Here's how Tibo sold two products for $8M, and why he'll never do it again.

33-year-old Thibault (Tibo) Louis-Lucas grew two companies to six-figure MRRs and sold them as a package deal for $8M — and he regrets it.

His latest products, revid.ai, feather.so, and superx.so are bringing in about $28k/mo. This time, he has no intention of selling.

Here's Tibo on how he did it and why he isn't doing it again. 👇

11 products in 11 weeks

I built a few startups between 2015 and 2019, but they didn't generate any revenue so I almost gave up. In 2021, my cofounder, Tom, and I started this crazy challenge — we decided we'd created one product per week until something started generating revenue.

We created ten products and it was crickets. But product #11 was Tweet Hunter, and it took off rapidly after we shipped it.

I think this one worked where the others didn't because of how we differentiated it. Every product out there focused on being the best scheduling experience, but Tweet Hunter helped people come up with better content instead. It wasn't just a scheduler.

Plus, we just moved faster than everyone else. We were shipping more and experimenting with more growth tactics.

Never selling again

After launching Tweet Hunter, I launched Taplio too. At its peak, Tweet Hunter reached $300k MRR. It's doing a little less now. And Taplio hit $600k MRR.

Eventually, I sold Tweet Hunter with Taplio as a package deal. They sold for $8M — $2M up front, plus up to $8M, depending on performance. We got $6M out of the $8M for the "performance bonus".

Sounds great, right? But it was not a super pleasant experience.

First off, I gave up something that was really important to me. I gave up on my baby and now I see the new owners screwing things up.

Secondly, I got a bunch of money at one time. And it's not like that's a horrible thing, but I find it way more healthy to earn it over time.

And thirdly, because we wanted a high multiple, we opted for an earnout that was based on performance. We had to hit very high revenue milestones, which made for a very stressful two years.

So I don't plan to do that again. I want to keep building apps and reach slow, continuous growth while living off the profit.

Acquiring and building products

I sell SaaS subscriptions to creators and solopreneurs. Currently, I'm working on three products.

I acquired revid.ai as Typeframes in September, 2023. It creates short viral videos from scratch and it's making $18k MRR.

I chose to acquire it because I was still working on my earnout and I didn't have time to create something from scratch. When I bought it, it was making less than $1k/mo, and that wasn't recurring revenue.

In April, 2024, I acquired feather.so, which creates blogs in Notion. It's making $9k MRR. This one, I acquired because I just really liked the app. I liked how it was built. And I wanted to go faster by acquiring a user base and product-market fit — it was already making $6k or $7k per month.

And in June, 2024, I created superx.so, which is at $800 MRR. It consists of Twitter audience growth tools.

Overall, here are my criteria for acquiring a product:

1. It needs to be aligned with my tech stack: basically Next.JS.

2. It needs to have revenue and PMF.

3. I need to have a clear plan on what I would do exactly to 10x the revenue. I don't buy anything for a slight increase in revenue.

Just ship it

I plan to keep the products coming. I have endless ideas.

I think founders are thinking way too much about what they should and should not do. The truth is you'll never know. You just have to do more and ship more. More often than not, you'll be surprised by what ends up working.

And if you're having trouble coming up with ideas, just start something. Coming up with ideas feels very hard before you start, but then it feels incredibly easy. Conversations with users, in particular, create a continuous flow of ideas.

Just keep an eye on two things:

1. Keep your ideas within your niche.

2. Build them within your stack. I build everything in NextJS with Firebase. It's the thing that I'm the most comfortable with — like Levels says, I'm not trying to innovate with my stack.

And remember, the only validation is revenue. One of the biggest differences between my failures and my successes was that I looked at revenue as validation for my successes. By doing that, I avoided the "I would pay if" that free users create.

Organic growth

Building in public

Building in public is what works best for me.

When I started Tweet Hunter, I didn't have any following at all. It was the act of building Tweet Hunter in public that got me the following. So the best advice I can give is to do something interesting outside of Twitter, then share about it. The following will come as a natural byproduct.

I share everything I do, and show the value of my software by sharing what current users are getting out of it. That means tweeting, posting on LinkedIn, and sharing in my newsletter.

As far as the newsletter, I'm doing two things. The first one is sharing about it a lot on Twitter and LinkedIn. And the second thing is trying to turn every user that signs up for my products into a newsletter subscriber.

Influencer partnerships

I had a big "aha" moment when I realized that I could partner with big influencers and offer them equity. This made them way more engaged than any sponsored influencer I've worked with.

That's a big part of how I grew Tweet Hunter and Taplio. I gave up 25% of Tweet Hunter and 30% of Taplio. In exchange, the influencers were supposed to handle all the promotion, referral programs, and marketing campaigns. In reality, we still did a lot of it, but they were still very successful partnerships. If you don't have an audience, consider doing this.

These days, I'm growing my projects by being that influencer myself.

SEO and free tools

Another big acquisition channel is SEO. I do two things. The first is obvious: I write blog posts that rank on very targeted keywords.

The second is that I create free tools that aim at ranking and redirecting traffic to my main software. I try to build at least one every two weeks, and that adds up. I don't do super-deep keyword analysis or anything, but about 20% of them get solid traffic and that's enough to compound in a big way.

What I don't do

People say that everyone needs to try cold emailing, ads, etc. I ignore them because I know I'm not good at these types of marketing, so why bother?

Start now and hurry

At the end of the day, my advice is this: Go for it.

This is the best time ever to start indie hacking.

And yes, it's very likely that your first businesses will fail, but you still need to build it. Because that experience is what will make your third or fourth or fifth business successful.

So start something. Expose it to the world as soon as possible, have fun, listen to feedback, be curious, and try to niche down to something super specific. Eventually, I'm sure you will succeed.

You can follow along as I do the same. I'm on X and here's my newsletter. You can also check out revid.ai, feather.so, and superx.so.