Bastien Paul

Co-founder of solve LinkedIn prospection problem for HubSpot customers.

[Bastien Paul @bastienPlf]

I've been running Hublead for 2 years. Full transparency: It's been hard. Really hard. Here are my top 10 tips so you don't make the same mistakes:

1. Launch ugly and launch fast
Everyone wants a perfect product, but there’s no medal for beautiful code.
➜ Ship early. Ship broken.
➜ Let real users break it.
➜ Fix what matters.

2. Price higher than you’re comfortable with
Most founders undercharge because “it feels safer.” Truth:
➜ Cheap prices = less respect, worse customers
➜ Expensive prices = higher retention, more breathing room
You can always lower prices later.

3. Focus on one niche, one value prop
Resist the urge to “serve everyone.”
➜ Go deep, not wide
➜ Be the tool, not a tool
Niching down is how you win search, referrals, and trust.

4. Marketing > product
You can have the world’s best product, but if no one knows about it, you’re dead.
I learned the hard way.
➜ Build marketing engines from day one
➜ Don’t hide behind “growth will come”

5. Ignore most customer requests
Not every feature request deserves to be shipped.
➜ Most customers don’t know what they need
➜ Find the root pain, not the surface symptom

6. Stay lean as long as possible
Every extra hire adds complexity.
➜ Do more with less
➜ Learn every function; outsource later

7. Don’t chase the wrong metrics
Churn, net new ARR, usage (these matter).
Vanity metrics? Meh.
➜ Awards, “likes,” conferences = distraction
➜ Focus on dials that move revenue and retention

8. Be resilient about rejection
Europeans love to threaten legal action over a cold email or outbound call.
➜ Don’t take it personally
➜ 99.9% of threats go nowhere
Risk it a little.

9. Don’t overthink integrations and partnerships
Everyone wants to partner. Most don’t deliver value.
➜ Focus on what your users need
➜ Integrate only when there’s clear ROI
Partnerships = distraction until proven otherwise.

10. Never stop testing your own beliefs
What got you from zero to one won’t get you from one to ten.
➜ Keep a beginner’s mind
➜ Your limits are (usually) self-imposed
Keep rewriting your own “rules.”

Quick Recap:

- Ship early, ship ugly
- Price with courage
- Niche down
- Obsess over marketing
- Be ruthless about what you build
- Stay as small as possible
- Forget the applause
- Learn to love “no”
- Ignore shiny partnerships
- Challenge yourself to grow

I’ve made every mistake on this list (sometimes twice). If you’re a founder going through it, drop a comment or DM. Always happy to swap stories (and scars).

[Marc Randolph @marcrandolph]

I feel like startup twitter needs to hear this. You need to stop trusting one hit wonders.

The problem with taking advice from someone who succeeded once — especially someone who knocked it out of the park on their first swing. They don’t actually know why it worked.

When you’ve only done something a single time, you can’t separate the signal from the noise.

You can’t tell what worked because of what you did versus what worked in spite of it.

You can’t tell skill from luck. You just know you won — and you assume everything you did along the way was the reason.

It usually wasn’t.

[Paul Mit @pmitu]

Please, stop using AI as your business coach. Please.

[Bastien Paul @bastienPlf]

How to not grow a Saas.

Don’t sell

To do that
- Don’t create content
- Don’t do ads
- Don’t cold call
- Don’t demo
- Don’t paywall
- Don’t onboard
- Don’t build a website
- Don’t put sign up form

If you want to solve a problem, invert it and avoid all the things.

[Bastien Paul @bastienPlf]

Failure is a myth; if you fail, you will achieve great success. To everyone else, you never fail, so failure doesn't matter.

[Vivek Sen @Vivek4real_]

2026 BE LIKE:

[Bastien Paul @bastienPlf]

@bohdanbasov The 5 hits so hard

[Bastien Paul @bastienPlf]

I am a founder, working 30 hours a week.

According to social media I’m a failure.

I should grow faster and work more.

I’ve seen people making 400k MRR and working 30 hours too.

According to me, that should be the goal.

[Bastien Paul @bastienPlf]

every CRM company sells "adoption."

dashboards, gamification, training, nudges.

if you need all that to make people use your tool, the tool is the problem.

How can we solve this adoption problem, not sure AI will fix this,

[Bastien Paul @bastienPlf]

I am a founder, working 30 hours a week.

According to social media I’m a failure.

I should grow faster and work more.

I’ve seen people making 400k MRR and working 30 hours too.

According to me, that should be the goal.

[Chris Hoffmann @STLChrisH]

Favorite excerpt from Brent Beshore's annual letter:

What CEOs Are and Aren’t

Most people think of a CEO as the person at the top. That’s true in the same way it’s true that the windshield is “at the front” of the car. Technically correct.

Also, misses the point. The windshield isn’t the engine. It isn’t the wheels. It doesn’t move anything. But it does determine what the driver can see, what they ignore, and what they slam into at 70 miles an hour.

When done well, the CEO job is an arbiter of truth. The CEO stands at the border between the outside world and the inside world, between company mythology and competitive reality. That sounds obvious, but it’s not.

I’d argue the norm is delusion, where organizations create realities disconnected from truth, complete with alternate headlines, villains, and heroes, all proclaimed with a shocking level of certainty.

So the CEO’s job starts with a basic question: What’s true?

Not what’s comforting. Not what’s politically convenient. Not what our dashboards can measure. What’s true?

And what should we do about it?

But deciding what to do and then doing it, requires a blend of rare attributes.

The CEO must be confident enough to pick a direction and humble enough to change it.

Optimistic enough to inspire and paranoid enough to prepare.

Warm enough to build trust and hard enough to make calls that disappoint people they like and care about.

We need to strip away the mystique.

In practice, the CEO allocates three things:

Attention: If you want to understand a CEO, ignore their strategy deck and read their calendar. Where attention goes, energy flows. Where energy flows, money follows. And where money follows, the organization slowly becomes something different, usually without anyone noticing until it’s obvious. This is why the CEO’s attention is so expensive. It’s why it’s so easy to waste. There are a thousand “important” meetings that are actually just elaborate ways to avoid the one meeting that matters. There are a thousand “urgent” problems that are actually just the company asking the CEO to temporarily soothe anxiety. A CEO’s attention is the company’s flashlight. Point it at the right things and companies transform. Point it at the wrong thing long enough and the wrong thing becomes the thing.

People: The CEO builds the team that builds the team. I’ve learned that a healthy company isn’t built by a heroic CEO. It’s built by a great team operating with clarity, trust, speed, and accountability. The CEO’s role is to create that environment, protect it, and, when necessary, make the painful personnel decisions that preserve it. This sounds straightforward until you live it. Then you realize you’re not moving boxes on an org chart. You’re messing with people’s dignity, livelihoods, and families. You’re also messing with the morale of everyone who stays. Every hire is a bet. Every promotion is a signal. Every tolerated behavior becomes a de facto policy. The CEO becomes, whether they like it or not, the embodiment of culture. It’s not what they say they value, but what they practically reward, punish, ignore, and allow.

Money: This is the CEO’s most difficult job because it’s often the one they’re least trained for, that seems the most glamorous, and is extremely impactful over time. Most CEOs come up through some form of excellence in sales, operations, engineering, or product. Then one day they wake up and realize the biggest decisions they make are capital allocation decisions: reinvest or distribute, grow or consolidate, buy or build, add headcount or automate, bet on the future or play it conservative. Capital allocation is where strategy stops being a noun and becomes a verb. It is where vision gets an audit. And it’s also where a CEO can quietly ruin a business while looking busy.

It’s remarkably easy to confuse action with progress, and reinvestment with wisdom.

Oftentimes the best capital allocation decision is painfully boring: Do fewer things, do them better, and keep your powder dry. But, that’s not what gets applause.

In our world, with long-term owners, permanent capital, and no forced exit timetable, this is where the CEO job gets simpler. We don’t need theater. We don’t need growth for growth’s sake. We don’t need to hit a narrative for the next fundraising cycle or quarterly call. We can play offense when the opportunity is real and defense when it isn’t. We can say “not now” without pretending it’s “never.”

This brings me to what might be the most misunderstood part of the CEO role: The CEO is the Chief “No” Officer. Every yes is a no to something else. Every strategy is a pile of exclusions. Every commitment is a tradeoff.

The organization will always ask for more: more initiatives, more products, more meetings, more hires, more exceptions, more complexity.

Increasing complexity is the default setting of life, and companies are not exempt from natural order. A CEO has to become comfortable being the person who disappoints people in the short term so the company doesn’t disappoint everyone in the long term.

This is where I’ve personally struggled, both as a leader and as an owner. I want to be helpful, agreeable, and liked. I can easily slip into short-term people pleasing at the expense of leading well. Sometimes I’ve confused my progress anxiety for insight. I’ve wandered into decisions too early because “someone should do something.”

I’ve also learned slowly and painfully that a CEO can add enormous value simply by refusing to add noise. Clarity is kindness, but often feels like inaction to busy people. A lot of CEO work is invisible. It’s pressure management. It’s absorbing emotion without spreading it. It’s knowing what you think and how to say it with grace. It’s carrying the weight of uncertain outcomes while still asking the team to move forward decisively.

This is why, in our portfolio, we care less about a CEO’s charisma and more about their character and judgment. We’ve found that the best CEOs have a rare combination of humility and intensity. They don’t need to be the smartest person in the room, but they do need to be the clearest. They don’t need to have all the answers, but they do need to be willing to make the hard call.

[Bastien Paul @bastienPlf]

One of the best pieces of advice the founder of my former company gave me: You're too young to start a business, you’re not good at brand building.

[Bastien Paul @bastienPlf]

@danielzarick Congrats!!

[Bastien Paul @bastienPlf]

@danielzarick Haha awesome, I’m nearby!

[Bastien Paul @bastienPlf]

Just arrived in San Francisco for the @INBOUND, can’t wait to meet new people there!

I already see @HubSpot everywhere 🔥

[Bastien Paul @bastienPlf]

@danielzarick Send me a message when you arrive 🔥

[Bastien Paul @bastienPlf]

How to build a CRM that aligns Sales and Marketing:

— Track source and campaign on every contact
— Create pipeline views by campaign type
— Trigger alerts for high-intent actions
— Lock fields marketing shouldn’t edit
— Tag disqualified leads with reasons
— Build lead scoring with sales input
— Set MQL and SQL rules as a team
— Build shared dashboards for opps
— Review data together every week
— Auto-enrich leads before routing
— Define lifecycle stages together
— Let sales grade lead quality

One rule holds it all together:
No shared goals without shared tools.

[Bastien Paul @bastienPlf]

How to grow your startup faster:

→ Ship features before you’re ready
→ Hire slow, fire on culture misfits fast
→ Talk to customers every single week
→ Keep CAC low by owning your channel
→ Share progress in public, even the boring stuff

Growth often comes from momentum.

[Bastien Paul @bastienPlf]

How to build a CRM that aligns Sales and Marketing:

— Track source and campaign on every contact
— Create pipeline views by campaign type
— Trigger alerts for high-intent actions
— Lock fields marketing shouldn’t edit
— Tag disqualified leads with reasons
— Build lead scoring with sales input
— Set MQL and SQL rules as a team
— Build shared dashboards for opps
— Review data together every week
— Auto-enrich leads before routing
— Define lifecycle stages together
— Let sales grade lead quality

One rule holds it all together:
No shared goals without shared tools.

[Bastien Paul @bastienPlf]

The biggest issue in RevOps is that there are thousands of “HubSpot experts” selling the idea that you just need better automation.

HubSpot isn’t broken because your workflows are too short.

It’s broken because your data, stages, and users are all out of sync.

This isn’t as simple as turning on a few zaps.

[Bastien Paul @bastienPlf]

How to grow your startup faster:

→ Ship features before you’re ready
→ Hire slow, fire on culture misfits fast
→ Talk to customers every single week
→ Keep CAC low by owning your channel
→ Share progress in public, even the boring stuff

Growth often comes from momentum.