How lemlist got its users

Before he had followers, Guillaume posted screenshots of reply rates from his personalized-image campaigns inside other people's cold email Facebook groups, then asked commenters to join the beta. About 200 commented, 100 signed up. The editor was unusable, so he built each new user's first campaign by hand before giving them access. Copy that order: one screenshot of a real number, in a room you do not own, then manual setup for everyone who raises a hand.

done whenName three rooms where your buyers already talk and you are not the owner. If you cannot, you have nowhere to post your first screenshot.

After the AppSumo and Product Hunt launches he opened a Facebook group, The Email Outreach Family, later renamed The Sales Automation Family. Every lemlist signup got an automatic invite. Three questions gate entry: who are you, LinkedIn profile, email. The profile is checked against their personas. Self-promo is banned, new members get tagged in a welcome post, member screenshots get featured. lemwarm, the deliverability product, came out of requests in that group.

done whenDoes every new signup land automatically in one room you own, and can you name a feature a member asked for there?

Name the asset: Guillaume had no LinkedIn following at launch, but he co-owned lempod, a Chrome extension that traded likes between LinkedIn users, and it inflated his own posts. You do not have that. What you can run: he sent a connection request to every new signup with a script searching first name, last name and company, so his feed landed on users instead of strangers. Nine value posts, then one promo post closed with comment "interested".

done whenOf your last 100 connections, how many have an account in your product? Under half means your feed is talking to strangers.

lemlist ran its own product against five verticals: founders, SMB sales teams, lead gen agencies, SEO agencies, recruiters. The winning campaign paired a short opener with a dynamic image carrying the prospect's logo and a screenshot of their website, plus a personal landing page with a calendar. Those sequences became lemlist.com/cold-email-templates: ungated, filtered by intent and audience, each showing its open and reply rate, with a Duplicate template button into the app.

done whenCan a stranger copy your best campaign end to end from a public page of yours, and does that page have a one-click path into the product?

Borrowed names came first. Inside the group lemlist ran webinar interviews with outside authorities like Aaron Ross and Rand Fishkin, which pulled their audiences into a room lemlist owned. What you cannot copy: an internal LinkedIn Masterclass that got 15+ lemlist employees publishing, so the founder's account was not the whole channel. With no team, book one guest bigger than you per month and publish the recording in your own room, not theirs.

done whenWho did you invite this month that your buyers already trust, and did the recording land in your room or on their channel?