The $150M Secret - Summary and review

Hint, it doesn't exist..

The perfect idea is something that gets a lot of people stuck. And get's in the way of them starting a company.

The books starts off, with Guillaume sharing some common lies you often hear about starting and running a business.

Guillaume shares the 5 big lies, that rich and successful people tell us.

Execution > idea. This is why you can build in public, share your ideas freely. Of 200,000 people hearing about your financial and awesome company - how many will actually go through with copying you and building a competitor?

Ideas are easy. Execution is not.

So don't get stuck chasing the perfect idea. Instead, execute and know when/how to pivot.

You hear about the extremes. Either:

(A) "VC backed 16 year old Stanford-dropout growing big billion dollar unicorn in AI", or

(B) Sifted: "Hopin raised >$1B, valued at $7.75B - goes bust and sells assets for $15M".

It's black and white. Nothing in between.

But, that's not how the reality of business works.

There are tons of small and mid-sized businesses that never grow to become unicorns. They don't make the headlines.

Profitable companies that DON'T WANT TO become unicorns. That sit on nice profit margins, life a good life, and eventually never have to work a day in their life again. WITHOUT becoming a unicorn. WITHOUT ever raising one check from VC.

VC and media often feed this hype - that the game of startups is binary - an all or nothing play. That is what they profit from. And what feeds their agenda. But, not necessarily the best thing for you as a founder.

Ambition is not always something you start out with. It grows over time. Set up smaller goals first. And surround yourself with people that are ambitious and high-performers.

The best founders are the ones that adapt quickly. NOT the ones with a 5-year plan.

How much did you raise? How big is your team? That's common vanity metrics of how well you are doing.

"How much money did you get from investors?"

I told him that we didn’t get any. And then he said: “then you don’t have a start-up”

- Guillaume Moubeche

In reality, those are useless metrics. And you don't need alot of capital to get started.

Guillaume (and many others) started his business with just $1000. Instead he charged his customers proper money from the start.

Put more of your time into the first customers, like a consultancy that would have costed them 10X. That way you can build up the base of ARR, without needing a ton of money upfront.

Everyone believes that if you want to sell in a specific country, you need to have a physical shop there. Truth is the total opposite.

In SaaS, if you target the right communities, growth hack, and have a PLG type of offering with easy onboarding, etc. You can scale as well, or even better remotely in other markets.

Guillaume shares how he, with lemlist, saw an even higher conversion to paid from their beta amongst people outside France vs. in France (their home market).

Now we will look into the process of getting started building your company, how to grow and scale it, and eventually Guillaume's guide on exit.