Guillaume Moubeche

Guillaume Moubeche is co-founder and chief executive of lemlist, a sales outreach tool for personalized cold email, and of its parent company, lempire. He is from Paris, France, trained as a chemical engineer, and grew lemlist without venture capital.

A Chemical Engineer from Paris

His parents grew up on a farm and did not study much. “For them, it was super important for me to study science so I could get a good degree, a good job and a good situation later on,” he said on the Marketing Umbrella podcast. He earned a master’s in chemical engineering, then a second master’s in marketing. His first business, a T-shirt company started with his father, was in his words a “total failure.”

Prospecting at a Lead-Generation Agency

A friend asked him to co-found an agency that did sales prospecting for other companies. Moubeche ran cold email campaigns for its clients and booked hundreds of meetings, and he decided the tools were selling the wrong promise. “You need to personalize your emails,” he said. “In the end it’s about building relationships.”

Starting lemlist Without Investors

In 2018 he put his savings of $1,000 into lemlist, which launched as an outreach tool that creates personalized images automatically, he told Product Hunt. He pitched dozens of investors and was turned down each time, so he focused on profit. After lemlist passed $1 million in annual recurring revenue, investors began writing to him every week, and he turned down offers including a $30 million investment. “When you bootstrap, you have no other choice than to focus on what matters,” he said. In 2021 he sold 20% of the company in a $30 million deal that valued it at $150 million.