TIBO

In the spring of 2021, Thibault Louis-Lucas - better known as Tibo, later as @tibo_maker - sat in a rented apartment in Bali with nothing but a MacBook Pro and a very specific list of things he would never do again. No VC money. No large teams. No two-year runways that end in bankruptcy.

He had been through it. Built ~15 products across multiple startups. Raised venture capital once. Hired a big team. Watched it collapse - couldn't pay the salaries, couldn't pay the debts. Declared bankruptcy. Took a CTO job at someone else's startup just to financially survive. Then, after exactly one year, the itch became unbearable again.

So he and his co-founder Thomas - the same Thomas from his very first startup, the educational tool for kids that made zero revenue - made a pact. Ship one product per week. Validate fast. Stay small. No hiring until a product pays for itself three times over.

In four months, they launched eleven products. Only four made any money. One of those four was Tweet Hunter - a tool for discovering and repurposing viral tweets. The MVP was embarrassingly simple: an inspiration wall. If you wanted to find the best tweets about product growth, you searched, browsed, and picked. Nothing that a determined Google search couldn't do badly.

But Tibo had learned something from all those failures: distribution matters more than product. In July 2021, he gave J.K. Molina - a Twitter influencer with a large, engaged following - 25% equity in Tweet Hunter. No salary. No guaranteed outcomes. Just a bet on alignment. The bet worked spectacularly. Before the partnership: $3K MRR. After: $20K MRR. Overnight.

By March 2022, Tweet Hunter was at $60-70K MRR, growing 20% month-over-month for six consecutive months. He'd also built Taplio - the LinkedIn version of the same idea - alongside it. Combined, they were approaching $2M ARR. And then his middle school classmate called.

Guillaume - who had built Lempire, a growth-tools company - made an offer. $2M upfront, plus up to $9M in performance milestones over two years. The total potential: over $10M. Tibo said yes. He also stayed on, keeping product autonomy. The combined products eventually tripled revenue to $6-7M ARR within 18 months of the acquisition. Product Hunt named him Maker of the Year 2022.

Most people with an eight-figure exit decompress. Buy a nicer dining table, at least. Tibo did not. He was already looking at the next thing.

Tibo works from a MacBook Pro. No monitor, no standing desk, no Sonos speaker in the corner of a converted-warehouse office. This is not an affectation - it's a consistent operating choice. He's worked this way through exits, through $600K MRR months, through building a studio with 8 people. The dining table works.

The person who bought his $10M company is someone he went to middle school with. Guillaume, the founder of Lempire, and Tibo have known each other since they were children. The acquisition wasn't cold outreach from a strategic buyer. It was a middle school classmate with a growth tools company recognizing a product that fit perfectly into his stack. The due diligence probably included a lot of context that no investment banker could have sourced.

He has two children and was previously nomadic, living out of Bali and Thailand with his wife for years before settling back in France. The nomadic period ended. The shipping pace did not. Tweet Hunter's most explosive growth months happened while he was floating between time zones.

On Revid.ai crossing $600K MRR, Tibo reflected: "Sometimes I see companies raising $100M+ and burning cash at insane rates and a small voice in my head goes 'should I be doing that instead?' then I look at Revid - profitable, no investors breathing down my neck - and I remember why I became an indie hacker."

He tracks acquisition costs obsessively, knows that most of his users don't come from his Twitter following (they come from the distribution infrastructure he built - SEO, affiliates, creator partnerships), and recommends the book It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work with a frequency that suggests it changed something for him.

For 2026, he's watching AI carefully. His predictions: Google overtakes everyone in the AI race. Agents start buying things for humans. AI security becomes a massive problem. None of these require him to pivot - they're inputs. TMAKER keeps building either way.