Funding

How Maxime Berthelot grew PixelMe to $5k MRR and kept his day job at Buffer

I spoke to Max about his experience with complete transparency at Buffer and how he managed to get his first paying customers for his side project PixelMe.

A lesson in early-stage B2B growth

“You just have to think about what you really want to achieve with a side project…I really wanted to have a sort of laboratory to be able to experiment with ideas…”

Today really excited to share this conversation with Maxime Berthelot (@Maxberthelot). Maxime is Product Manager of Growth at Buffer and Co-Founder of PixelMe. If you follow the SaaS universe on Twitter you might have seen his inspiring tweets tracking PixelMe’s growth:

https://twitter.com/Maxberthelot/status/966684771496742912

Max, along with his co-founders Tom Benattar (@TomBenattar) and Jérémie Doucy (@jdoucy), have done an incredible job of validating and launching their concept to the world — their approach to generating interest and initial signups is a textbook example of a low-budget growth strategy for B2B.

If you’re thinking about launching something new — whether a side project or a full-scale startup — there’s a lot you’ll learn from this story.

Topics covered

“Don’t think too much, and just go…if you want to, just start.”

Here are just a few of the questions I asked Maxime about his experience building and scaling products:

  • How did you manage to validate your idea without writing code?
  • How did you get those important first few paying customers?
  • What’s your view on the radical transparency at both Buffer and PixelMe?
  • How do you balance your time on PixelMe with your primary job?

Listen to the episode

As always, you can find this episode — along with previous ones — in your podcast player. Just search for “SaaS Open Mic”.  If you enjoy it, please take a moment to leave us a review, it’d really help us reach a wider audience. Thank you!

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Ed Shelley

Former Director of Content

@Mr_Ed

bootstrapping early growth podcast saas saas open mic