From Bankruptcy to Millionaire in 2 Years: How Tibo Louis-Lucas Built and Sold TweetHunter & Taplio for Multi-Millions

Yong-Soo Chung [00:00:00]

It was only a few years ago that Tibo Louis-Lucas had reached the point where he had to declare bankruptcy after his second startup failed.

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:00:08]

It was very hard. I went through one of the worst moments for entrepreneurs. It was like there's no more money on the bank accounts. We have to pay people and we have debts. And so we just couldn't pay anyone anymore.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:00:21]

Today, Tibo is waiting to clear two milestones which will unlock the final two installments of a multi-million dollar deal...

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:00:30]

So it was a million acquisition right up front. And then from this million, there was like million to unlock through two years based on performance and six revenue milestones to achieve.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:00:47]

Wondering what happened between then and now? Then, stick around as we unpack the incredible story of how Tibo Louis-Lucas went from bankruptcy to a multi-million dollar exit in less than two years, and how YOU can do the same.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:01:08]

The next generation of successful founders in this digital age of entrepreneurship will leverage their audience to launch, build, and scale their brands. First Class Founders explores this golden intersection of audience-building & company-building with proven strategies to grow both your audience, which is your distribution, and your brand, which is your product.

Because those who can master both will create a category of one.

Hi, my name is Yong-Soo Chung and I'm a serial entrepreneur who bootstrapped 3 successful businesses from $0 to $20 million over 8 years.

On this podcast, you'll learn timeless lessons from world-class content creators, startup founders, and CEOs. You'll also hear tactical tips & strategies from ME, Yong-Soo Chung!

Are you ready? Then, let’s begin!

My CO-PILOT on today's episode of First Class Founders is Tibo Louis-Lucas.

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:02:07]

Hi, I'm Tibo. I'm the founder of Tweet Hunter and Taplio. Both tools are dedicated to helping people grow on Twitter and LinkedIn. Both have been acquired by Lempire in 2022. And I'm trying to make them grow to 10 million in annual revenue by next year.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:02:28]

I invited Tibo to join me on the podcast because I have used both TweetHunter and Taplio, the two products that Tibo sold for multi-millions.

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:02:37]

It's so cool that you're using them. Like it's, it's so just awesome to meet people that are using the product that you actually built. It's like, this feeling is crazy.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:02:45]

Quite humble of him to say that because, judging by his MRR, a HUGE number of people clearly use TweetHunter and Taplio regularly to grow their audiences.

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:02:54]

...I think together they are doing like six million in annual revenue.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:02:59]

So, obviously, I wanted to figure out...

What exactly did Tibo do to get to this point?

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:03:05]

So I teamed up with my old co-founder, the one I worked with on my first startup, the one that was supposed to hold me back, but he definitely didn't.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:03:15]

How did he go from having to declare bankruptcy to a multi-millionaire in such a short span of time?

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:03:21]

You have a lot of people that try to replicate the experiment of just ship one product every week until something sticks, but we just didn't do it randomly.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:03:31]

Is there a specific secret to his success?

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:03:33]

It's funny because people say that it was a very large component of our success, but it's definitely not.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:03:41]

And is there a way for YOU AND ME to replicate Tibo's success?

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:03:45]

It's crazy the number of stuff that I built that didn't go anywhere. But if I didn't build those...

Yong-Soo Chung [00:03:55]

Over the next thirty minutes, we will deconstruct Tibo's incredible success story and extract elements from it that YOU can use for yourself.

So, jet-setters, buckle up and get ready to take-off!

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:04:11]

Hey, I'm Tibo. Let's get down to business.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:04:17]

Before we begin, we teamed up with HyperPods to bring to you a quick 3-min hyper-visual summary of this episode with Tibo Louis-Lucas to help you consume faster, understand better, and retain more key ideas and insights.

You can grab the hyper-visual summary for this week’s episode absolutely free at firstclassfounders.com/hypervisuals.

The first-ever startup that Tibo Louis-Lucas ever launched was, in his own words, a miserable failure.

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:04:48]

Like right after school, I rushed to startups and I created the first one about... That was an educational tool for young kids and it miserably fails.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:05:03]

Young Tibo mentally blamed his co-founder for not being aggressive enough...

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:05:07]

Basically, I think I thought at the time that the failure was because of my co-founder who were holding me back on a lot of decision. And so I decided to do it again alone this time.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:05:20]

But, the second one also met the same fate...

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:05:23]

I raised more money, I hired a bigger team, and I just didn't understand why I failed the first time. And so I basically did the same mistake.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:05:34]

Except this one took a bit longer to fail.

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:05:37]

It took me two years to realize that it was not gonna go anywhere. And that's super important because the, so those two startups were, for both of them I needed two years to realize that it was gonna be a failure.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:05:52]

If Jim Collins were listening to Tibo's story, he would simply point out that Tibo had made the mistake of firing cannonballs instead of bullets - BOTH times.

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:06:02]

I think we did everything wrong. We rushed to raise money from VCs. We rushed to hire a big team. It was awesome to tell my parents that I was managing 10 people and that we had raised money. It was just great at family dinners, but the thing is we just didn't have product market fit and we didn't have a client revenue. Basically no customers, a lot of users using our tools, but no one paying.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:06:34]

In fact, that second cannonball actually ended up tearing a massive hole through Tibo's entrepreneurial career.

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:06:41]

I went through one of the worst moments for entrepreneurs. It was like there's no more money on the bank accounts. We have to pay people and we have debts. And so we just couldn't pay anyone anymore. And I had to go through this awful process where you declare bankruptcy, you have to go to the courts and close the company and explain why you cannot pay anyone. It's just an awful feeling.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:07:09]

With two failed startups weighing heavily on his mind, Tibo decided to take a break from entrepreneurial life...

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:07:15]

I was hired with a very nice salary as a CTO for a scale startup. And it was nice.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:07:22]

...but, as everyone knows, you don't quit the startup life just like that.

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:07:26]

But one year later, I was so bored. I wanted to do it again. So I think I needed this short break. But yeah, after that year, I just wanted to do it again.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:07:39]

And so he teamed up with his old friend, the co-founder of his first startup.

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:07:43]

And we told ourselves that, okay, so never again, never again we will realize, we will need two years to realize that something is abad idea, never again.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:07:52]

And this time, the two of them decided to... NOT fire cannonballs but, instead, fire bullets.

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:07:59]

So we had this crazy challenge where we started to try to ship one new product every week. And every week we would ship something, a new product, and we would give it like a week or two to realize if we need to give up or not.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:08:18]

A week to ship a product and two more to test the waters. That is insane pace no matter which way you look at it.

But, that's what firing bullets is all about. Over a period of several months, Tibo and his co-founder built and shipped TEN different products.

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:08:30]

He was doing the marketing and product design, and I was actually developing and building the stuff. And for one week I was building and the week after he was kind of marketing and finding customers for the products. And the week after that we would just start over. And I think we created like 10 different SaaS products like that.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:08:53]

Fire. Bullets. First.

You test out small ideas and watch to see if it gains some kind of traction. And, in this case, Tibo was only interested in ONE metric to gauge potential traction for the product.

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:09:05]

Revenue, only revenue. Like I think out of the eight or ten projects, only four made some revenue.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:09:15]

Makes sense. Because his first two startups had failed because they made little to no revenue.

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:09:20]

For the first one, it was because at one point we were exactly at the same position than one year before. Same products, same number of paying users, basically no movements.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:09:32]

In fact, Tibo believes that the DEMAND a product generates is the easiest and most straight-forward way to determine its product-market fit.

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:09:39]

...when you have it, it becomes so obvious that you have it because you're basically overwhelmed by the customer demands. You are overwhelmed by the numbers. It goes very fast. I think I've seen someone on Twitter saying that when you get product market fit, you're struggling to fulfill the demand. That's how you know that you have product market fit.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:10:02]

And that's how Tibo found product-market fit after shipping TEN different SaaS products in a span of a few months.

Because the eleventh product was... TweetHunter.

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:10:16]

...Tweet Hunter in the first few weeks, I think it just took off to more than a thousand in monthly revenue very fast. So that was the clear indicator that it's not only useful, it's useful to a point that people are willing to pay for it, and that's product market fit.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:10:35]

Coming up, Tibo explains WHAT it was about TweetHunter that clicked IMMEDIATELY with its users, despite there being already several other *really* popular competitors out there such as Hootsuite and Buffer doing a stellar job!

We wanted to do the opposite of that… But first, I'd like to take a moment to thank my sponsors for this episode CastMagic.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:11:00]

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And now, let's get back to our interview with the founder of TweetHunter, Tibo Louis-Lucas.

Before that short break, Tibo recounted the insane period of non-stop product development before TweetHunter finally clicked for them.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:12:37]

But, what exactly was it about TweetHunter that caused it to, quote-unquote, "click" with its users?

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:12:43]

I don't know, it's crazy because we were definitely not the first player. Like when we launched TweetHunter on Twitter, there were already a few players. And we just, I don't know, we just, I think, created the perfect tool for the perfect kind of people.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:12:59]

That might sound like an exaggeration but I think there is both logic and truth in Tibo's statement.

See, one thing that definitely worked for TweetHunter was its RAZOR-SHARP focus on a single problem...

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:13:11]

The competitive landscape at the time was like a lot of big SaaS, like a hootsuite, later, buffer, which basically supports all social media and are made for companies that just want to be everywhere. We wanted to do the opposite of that, like build a tool that is fully dedicated to creator that wants to be the best in one specific social media platform.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:13:36]

And, the other thing was that TweetHunter WASN'T a random idea!

In fact, every one of the products that was MVP-ed in the run-up to TweetHunter had a CLEAR goal and it was the SAME goal every single time...

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:13:49]

It was always to help creators make more sales. And so why this is important? It's super important because every time we put every people interested in our products in the same mailing base. And so this mailing base just grew and grew and grew. And at every product that we built and at every launch, we were stronger and stronger because we had more people, more creators following what we were doing because every time it was relevant to them.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:14:20]

In other words, capturing those email addresses ensured that, each time they launched a new product, they reached a bigger audience than the previous launch!

Now, some of their early products didn't pan out the way they hoped.

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:14:32]

We built this search engine of communities that you can reach out to when you are launching a product. And I think on paper, it seems like a very good idea. Like you are launching products, and you are looking for communities to talk to. And I think that's very bad products because you are launching a very limited number of times.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:14:55]

True. Most creators don't launch new products very frequently, so the chances of having return customers for this product was practically zero.

But, they kept firing these MVP-bullets and, when TweetHunter launched, they knew they had found themselves a cannonball...

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:15:11]

So the revenue was coming when we were promoting Tweet Hunter, but it was also coming when we stopped promoting the tool. Like it's word of mouth, and word of mouth was here from the very, very beginning.

Yong-Soo Chung  [00:15:25]

Even with TweetHunter itself, they didn't build the whole thing out at once. They started by building the absolute, bare minimum tool that twitter creators wanted in their MVP...

Tibo Louis-Lucas  [00:15:35]

It was only one thing. It was inspiration wall to find old and viral tweets that are basically talking about the same thing as you are. The goal is just to make connection between very great ideas to then come up with new ideas by yourselves.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:15:54]

If I were to continue the 'bullets' analogy, I guess we could call this firing a 'tracer' bullet.

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:15:59]

...when you build a product, we learn the hard way that you need to start very, very little. That's the way to go to just validate your ideas and grab people's attention on something that's very, very specific.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:16:13]

A quick sidebar here.

If you get the feeling that I am being excessively insistent on the whole "fire bullets first" philosophy, it's because I see Tibo's entire entrepreneurial career as a perfect example of that philosophy.

When Tibo tried to launch big the first two times, it ended up being quite disastrous for him. It was only after he adopted this MVP philosophy of "firing bullets first, then cannonballs" did he begin to see some semblance of success.

I urge all entrepreneurs to start a bunch of projects serving your core audience and see which one resonates the most. You’re essentially planting a bunch of seeds and seeing which plant grows the fastest.

Anyways, getting back on track, the TweetHunter MVP product was a simple idea wall, to which they added all the other features that can be seen today...

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:16:59]

..the full scheduler feature, all the automation and all the things that you have on Twitter right now.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:17:07]

One of the fascinating things about TweetHunter that I remember was a conversation where Tibo reported solving a bug-report that had come in via his DMs.

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:17:16]

I think during more than a year, there was this little bug report link at the very bottom of Tweethunter, which was basically, have a bug, send your... get help here. And this button was redirecting people directly to my Twitter DMs where they could just share about the issue and I would just answer in real time.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:17:39]

And that little tidbit blew my mind.

Because, that little gesture represented TWO things to me. One, TweetHunter wasn't just another product for Tibo - it was very much tied to his desire to succeed as an entrepreneur.

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:17:53]

When you start having one foot on something like a Twitter scheduler, you need to provide awesome service. Like you need top quality products. You are not allowed to fail on posting content. Like people expect reliability.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:18:09]

And two, it reinforced my other belief that the best journey for any product was to build it in public. And, boy oh boy, did Tibo LIVE that journey!

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:18:20]

We had a few stories of people mentioning that, hey, I have these bugs and I was live at the time working. So I just jumped on the issue and I was able to share in about like 15 or 20 minutes that the bug was fixed.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:18:36]

Building in public, when done RIGHT, can create a SOLID emotional connection with your users.

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:18:41]

It's crazy because it wasn't a big deal for me, but the impact that it can have, it's just this, it provides this awesome feeling for the user.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:18:52]

Of course, back then the TweetHunter team was incredibly lean - it was just him and his cofounder Thomas handling everything from development to marketing and support.

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:19:11]

And I think that's, that's a key component. That's a key mistake that I did in the past is right from the very start, hiring a big team. I would never do that again because you need to understand the core problems of your audience and you can't do that by hiring people.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:19:39]

Whew. There is a TON of stuff to learn from this entire process that Tibo just outlined. Let's sync our notes, shall we?

Essentially, there were FOUR things that contributed to TweetHunter's initial success.

1. They fired bullets first. That is, they created a bare minimum MVP and then added more stuff along the way.

2. They built their product in public. This was evident in the decision to invite customers to send issues to them directly through Twitter DMs.

3. They kept their team LEAN. Sure, it may have ended up being a bit hectic for Tibo and Thomas but it definitely helped establish a close rapport with their customers.

AND

4. Their focus was razor-sharp. Unlike all its competitors at the time, TweetHunter focused on solving the problem for ONE platform - Twitter.

These FOUR principles together helped lay a solid foundation upon which the subsequent rocket-like scaling of TweetHunter could be executed.

I say 'rocket-like scaling' because, within a couple of years, TweetHunter has now grown into an app that earns TWO MILLION in annual revenue, along with Taplio.

Yes, you heard that right! Two. Million. Annual. Revenue.

How?!

It starts with a conversation featuring... J. K. Molina.

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Okay, now let's get back to our episode with cofounder of TweetHunter, Tibo Louis-Lucas.

Before the break, I told you that TweetHunter rapidly grew to a point where it now earns TWO MILLION in annual revenue, along with Taplio.

One of the early reasons for that rocket-like growth was consolidating the market.

Remember when Tibo said this about early-TweetHunter?

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:22:29]

It was inspiration wall to find old and viral tweets that are basically talking about the same thing as you are.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:22:36]

Here's the smart bit. Tibo scanned the market for possible competition and found something incredibly valuable.

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:22:42]

The first one was a very small tool called What2Tweet, which is ranking first for What2Tweet, and which is directly super relevant for tweet-hunting. And we bought that for like... very small amount of money and it was a key growth driver, even until now.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:23:04]

Wanna take a wild guess at what he paid for "What2Tweet" back then?

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:23:08]

So we didn't have money at the time. So we paid 500 for it, which basically is no money, just paying for the time of the guy who were selling it.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:23:21]

Incredible. To get something THIS valuable for what essentially amounts to peanuts is just... mind-blowing!

And, the thing is, this isn't a difficult move to execute. Tracking the competition is just Business 101. Tibo's stroke of genius here was essentially spotting it ahead of time and acting on it immediately...

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:23:39]

...you have a lot of people like him who are, they're just having fun. They're building something nice. It performs very well on ProductHunt. So he gets traffic. And the tool is nothing that he can use right now. It's like it becomes useless for him or her. So you have those tools around there and you just need to reach out to those people who would have not imagined that someone would be interested in buying something like this.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:24:08]

I hope you noted it down as an important lesson because this... this was some truly *inspired* thinking by Tibo!

But the MAIN reason that really gave TweetHunter the rocket-boost I mentioned before the break was... J. K. Molina.

If you don't know who J.K. is, he is a rather famous Twitter influencer / community builder who also writes a newsletter called Likes Aint Cash. Pretty cool stuff. You should check it out for sure!

How he got involved with TweetHunter is actually a fascinating little story...

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:24:42]

...we reached out to a lot of Twitter creators, just trying to get them to use the products. But JK had this awesome reaction where he said, this is this product is awesome. This is the exact thought process that I'm teaching in my course. I want to be in.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:25:00]

By 'in' he meant he wanted a piece of the TweetHunter pie...

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:25:04]

And so we were not expecting that and we thought a lot about it. And we built this partnership where he got up to 25% of the product. So limited to Tweethunter, not in the Taplio cup, but so he basically got a co-founder role and he really contributed to the success of TweetHunter.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:25:27]

And, when Tibo says "success", he REALLY means success!

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:25:31]

So the first paying user for Tweethunter was in May 2021. And we started talking with JK on July. We were at like 1.5 in K monthly revenue. And when we announced the deal and executed the JK launch plan, it was in September, we were at 3K MRR. And just with the JK's launch, we went from 3K to basically 20K in monthly revenue. So that was a huge jump.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:26:05]

Having a creator who is this invested in your journey is an incredible growth lever to unlock. We saw this in an earlier episode too, when Tyler Denk the founder of Beehiiv spoke about getting early-adopters to invest in the product.

EPISODE 42 - Tyler Denk (22:36)
"That's one I'd say like a cheat code for startups in general of getting early adapters on the cap table also because they aren't just dumb money per se, they aren't just investing to get involved with around, but they're users, so they know exactly what you should be building. They almost become like quasi-advisors as well, where they can say “I was on X platform before they did this really well.” So they're investors who are actually giving very tactical advice, which then encourages us to take that advice to heart build it, and expand our offering and our platform."

...which, if you think about it, is also exactly what JK Molina also did with Tibo and TweetHunter!

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:26:55]

...I think the core idea is that if JK stopped doing any promotion, he would lose the share of the project. And the second core idea is that this is not equity. This is like a distribution deal where he would basically get a percentage of the profits and a percentage of the product exits if it happens.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:27:20]

Those were incredibly favorable terms. To his credit, JK also responded positively. The result was immediately visible because it delivered a rocket-boost to TweetHunter's monthly earnings...

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:27:32]

And we even anticipated the degrowth, but it didn't happen. It kept growing 20% per month for the next six months after that. And I think JK had a huge impact on these first six months, like September to March 2022. Basically, the growth from 3K to like 60, 70K MRR.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:28:00]

By the way, the strategy of involving a passionate creator was so successful, Tibo chose to replicate it with Taplio - the LinkedIn version built around the same principles (and codebase) as TweetHunter.

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:28:12]

And this time we actively, we were proactively looking for LinkedIn creator to be like the lead creator of the products and to share about it.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:28:25]

Keep in mind that TweetHunter had its first paying user in MAY of the PREVIOUS YEAR! They had gone from having ZERO revenue to 60, 70 thousand monthly RECURRING revenue in less than a year!

And, since then, in the months that followed, Tibo focused on growing TweetHunter through a combination of two incredibly simple strategies.

The first was to build small fun-based tools to capture and convert new users...

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:28:55]

Basically, we had a lot of fun ideas to execute on Twitter. That was like tweet generators or growth challenges. Or I don't know, like we even built this Elon shitposts tweet generator, and Elon Musk quiz. All of that was super fun to work on. And we tried to release at least one every month. And every time it was, it made a bit of noise, even on producthunts and on Twitter. And I think it got us a lot of users.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:29:31]

...and the second was plain old SEO.

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:29:34]

I think SEO is now playing a huge part of the growth. And it's starting ramping up around that time where we're at 60, 70k. Basically, when we started the growth at the very beginning, the small tool that we built, they were variety-oriented. And we had a shift after that where all of the mini-tool that we built after that, we made them more SEO-oriented in the way that it's something like... download video from tweets or delete tweets, delete retweets. Things like people are writing and searching on Google, we built many tools for that. And so we had some that are generating an insane number of traffic that is now playing a huge part on Tweethunter growth.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:30:38]

And the growth has now reached a point where TweetHunter, together with its cousin Taplio, are making a cool TWO MILLION dollars in annual revenue combined!

But, between the first user in May 2021 and reaching the two million ARR figure, a major seismic event happened in the TweetHunter journey.

It got SOLD.

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:30:58]

TweetHunter has been built to be sold. It's something that's a bit crazy, but the thought process behind everything we did with Thomas is like sell TweetHunter, build a tool, sell it in a year and start over.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:31:12]

And the story of that sale starts in January 2022...

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:31:16]

...so in January, 2022, we booked a broker and he had the mission of finding companies to acquire Twitter and Taplio. And what motivated the move is that there was a lot of things happening with Twitter because of Elon Musk. And then the Taplio side, Taplio is not fully compliant with LinkedIn. So we were afraid that LinkedIn would just try to block Taplio.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:31:47]

Things moved so fast that, in May of that same year, Tibo struck a handshake deal to sell TweetHunter to a company called Lempire...

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:31:55]

And Lempire has been built by a guy that I actually knew from middle school.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:32:02]

Except, it wasn't the broker who brought Tibo and Lempire together!

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:32:06]

The broker didn't actually get us any relevant deals. It didn't really work.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:32:13]

So, what happened? How did Tibo manage to find a buyer? What were the terms of the deal he finally struck with Lempire?

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:32:20]

So it was a 2 million acquisition right up front. And then from this 2 million, there was like 9 million to unlock through two years based on performance and six revenue milestones to achieve.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:32:38]

And, if you want to hear all the JUICY details of the deal, I recommend that you sign up for the premium membership of the First Class Founders community. Because premium members are currently being treated to an extra segment in which Tibo explains the various aspects of the deal - ranging all the way from how it was struck to how exactly it was structured and when he expects to unlock the full amount.

Spoiler alert, there's another year to go according to the terms of the deal but he's already crossed two-thirds of the milestones!

In this exclusive segment, you will also hear Tibo talk about how arriving at a mutually-acceptable deal took way longer than he had expected...

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:33:15]

The issue when you are growing very fast is that you agree on an amount (and) then your company is doing awesome.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:33:29]

...and how things are currently progressing.

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:33:31]

But just to give you an idea, we were below two million in annual revenue when the acquisition happened. And to unlock the full amounts of the acquisition, we had to go from two to 10 million in annual revenue.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:33:47]

...and whether he is ultimately happy with the deal!

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:33:50]

It's super easy to say right now that the amount was not enough, but the truth is when we got acquired...

Yong-Soo Chung [00:33:58]

Want to become a premium member? Go to firstclassfounders.com/join.

And now, before we wrap up, I'd like you to carefully listen to these incredibly powerful words of advice from Tibo.

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:34:10]

you need to build on something that you are deeply enjoying, because it's gonna be hard. And you need to enjoy what you are doing so much, that you will very often run experiments, code new stuff, without even wanting, without even knowing that it's gonna be interesting, that people are going to like it. It's crazy the number of stuff that I built that didn't go anywhere. But if I didn't build those, I would not have built the few that went viral and that generated tons of users for us. So you need to be so passionate that you're actually enjoying what you are doing and you are willing to do it even if you have absolutely no guarantee that it's gonna work out.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:34:59]

You can connect with Tibo on his Twitter account.

Tibo Louis-Lucas [00:35:00]

Yeah, I'm tibo maker on Twitter, like the @tibo_maker. You can also find me on LinkedIn and yeah, I try to read most of my DMs. So feel free to reach out to me. Super happy to talk.

Yong-Soo Chung [00:35:17]

If you enjoyed this episode with Tibo, I recommend queue-ing up episode 24 of this podcast next. It features Arvid Kahl of The Bootstrapped Founder podcast. Arvid and his business partner Danielle sold their startup FeedbackPanda to SureSwift Capital in 2019 for an undisclosed sum.

I'm not really allowed to talk about the number because that's in the contract, I guess. But we sold for a uh, life changing amount of money.

Arvid and I spoke about his life post-acquisition and discussed, at length, his decision to focus on content-creation full-time. I extracted FIVE lessons pertaining to effective content creation, which will help you build your chops as a successful content creator.

I’ll leave a link in the show notes for episode 24.