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Interviews with world-class startup founders about their unique paths to uncover tactical insights they've learned about how to fundraise, grow, validate, hire, scale, and lead teams while building your startup.
Get full access to detailed takeaways on each episode, additional case studies, and more at join.foundingjourney.com
When I created my first startup, that's what I did. Like, I raised money, tried to hire the highest number of people that I could, and I don't think it worked like that.
Michael Houck:That's Thibault Lewis Lucas. After his first two venture backed companies failed, he bootstrapped his next one to a $10,000,000 acquisition. But first, he changed his approach.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:We had this crazy idea of trying to ship one product per week until something stick.
Michael Houck:He followed one simple rule, Follow the revenue.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:Revenue was the only metric that we were following to decide if we would continue or shift to another idea.
Michael Houck:He told me why you no longer need
Michael Houck:to raise money to build SaaS, best practices for startups looking to partner with creators, and what types of moats are still defensible. This is Tivo Lewis Lucas' founding journey.
Michael Houck:Tivo, what's up, man? Thanks for coming on.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:Well, thank you very much, Michael. I'm super happy to be here.
Michael Houck:So we've known each other for a while now, but I actually just learned this about you when we were doing research for this episode. You're not only the king of bootstrapping with a $10,000,000 exit under your belt. You've also been a venture backed founder twice. Both companies had some success. 1 grew 500,000 users, if I remember correctly, and the other got, like, a licensing deal with Ubisoft and had a bunch of employees.
Michael Houck:What happened there? Why go bootstrapping?
Tibo Louis-Lucas:Yeah, but like both of them crashed 23. And that's, that's pretty much why I went into bootstrapping. And I like, I wanted to go super lean and like go, go back being hands on because I don't feel like I'm a good manager, you know? And thing is like when you are at like engineering school or business school, it's like everyone around you, they are telling you like they are looking up to being a project manager or being, being like the super team manager. You have to work on your leadership, stuff like that.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:And so that's, that's what you want to do when you get out of school. And so when you, when I created my first startup, that's what I did. Like I raised money, tried to hire the, the highest number of people that I could. And, and I don't think it worked like that. Like, you cannot create a good product with 10 interns rolling over after a period of like 6 months.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:It doesn't work like that.
Michael Houck:What happened? Like what did you learn from those experiences? Maybe about yourself, about sort the companies you wanted to build, that sort of have now taken you on this new path?
Tibo Louis-Lucas:What I learned the most is that when you have a big team, you feel awesome at a family dinner saying that you're managing 15 people at work. Like it's like, it's like you're successful. But in the end, if you want to reach public market fit and I think that's the most difficult thing as a founder and, and the, the one goal that you need to go after. If you want to go, if you want product market fit you need to be super hands on. Like you are the most motivated person, You are the, the person that can iterate, like launch more experiments, go fast and, and go after specific opportunities that you will see on the markets.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:And, and I, like right now I'm pretty sure like no one else in the company can do that better than you. And so that's, that's why I like, I totally changed my mindset when I started this, 3rd company. We did it just the 2 of us with, my co founder. And we had this crazy idea of trying to ship 1 product per week until something stick. And it's like, it was a nightmare at first, but it was the one key process that enabled us to like quickly pivot until something that until we got into something that was truly valuable.
Michael Houck:Yeah. If memory serves, you guys did this for like 4 months, right? And there were like, I don't know, 10 or 11 products. And then the last one was TweetHunter, which which took off. What did that approach kind of allow you to do differently that led to discovering product market fit with TweetHunter unlike the other products?
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Tibo Louis-Lucas:I think the one mistake that many people do and, and we did that in our first two project is you are trying to reassure yourself with anything that you see. So just a few users telling you that your product is awesome, it's gonna pump you for weeks and make you want to continue on, on these ideal products. If your mom is going to tell you that your product is awesome, like what does she know about your industry? What does she know about your products? We did that with users, like with free users.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:Free users for, of 2 first startup was way enough for us to make us continue working on, on those IDs. And what changed with this one product per week until something stick is that we were looking at revenue and revenue only. And revenue was the only, metric that we were following to decide if we would continue or shift to another idea. And, and so we did that, like we, we even, we even, like reached 300 monthly revenue on one product that we killed and moved to something else. Because we wanted to, to hit like this threshold of like 1 k in monthly recurring revenue until we really go like all in on a concept, like on an ID.
Michael Houck:Why was 1 k the magic number?
Tibo Louis-Lucas:I don't know. To be honest, like, I don't think it was a magic number. It was just a strong signal that we would need to, like something that was super insightful for us is on Twitter we were, like we were actively posting on Reddit, posting like tweeting about the process, building in public. And for sometimes we're just sometimes like not doing anything. Like for 2 or 3 days, because we're building stuff or like just building big features, we're not, doing any permission to work.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:And, and at those specific times we were noticing that we were still getting new users and still getting free files. And, and, and this stuff is like huge signal. It means that, it means that you have people out there who found your products, even if you are not actively pushing it that day. So that was an even better signal for us compared to the revenue. We were getting revenue without pushing it.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:So there was some kind of word-of-mouth referral, I don't know, something that was working. So that's, that's what made us like go all in on that. You mentioned building in public, and
Michael Houck:this is something I wanted to ask you about because you've done this incredibly well both with your own social media accounts, with working with creators, everything. So we're getting the process out there. Has that changed? Do do you think the value of that has changed? Because a couple years ago, when you guys were first getting started with tweet hunter, building in public was it's not like there was social pressure to do it, but it massively benefited you to do it.
Michael Houck:Now with all these AI tools out there, building products can happen a lot quicker, is a lot easier. There's less differentiation based on product. And so sharing your secrets, putting things out there might actually work against you. Is that something you're thinking about?
Tibo Louis-Lucas:Yeah. Definitely. And I think you you you send it up pretty well. Like it's the main difference is that when I started building in Pyrites was like more than 3 years ago, building was hard, like much way harder than it is right now. When you think that you can create a full app right now with like so, so many advanced feature and leverage AI on so many things.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:If you are hitting some kind of success, it's pretty easy for a newcomer to copy paste your app and set it for like half the price. It's very hard to like on most, on most product it's hard to build the modes, and so if you don't have a mode, like why would you build and share all your secrets? That's a very, that's a strong question I have right now and so I don't have a clear answer on is it worth it? The one key thing right now I think is, if you are a nobody, like you don't have an audience, you don't have, any success, you don't have a working product, but you don't have anything to lose. And it can be, it can be a great way to start.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:If you have a 100 ks followers, it can really works against you because you, you are being looked over constantly and every new thing that you will ship is going to be copied. So if you share about them perfectly, you need to be like comfortable getting a 100 copy cats by fast.
Michael Houck:Yeah. We've seen some instances of this on on X, I think even in the past few months, people complaining about it. What what do you think founders should do instead? If they do have a big audience or even if they're just, you know, have a decent audience, what should they be doing instead of building public? What's next for these types of growth strategies?
Tibo Louis-Lucas:One thing that I think you are doing, and I think you're right is going on on YouTube. The value and the engagement that you have there on YouTube might be worth the potential issue of being copy pasted. You know, the more the more engaged your audience is, the more valuable it is. And so it's it's always a balance of how how valuable it is to share about your tips publicly compared to the the price of all the sco the scopic cats coming.
Michael Houck:Yeah. The potential downside. You mentioned motes. I've been thinking a lot about motes. Basically, ever since ChatGPT came out the end of 2022.
Michael Houck:What are the motes today? If product can't be a moat, where where do the motes live? Both for, you know, companies that wanna get maybe really big, but also just for for bootstrappers building building products.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:I see 3. Three main modes is I think, I think the, so there's data. You, you often have like, in house data that are super valuable and they are much harder to copy than, the project itself. 2nd one would be distribution. Like you have, you have a key distribution channel that you have access to and nobody else having a, having a YouTube audience is a great example.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:And the third one is I guess, users and network effects. And you, you can see that it's like the, the network effect of X and like Twitter is, is super strong. Like if you are the president of the United States of America or a random CEO, you might want to pro- to publish only on the place where most people are listening.
Michael Houck:I saw people getting banned and I was like, I don't know
Tibo Louis-Lucas:if this place is for me. All time here right now is getting banned on on many platforms. So
Michael Houck:Well, platform risk is real. Right? I mean, I think Yeah. You cited that last time we talked actually about, like, why you decided to sell tweet hunter. Right?
Michael Houck:You were like, oh, well, Elon's just taken over Twitter then at the time. And you're like, I don't know what's gonna happen to the platform. People are leaving. Is this product that I've put my blood, sweat, and tears into still gonna be as valuable? And so that that helped drive the acquisition decision.
Michael Houck:So I mean, yeah, platform risk is is real. Yeah.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:Do you know that, my LinkedIn account got suspended? Hopefully, I'm out of Tapio, like my my former, LinkedIn products. But when I got out, like in, in last April, Tapio was 2 third of our revenue. And so getting a hit on LinkedIn like this, I'm so happy that, that I sold. It it would have been a nightmare to manage.
Michael Houck:Yeah. A 100%. It's it's tougher to market that way too if you're not on the platform your yourself. I guess, you know, looking at it now, you know, we're a couple years on from Elon acquiring Twitter. It's now x.
Michael Houck:The platform's going fine. It's actually growing. Any regrets?
Tibo Louis-Lucas:People are fighting for engagement more than ever. So I wonder like many, many, many people are blaming the new algorithm for some, like some, some hits on, on their engagements. It's super hard to know if lower engagements could mean less users or less bots and maybe before you had engagement from bots. Or a real algorithm change, you know? So it's The truth is we have no idea what's going on there.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:Like it's, it's a complete black box and I don't know if you noticed but I'm building a new app for X like after, I'm basically trying to do over to like to redo what I did for 3 Hunter. Oh. And so I'm going to get exposed again on all those things. And so, I'm like, I'm going to
Michael Houck:feel naked, I guess. Yeah. I think they've taken a harder stance against, I think, 3rd party apps in general since Elon took it over. Are you worried about, you know, is you you said you've been suspended on LinkedIn. Are you worried about getting suspended on Twitter?
Tibo Louis-Lucas:Yeah. Because like LinkedIn for me was this like secondary platform. My primary platform has always been X. I'm super scared that I could just get banned like this in just in a day and, and I couldn't do anything about it. But that's the game.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:Like, it's hard to it's easy to complain, but without those platforms, it's hard to grow an app. Yeah. I mean, you guys mastered growing on X for tweet hunter. You know, you were using so many, like, micro influencers,
Michael Houck:giving them even equity in tweet hunter to keep promoting the product. What was that like? Because I see a lot more people exploring that now, actually, to the degree that we're building it into megaphone is like creator partnerships, sponsored posts. How did you see that so early and sort of how did you approach those creators?
Tibo Louis-Lucas:I think it's it's a little bit like, many things in life. I was not planning for all that. Definitely not. And the one key thing that started this entire journey is I think we were a little bit above 1 ks in monthly revenue. I was reaching out to a lot of Twitter creators.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:Like I was, I was trying to get, big Twitter creators using Twitter. And one of them got, got like this super ballsy and weird reaction where he said, I want in. And I, I didn't really understand what it meant but he basically wanted to like get into the journey. He wanted to like get at the co founder level. And this guy was, GK Monina.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:He was, like a growing creator who was talking about the exact methodology that we were having with, with Twitter. Like he was, he was setting this, this concept of having an inspiration wall, like a tweets wall to inspire you on how to write better. And from the very beginning, it was a strong fit. Like his audience was the exact audience that we were trying to reach with Twitter. So we found the deal, it was very generous.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:We gave him until up to like 25% of Twitter. And this like, it it's it started this all like it started this idea of sharing equity with people. And so we did it again at the much lower scale with like 17 different creators. We gave them 0.1% of Twitter. And we realized that it was, it was giving us this huge power, like huge we had like 17 big creators strongly incentivizing us growing.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:And to, and so at every new feature launch, at every new things that we were announcing, we had this huge pool of people that were pushing us. It works so well. But what I meant here is that we didn't plan all this like we were just reacting to people like, hinting us this idea, like they were just sharing about, they were just pushing in this direction and we just listened. And I think, I think right now, like you have so many things happening. It's a real work, but that's how it works.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:Like you need to just listen to the, listen to the market, listen on it, just observe, start experiments and see what works and just double down on what works and kill what doesn't, like relentlessly, like kill what does the work. Do not, do not like push harder on something that doesn't work.
Michael Houck:Yeah, I think that's where a lot of people get tripped up. They, you know, maybe they're sentimental. Maybe they feel like they put effort into something and they have like a, they have like an issue letting go of it. How do you kind of force yourself as
Tibo Louis-Lucas:a founder to just say, you know, this might be my baby, but I gotta move on from it. You know what, like when the, because I'm saying it's, it helps me just remembering it because, and I did this mistake so many times. I, first startup that I did, I spent 2 years on this IDE whereas it should have in 3 months. After, after the initial 4 months, the app that we created was not working. So we raised money to build a better version of the same app.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:And it was, it was such a mistake. It was like just so dumb. And we did it again this year. Like I wanted to create an app and so we outsourced the development to a developer. It like after 3 months, it was supposed to be a 1 month project.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:After 3 months, the app was not really working. Like obviously there was no fits between the developer and the, and the, the ID and the product. But we just kept going and we, we just, we entered into this cycle of let's add 2 weeks of development, let's add 2 weeks. And because each time you add 2 more weeks, the amount of money that you spent on this project is growing. And so you do not, you don't want to waste this money.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:Like the higher, the higher, the longer you spend on these projects, the higher is the amount. And so the higher would be the amount that you would lose if you kill the projects. And so you don't kill it, but you have to, like just kill the project.
Michael Houck:You mentioned that you have sort of outsourced this to a developer. And I think, you know, at least in Silicon Valley, there's, like, strong pushback against that idea. Right? Early on, you're like, you have to be in the weeds. You have to be writing the code, maybe work with AI these days.
Michael Houck:But, you know, they have as much skin in the game as you do at the end of the day. What makes it worth it? Because I've done the same. You know, I've I've outsourced stuff to developers. It's worked fine.
Michael Houck:What what do you think makes the may makes it worth it to do that?
Tibo Louis-Lucas:It doesn't. It doesn't work. The the only thing that I think that it can work if you are like pressurizing the, like you you give, you give like strong package, like super high package and you hire a very highly talented people. That's not what I did. Or, you hire someone that is like way, way more junior, less experimented but you are, super hands on managing the guy.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:And that's not what I did either. So what I'm doing right now and I think I'm going to do that only is just equity partnership. Like I want, I want to work with people who have like strong skin in the game. I want to be highly motivated because it's their baby. And most of the time I'm going to work on ideas that are not mine.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:Because it's, it's incredible how, like how people are motivated when it's their IDs and not yours. Do you follow me?
Michael Houck:Is this related to what you've been doing, I think recently, which is, you know, you've bought some products that are exist. Like you bought feather, you bought type frames. Obviously, you sort of forked type frames. We can talk about that. But, yeah, is that sort of that strategy playing itself out?
Tibo Louis-Lucas:Yeah, exactly. The the last one, Adri, is a project called outrank. It's outrank.so. It's, keyword generation tool plus blog post generation. And so it will try to understand your, your niche and will publish 1 new blog posts every day to rank on the specific keywords.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:And so the idea is to get traffic on autopilots. What I did here is I noticed a guy working on, on this product on his own. And getting some kind of success, but it's like, what I mean by here is like 3, 300 per month in monthly revenue. This is a very nice spot, like 300 in monthly revenue. It means that you have something valuable here.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:Like it's, you have something. But it's like it's not shaped in a good way. Like the, the packaging around it is, is not, is not well. I got inclusive projects. We made this, inequity splits.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:I got hands on. Together we reshaped the app. We changed many thing. We improved, generation. I got involved into the prompting and, and the product that we got working is much better right now.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:And, and I think it worked very well because the guy that I worked with, it was his ID that the, the foundation ID is, is his, so he's super motivated to make it work. Like we have very strong positioning, like I'm focused on distribution, he's focused on building. It just work like we launched, we launched yesterday, we got, 50 new free trial working. We're already at, 2 ks in monthly revenue and I hope to get it like to 5 ks in a few weeks. We see how it's going, but it's working.
Michael Houck:You 300 a month is not a lot of money. Right? And there's probably a lot of products, like a large number of products that are at that level.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:How do you identify a product that
Michael Houck:early that you know you can get to 5 ks a month or 10 ks a month or a 100 ks a month or beyond?
Tibo Louis-Lucas:I'm scrolling Twitter. And honestly, like many people are looking for magic recipe and how to find those but that's my way. Like I'm seriously scrolling Twitter and trying to notice the cool stuff that I see. It's just that simple. And then I engage, like I engage.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:Talk with people, ask question, ask many, many questions.
Michael Houck:That's my way. So you, you basically, you trust your intuition to say this looks interesting and then you go deep and ask questions and kind of learn, okay, how promising is this actually?
Tibo Louis-Lucas:Yeah. I also think that you need like a power, you need to be a power user of Twitter in a way that you need to set up a few things on Twitter that are not there by default. Otherwise you would just get the, like the more viral, like the, you would just get the viral memes of the day on your Twitter feed. But if you, if you set up like least use my other products, super x, and a few, a few nice, a few other poor user things, yeah, you can notice those guy and, try to engage with
Michael Houck:them. When you are engaging, how do you decide how much to invest into these acquisitions or these equity partnerships as you call them? And like, how do you determine that it's worth doing that in the first place?
Tibo Louis-Lucas:What I'm trying to do every time is trying to like have a working version in less than a month of the new vision that we will have together. And so it means that in less than a month, just by working together, we'd have something to put into the hands of users. And that's what we did. And so I, I, DM'd a few people asking them to just try it and I got some very good feedback. And so let's go to phase 2.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:Phase 2 is spend another month trying to deliver more value, DMing more people and see if I can get these 2 like a little bit above 1 ks in revenue. And if, if I get into this stage, let's work on it more and let's launch. And that's what I did yesterday. The launch has been doing quite okay and so I'm going to spend more time and, and, try to get this project to the new stage. And it means activating SEO, looking at, maybe new acquisition channels and see what I can do here.
Michael Houck:And when you when you actually decide that, hey, this is a product that has promise that I like working with the founder of, and I can see a partnership with them. You know, if something's doing under a1000 a month in recurring revenue, how much are you investing into the product? Like, how much are you actually putting into it? I'm
Tibo Louis-Lucas:not really putting any rev- any, any money. I'm just putting my time. I'm putting my time, my audience, and activating like every every channel that I can. No, it's I don't think it's bad at all for both of us. What's changed and I think I'm going to go with this kind of deal only from now on because when you are just putting money on the table and paying a guy to do the work, even if he still has some equity, the how much skin in the game you have is much lower.
Michael Houck:Yeah, I agree. Because you have that, that flat amount of coming out. Sort of related to this, in your newsletter, you mentioned that people should buy assets or products rather than buying companies. What, what did you mean by that?
Tibo Louis-Lucas:I think it's just legal thing. I sold my company and I saw how complicated it is. Like it's, it's so hard. Like you have so many, so many things to handle like the, setting the equity, paying cogs, having contracts super well suited. It's, it's so much easier when you restrain the setting to a specific asset and not the company.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:In, in some cases, it's not something that you want to do for tax and a content reason, but if you can, I think it's so much simpler?
Michael Houck:Yeah. I mean, when you sold tweet 100 and Tapplio, they both got sold together. I imagine that was under like the company, right? What was that like? What were the pitfalls that you sort of realize you wouldn't recommend other people to go through?
Tibo Louis-Lucas:In this case, I honestly think that we would not be able to, like we would not be able to avoid that. Like they were, it was, I think it was the right thing to do. I'm not talking about this specific case. I'm more in my newsletter when I was talking about, asset sale instead of company sale. I was talking about micro acquisition, which we did a lot.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:I think, when we were working at Twist and Tool we acquired more than 10 tools. And, and people thought that acquiring 10 tools is a hard thing to do. It's really not when you are talking about 10 ks USD assets that you're just, you just, just basically what it means is, people think that's super long process and super hard to do, but basically what we're doing is wiring the guy 5 ks, getting all the assets, and wiring 5 ks more at the end. That's, that's pretty much that. And the contract is less than 1 page, generated by, GPT 4 and that's it.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:It's really something that you can do.
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Michael Houck:We've seen the similar thing. We've acquired a couple of newsletters over the past year and a half or so, and it's the same. We literally did it in 30 we did one of them in 30 minutes over Twitter DMs. On the newsletter front, you know, you guys, you have feather now.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:And another one of my tools.
Michael Houck:With both. Right. You've turned it from a you've turned it into a newsletter tool to compete against, you know, some of these really big players in the space. What's that been like?
Tibo Louis-Lucas:The story is nice because I, again, I didn't plan this. Like I, it's, it's, it's been a while that I wanted to acquire feather, not to turn it into anything, but because I got a lot of money from the acquisition of Twitters and Tapio and that feather got very healthy metrics, like very low churn, constant growth and it was very attractive to me. I was a user and so I really liked the products. But during the acquisition process, the hive, did this crazy price change. And I was just like blown away.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:For me on my partial recruiter case, I would have to pay 2 and a half more for the same thing. I did so many price increase in my life like on tweet and I think on tweet hunter, we raised the price 5 times. But every time, every single time we were grandfathering all the users, meaning that's user who joined before would just keep paying the same price. And all the, all the pricing keys was like 20% or 30%. Here is 2 and a half more.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:It's crazy. I was going from a 100 per month to 250 per month. And so I was thinking that many people would be in the same position as me. And so I found this other tool where, which were sending newsletter from Notion. And so I just reached out to the founder and decided to acquire it as well.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:And so I acquired both Boostool, Notion Sender and Feather, and I merged the capabilities of Notion Sender into Feather. And I was super surprised, like it's, it went very well. The newsletter feature itself is, was very hard to do, like much harder than I thought. But once we released it, like the, the growth of feather kicked in and we got some very nice results.
Michael Houck:So you have a ton of these products now. Right? Like, we've talked about, I think, at least 4 already, and I know there are more we haven't talked about.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:Four four products that are bringing revenue.
Michael Houck:Okay. So let's let's talk about those 4 then. So you stated at one point that you had a goal of getting 5 companies to 100 k MRR each over the next 3 years. Are these 4 part of that 5? And I don't know.
Michael Houck:Tell me why that isn't an insane idea to try to do 5 at
Tibo Louis-Lucas:once. Because of what we talked to together before, like, because of, because it's getting way easier to build. I want to focus on something that I find very valuable, which is, distribution. I want to build a very strong acquisition engine system. And, and to make it profitable, I think it's, I think it's worth it to make this engine work on multiple products.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:4 is very hard. Like my, I feel right now that I'm having, I'm almost at maximum capacity. So getting to 5 is going to be very hard too. More than 5 would be crazy too. I do think that by setting the goal of a 100 ks monthly revenue per project on 5 projects, This is definitely not what's going to happen.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:I hope that maybe 2 or 3 are going to be in this range. One product probably going to be in the like 10 ks, 20 ks, range. And I hope that one of them is going to blow up like way, like way, way above, this 100 ks per month. I hope that this is what's going to happen.
Michael Houck:You know, traditional advice would say that focusing on one thing is where you make more money in the first place. Right? So when you do have one of these blow up and maybe even exceed, hopefully, where Tweet Hunter and Tapio got to, you know, are you going to focus down on just that? Maybe sell off the others or what's your thought there?
Tibo Louis-Lucas:I have no idea. I'm so I'm building every single product with co founder and so I would not be the only one deciding for sure. I love that. I love what this guy, Andrew Wilkinson is doing. He has like this umbrella company, with many, many different companies.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:And I love to see that you can maybe transition from making one product to, to building this system of products working together with a nice distribution engine. That's what I'm trying to create. It indeed goes against every single advice that you can see on many places. But I want to try and I'm, I'm going to, I'm pretty sure I'm going to learn a lot along the way. From day 0 I've been working on many things at once.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:Like even when we were working on twitter, we had those second product Tapio, and it's the one that's made the most revenue. And it's often the case, like you have so many example, like AWS doing more than Amazon marketplace. You have so many example on on on earth. So I want to just try this.
Michael Houck:Andrew Wilkinson is actually a great example with with tiny. People call tiny the the kind of like, you know, the the the modern or some call it the baby, but it's it's at this point, it's a pretty big public company. But we'll call it, like, the baby Berkshire or baby Berkshire Hathaway. Do you see AI as having, like, uniquely enabled that structure to actually be more, not just viable, but more likely to lead to financial success for somebody than the traditional path of just going all in on one thing?
Tibo Louis-Lucas:I don't know. Maybe. The, the, the thing is I think we have no idea where we are going this. Like if, if you can just prompt to create a software and you have a full SaaS working from just one prompt done in a day. Like it, it means, it means so many things, like so many things are going to change because of that.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:And so it's very hard to see where value is, what's left in the work that we are doing right now. And so my, I don't have an answer to those. The only thing that I, that I see is that's just moving quickly, doing things, shipping things is I think the only thing that can work.
Michael Houck:So you mentioned that with each of these projects, you have a cofounder. Right? Exactly one cofounder per project, I think. You also mentioned earlier in the conversation that you don't wanna be this big people manager that's not maybe where you're most excited about spending your time. Does that mean that as these grow, it's just gonna be a 2 person company essentially?
Michael Houck:And is that sort of also uniquely enabled by AI now?
Tibo Louis-Lucas:I think it's true. Yes. So the why I I do like this system is that car funders don't really mean, don't really, need managing. Like they are people like me, starving for success. They want to grow the products, and they are just, they're grown up and they know where like they just they they don't need me to, lead lead them exactly where, we should go.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:So we have like, we have our own, responsibilities. I'm doing everything I can on the distribution side and I do agree that AI is helping a lot in making us, I think we are both worth like 10 people from like 5 times, 5 years ago. So, yeah, I think we can achieve a lot with AI.
Michael Houck:I wanna talk more about co founders. So when you started Tweet Hunter, right, you went back and worked with Tom and Tom was your co founder actually on the 1st venture back company. How did you know at that point that Tom was the right guy to go back and build with again after having built something that didn't get to where you guys wanted to? And similarly, how are you kind of evaluating these new co founders on these new projects?
Tibo Louis-Lucas:I think it was almost a perfect fit with Tom because for a few reasons is the first first thing is it's super easy to communicate with him. Like it's every time we have an issue, every time there's something wrong, we are both able to communicate frustration or every other feeling that we have. It's easy for him and I to say, I feel frustrated. I don't like how this conversation, this conversation went. I feel like my ID got rejected for wrong reason.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:And it's, it's very likely that something's going to go wrong at one point with the co founder and so being able to share this is super valuable. And at the same time, we often disagree. We have so many, like there's so many topics where we disagree with each other, but overall we want to go in the same direction. And I think that's, that's super powerful. Like you have this baseline of we communicate on the same way, like we speak the same language.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:We come from pretty much the same background. But we have very different ideas and we have very different skills and mindsets. I, I want to go very fast. I will, I will ship first and think later. I will go quantity over quality, but Tom is going to hold me, and he's going to force me to deliver higher quality on some topics.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:He's gonna tell me on this specific thing, you need to spend way more time and make it better. And so there's super nice complimentary. I'm trying like with, with my new co founders on my new products. I'm trying to find this and I know that on some products we are weak on some aspects. Way weaker than when I was working on, on Tom.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:It's super, super, super important for me to like acknowledge this and and work on that because we like obviously Tom and I, we know each other for like 10 years. And so it was the perfect match.
Michael Houck:Yeah. What what do you do when you realize that, about, you know, these new co founders, maybe some of them you guys aren't on exactly the same page or
Tibo Louis-Lucas:I'm trying to, like, I'm trying to change my mindsets with some of them compared to the other one. Like, because I I for like, for one of them, I know that I need to be the quality guy, whereas I was the quantity guy before.
Michael Houck:Different versions of TiVo.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:Yeah. Trying to. It's not working yet. So we'll see.
Michael Houck:Any tips for other founders who, you know, are on the same page or maybe they're seeing things differently than, than their co founder?
Tibo Louis-Lucas:I think like the one thing that I would advise is if you have a Latins problem, if you have an issue and like waiting, waiting doesn't solve anything. And it's, in my opinion, it's as soon as you have an issue with anything, it's much easier to, to talk about that, possibly risking the, the collaboration. Because if you wait, it's just going to be harder and harder to talk about it. And eventually you will just, just like blow off.
Michael Houck:When you were working with Tom and you guys were starting from scratch and you're going through that process of, you know, 11 products in a couple months, one product a week. What were you doing to decide sort of what to build, how to validate it, and also whether you would take funding for something if it did take off? How were you guys thinking about that as a co founding team?
Tibo Louis-Lucas:I think it was not just, I'm not sure it was like crazy things. We're just basically talking on, talking on zoom, trying to brainstorm together about what could be valuable. The one thing that I think was interesting is if we got an idea, we would try to ship during the same day. And I mean by that if, if the product like do during a zoo, a Zoom call, we could have something that we would find super valuable. And I would end the Zoom call and just start coding and try to get this ID up as soon as possible.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:And it was, I think it was super appreciated on both sides that both of us were able to just like, just ditch anything else and focus on the one idea that we got that we think is, is valuable.
Michael Houck:And did you guys know from day 1 that you were going to bootstrap, not take funding, that you wanted to also sort of exit at some point? Was that all planned?
Tibo Louis-Lucas:Yeah. Yeah. The, this was planned. Like the, the goal was work on an ID, make it go to 10 ks in monthly revenue, set it for 1,000,000 in less than a year and start over. It didn't really go like that because tweaking to Interpreo grew way more than, 10 ks monthly revenue.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:And something unexpected happened is that we wouldn't find any buyer willing to buy this without having us onboard for 2 years. And so this totally changed the plan of build, sell, start over.
Michael Houck:Staying on for 2 years, that's a considerable ask, I think, for someone like you or me who's sort of, just loves to build things.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:How did you find a deal structure that worked for you? Just one thing before answering but I think it's not that it went wrong, but I'm pretty, I'm pretty confident that right now I would not said anything which required me to stay 2 years in business. Like I, like I now consider my time to be way more valuable than it was before and 2 years is just huge. So nothing more. But your, your question is very legit.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:Like we, we had a very early business. Like it was, I think it was almost a year old when we were thinking about selling it. Like when we had the first talk about sending it with the buyer. And so it was super risky. Elon Musk took over already on X.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:We, we knew that we were not really compliant with the LinkedIn rules. So there was so many risks. And so the, the deal that we found is that only 20% of the acquisition price would be paid upfront And 80% of the acquisition price would be based on an performance on performance milestones based based on, monthly revenue. There were 6 milestones that would unlock, that would allow us to get from the 2,000,000 upfronts up to 10,000,000. And we unlocked 5 of them.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:And so we reached an 8,000,000 of as a final acquisition price.
Michael Houck:Is that a structure you'd recommend to other founders, like trying to find a creative solution like that?
Tibo Louis-Lucas:Mostly yes. I think in our situation, we couldn't have avoid that. But I think that's was pretty bad about this, dude, is that those 2 years was very stressful. Like it was really, we, we solved, we got acquired and we could have thought about, okay, so now even if we need to stay 2 years, it's going to be transition time and we're going to train new people and they're gonna, they're gonna like get into the project and they're gonna manage it. It was really not like that.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:Because of these, because of those milestones and because of the performance, thing, we were like so pressurized. Like we were working even more than before.
Michael Houck:You're still in front of
Tibo Louis-Lucas:them. Yeah, definitely. So it's a, it's a very tricky question. We, we would have probably we would have earned more without selling it, but we got like so many things happened, we got suspended by Twitter at 1 point, we recovered from that and then there was a LinkedIn ban so it's very we are very happy that we sold. Platform risk again.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:Yep. Exactly.
Michael Houck:For founders who make it to the point where they know they wanna sell, how do they know they found the right buyer? In your case, it was like a childhood friend, right, he ended up buying?
Tibo Louis-Lucas:Yep. It does really matter. Like the we we we got into codes where we will gets we get acquired by very big, US companies or very big Indian company. And it was very hard to have, like a good and constructive, talk. We like obviously were like just living very different lives, very different way of seeing things.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:And so I have no idea how we would have gone, but I'm pretty sure like we got a very nice deal from a French company, pretty much like it's a 60 t people company. So still very small, very easy to talk with the founders and the executive team. So I'm super happy with how it went.
Michael Houck:Any tips for other founders who are negotiating deals?
Tibo Louis-Lucas:Yeah. Something which I think is very important is we all focus on the numbers, but the, like the terms, they're so, so important. The terms is gonna make, it's gonna make you, bless your lawyer or, want to kill him. It's like, we, we, we skip them because we want the millions, but just make sure that the terms are okay.
Michael Houck:While bootstrap companies can get huge, in general, typically a venture scale $1,000,000,000 type outcome is is out of reach unless you're raising money and, you know, going as fast as humanly possible. You raise venture initially as we talked about, and then you kind of went to the bootstrap route. Was that a function of, like, your goals changing or did you just wanna get a win under your belt? Like, what was the thought process there?
Tibo Louis-Lucas:I think it was about, how much I value my freedom. COVID had an impact here. Because of COVID, we were nomading with my wife. I wasn't physically present in Paris anymore. The thing is if you want to raise money, you need to, you need to talk with VCs, you need to hire a team and it's, it's way harder to do that when you are, when you are traveling.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:And so I was kind of forced into this new life of bootstrapping. And I really enjoyed it. So it was a very happy accident.
Michael Houck:Since you've done both now, would you recommend other founders do 1 or the other first before trying the opposite?
Tibo Louis-Lucas:If you run the math on how much you can get as a founder, raising money with a very successful startup, it's not that much because very often you, you gave away huge percentage of equity. And so I would definitely recommend bootstrapping even, even in this context of like AI blowing over and cost of building going almost to 0. So I do think that you need less money than you ever had. I'm, I'm getting, I'm getting messages from people. Like I'm, I'm getting a lot of people trying to like give me money to do things like they want to, they want to invest into things that I do like into products, into new startups but I don't need it.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:Like I honestly don't need money to create SaaS right now. And so why would you raise and what? Like taking money is always something that sounds appealing. Like you want to take it just in case, but it's it adds so many issues. You have so many problems.
Michael Houck:What do you think is the future of SaaS? Right? You mentioned right then that, you know, SaaS is getting easier to build. You need less money for it. We talked earlier about how AI is impacting product not being a moat.
Michael Houck:Where do SaaS builders go from there? What's it gonna look like 5 years down the road?
Tibo Louis-Lucas:I think it really depends on where AI is gonna go. If it's true that AI can build a full SaaS in just a day with prompts. I think that many companies will have a guy who will build the perfect SaaS for them with AI. And so they will almost not be paying for any software, except those guy building and maintaining a huge number of, of SaaS. Maybe it could go, it could go that way.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:Another possibility is that this is overhyped and AI will not be able to do that in a long, long time. And so we're going to stay in pretty much the same situation as we are right now. You have a lot of competition, like you have it's, it's way easier to build than it was before, but we still value very well built software. Something that we were, that, that was not the case before I think is right now I'm buying Sass because I know the founders and I want, I want to be closer from them. Like I want to be, I want, I want to like, I love the founders so much that I want to be, I want to, I want to give my money to them instead of the competing product, even if it's better.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:Yeah. And I think this is going to be more and more powerful.
Michael Houck:Talk about that a little bit more, like in what way is that going to be more powerful?
Tibo Louis-Lucas:One example is Damon Shen. Damon Shen, the founder of testimonial.2. I love so much how, like who he is. Like I love, I love how he behaves on social media. I love who he is as a person.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:Like the fact that he's a father like me, how he's nice, helpful and how he talks to people. And so if, if I'm paying for embed of a word of tweet, like a testimonial tool, I'm gonna be paying for history because I really like, I like who he is as a person.
Michael Houck:So the value of a personal brand goes up in 1? Yep. Exactly. With what you mentioned about sort of having the perfect guy to build a tool for a specific company instead of buying all these external SaaS products, I think we're gonna see the result of that or at least the viability of that pretty quickly. You know, Klarna announced a few months ago that I think they're stopping a lot of their enterprise contracts with, like, Salesforce and Workday and other big tools like that.
Michael Houck:And they're building everything internally with AI. So I think pretty quickly we're gonna see if they're viable businesses to help companies do that or not based on whether they go back to these contracts or not.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:Especially like what work they are like tools, tools related to legal thing. It might be something that it's too soon, I think. But when you look at what Salesforce can do, like when you look at all the custom things that you ask to Salesforce and like you need to hire developers working on Salesforce to customize it for you, it feels obvious to me that you can build something better, very specific to your use case internally.
Michael Houck:I think intuitively that makes sense to me too, if we are to believe that AI is as helpful and as good as as we're being told. Cool. One more topic I wanna hit on before we go into our little rapid fire outro that we do is burnout. Right? So you did 2 venture backed companies.
Michael Houck:You scaled them up to decently sized teams. After that, if I if I remember correctly, you actually got a job at a scale up as CTO. What was that like? Were you sort of burned out after the 2 venture backed companies? What was that, time like for you?
Tibo Louis-Lucas:I wouldn't say burnout because, I was feeling okay. It was just hard to go into like those two failures. And I had to go to court to close the company because it had debts and I was not able to pay for those debts. And my wife and I wanted to have a kid. And so I was not, I was not being able to like get money from my 2 first startups.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:And so getting a job seemed like the reasonable and healthy thing to do. And I was super happy about the job I got. It was super insightful and that's basically what got me into B2B SaaS, which is what I'm doing right now. And so again, happy actions.
Michael Houck:Yeah. I mean, you know, knowing you as I do, I can't imagine you working for somebody else other than yourself and that's a compliment. And I also, I know
Tibo Louis-Lucas:what it's like when a company that you've sort of put everything into raise money for sort of, you know, falls apart, right? It's tough. It takes a while to get over sometimes. But I do think like to, to come back to your point, like the, the combination of Twitter, X and other social media, like the fact of you see everyday people succeeding, they're like sharing their revenue milestones. And at the same time you have an app and it's not taking off and you are shipping like crazy, you are hot, like very hardworking but it doesn't just work like that.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:Yeah. I understand that's like burnouts could be very close and you feel alone because you are just working remotely every day. And I disagree with a lot of things that he says, but Peter Leves on X talks about how friends, community, working out is, is and, and eating healthy and sleeping. He talks about that. And I do think it helps, like keeping a nice way of living.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:Yeah. I do think it helps.
Michael Houck:Sort of in this vein, you mentioned something to me last time we chatted, which was founders never know when they need to quit, but they definitely know when they need to continue. And that kinda stuck with me. What do you mean by that?
Tibo Louis-Lucas:Yeah. That's true. That's so true. Like, every time I reached PMF, there were there were times where I was just so overwhelmed with customer supports, with growth, like fire, fire to handle everywhere with that tech not holding up. And, and during those times, you just, you just know that's you could, you just get so many things to a handle because of the growth that you just know that you have something valuable.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:That's I think positive market fit for sure.
Michael Houck:That's actually similar to what Mark Andreessen said in a blog post from, like, at this point, almost 20 years ago about product market fit. Everything's falling down around you. The customers are writing in constantly with support tickets. You know you're onto something. Cool.
Michael Houck:Okay. Couple rapid fire ones here. Obviously, Tivo, you're you're bootstrapping so many different products. You're not taking money from investors anymore, but who should founders, if anybody, take money from who's an investor they should?
Tibo Louis-Lucas:But if I had to take money from someone, it would be from like other indie makers and other, other founders. I want like, I want to take money from guys who will, who did pretty much the same thing that I'm going to do. And who would have like awesome, awesome advice, tips, and who could be a little bit more hands on than any other investors out there.
Michael Houck:What's one thing that you would change about the startup world?
Tibo Louis-Lucas:Copy cuts. But again, like, it's, I think it's wrong to say that because I'm taking like, I'm taking inspiration from existing software as well. So it's, it's a little bit hypocrites to just criticize copycats, and and still be building stuff.
Michael Houck:I think there's a there's a fine line, right? It's like, are you copying our landing page? Are you copying our onboarding? Are you copying the product versus getting inspired by an idea? What's the number one piece of advice you would give to somebody who's just starting out, first time founder?
Tibo Louis-Lucas:It's hard, but just take the first idea that you have and ship it and, and show it to the world. And it's probably not gonna work, but you still need to do it because that's how you learn, that's how you get feedback and that's how you get a much better idea and much better product to build.
Michael Houck:And last one, what's something you believe that most people disagree with you about?
Tibo Louis-Lucas:That's that quantity is better than quality. Because if you focus on quantity, you would eventually, deliver higher quality than if you focus on quality only. You know, there is this, there is this study, I think it's from Harvard, that they gave an assignment and like they split the group into one group. They were just focusing on quality and the other group they were just focusing on quantity. And, and the best, the best papers coming from this, from both groups were from the goo from the group delivering quantity.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:What I mean by that is you have a higher chance of delivering a very high quality products when you focus on the quantity. Instead of just trying to build the perfect thing from day 1. Yeah. You're more likely to find a global maximum versus a local maximum.
Michael Houck:Cool. Well, Tivo, thanks for coming on, man. Great to catch up and chat. You have so much going on. I don't even know what to plug.
Michael Houck:Where should people go to find you and use your products?
Tibo Louis-Lucas:I think the, the one place where, I onboard deeply is tmaker. Io. T like the letter tmaker. Io. You have a link to my newsletter and my projects there.
Michael Houck:Cool. We'll, I'll drop that into the description. Thanks again for coming on, man.
Tibo Louis-Lucas:Thank you, Michael.
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