Tibo Louis-Lucas, TMAKER
The SaaS Distribution Channel Bet Behind a $12M Portfolio
Tibo Louis-Lucas is the founder of TMAKER, a bootstrapped portfolio of 5 SaaS products doing over $1M a month with a team of 10. His flagship product Outrank crossed $200K MRR on its own. But the road to TMAKER ran through two bankruptcies, 250,000 euros of personal debt, a $8 million exit Tibo publicly regrets, and a complete rethink of how SaaS distribution channels actually work. Tibo raised 200K euros for his first startup in 2015 and another 500K for his second in 2017. Both went to zero. The second left him with 250K in personal debt. He took a corporate CTO job for stability. Then his first child was born, got severely sick at two months old, and he and his wife quit their jobs to travel the world. Three weeks later, COVID hit. They were stuck in Paris with a sick baby, no income, and no plan. Most people would have crawled back to a salary. Tibo went the other way. He partnered with co-founder Tom and shipped 11 products in 4 months on unemployment benefits. The kill criteria was revenue, not downloads or feedback. Ten products flopped. The eleventh, Tweet Hunter, hit $1K MRR in its second month. Then Twitter influencer JK Molina asked for 25% of profits in exchange for promoting it. Revenue tripled from around $3K to $20K MRR in three weeks. They forked the same model into Taplio for LinkedIn and sold both to Lempire less than two years in for $2M upfront and an earnout that closed at $8 million. After the earnout ended, Tibo experienced what he calls a void. He publicly regrets selling. Now he runs TMAKER as a portfolio studio with the opposite playbook. Instead of being the maker, he is the SaaS distribution channel. He partners with co-makers who build the products while he handles audience, SEO, ads, and influencer pipelines that get reused across every product. Outrank is the flagship at $200K MRR. Revid does over $600K a month. The portfolio crossed $1M a month a few weeks before this conversation. In this episode, Tibo unpacks why SaaS distribution channels matter more than the product itself in the AI era, the exact signals that told him Tweet Hunter was the one after 10 failures, the structure of his JK Molina equity deal, why he regrets the $8M exit, the co-maker model that powers TMAKER, and how he uses SEO as the most durable SaaS distribution channel of all.
