Opinion
Moubeche: I don't trust OpenAI CEO Sam Altman for a second
“Because this guy is like, so like, I don't trust him like a second. He's been changing his mind. Like so many times”
Insight
Moubeche: Non-paying design partners do not validate software products
“I think you shouldn't call someone design partner if they don't spend anything, you know, like it's not a design partner. It's like it's your grandmother being nice with you and telling you that you are like the most handsome person in the world, you know, lik…”
Insight
Moubeche: Crowded markets indicate existing product-market fit
“But later on, I realized once a market is crowded, it means the product market fit already exists.”
Prediction Held up
Guillaume Moubeche: Lempire will hit $29M ARR and $10M EBITDA
“We're, we've been, like, fully bootstrapped. So we will end up the year close to, like, twenty nine million in ARR with ten million in EBDA.”
Disclosure
Moubeche cashed out $30M in secondary liquidity from Lempire
“We, I mean, with Lempire, I also cashed out thirty million dollars, so made money along the way, et cetera.”
Insight
Moubeche: Sales is the most important skill for a founder
“But actually sales is the most important skills. You need to learn as a founder because everything is about sales. It's about sales when you want to hire like a top talent. It's about sales whenever you need to make your first dollars and understand like what …”
Insight
Moubeche: Non-paying customers indicate a core issue regardless of product readiness
“I think the biggest mistake is not trying to sell. And if someone is not paying, whether your product is ready or not, if they're not paying, it means that something is wrong.”
Insight
Moubeche: Founders Should Call Users Directly to Fix Low Activation
“The best way for me, it's like pick up your phone, like just call people. And if they don't answer call again and again, until you get to a point and it's fine, you know, like it's your right.”
Insight
Moubeche: SaaS founders should increase prices at least once a year
“As your product evolves and as you're bringing more value, your price should increase. And this is a rule that you should have. And I think like our growth has been has been driven also by price increase at some point. And it's quite helpful. So don't hide beh…”
Insight
Moubeche: SaaS churn is driven by unused licenses, not high prices
“I think a lot of people are suffering in this market, not so much because their price is too high. And a lot of people are saying that, but I don't think it's the case. I just believe it's that people are realizing that if they're not using a tool, they should…”
Insight
Moubeche: Rapid hiring often slows startup growth by diluting talent density
“I don't think that hiring more Is always the answer to growing faster. And actually I think sometimes it's the opposite. I've seen too many times, you know, like you hire too quickly, you hire the wrong people. You can't keep like a high level, you know, like …”
Insight
Moubeche: Hiring scorecards are bullshit; founders should rely on intuition
“Everyone, you know, wants like scorecard and try to make it as an engineer, like, okay, how many points do they have for this skill, et cetera. This is bullshit. Like, Hiring, you know, it's like you should, you know, like it's the same, you know, at school we…”
Insight
Moubeche: High salaries make firing underperforming hires easier for founders
“Whenever, you know, you have someone with A really good package that you are paying extremely well. The reason it's helpful is because if they don't deliver, it's super easy for you to let them go fast and find someone who could.”
Insight
Moubeche: Never hire skilled candidates you cannot see working with for 10 years
“One thing that I think would have helped me is like after an interview, asking myself, do I see myself working for 10 years with that person? Like, do I like their energy or like this kind of things? I think it's super important. And sometimes it's not even th…”
Opinion
Moubeche: External advice cannot replace founders making their own mistakes
“I think it's difficult, you know, like to predict because you know, it's like your mistakes are like a light that only lights your own past. I don't know if this is the quote, but you know what I mean? You know, it's like your learnings are your own. So someti…”
Assertion Supported
Moubeche is handing lempire CEO role to an internal executive
“Because I hired someone who's like extremely talented and skilled at that role for 18 months now, I feel like this is a time for him to have that role because he's definitely better than me.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Moubeche: Lempire reaches 10M LinkedIn users quarterly organically
“Right now, like, just to give you an example, we reach about like, ten million people every quarter on LinkedIn without spending a single dollar on ads, just through like our networks. And that's like That's like millions of dollars in revenue every year.”
Insight
Moubeche: Claiming lack of time for fitness is a discipline problem
“It's not about time. You know, it's about like the discipline it's about like self-love because you know, like there is a definition of discipline that says it's the purest form of self-love.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Moubeche: Disciplined founders will dominate because competitors have weak minds
“The ones who train their muscles for discipline, Are the one we're gonna really like crush the game because we're definitely like, I don't like too much talking about like weak and strong, et cetera, but I definitely feel that there are so many weak minds out …”
Insight
Moubeche: Sales equals timing times binary trust
“If you want the equation of sales, sales is equal timing times trust. Timing and trust is either equal to zero or one.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Moubeche: Lemlist scaled to $10M ARR in 3.5 years
“And then after that, we grew very quickly to like a million and then to ten million, it was three and a half years in total.”
Insight
Moubeche: Users want software to guide them step-by-step rather than modular workflows
“In reality, people, they want, you know, like you should take them by the hand and say, this is step one, then this is step Step two, this is logical and step three and so on and so forth.”
Insight
Moubeche: Startup growth is a sequence of S-curves, not exponential growth
“When you have like an exponential growth, it's actually not mathematically, it's never truly an exponential. It's always a S curve and the companies that maintain, you know, that, and that make it looks like an exponential are the one that were smart enough to…”
Disclosure
Moubeche: lempire saw >100% retention for larger sales teams vs 15% churn for solo founders
“So when a sales team has more than four people, we realized that the net retention was over a hundred percent monthly. Whereas when it's like a founder or a marketer, or like the first employee of a startup, the churn can be up to like 15%. Monthly.”
