In this article, we'll break down how you can fail 10 times but still win big after figuring out one specific marketing strategy that most startup founders forget about.
Background
Meet Tibo, an ex-software engineer from France. Now a well-known indie hacker who exited his startup in an 8-figure deal, who's running a portfolio of SaaS products doing over $10M per year.
But just a few years ago, he had no money, no audience, and a family he had to provide for, so he had to figure something out, fast.
He started working with Tom, his old friend, and they split their roles:
- Tibo was responsible for the technical part
- Tom was responsible for marketing
They shipped 10 apps very quickly, spending less than 2 weeks on each one. All of them failed.
But then the 11th one worked!
In this article, we'll break down the exact strategy that helped him get his first users and scale his business.
Marketing Breakdown
Step 1: Get early feedback
After shipping a lot and documenting their journey on Twitter, Tom and Tibo noticed that some of the users of their apps were coming from Twitter. So they came up with the idea of building a tool that would help Twitter creators grow faster.
To get some early feedback and understand if this tool would be useful, Tibo offered it for free to a small group of people to get feedback as early as possible.
This tweet didn't go viral, but it got him a few beta testers.
On top of making his own tweet, he engaged with other Twitter creators and sent them DMs, offering to try out his tool for free.
After collecting early feedback and improving the tool, the initial version of TweetHunter was ready. Initially, it was a simple application that showed a collection of high-performing tweets that you could repurpose to increase your chances of going viral on Twitter.
At this point, they proved that getting early validation and sales, you don't need a complex product. As long as you solve a painful problem, and you do it well, it will work.
Step 2: Right distribution channel
Tibo wasn't getting a lot of views. Some of his build-in-public posts were getting only 8 likes:
But he absolutely nailed the distribution channel.
He was promoting on Twitter, a tool that helps you grow your Twitter account, to people who were on Twitter. That's what you'd call "the META play".
Because he used the right channel, even with 8 likes, he was getting leads.
If he were to promote this tool on Instagram, even with thousands of views, most likely the results wouldn't have been that good.
Step 3: Get people to engage + send DMs
After getting early feedback and the first beta testers, he started selling.
For that, he used one simple, powerful strategy.
He figured out his ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) and got them to engage with the post. This tweet performed very well and got ~500 people to leave a comment.
After that, he DMed those people and offered them TweetHunter.
On top of that, he reached out to dozens of Twitter creators with over 1,000 followers.
Here is what this DM looked like:
After 2 weeks, they reached 288 users, 28 active subscriptions, and $560 MRR:
Step 4: No audience? Borrow it!
After 4 months of working on Tweet Hunter and promoting it on Twitter, they reached ~$3K MRR. It was a successful product, but their own audience wasn't big enough, so they didn't have the leverage to grow the tool any further.
So Tibo reached out to a big Twitter creator, JK Molina, and offered him equity and revenue share to start promoting Tweet Hunter to his big audience.
Signing the deal was a complex, slow process, but after a month, JK came up with the launch plan, which helped them get to $18K MRR in just 3 weeks.
The lesson Tibo took from that was simple: for viral, easy-to-adopt products, a great maker plus a great distributor can beat a founder trying to own 100% of a tiny pie.
Remember: 100% of $1,000 is less than 70% of $10,000. And Tibo figured that out perfectly.
People worry too much about giving up an equity percentage and not enough about whether the partnership can take the product to a whole new level.
After that, they started working on SEO, running giveaways, mini-challenges, and launching free tools. They gave equity to other Twitter creators, and after 6-7 months, when they reached $30K MRR, they even ran an equity giveaway:
After about six months of working on Tweet Hunter, they launched Taplio, a similar tool, but for LinkedIn.
Two years later, they grew both products to almost $3M ARR.
And in January 2023, they sold both products to Lemlist for 8 figures. That part of the story deserves its own breakdown.
But the lesson from Tibo’s early journey is simple: You don’t need a huge audience, a big team, or a massive budget to get your product off the ground.
You need to understand where your customers are, create something they clearly want, and put it in front of them again and again.
Action Plan
If you want to adapt Tibo’s success framework, here is the step-by-step plan you can use today.
Step 1: Find where your customers are
Start with the audience you can access most easily. Tibo was building a tool for people who wanted to grow on Twitter, so he promoted it on Twitter. That sounds obvious, but most founders get this wrong.
If you are building a tool for X creators, be active on X. If you are building a tool for e-commerce owners, find Facebook groups, Discord servers, Skool communities, subReddits, newsletters, or podcasts where e-commerce owners already spend time.
Your goal is simple: Find 50-100 people who match your target customer.
Before building more features, make sure you know where your potential users are, how you can reach them, and that the features are solving their actual problems, not the ones you think they have.
Step 2: Build one simple, useful thing
The first version of Tweet Hunter wasn't a huge all-in-one platform. It was a simple tool that showed high-performing tweets that people could use as inspiration. That was enough to get early users and first sales.
You don't need a complex application to get your first MRR. Just focus on solving one specific problem really well and ship it early.
Step 3: Offer it for free to get early feedback
Once you have the simple version, go back to the people from Step 1. DM them one by one and offer them free access in exchange for honest feedback. Don’t pitch your product straight away. Talk like a founder who is trying to learn.
You can say:
Your goal is to answer:
- Do people understand it?
- Do they use it?
- Do they come back?
- Do they say it solves a real problem?
- Do they ask for improvements?
If people don’t care, fix the product or positioning. If enough people like it, move to the next step.
Step 4: Repeat until you reach consistent MRR
After getting early feedback and improving the product, you can put a paywall and start collecting payments.
You can get quite far just by sending a lot of cold DMs, but if you want to speed up the process, you can create content that calls out your ideal customers.
That’s exactly what Tibo did with this tweet, which got over 500 comments from people he later DMed.
Step 5: Borrow an audience once you have proof
If you don’t have a huge audience, you can partner with someone who does. But don’t do it too early. Influencers and content creators get cold DMs all the time, so you have to stand out.
It’s much easier to convince them when you can say:
- “We already have users.”
- “We already have revenue.”
- “People are asking for this.”
- “This is going well, but we need more distribution.”
That’s what Tibo did with JK Molina. Tweet Hunter was already making around $1-2K MRR when Tibo reached out to him. Then JK got equity and revenue share, promoted the product to his audience, and helped them grow much faster.
Don’t ask someone to make your product work. Make the product show signs of working first, then use their audience to scale it.
Now Tibo works on Outrank (SaaS to Grow Organic Traffic on Auto-Pilot) and Revid (SaaS for AI video generation). Collectively, they do over $1M / month. Let us know if you want to learn how he bootstrapped those projects.
