How Lemlist Grew to $28M ARR in 8 Years

Lemlist is a popular SaaS product for cold emailing and is used by 37,000 users worldwide. Launched in 2017, it currently generates $28M ARR completely bootstrapped. Running and scaling a bootstrapped company to 28M ARR is no easy feat. In this article we are going to breakdown how exactly they did it.

The Lemlist tool allows sales teams to enhance email outreach and generate more leads. The key features Lemlist provides are:

1. Personalization at scale using emails using text, images and videos at scale.

2. Multi channel prospecting on email, linkedin and calls.

3. Improve email deliverability using built-in email warmup tool called Lemwarm.

How did it all began

Founders and Founding Story

Guillaume Moubeche graduated from HEC Paris in 2017 where he completed MSc in social media and marketing. Prior to HEC Paris, he worked for companies such as P&G and Hermès after his masters in chemical science and engineering. Before starting his own company, Guillaume was running his own sales agency.

Being from a non-technical background, he looked for technical a co-founder. After experimenting and failing with freelancers, visiting startup networking events and hiring bad programmers as his co-founders. He decided to start helping other founders with his domain expertise such as Marketing, User Acquisition and Growth Hacking. In the process, he finally met his technical co-founders Vianney and his brother François 2.

Why did they pick this problem?

While running his own sales agency, and using almost all outreach tools in the market Guillaume found that the existing email automation outreach tool did not have the important personalization features they needed. He believed, by adding more features specific to personalization on top of existing automation features provided by other tools in the market, could help their customers get more replies, calls and ultimately more deals. Being the crowded market, he also believe that “being in competitive market, the product market fit already exist. You just need to be better than your competition to get that traction.”

Early Traction

Being in a crowded market dominated by tools like Salesforce and Mailchimp. Lemlist team focused on differentiating themselves from the beginning. This allowed them to get good customer feedback and initial traction for their product.

Product Hunt Launch

The first version of lemlist was launched on Product Hunt in January 2018 with emphasis on adding personalized images and dynamic tags in the cold emails. These features allowed the outreach teams to personalize their emails to build better relationships with their prospect, and ultimately get more replies.