good piece of advice for any entrepreneur or founder out there, what would you say to to to make sure that they do early on instead of wait until time passes by? I really I would say to the I think that’s pretty like everyone would say that, but it’s like do things that don’t scale like seriously, I think automation is really great.
Guillaume Moubeche
But, you know, personalization and automation can go together. But you still need to spend time like, you know, if you want to build a proper relationship, get to know your users, get to know your potential customers, spend time doing that job because in the end, it would help. You nailed your messaging not only in your sales pitch, but also when you write copy, when you send emails and on your websites. And once you got that, then, you know, it’s.
Guillaume Moubeche
Yeah, I mean, you’ve still got work, obviously.
Luis Camacho
But, you know, is that is that something they can maybe scale using Lemlist.
Probably yeah.
Luis Camacho
That’s awesome. That’s great advice. And what about a favorite book? Do you have any books out there that you absolutely love that have helped you shape your company the way that you’ve done? Obviously super successful so far. And and what’s a book that you’d recommend for anyone that’s looking to create a company?
Guillaume Moubeche
We’re already in the early stages of the book that I really liked was predictably irrational by Dan Ariely. It’s basically explaining like why people do things that they basically why why would you buy something? You believe that this is totally irrational, but actually the consumer science behind it can always explain. Right. And I think this is interesting.
Luis Camacho
Yeah. It’s more of a psychology, psychology kind of psychology of consumers.
Guillaume Moubeche
I think it’s important to understand, like all those books, you know, like influence or like words of advice. Yeah, exactly. You know, it’s all about like if you understand, like in a business, you know, like something I don’t like today, it’s basically whenever someone is like young and a CEO, it tends to have a lot of media cover. Really assumes that to be successful when you’re a CEO, you need to be young, which is totally untrue, like the average of successful CEOs.
Guillaume Moubeche
It’s like forty five fifty years old. And white people don’t ask why, but the reason is like when you’re forty five years old, you have time to make yourself such a network of friends of influential people that it’s much easier to launch a business and be successful. That’s true because in the end, the first person that you’re going to talk to when you want to launch a business are your network. And your network when you grow up is basically like more CEOs, more CMO, where influential people.
Guillaume Moubeche
So when you sign, let’s say like if your friend is working, like, I don’t know, at Zendesk or Salesforce and is a CMO CMO there and you do a product for them, is they become your customers from day one. You already have, like, I don’t know, 10, 20 camera. So that’s pretty decent. And then you can scale. So definitely I think like understand how building relationship works and why it’s important to spend time doing that.
Guillaume Moubeche
And then from there like expand. That’s awesome.
Luis Camacho
And as far as the the one thing that really helps you get your products from nothing. Right. Right off the bat, starting to where it is right now other than the product and things like that, what would you say was that one thing that really put put the, you know, the tipping point to creating the the product that you have now?
Luis Camacho
Where are the user base that you have today?
Guillaume Moubeche
I think it’s it’s all about team and execution because your ideas can always evolve like people are stealing ideas from each other. Like it’s been like once we launch on product and we have like two Indian guy, like trying to do exactly the same as us. And it’s like, what the fuck? Like seriously, like a week after they were or something like that. So I’m like, man, like it’s fine in the end and in the long term it would be execution and you can only execute with a good team.
Guillaume Moubeche
So make sure your co-founders or your team is very solid because entrepreneurship is not like roses and flowers, like you’re going to have ups and downs. And when you’re down, you really need people with you so you can just go up again.
Luis Camacho
And what if it’s someone without a team? What if they’re starting on completely by themselves? Is it the same thing? Do they still have to, you know, get their ideas and execute? Right, put your head down and just get to work? Yeah, exactly.
Guillaume Moubeche
At some point, like listening to advices and stuff is really good. Like having mentors. It’s nice, but not too many, because you would see that actually you can have two very good mentors that would tell you absolutely two different things. But in the end, if you’re launching a product or a company, make sure you like what you do. Make sure to be yourself and true to yourself, because in the end, you’re going to have to work during the hours where you do want to work.
Guillaume Moubeche
So if you’re not true to yourself, you’re just going to get burned out and just like totally like give up.
Luis Camacho
So I think that’s that’s a huge point. And just enjoy what you’re doing if you’re not enjoying it. Definitely. There’s really no point like leave it to someone else, that’s if someone else is enjoying it and you’re not enjoying it, they’re going to do a lot better.
Luis Camacho
Right, than than whatever, you know. So I think that’s that’s awesome advice. And are there any questions that you have for me about anything? Really?
Guillaume Moubeche
Yeah. Like what’s your goal with the podcast?Like, how big do you want to grow it or what the next steps?
Luis Camacho
At this point, I really want to just get to the point where I get to interview a big, big, big name in the industry, whether it’s like the CEO of HubSpot and things like that, just someone huge. I think it’s going to take a while. Definitely, you know, it’s not going to be super easy to create a name for myself. But so far, I’ve honestly had a lot of a better response that I that I imagined.
Luis Camacho
And I’m super happy that and it’s thanks to people like you that want to get on the podcast and hear their story and really try to help other company founders, et cetera. So the goal is just to to learn more about people and more about the industry and try to help you guys as well, you know, with whatever it is that you have questions and like you said, do things that are not scalable and create relationships. So whether that is through a podcast or messaging back and forth on Facebook at 2:00 in the morning, whatever it is, you know, it’s it’s it’s something that I enjoy a lot.
Luis Camacho
And I think it’s valuable to create relationships. And do you think about it?
Luis Camacho
I forgot maybe like a month ago I started doing the podcast and I didn’t really know anyone overseas. Right. And now I’ve had I feel like I have friends in the world and it’s only about one month. And so it’s absolutely awesome.
Luis Camacho
It’s a great feeling. And really, it’s just getting to know people like yourself.
Guillaume Moubeche
Awesome. Yeah, I love it.
Luis Camacho
Thank you. And so with that being said, I do want to say it was a great interview. It was very cool having you here and telling us about Lemlist and what you’re able to do for companies that are currently trying to reach out to more people in a more personal way. Obviously, those are the things that get to someone seeing an image or a video with with your name on it. It’s not something that you get every you just get a plain text, email with nothing on it and says, hey, I want to tell you something.
Right.
Luis Camacho
That’s not that’s not something people like. It’s probably just going to spam anyway. So just make sure that, you know, that you’re doing things like you said that aren’t scalable and be personable, create relationships and things like that. So, again, thank you for being in the podcast. It’s always great learning more about yourself and more about the people like you that are creating companies. And for anyone that’s listening, I really appreciate you taking the time of your day to be here with us today and listen to stories like Yon’s and other great people out there and the American people find find you online.
Guillaume Moubeche
Online, you can find me like on LinkedIn, we can put like all the profiles, like on the length of the description, so like LinkedIn, Facebook on the Email Outridge Family Group or directly on the top on the website.
Luis Camacho
So we’ll get all those we’ll get those links on the descriptions on YouTube, Facebook, et cetera. You know, wherever it goes, you can find me at Instagram tomatoe FTM and also Phantom DOT Agency. Any of your sites, founder, entrepreneur, CEO, make sure you go to the group. And if you want to be on the podcast, just let us know. We’ll be glad to have you and hear about your story, whatever you have to share.
Luis Camacho
And I challenge every single one of you to go out there and like I said, start executing ideas aren’t going to get you anywhere. Get the idea from a piece of paper and just start doing whatever it is you need to do to to create your company and start changing people’s lives.
Luis Camacho
So thank you, everyone, and have a very nice day.
Guillaume Moubeche
Thank you, guys. Thank you. Bye bye.
