How did lemlist start?
lemlist started in January 2018 with two technical co-founders, a cold email idea and about $1,000. Guillaume Moubeche, co-founder of lemlist and now CEO of lempire, the company behind it, had worked in a lead generation agency and was frustrated by how little personalisation cold email tools offered. In a Failory interview published on 20 March 2020, Moubeche said the first version was ready within two weeks and the basic plan launched at around $19 a month. The difference from rivals was personalised images and landing pages inside cold emails.
The $1,000 went a long way. On the SaaS Club podcast in August 2024, Moubeche said hosting ran on AWS startup credits and that lemlist traded its own licences for the data tools and software it needed. The first paying customer came out of the beta around April 2018.
| When | Milestone | Who said it |
|---|---|---|
| January 2018 | Work on lemlist starts | Moubeche, SaaS Club (2024) |
| 2018, before launch | One Facebook group post brings almost 300 beta sign-ups | COO Charles Tenot, Growth Unhinged (2024) |
| About April 2018 | First paying customer | Moubeche, SaaS Club (2024) |
| About a year after launch | $200K ARR | Tenot, Growth Unhinged (2024) |
| March 2020 | $1M ARR, 8,000+ customers, a team of ten | Moubeche, Failory (2020) |
| About 3.5 to 4 years after starting | $10M ARR across lemlist and lemwarm; founders cash out $30M at a $150M valuation | Moubeche, SaaS Club (2024) |
| August 2024 | lempire at $26M+ ARR with about 90 people | Moubeche, SaaS Club (2024) |
| October 2024 | $28M ARR, bootstrapped | Growth Unhinged (2024) |
All figures are company-reported. Accounts of the $1M milestone differ: Moubeche reported $1M ARR in March 2020 and Tenot dates the first $1M to 2020, while a 2024 deep dive by Aakash Gupta, a newsletter writer and former VP of Product at Apollo.io, puts it in 2019.
What did one Facebook group post do for lemlist?
It filled the beta. In Kyle Poyar's Growth Unhinged newsletter on 2 October 2024, lemlist's COO Charles Tenot wrote that Moubeche found early adopters in a sales prospecting community on Facebook. The group's creator, Jon, agreed to the tool being shared, because members were always looking for better sales automation. That one post generated almost 300 sign-ups for the beta.
Moubeche's 2020 Failory interview describes a similar moment, without naming the group. Moubeche shared a screenshot of the beta in a group of people who send cold emails and got a flood of comments from people who wanted to try it. A competitor in the same group then announced a similar personalisation feature, so lemlist raced to launch first.
The post worked because of what came before and after it:
- Before: helping for free. Moubeche told SaaS Club about spending time in Facebook communities, Reddit and Indie Hackers, answering questions from people with problems.
- After: onboarding by hand. With more than 100 people on the beta, Moubeche had beta users create their accounts on calls and set up their campaigns for free. At the agency, the same work had cost clients about $1,000 to $2,000 each. Moubeche said the first version was buggy and had no follow-ups, so service had to make up for it.
- Outbound with its own tool. For the first 100 paying customers, Moubeche did outbound with lemlist, testing short and long emails, with and without images and videos.
How much did lemlist really make on AppSumo?
$160,000 in two weeks, of which lemlist kept about $60,000, by Moubeche's own count. AppSumo sells lifetime access to software at a heavily reduced price. In the March 2020 Failory interview, Moubeche said lemlist sold thousands of licences in two weeks, adding: "From those $160k, we ended up with just $60k." Neither that interview nor the later write-ups we checked give the year of the deal.
A later account gives a different number. Aakash Gupta's October 2024 deep dive on lempire says the team generated $175,000 in revenue in two weeks. The founder's own figure, given more than four years earlier, is $160,000 gross.
| What the deal gave lemlist | What it cost |
|---|---|
| $160,000 in sales and thousands of licences sold in two weeks | All but about $60,000 of the $160,000 |
| Traction and word of mouth | Two weeks of nonstop support, with Moubeche waking at night to answer messages |
| A lot of user feedback and money to put back into the product | Lifetime users who, in Moubeche's experience, don't move to higher plans |
Moubeche's verdict was blunt: "And no, these people won't upgrade to better plans afterward." In the same interview, Moubeche said AppSumo is worth it if you target SMBs, startups, agencies or business owners, as a way to get funding and learn from customers. Gupta's piece quotes Moubeche saying the most important part was the feedback and the community built from it.
What changed when lemlist rebuilt its onboarding?
Activation doubled. Moubeche told Failory in 2020 that lemlist's activation rate, meaning people who signed up and then launched a campaign, was low because the product was far too complex. Together with some unhappy first paying users, that pushed the team to rethink the whole UX. After the fix, activation rose by 100%. Moubeche said lemlist lost a few users at first but gained two or three times as many later.
A later account gives a bigger figure. Gupta's 2024 deep dive reports activation going up 4x, to 35% of sign-ups starting a campaign, after a rebuild where the only thing a new user could do was take the next step. It also says the change brought lemlist's highest churn month ever, that the redesign had hidden features people wanted, such as templates, and that the team fixed most complaints within 24 hours. We use the founder's own 2020 figure, a 100% rise, and note the later one.
The insight came from demos, according to Gupta's interview: Moubeche had built lemlist the way an agency organises campaigns, and new users did not think that way. Two lessons travel to any small product:
- Define activation as one action. For lemlist it was launching a campaign. Count the share of sign-ups who do it.
- Watch new users before you redesign. Then check what the redesign hid, before the complaints arrive.
How did building in public grow lemlist?
By turning every result into public proof. On SaaS Club in August 2024, Moubeche described documenting the outbound campaigns that got good reply rates and publishing the exact templates and the replies they got, on LinkedIn and the lemlist blog. It became a weekly cold email template. Later, customers shared their own campaigns as the lemlister of the week, which gave social proof and fed product feedback back into the roadmap.
Moubeche calls the wider habit the Marco Polo strategy: be the first to document the route. That meant posting how lemlist got its first 10 customers, its first 100, $250,000 in ARR and then $1 million, including the mistakes. Moubeche said lemlist grew about 30% month over month for two to three years, up to almost $10 million in ARR. Tenot wrote in October 2024 that Moubeche had built an audience of more than 500,000 followers across social media.
The audience later shaped lempire's acquisitions. Moubeche told SaaS Club about exporting people who had liked or commented on posts, filtering them by ideal customer (for example VPs of Sales, or founders of companies with more than 100 people), and running lemlist campaigns to them. The results beat cold outreach by a wide margin, in Moubeche's telling, which led lempire to buy Taplio and Tweet Hunter.
If posting every week is what stops you, Siela's social media agents post on LinkedIn in your voice at the pace you set, and you can choose to see every post first. Our founder personal branding guide covers what to post.
How can a 1 to 5 person team copy lemlist's community launch?
Pick one community, earn trust there for two weeks, then ask the admin before you post a real result and invite beta users. Our suggested plan, sized for a 1 to 5 person team:
Choose one community
Find the Facebook group, Slack community or subreddit where your buyers ask about the problem. Read the last 30 days and list the 10 questions asked most.
Answer before you pitch
Answer five questions a day with real detail and no link. Moubeche spent time helping people in these communities for free.
Ask the admin
Tenot says the group's creator agreed before the post that brought almost 300 beta sign-ups. A message to the admin costs nothing and keeps you in the group.
Post a screenshot and one result
Show the product doing one specific thing and the number it produced. Ask for a small number of beta testers.
Onboard every sign-up on a call
Have them create the account while you watch, and track one activation action within seven days.
Publish the numbers weekly
One template, its reply rate and what you changed. Our LinkedIn post templates give you a structure.
On lifetime deals, a test based on Moubeche's experience: consider one only if your buyers are SMBs, startups or agencies, you can handle a surge of support, and you treat the money as one-off funding.
Frequently asked questions
How did lemlist get its first users?
Mostly from communities and outbound. COO Charles Tenot wrote in 2024 that one post in a Facebook sales prospecting group brought almost 300 beta sign-ups. Guillaume Moubeche also did outbound with lemlist itself, onboarded beta users on calls and set up their campaigns for free. The first paying customer came around April 2018.
How much did lemlist make from its AppSumo deal?
Guillaume Moubeche told Failory in March 2020 that lemlist made $160,000 in revenue in two weeks on AppSumo and kept about $60,000 of it. A 2024 write-up by Aakash Gupta gives $175,000, which does not match the founder's own figure. The interview does not give the year of the deal.
Is lemlist bootstrapped?
Yes. lemlist started in 2018 with about $1,000, and Growth Unhinged described it as bootstrapped at $28M ARR in October 2024. Guillaume Moubeche said the founders cashed out $30 million at a $150 million valuation about three and a half to four years after starting, which was a sale of founder shares.
Do AppSumo lifetime deal buyers upgrade to paid plans?
In lemlist's case, no. Guillaume Moubeche told Failory in 2020 that AppSumo buyers would not upgrade to better plans afterwards. Moubeche still called the deal worth it for products aimed at SMBs, startups, agencies or business owners, as a source of funding, feedback and word of mouth.
What is Guillaume Moubeche's Marco Polo strategy?
It is Moubeche's name for documenting a route before anyone else does. At lemlist, it meant publishing how the company got its first 10 customers, its first 100, $250,000 in ARR and $1 million, with exact templates, reply rates and mistakes. Moubeche described it on the SaaS Club podcast in August 2024.
Sources
- Failory: lemlist interview with Guillaume Moubeche (published 20 Mar 2020)
- SaaS Club podcast, episode 405: Guillaume Moubeche (with full transcript) (published 1 Aug 2024)
- Growth Unhinged: Turning $1,000 into $28M ARR at lemlist (Kyle Poyar, with COO Charles Tenot) (published 2 Oct 2024)
- Aakash Gupta: How Lempire Built a $28M ARR SaaS (published 8 Oct 2024)