Balancing Paid Ads with Branded Creative

Domitille de Saint-Exupéry is the CMO and Erwan Gauthier is the VP Growth at lemlist, the multi-channel outreach platform founded by Guillaume Moubeche.

They’re bootstrapped, doing mid 8-figures in revenue, added over $10m in net new ARR in 2025, have 180 employees, and recently acquired Claap, an AI meeting notetaker.

In this episode, we talk about how to grow in a massively crowded market, their full marketing budget breakdown, what worked and didn’t, their biggest bet for 2026, why lemlist spends roughly 10x less on ads than competitors at their stage, and more.

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Listen on: YouTube, Apple Podcast & Spotify

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We discuss:

* Tips on growing in an insanely crowded market

* Their 2025 marketing budget: turning $1.2M total marketing spend into $31M net new ARR, broken down by channel

* Spending $60k on influencers & lemlist’s Linkedin playbook

* How to run a proper pilot/experiment for influencer marketing in your own company - and how to frame it to your CEO/CMO

* Breakdown of lemlist’s approach to AEO (reddit agency, G2, Wikipedia, atyla.io)

* How lemlist measures and attributes brand

* Their biggest marketing bet for 2026

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Connect with Domitille and Erwan:

Dom’s Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/domitilledesaintexupery/

Erwan’s Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erwanxgrowth/

lemlist: https://www.lemlist.com/

Claap: https://www.claap.io/

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Connect with Finn:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/finnthormeier/

Project 33 - LinkedIn Agency for CEOs: https://www.project33.io

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Other links and resources:

My interview with lemlist founder Guillaume Moubeche: https://www.executivebrand.org/p/bootstrapped-to-26m-arr-guillaume-32e

My interview with lemlist CEO Charles Tenot: https://www.executivebrand.org/p/lemlist-ceos-linkedin-playbook-33m-fb7

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Some of my personal takeaways:

* lemlist spends roughly 10x less on ads than competitors at their stage, because they built brand first. Domitille’s actual line: “distribution is the moat today, maybe even more important than your own product and content.” Most of their pipeline still comes from branded SEO and direct traffic, the boring metric nobody wants to hear.

* “No one is writing any posts for other people at lemlist.” They don’t ghostwrite for employees. If you want to post, post. If you don’t, don’t. But they DO carefully train external influencers on narrative + use cases, and those are the posts they boost with ads.

* Influencer is a brand channel, not a performance channel and it’s their biggest budget increase in 2026. Their attribution: reach * average conversion rate to estimate revenue per post, then subtract that from the brand bucket so they don’t double count. They treat it as a brand investment with a halo effect they can’t fully track. To test it yourself take 5-15 creators, 3 posts each, ~$50k starting budget.

* 70% of lemlist’s own users still spray and pray because it’s easier. Their entire 2024-2025 narrative was “stop blasting, send the right message at the right time.” And yet 70% of their own users are ignoring it. This is the gap every B2B SaaS company underestimates: positioning doesn’t change behavior, enablement does. Templates, tutorials, GTM Engineer playbooks, that’s what closes the narrative-to-execution gap, not better positioning.

* The AEO playbook is already running. For LLM ranking: a Reddit agency posting threads on specific subreddits (LLMs love Reddit because it’s “human advice”), heavy investment in G2 reviews, and a newly created Wikipedia page. They use atyla.io to track LLM mentions

* “If you don’t have budget and you’re not in a mature market, just abort mission.” The budget x market maturity matrix:

* Mature market + real budget → sweet spot, do everything

* Mature market + small budget + a great AI-native product → capture existing demand, kill the competition, skip top-of-funnel entirely

* Small budget + immature market → don’t bother

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