Tibo Louis-Lucas Built and Sold Tweet Hunter and Taplio

Tibo Louis-Lucas is a French developer and founder who built social media tools with co-founder Tom Jacquesson. Tweet Hunter targeted Twitter, now X, while Taplio targeted LinkedIn. The business owning both products was sold to lempire in 2022. This was a co-founded business that grew through a division of development and marketing work and outside partnerships.

Checking for Payment Before Investment and Hiring

Tibo had earlier startup experience. Pistache, a parenting app he started with Tom in 2015, generated enough revenue to support the founders but could not sustain the expansion they had hoped for. Dreamz, an educational coding game started in 2017, also failed to generate sufficient revenue despite fundraising and hiring. These experiences taught him that building a large organization and validating a business were different things.

When they reunited in 2021, they changed their approach. Rather than spending a long time on one idea, they aimed to ship a product a week and tested 11 products over about four months. When the eleventh, Tweet Hunter, showed a clear response, they stopped new experiments and focused on it.

They were not simply building unrelated apps at random. They worked around a shared problem: helping early founders and makers find customers. Each launch deepened their understanding of users and built their Twitter and email audiences. Their criterion was whether people paid, rather than whether they expressed interest or registered an email address.

From Tweet Search to Content Operations

Tweet Hunter began with a problem the founders experienced themselves. Tibo's Twitter following, numbering in the thousands, was bringing in early users, while Tom, responsible for marketing, struggled to create content consistently. They organized a tweet database collected for another project into a tool for finding good posts and drawing inspiration from their ideas and phrasing.

About a week passed from idea to first launch. The initial product was essentially a searchable tweet collection with signup and payment functionality, priced at $9 a month. Signups and paying customers appeared soon after they shared it on Twitter and Reddit, and they decided to focus their time on it.

The product expanded from finding ideas to writing and managing content. As checked in October 2026, Tweet Hunter offered popular-post search, AI writing and editing, scheduled publishing, analytics, and relationship management with potential customers. Its features support deciding what to write and whom to engage with to create business opportunities.

Launching quickly did not mean treating operations casually. For more than a year early on, Tibo linked the bug-report button to his Twitter direct messages and handled reports himself. He described fixes made within 15 to 20 minutes of receiving a request. He emphasized that once users relied on scheduled publishing, they expected reliability: failing to publish at the agreed time was a serious problem.

Bringing the Person Who Attracts Customers into the Business

A major turning point was collaboration with Twitter content expert JK Molina. It is often described as giving him 25% equity, but Tibo clarified in a later interview that the agreement was closer to sharing up to 25% of monthly profits and sale proceeds. Molina was expected to promote the product continuously and contribute at a co-founder level. If he did not fulfill those responsibilities, he could lose his rights.

According to Tom's account at the time, promoting through their own accounts and free supporting products brought Tweet Hunter to $5,000 MRR about three months after launch. Molina then introduced it to his audience, and MRR roughly tripled within weeks. Scheduling and automation features were strengthened and prices rose around the same period, so growth accompanied an expansion of product value as well as promotion.

They also acquired a small service that already attracted relevant visitors. In a case Tom shared in July 2021, they bought WhatToTweet, a source of tweet ideas, and added links guiding users to Tweet Hunter. In the following seven days, they gained 113 new visitors and 47 trial starts, some of which converted to payment. The 47 were trial starts, not paying customers. The acquisition's value included access to people with the same problem.

Public metrics showed further growth. Tom's first-quarter 2022 figures were 1,721 paying customers and $58,800 MRR. In May that year, he announced that Tweet Hunter had reached $1 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR). This was recurring revenue expressed on an annual basis, not the founders' net profit or cumulative revenue collected up to that point.

Moving to LinkedIn with a Separate Product

Taplio applied the problem of demonstrating expertise and finding customers on social media to LinkedIn. As checked in October 2026, it supported post ideas and AI writing, scheduled publishing, analytics, engagement with relevant people, and connections with potential customers. Its focus was connecting consistent activity with professional relationships and business opportunities.

There were two reasons to make it separate rather than adding LinkedIn features to Tweet Hunter. One was to build deeply for a single platform. The other was to avoid automatically extending Tweet Hunter's existing profit-sharing arrangement to LinkedIn, instead working with a partner suited to that platform.

For Taplio, they worked with Alex Berman and repeated the approach that had succeeded with Molina. However, an interview at the time said finding the right person required contacting 30 people over roughly six months. A large following alone was insufficient: the partner needed an audience matching the product's customers and the motivation to build the business together.

They continued acquiring users through free tools. Taplio Stats, a free Chrome extension launched on Product Hunt, made it easier to inspect popular LinkedIn posts and key metrics. Alex Berman described it as an entry point to Taplio's paid AI content tool: solve an initial problem for free, then connect broader work to the paid product.

The 2022 Sale and the Growth Obligations That Followed

They began looking for buyers in early 2022 and reached a deal with lempire, led by Tibo's middle-school friend Guillaume Moubeche. Moubeche was already using Tweet Hunter. The founders felt lempire's relatively small scale and working style suited them. They negotiated the basic terms on WhatsApp over about two weeks, which does not mean every legal and operational step of the sale was completed in that time.

Platform dependence was a major reason to sell. Twitter and LinkedIn policies and integration conditions could materially affect both products, a risk the founders could not control. Even as revenue grew quickly, the underlying platforms could destabilize the business. That helped motivate accepting a deal that secured some cash upfront.

The transaction's conditional amount and actual payout must be distinguished. In September 2024, Tibo described receiving $2 million upfront and $6 million in performance payments, for $8 million total. Up to $8 million in performance payments had been possible, but he said they received $6 million of that. The maximum $10 million total therefore differs from the actual payout. These amounts concern the business owning both products, not Tibo's personal after-tax income.

Selling did not immediately free them from the business. The founders had growth targets to pursue over roughly two years. In a later interview, Tibo said annual revenue grew from about $1.5 million at acquisition to roughly $8 million by the end of the earnout period. Assigning that later revenue to the 2022 sale would erase the growth work done after acquisition.

In his 2024 retrospective, Tibo said he regretted selling because he had given up ownership and faced pressure to meet high performance targets. It is uncertain whether keeping the business would have produced a better outcome. He also acknowledged in a later interview that they spent more boldly on acquisition and marketing after the sale and might not have taken the same risks independently.

What Mattered Beyond the Ability to Build Several Products

Tibo continued building and acquiring products. He acquired the video tool Typeframes in 2023 and developed it into Revid. In 2024, he acquired the Notion-based blogging tool Feather and built SuperX for growth on X. In an interview at the time, he said he preferred owning products and earning ongoing profits to pursuing another sale.

What matters in this case is learning problems within the same customer group, validating payment, and reusing customers and promotional experience in the next product. Fast development worked alongside a marketing co-founder and specialist partners who could attract customers. Tweet Hunter and Taplio grew through combining production, sales, and partnerships into a small business with several products.