Bootstrapped SaaS: $12M ARR Across 5 Products With a Team of 10

Summary

Podcast Summary: The SaaS Podcast - "Bootstrapped SaaS: $12M ARR Across 5 Products With a Team of 10"

Episode Theme:
This episode features Thibaut Louis Lucas, founder of Tmaker, as he shares his rollercoaster journey from burning through €700,000, landing in $250,000 of personal debt, and being stuck in Paris during COVID—with a sick baby and no job—to bootstrapping multiple SaaS businesses to $12M ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) with only 10 people and no outside funding. Thibaut unpacks the hard lessons from his failures, the rapid product-building strategy that led to hits like TweetHunter and Taplio, his philosophy on product-market fit, his playbook for distribution in the AI era, his regrets about selling, and advice for SaaS founders navigating the evolving field.

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Guest & Business Overview

Thibaut Louis Lucas

• Bootstrapped Tmaker as a holding company with 5 live SaaS products, targeting founders and small business owners to help them grow.
• Team: ~10 people.
• Revenue: $1M/month ($12M ARR).
• Notable past exits: Built and sold TweetHunter and Taplio, reaching high 6-figure MRR and an eventual $8M sale.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. From Failure and Debt to Bootstrapped Success

• Early Mistakes & Debt
  Thibaut explains burning through capital and making all the classic founder mistakes:

  “I did the dumbest and the most classical mistake that a founder can do... You do it because it’s ego driven... you think that to be successful you absolutely need to raise money... But the thing is, I didn't even validate the idea. There was no recurring revenue stream.”
  — Thibaut (05:03)

• Raising money too early made it harder to pivot and led to a $250k debt after two failed startups. Realization: only recurring revenue matters, not vanity metrics or fundraising.

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2. The Crucible: COVID, Unemployment & Shotgun Product Launching

• Pivot Point
  After quitting his job for family reasons and getting stuck in Paris due to COVID, Thibaut decided to stop waiting for the perfect product and build repeatedly:

  “The goal was to spend our time on something where we would see strong signals that there is very high potential. Build one product per week until something sticks... looking only at revenue.”
  — Thibaut (10:10)

• Built 11 products in 4 months, looking for fast validation through paying users, not mere signups or downloads.

  Memorable Example:

  • Built a search engine for communities—saw some revenue, but not recurring, so moved on.
  • Key metric to continue: Recurring paid usage and organic traction (14:23).

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3. Fast Validation, Fast Iteration

• Product-Market Fit Signals

  “If you start having some people paying for a second month after the first month, it's one of the best things... if you do nothing during the day and still get some new signups—another very strong signal.”
  — Thibaut (14:23)

• Emphasis on building MVP landing pages to gauge signups before investing in product.

• Spaghetti code and recycled backends for speed—“optimizing for fast shipping” (13:07).

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4. Breakout Products: TweetHunter & Taplio, and Growth via Influencers

• TweetHunter Genesis
  Built for his own need to grow on Twitter; saw clear internal usage and rapid external demand.

  “It started to get overwhelming... this is the true product market fit—it’s when you get so much demand that it’s getting hard to serve.”
  — Thibaut (15:30)

  • Hit $1k MRR in weeks, $20k/month with partnership and influencer launch (16:58, 18:17).

• Growth Playbook: The Influencer Co-Founder Model

  • Partnered with influencer JK Molina (TweetHunter), granting up to 25% profit share and exit for active, ongoing promotion.
  • Replicated approach for Taplio (LinkedIn).

  “He got up to 25% of the product... but he was considered as a co-founder and he had to work like that. If he was not fulfilling his co-founder commitments, he could just lose it all.”
  — Thibaut (20:52)

  • This model rapidly drove acquisition and organic, product-led growth.

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5. The $8M Exit—and Regret

• Sold TweetHunter and Taplio for $2M upfront, up to $10M on earnout (final: $8M) (25:23).

• Financial & Emotional Fallout

  “We grew like crazy... basically ended up selling an $8M company for $8M.”
  — Thibaut (26:18)

  • Grew 5X post-acquisition; in hindsight, would have been better off not selling.

  • Negotiated to retain autonomy, so post-acquisition growth was largely founder-driven, not acquirer-driven.

  • Describes "post-exit depression"—the emptiness and fear of being judged for future work (28:46):

    “When you get acquired and then at the end of the earnouts, you really have nothing to do. You have this big void... every single thing that you show to the world, you take the risk of going from being the successful founder to being this loser who built a very shitty product.”
    — Thibaut (28:46)

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6. Re-Invention: Distribution > Building (The New SaaS Moat in the AI Era)

• Acquired (rather than built) TypeFrame (now Revit), a video AI SaaS—now doing $600k/month (31:23).

• Shifted from builder to distribution guy for his portfolio—partners with others who own product delivery.

  “With AI making building so easy, I wanted to go into the distribution space because I think this is where it’s all going to play... the success of products is going to be based mostly on distribution.”
  — Thibaut (33:09)

• Building repeatable systems for SEO, paid ads, influencer marketing, and rapid distribution—reusing playbooks across 5 live projects that mostly serve the same audience.

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7. SEO and AI Discovery—The Modern Playbook

• SEO as primary customer acquisition channel; the best way to be cited by AI (ChatGPT, Google, Perplexity).

  “I really find SEO to be one of the most interesting acquisition channels because you are capturing people with the highest intent... when you build something and it captures search traffic, it can last for a very long time.”
  — Thibaut (34:30)

• His product Outrank is designed for this—helping SaaS get discovered via AI and traditional SEO.

• Dismisses “SEO is dead” narrative; says good SEO is more important than ever for LLM and AI visibility (37:12).

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8. Repeatability, Systems, and Focus

• Why many products? All share core audience, distribution systems, and underlying problems—focus comes from depth, not breadth.

  “There is some focus in not being focused… every single one of our products is talking to pretty much the same people, going through the same acquisition channel, and trying to solve the same core needs.”
  — Thibaut (38:08)

• Product-market fit is the bottleneck—his process is designed to get rapid “reference points” by launching often (40:11).

• Rejects “talk to 100 customers first” approach; favors shipping MVPs and seeing if people chase you to pay (41:30).

• Warns that AI-driven ease of building will flood market with forgettable, abandoned projects (44:22).

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Notable Quotes & Key Moments

• On Early-Stage Focus:
  “The mistake... was looking at weekly active users or downloads. In the end, you need revenue if you want to make a living out of that.” (10:10)
• On Product Validation:
  “If you don’t tweet, don’t post on Reddit, like do nothing during the day and still get some new signups... this is another very strong signal.” (14:23)
• On Distribution as Future Moat:
  “With AI making building so easy, I wanted to go into the distribution space because I think this is where it’s all going to play.” (33:09)
• On Selling Too Soon:
  “From a financial standpoint, it was not a great decision... grew an 8M company for 8M.” (26:18)
• On Post-Exit Depression:
  "You have this big void... every single thing that you show to the world, you take the risk of going from being the successful founder to being this loser." (28:46)
• On Advice He Disagrees With:
  “Be focused. I’m definitely not a focused guy and I think it’s a mistake to be focused on one single product for a long time.” (46:57)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 03:06 — Thibaut’s intro & company overview
• 05:03 — Major early mistakes, ego-driven startups, and VC pitfalls
• 10:10 — Shotgun product-building and rapid validation philosophy
• 13:07 — MVP building process and signals for doubling down
• 15:30 — TweetHunter's origin and product-market fit moment
• 16:58 — $3k to $20k MRR growth via influencer partnership
• 22:12 — Building Taplio using the same “influencer co-founder” strategy
• 25:23 — Acquisition structure and final $8M exit
• 26:18 — Regrets about exiting and post-acquisition growth
• 28:46 — Psychological and emotional impact post-exit
• 31:23 — Buying existing SaaS as a playbook (Revit)
• 33:09 — Why distribution is now his focus
• 34:30 — SEO as the new product moat in the AI era
• 38:08 — How working on multiple products can still be focused
• 40:11 — Repeatable systems and product-market fit
• 41:30 — Shipping first vs lean startup advice
• 46:57 — Lightning Round: Contrarian advice and habits
• 48:37 — Learning to fly: Thibaut’s current hobby

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Lightning Round (46:51–49:15)

• Startup advice Thibaut disagrees with: Focus on one product.
• Book recommendation: The Mom Test.
• Most important lesson: “Ego is your worst enemy.”
• Time-saving habit: Build for himself first, then generalize.
• Outside of work: Training for a private pilot license.

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Contact & Resources

• Tmaker site with product links: tmaker.io
• Find Thibaut online: X (Twitter) — best for direct messages

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Episode Takeaways

• Fast prototyping, rapid validation (with focus on revenue), and willingness to kill “okay” products set up Thibaut’s SaaS wins.
• Building distribution systems—especially SEO—can be a growth moat as AI commodifies software building.
• The “influencer co-founder” playbook is highly effective for new SaaS go-to-market.
• Exiting too early has significant downsides—emotionally and financially.
• Focus can mean replicating systems across aligned products, not just sticking to one product forever.

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This episode is a powerful roadmap—as well as a frank, honest reflection—on what it takes to build (and rebuild) a bootstrapped SaaS empire in the new AI-driven world.

Transcript

[Omer Khan]

Welcome to the SaaS podcast. I'm your host, Omer Khan. AI has changed the playbook for building and growing SaaS. Every week I talk to founders who are writing the new one.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

He burned through €700,000 on two failed

[Omer Khan]

startups, walked away with $250,000 in personal debt, and then quit his job to travel the world. Three weeks later he was stuck in Paris with a sick baby and and no plan. My guest today is Thibaut Louis Lucas, who built Tmaker into a million dollar a month business with a team of just 10 people and zero outside funding. In this episode, Thibaut breaks down how he built 11 products in four months while he was on unemployment benefits, how he took one of his products from 3k to 20k in MRR in just two weeks, the model he uses to

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

launch new products without actually building them,

[Omer Khan]

and how he publicly regrets selling one of his products for $8 million.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

So I hope you enjoy it. If you do SEO for your SaaS,

[Omer Khan]

you already know AI is changing how people find products. Buyers are asking ChatGPT and relying on Google AI overviews for recommendations.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

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[Omer Khan]

Respawna helps you show up in those AI answers. They get your brand featured on the sites that AI tools actually cite. They helped Opus Clip hit number one in AI visibility and add over 100,000 visitors to their monthly organic traffic. SaaS. Podcast listeners get $1,000 in credit when you sign up for a subscribe and Save plan. Just mention my name after you sign up. Visit respona.com to get started. That's R E S P o n a.com I talked to a lot of founders stuck in the same spot. They've got a clear vision. They just need the right team to build or scale it. That's where Gearhart comes in. They're an AI powered product development studio that handles the entire technical side of building your B2B SaaS platform or AI agent. Built by serial entrepreneurs, they understand the unique challenges of startups and can plug into your team to accelerate growth. They've built over 70 successful products, including SmartSuite, which raised $38 million and is used by companies like Capital One. Right now, they're offering our listeners the first 20 hours of development for free. Just book a call at Gearhart IO. That's Gearhart IO.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

You're putting in the hours, but your SaaS isn't growing.

[Omer Khan]

It's not your product, it's not your pricing, it's the way you're wired. As a founder and once you see it, everything changes. Every founder has a blind spot.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

The builder ships great code but forgets to sell.

[Omer Khan]

The visionary chases big ideas but can't execute. The optimizer tweaks endlessly instead of finding customers. Which one are you? I created a free quiz that identifies your founder archetype and gives you a specific playbook to fix what's holding you back. Take the Quiz at Sasclub I.O.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

quiz.

[Omer Khan]

That's Sasclub I.O. quiz.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

All right, Thibaut, welcome to the show.

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

Hey, so happy to be here.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

So tell us about tmaker. What does the business do and who are you building for?

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

Tmaker is kind of a holding company for me. I have five projects live right now. I'm basically trying to build SaaS, products for founders, small business owners, everything that would help those people to just grow and be more successful.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Great. And give us a sense of the size of the business. Where are you in terms of revenue, size of team, that sort of stuff.

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

The crazy thing in like, I, I can't even realize it, but it's like a few weeks ago, we crossed a million per month, which is insane to me. It's like the furthest the, the further that I've ever been. So I'm just so happy about. About the growth.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

So you basically hit like the 12 million ARR.

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

Yeah, exactly.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

So you've got a really interesting story along the way. I mean, you started out, there was a lot of failed starts, failed attempts at building businesses, and we're going to talk about that. You eventually ended up building tweethunter and Taplio, which you ended up selling for several millions of dollars.

[Omer Khan]

And.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

And then now you're building tmaker and this holding company. But let's start with, I think the first two startups you worked on, they both failed or ran out of money. You raised funding for both of them, and then after the second one, the business was left with a debt of, what, two, $250,000 or something. So maybe just tell me a little bit about that start. What happened? Why do you think things went wrong?

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

I think I did the dumbest and the most classical mistake that a founder can do, which is you are desperate to build your own thing. You really want to do startups, and you do it, and you do it because it's ego driven. You absolutely want to be successful. You want to be the CEO. You enjoy so much putting CEO on your LinkedIn. You know those guys. So you start, you build a product, you hire a lot of interns, and what happens is that you think that to be successful you absolutely need to raise money. You want to be the next textbook and you raise money. I think my very first round was something like 200K. And you think that you've made it, this is being successful. And you're so happy because during family dinner you can say that you are managing a team of 10 people, you've raised a lot of money and it's amazing. But the thing is, I didn't even validate the id. There was no recurring revenue stream and I learned that much later. But having revenue is the very basic of any startups. It's not like you can go from VC rounds to VC rounds. Just a very small amount of startups are doing it that way. People need to realize that.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

So do you think it was too easy to raise funding for those startups?

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

Yeah, it was somewhat easy and it made you think that you succeed. But the problem with that is that it makes you confident about your idea. It makes you less willing to pivot to another thing that might be more profitable. And what I realized much later is that you need to pivot so much until you find product market fits. You need to do that so much that you need to remove any friction that would slow down in doing the pivots. And that means VC, of course, but also the team being just a 1 or 2% team, it's so easier to just pivot and go to a new idea if you think like, if you have spotted something that makes you think that it's going to be the right way now.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

So you had the experience with those two startup, you ended up getting a, a full time job and then did you lose that job during COVID Not really.

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

This is the worst story ever. That's like, it was an awesome job, like CTO job in a very big scaling startup. And that was the time where I got my first kid, by the way. The job was to get some stability for the first kid and she got sick, like super sick. Almost died at two months old. And so we had like this, I don't know, like these moments where we decided to quit our job, both my wife and me, to travel the world. And that was in February 2020. February 2020, we both quit our job to start traveling the world. And just like something like two or three weeks later, Covid became a real thing. And we got stuck in Paris. Nothing to do, no plan, the kids crying, not sleeping so much. It was kind of the worst time.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Wow. And then I think most people would have said, okay, let me find Another job and get that stability again. But you decided you were going to build startups.

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

Yeah, it was. So during this year and a half as an employee, I just couldn't help it. I had to go back to startuping. I had so many ideas that I wanted to work on and having a boss is something that is awful for me. I'm really not the kind of guy, I think I'm getting more and more unemployable. So, yeah, I just wanted so much to build the game.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Yeah. And then. So you and your co founder, is it Tom?

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

The two of you decided that you were going to build products, like one product every week. You ended up building 10 or 11. Most of them didn't go anywhere, but one of them turned out to be Tweethunter, which obviously did very well. So walk me through what was the plan that you guys had when you set out to build these different products?

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

So the absolute one thing that we wanted to avoid was working again two years on a product and in the end, after two years, realizing that it would not go anywhere. So the goal was to spend our time on something where we would see strong signals that there is very high potential. And so we decided to pick a niche, pick a positioning. And on this niche, on this positioning, build one product per week until something stick. And by sticking, I mean we were looking only at revenue to see if people were interested enough to put their credit cards and pay for it. The mistake that we did before was looking at average weekly active users or just downloads of our app as a signal for success. But in the end, you need revenue if you want to make a living out of that. So we decided, we saw that the creator economy was booming, so we decided to target founders and creators, build for them, help them being more successful by helping with their acquisition and build product after products on this positioning.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Give me an example of when you said picking a niche and then picking positioning. Just give me an example of that.

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

Like one very interesting thing is we built this app which was a search engine for communities like Slack servers, Discord servers, Telegram groups, things like that. Like things where you can post about your products when you launch something. So let's say you are into fitness, you are building a fitness app. This search engine would be able to find every community that it would be relevant to. Talk about your fitness app. It was kind of like, we had a nice start. We got people paying to access this search engine. But the thing is, you basically only launch once. And so people just paid once were using it a Bit they were doing the launch and then just skip. And so we had a very strong threshold for product market fits. And so even if this product generated some revenue, we just moved on to the next one because it was just not enough.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Now this was before the days of AI vibe coding. So I'm curious how much were you able to build of a product in one week to get people to give you money for it?

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

So I realized by that, just by being quite a good developer and by using many, many resources out there, by doing some spaghetti code, reusing the components from one product to another, reusing my databases, I was not buying, bothering recreating project. I was recycling everything. I had something like one backend for every single one of my product and then I was just plugging front end and reusing my function. So I was just optimizing for fast shipping. But most of the time still by doing that, it's hard to build something in just one or two weeks. So most of the time we were just building the landing page, adding a form for request access to the tool and people were just requesting access. We were just counting the email addresses that we were collecting. And if it was quite high, we were moving on and creating the product itself. So product after product, we were improving this process of creating the product and validating it step after step so we can just move on to the next one quicker.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

What was the signal that told you this is the time to move on? Next idea.

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

One of the strongest signal is how recurring the usage is. If you start having some people paying for a second month after the first month, it's one of the best things. If you see something, if you tweet and get new subscription and revenue, it's a nice start. But if you don't tweet, don't post on Reddit, like do nothing during the day and still get some new signups and subscription, this is another very strong signal. It means that someone is just going back to an old email or he thought about it and then coming back to the tool, or he talked about your product to a friend and he signed up all of those. They are awesome signals.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Yeah. So eventually you came to building tweethunter. What was different this time that told you this product is there's something special about this.

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

So first of all, I built Tweet Hunter for myself in the first place. I was realizing that product after product, Twitter was the tool that was bringing us the most user for every single one of the products. So I wanted to grow my Twitter audience and to do that. I was thinking that you need to see good tweets to write good tweets. And so I built just some backend stuff to scrap tweets and just order them. See the one that fit my positioning and my audience. And. And I realized that it was very useful, and I was using it every single day. I was coming up with my tweets by using Tweet on Twitter every single day. So that, in the first place, is an awesome signal for me. And that became the same for my co founder. And then we talked about it, and we got a constant flow of new user and new subscription, something like we've never seen before. It started to. It started to get overwhelming. And I think that this is the true product market fit. It's when you get so much demands that it's getting hard to serve. It's getting hard to go through all the DMs, all the feature requests, all the, like, everything.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

And I think you hit like, the first, like, thousand K in mrr, like in a couple of weeks with Tweet Hunter, right?

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

Yeah, something like three weeks. And it was crazy to us. I know it seems like a small number, but the growth was faster and smooth. Like, it was a really smooth curve going up, not stopping.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Yeah. I think you described somewhere these products, they go through a life cycle or different stages.

[Omer Khan]

And then.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

So you got this traction with Tweed Hunter, and then did it get to a point where it sort of started, growth stagnated? What was going on with it? What did that trajectory look like?

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

Not really. Or at least not for a very long time. We got incredibly lucky. I think we got at the perfect time, at the perfect spot, really. We quickly hit 3k in revenue. That was pretty much the time where we found this crazy deal with GK Molina. He was a growing Twitter influencer, promoting the exact method that was applied in tweethunter and gk. With his Twitter launch, he made the product go from 3k in monthly revenue to 20k in just 2 or 3

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

weeks by just promoting it to his audience.

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

Yeah, he had a big Twitter following and a nice email newsletter just by doing that. And just because of the crazy growth and the crazy launch, we anticipated a degrowth like a stagnation after this launch. And it didn't really happen because the users themselves are quite active on Twitter. They talked about the product quite a lot. And from that day, the product led, growth kicked in, and it never stops until very much, much later.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

So what was in it for jk? To promote the product, we had this

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

weird deal where he got up to 25% of the product. It was not really equity, it was something looking like a profit share, but also exit share. So he would get 25% of the monthly profit of the product, which by the way got quite high because we were fully bootstrapped, profit driven. And so the profit was getting higher and higher every month. And he would also get 25% off an acquisition if it happens and it happened.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

So partnering with JK got you to, I think you said 20k MRR and then just product led growth, word of mouth, those were the main drivers.

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

He was still working month after month doing campaigns, promotion campaigns. So yeah, he was really embracing his role of first ambassador, co founder. He participated a lot in the description of the product. But I think Tom and I did also a very good job on the product itself. There was something looking like a beginning of a startup app ecosystem. But Tweet Hunter was really a step up compared to the competition. It got much better very fast.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

I'm curious for a founder who's listening to this thinking, wait a minute, you gave away 25% of profits forever and any exit revenue to somebody who wasn't a founder and effectively just promoting your product, what would you say to them if it feels like that's too high a price to pay?

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

If you see that as an influencer deal, I think, yeah, it seems dumb and crazy. We saw it a little bit differently. The contract was actually saying that GK got at the co founder level, so he was considered as a co founder and he had to work like that. If he was not fulfilling his co founder commitments, he could just lose it all. All the shares. That never happened. He was highly motivated and he worked until the day that we got acquired. But it could have happened. So we were protected like that. It was not like he was just pushing at launch and then forget about it.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Right. Okay, Now I think TweedHunter got to around 100k in MRR when you decided that you were also going to have this second product, Taplio, which kind of did the same thing, but for LinkedIn. What was the thinking around that? And why did you build it as a completely separate product rather than adding it into Tweet Hunter and expanding that existing traction that you already had?

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

So there was actually two reasons for that, two very different reasons. But converging going into the same direction, which is, first of all, we got GK on tweethunter, so if we add LinkedIn into tweethunter, it would mean that he would not be very relevant for tweethunter, but he would still get 25% of the LinkedIn revenue. So we were highly incentivized to fork the product, build a LinkedIn one. And we actually did that and looked for a LinkedIn influencer to replicate this exact strategy. And it worked very, very well. The second thing is the social media space at the time was very big companies like Later.com, buffer, things like that, that were doing pretty much every social media around there. Tweetinter was different because it was focusing on one social media only. And we wanted to keep that in mind. We wanted to keep that mindset. If you want to be successful by creating content on social media, you need to focus on one interflow space. And that's what Tweetinter and Taplio will do for you. And we were able to go into so much depth, like so much feature integration, so much like dedicated feature, that it was a no brainer how better tweetmeter was compared to those big generalistic social media.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Did you use the same playbook to grow Taplio? Did you find an equivalent to JK and partner, or what was the way that you got the traction there?

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

Yeah, we did exactly the same thing. It was a happy accident on Twitter, but for LinkedIn and Tapio, we decided that we wanted to go that way and we were hunting the LinkedIn influencer until we found our experiment. We didn't even know if this partnership was successful because Tapio and Twitter got acquired very, very fast after the creation of Tapio. And so the partnership was terminated and we grew it on our own.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

What do you mean the partnership was terminated?

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

When we got acquired, Both the partnership on Twitter with GK and the partnership on Tapio with Alex added up directly.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Okay, okay. So because they got their 25% or whatever.

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

Yeah, they got their 25% of the upfront payments. And then we had like a big pay out, a big earn out, like a performance based earnout for two years. And we worked with a team, the Lampire team, on achieving those goals. That was very hard.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Now, I think the number I saw was that. Did you sell for around 8 million? Was that the number?

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

So we sold for 1.5 million upfront. No, sorry, 2 million upfront. And then it could go up to 10 million. So from 2, it could go up to 10 based on achieving 6 milestones. And out of the 6 milestones, we achieved only 5. And so the deal ended up being 8 million.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Got it. Okay. You've said publicly that you regret selling and that one of the downsides was that you experience post exit depression. Tell me about that. What happened? Why did it not turn out to be what most founders listen to this would be saying, Whoa, 8 million. Awesome.

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

Yeah, it's a very tough question because first of all, you cannot complain when you get so much money. So it's hard to say. So the very first point is from a financial standpoint only, it was not a great decision. We got acquires, we were doing like 1.5 million in annual revenue. And at the very end of the earnouts, we were doing 8 million in annual revenue. So we grew like crazy. We grew five times during those 18 months. And so we basically ended up selling an 8 million company for 8 million.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

But do you think the growth was

[Omer Khan]

because of the acquisition?

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

You got additional help to grow or you feel like you would have grown like that?

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

Anyway, it's very hard to say. If you ask the Lampire team, they would say that they handle us. If you ask me, I have a different story. But I really think this is not their fault, by the way. But we structured the deal by. It was very important to us to stay very independent during the announce. We didn't want to have a boss to report to. And it was written on the acquisition contract that, that we would remain in control of every decision related to Twittens and Tap IO. We were keeping every big decision about the product. And because of that, the team remained very separate. Like we were working very differently from different place. We didn't even have a common slack. We. We had separate slacks. So it was very hard for Lampire to help us with our acquisition. And so I really think that what we did with them, we could have done on our own. The only thing that would have been very different is that I think we spent much more in acquisition and marketing because it was not our money anymore. We took very big risk, which paid off. I'm not sure we would have taken the same risk without Empire.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

And how did it affect you personally and emotional and mental health?

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

So then that's a good question. I wouldn't say depression, but when you get acquired and then at the end of the earnouts, you really have nothing to do. You have this big void, like this big emptiness. You have created something that it has a lot of value and you got paid for that. And you get recognized for a successful founder. And I think this is the main thing. You get recognized for being successful. And so I talked about that with many founders and they all feel the same. It's very Hard to go back to building and to show your work publicly. Because every single thing that you show to the world, you take the risk of going from being the successful founder to being this loser who breed the very shitty product. And the truth is that no one cares. No one is really looking at you and judging you. But you feel that way. I guess it's the human thing.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

And I think people listening might be saying, well, you have all of this money, okay, you have a void, but you can go and go to the beach every day or something. Right. And for me, I can tell you personally, I moved to Florida, I live very close to the beach. It gets boring very quickly. You need some, you need purpose in your life. You need to be doing something.

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

No, no, I agree completely. The fun things, it can hook you for a few weeks and then you need to find something. And when you are a true builder, I really think that you cannot stop building.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

And so that's exactly what you did. You started building again, right?

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

Yep. In my case, I actually started building before completely leaving Lampire because I was not building this myself, but I myself acquired a very small tool called TypeFrame, which eventually became Revit, which is a video creation and editing tool with AI, which basically became my most successful product ever. Doing more than 600,000 per month right now, which I find insane compared to how much I paid for it.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

And did you use the same Playbook again? Did you find an influencer and partner up?

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

Something like this. But in this case I wanted to play the influencer so I shifted my positioning and this is what I'm doing right now with Keymaker in every single one of my products. Instead of being the maker, I'm now the distribution guy. And so what I'm doing right now is I have five active projects. I am the distribution guy for every single one of my products and I partner with a co maker who is building the products.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

I'm curious why you made that shift. Because if you're a builder, I would have thought you would have said, I'm going to keep doing the building and I'm going to partner with people who can get distribution across different niches or whatever. Why did you do it the other way around?

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

Yeah, that's a good point. For a few reasons. First of all is I think when you are building the thing, it's harder to work on multiple things. There is a, there is a lower limit. When you are the distribution guy, you can build an ads pipeline, you can build an SEO playbook, you can build an influencer network and every single product can benefit from those systems. I find it easier to build a system that can be reused for every single one of our products. And the second thing is, with AI making building so easy, I wanted to go into the distribution space because I think this is where it's all going to play. Like the success of products is going to be based mostly on distribution. I'm not saying that. So I'm still building for some of the products, but I'm highly committed on building great products. And that means that the product decision themselves, they are shared between my developer, co maker and me.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

So two of your most successful products you talked about, revit. The other one is, I think outrank. Both of those have some level of kind of wrapping some LLM in terms of what they do. And the distribution thing makes complete sense because now with Vibe coding, presumably you see a lot of copycat products, a lot more than you would have seen a couple of years ago. So describe to me how, how you build that moat with distribution. What are some of the specific things that you're doing?

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

The one thing that I try to do is ramp up SEO very fast and very aggressively. I really find SEO to be one of the most interesting acquisition channel because you are capturing people who have most of like in pretty much all the cases is the highest intent that you can get from a lead. You basically capture someone who is looking for a solution to a problem that you are sure that he is. And SEO when you like, sometimes like I sold tweets into something like three years ago and it's still ranking for tools that I built during my time at Twistentour. And so when you build something and it captures search traffic, it can last for a very long time. So it's sustainable and it lasts. And that's the amazing thing that pretty much every founder would want to have.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Yeah. And it sounds like you have outrank, which is solving exactly that problem. Right. It helps you figure out how to do SEO and generate content and stuff. And are you also moving into that space of like GEO and helping people get discovered in ChatGPT and perplexity and those places?

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

It's crazy because I see so many tools positioning themselves as the best tool for being mentioned by AI. The thing is outrank, which is an SEO tool, is in my opinion the best tool that you can use for that. Because what an AI is going to do is that it's going to perform a search on the same search engine that you are using, you and me, and it's going to take the Top tool there, it's going to look for best product to do this. And if the blog post mention your product first, it's going to pick this as the true answer. So you need to have an amazing SEO to be mentioned by LLMs. And so that's why I think outrank grew so much in the last year, is that it's like people are interested in this and outrank is the best tool for that.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

So when people say SEO is dead, not only is that false, it's almost like doing good. SEO is more about content getting discovered. Whether it's on Google or Google's AI answers or LLMs, the fundamentals still apply.

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

Yeah. So when an LLM replies, there's just two ways he gets information. It can be from its training data set, which basically is the web, and search queries, which is about SEO. So in any case, you need to be on the web, you need to increase your web presence, which is publishing blog posts, getting mentioned in other blog posts, and rank on Google, which is exactly what our rank does all across the world.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

How do you stay focused when you've got a holding company and you're involved in so many different products? The conventional wisdom would be like, one product. Right. And go deep into that. Why did you choose this path and how do you do it in a way that makes you be as effective as possible?

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

There is some focusedness in not being focused, which sounds a bit weird, I guess. So I'm not focused in the sense of working on one product. I have five different windows with five different agents doing some work for me at the same time. I'm switching context every two minutes. So most of my days, I'm completely burned out at the end of the day, and so it's hard to follow. But I still have focus in the way that every single one of our products is talking to pretty much the same people, going through the same acquisition channel and trying to solve the same core needs, which is I'm focusing on small business owners and I'm trying to help them make money, trying to help them being more successful. That's it. And so I think the underlying thing that I'm relying on is human technology and how they run their businesses. And understanding this correctly is helping me on every single one of my products. And for me, that's being focused.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Yeah, I can see this pattern. I don't know if it was intentional or not, that you seem to be building one thing on top of another. Everything from what you described with those 10 or 11 products when you were like I'm using the same backend. I'm just trying to do things through to having systems and playbooks on how you can repeat the SEO playbook. It seems to me like maybe from the outside it looks like all of this stuff going on, but really, I think the way I'm sensing your brain works is you're looking for repeatable systems that make you do the same thing for the same type of customer repeatedly. And do it well.

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

Yeah, definitely. I think one of the hardest things is finding product market fits, which, by the way, is happening at the very beginning. So that's why many, many founders get stuck below the 1k per month revenue threshold, because it's hard to go about that without true product market fits. Which is sad, by the way. But if you unlock this 1k per month, it means that you have real value. You are shipping something that people find valuable in. If you go about that, it's really about systems that you can copy and paste from one app to another, and which is exactly what I'm doing.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Most founders have been taught the lean startup type approach. Go and talk to 100 customers, validate your idea, then go and build something. Your approach is ship first, figure it out later. Almost Right. So somebody who's listening to that, just explain a little bit. Like, how are you making sense? Because on the face of it, it just sounds like just throwing spaghetti at the wall. But I think behind that, you've done this enough times that you have a, you have a more intentional system behind what you're doing. Right?

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

Yeah. I think the one core thing is when people are interested in something, they chase you, not the other way around. What usually happens when you have an idea is that you are trying to convince the guy that this is a good idea. He has objections, but you try to find answers to those objections and you try to convince. And then he forgets about testing your tool and you come back two days later and you follow up. Like you say, hey, did you find time to try my tool? Things like that. But when you get into something that is going to solve a real core issue for those guys, they are going to be the one chasing you, going into your DMs and asking, hey, this thing that you tell me about, is this Ready? When can I try it? I really want that. And I think my job is basically to spot that, to find those ideas where those people just get their eyes bubbling up and desperately wants the tool that you promise. That's it.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

And the way you're doing that is by saying, will people pay for this before I spend serious time trying to, or wasting a year or two years trying to figure out if this is the right thing.

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

Yeah, the way I do that is I tweet a lot. I see what resonates with people. I do MVPs. I try to put those MVPs into the hand of real people and I see if they just try it once and that's it, or they get really interested in that, they tweet, start talking to me over DMS and they ask for new things, stuff like that. I'm just like, I think, I think my job right now is like processing a lot of human conversations and trying to spot outliers, spots the product that generates more attention compared to the baseline.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

I think sometimes it's difficult for founders who are going through that process to know that because you don't realize what that traction looks like until you get the traction.

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

Yeah, because they build only one product and that was my mistake in the early days. I spent two years on one product. So it's very hard to know if the attention that you are getting is very average or very high or very low. How can I know? I get only one reference.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

And now, especially with vibe coding, you kind of don't really have that much of an excuse to not be able to put something workable fairly quickly in front of a customer and see if they'll pay for it.

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

Definitely the issue might be that we will be creating a huge generation of unfocused people because of that. Because it's so easy to switch from one context to another and build basically one app per day. But we see it's going to be fun.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Yeah, I always worry about, also I wonder when I use it or sign up for some random product, I always wonder, is there anybody actually working on this or was this some project that somebody built like a year ago and they forgot about it and they moved on to something else?

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

Yeah, that's a very good point. That's the Google effect. By the way, Google killed so many products that at one point some people were scared about using Google product because they might just get killed someday.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Yeah, yeah, very true.

[Omer Khan]

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[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

You've built the product, you've got a

[Omer Khan]

few customers, but 10k in MRR still feels miles away and you're not sure what to do next. That's the hardest part of the early stage. Not building, figuring out what actually moves the needle. SaaS club launch gives you a clear plan, weekly coaching, and direct access to me. So you're not guessing anymore. Apply@SASClubIO launch. That's SASClub IO launch. All right, we should wrap up, so

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

let's get on to the lightning round.

[Omer Khan]

I've got five quickfire questions for you.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

You ready?

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

Okay, go.

[Omer Khan]

What's the common piece of startup advice

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

that you disagree with?

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

I think we've talked about that, but that would be the be focused. I'm definitely not a focused guy and I think it's a mistake to be focused on one single product for a long time. People need to build more, people need to ship more to get more reference of what's a good product.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

What's a great book that you've read recently?

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

My absolute recommendation would be the Mom Test because it's the book where it shifts your mindset from I need to convince people that my idea is good to I'm going to discover if my idea is good by asking the right questions.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

What's the lesson that you have had to learn the hard way?

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

I think ego is your worst enemy. Like doing things because it's going to make you look more important. Like the status game. Basically trying to be important as a person. It makes you take the bad decisions.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

What is a tool or habit that saves you the most time?

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

I would say build for me in the first place, like building the tools where I would be the user. It makes me save so much time because I'm providing the feedback. I know that at least hundreds of thousands of people are pretty much like me. So I'm not building for no one. I'm a random guy. So if I'm using the tool and I find it cool, many other people are going to find it cool too.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

And finding outside of your work, what do you enjoy doing?

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

So I'm trying to learn how to fly a plane right now to get my private pilot license. I'm almost finished. I still have like 7 hours to go to get my 45 mandatory flying hours. So I'm excited.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

You're almost there. That's cool. Atiba, thank you so much for joining me. It's been a real pleasure. If people want to check out tmaker, I think they could go to tmaker IO.

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

Exactly. Yeah.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

And you can link off to all the products that we've talked about there and some more. And if folks want to get in touch with you, where do you hang out?

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

Well, on TMaker IO, there is my LinkedIn, my X accounts. I think my X account is where I'm the most active. And so if you want to DM me, that's the best place to go.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Awesome.

[Omer Khan]

Thanks, man.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

It's been a pleasure and I wish you and the team the best of success.

[Thibaut Louis Lucas]

Have a wonderful day. Bye.

[Podcast Host / Interviewer]

Thank you. Cheers.