Mickael Faivre-Maçon

lempire

Leading a 150M$ scale-up technical team toward the goal of becoming a French unicorn is extremely motivating! Let's go!

Privacy, data protection and ethics.

[GDPR]

Data Protection Officer

In the Product Trio (Product Manager / UX responsible / story shaper) the shaper has a technical knowledge of the product (here lemlist) and is in charge of insuring its technical and functional integrity. It's a mix between a scrummaster, a functional responsible and a project leader. He is accountable for the delivery.

In charge of 
- features department alignment and communication for lemlist product
- story shaping and prioritization for developers
- product development follow-up

lemlist story shaper (functional responsible)

Software developper @lemlist, the most comprehensive sales automation platform on the market.

✅  The best deliverability on the market. Consistently land in the main tab of your prospects' inbox 👍

✅  Close more deals by engaging with your leads across multiple channels (email, social, call..)

✅  Ultra customization of your messages, beyond the simple {fistname} or {companyName} variables, create custom landings, images and videos! ✨

Over 10,000 companies like UBER, SUMO, ZENDESK, SHAPR and others use lemlist to add a much-needed personal touch to their outreach without losing the ability to send emails at scale

Senior Fullstack Developer @lempire | $15M ARR - 100% bootstrapped

lemlist family

Best community in the world (no, no, I'm not biased)

Member

lemverse

It's my office! I work here everyday!
You won't believe how easy remote work is with lemverse, try it!
https://www.lemverse.com/

lemverse resident 🏢

Humanité Numérique

- Développement d’un framework de développement rapide de sites prêt à l’emploi
- Développement de sites sur ce framework

(MeteorJS, mup, MongoDB, Stripe, JS, HTML, CSS, Sendgrid, WebRTC)

Freelance / Project Leader / MeteorJS Lead Developer

GO-SENS.fr

Développement d’une plateforme pour la présentation des richesses du territoire normand avec des services informatiques pour les PME (CRM, envoi d'emails avec l'API Sendgrid, système de réservations de salles)
- gestion et développement de la plateforme
- commercial

(MeteorJS, mup, MongoDB, Stripe, JS, HTML, CSS, Sendgrid, WebRTC)

Cofounder / CTO / Project Manager / MeteorJS Lead Developer

ZAPPIK.com

Pilotage de projet sur l’application Zappik
- Développement d’une méthodologie / Process Qualité basé sur l’Agilité
- Développement d’un outil de gestion à partir de cette méthodologie
- Gestion de projets basé sur cette méthodologie (MeteorJS)
- Management de l'équipe de développeurs

(MeteorJS, mup, MongoDB, Stripe, JS, HTML, CSS, Sendgrid)

Cofounder / CTO

SQLI

Customers: Airbus, Airbus Helicoper (Eurocopter)
Teams between 10 and 33 people (devs, technical responsible, offshore tests project leaders, test teams, QA engineers)

- Guaranteeing the on-time delivery of software applications, respecting costs and quality.
- Responsible for the specifications, the architecture, the development, the tests and the support.
- Workloads and planning construction
- Leading the whole team, including functional responsible, technical responsible and developers.
- Leading offshore team
- Defining quality referencial adjustments to project context

Project Leader

Responsible of 10 people at SQLI
Annual performance evaluation
Salary negociation
Career follow-up
Support and advices in daily activities

HR Team Manager

Airbus

Project Leader assistant at Airbus on NSS part of A380 (the "light green" as we called it, coming from the color of a slide in a presentation, hello Airbus I love you !)
- managed specs and development made by a subscontrator
- lots of meetings (surprised ?)

Product Leader Assistant on A380 (for SQLI)

Aston

Back to France, I was a consultant before Aston were acquired by SQLI.
You won't be surprised if I told you that I was specialized in Unicode and how to do app localization in Chinese.

Software Consultant

Self-employed

After 3 years in a software development company, I started my own with a designer friend. I was 27 years old. We were conquering the chinese world  and having a lot of fun !

I did some ASP development backed up by C++, I was so proud to hack Microsoft technologies, ah ah.

Freelancer

CTO @lempire - building the best place to work for senior devs

Helping 1 million businesses grow @ lemlist / lempire 🔥

Experienced Project Manager and Fullstack Developer with a demonstrated history of working in the computer software industry. Skilled in People Management, Management, Scrum, Quality Assurance processes and Web Applications. Strong information technology professional with a Master focused in Artificial Intelligence (Automatic Language Processing).

I've spent 15 years as a project manager, mainly for Airbus in Toulouse. I've always coded applications even in my project manager years, filling some gaps in management tools that were used internally, mainly in C++ before 2004 and then Ruby on Rails after that.

Until I discovered Meteor in 2015. I was so in love that I left my job in 2016 to build 2 startups in 4 years around this technology that were both huge successes for my personal experience and miserable failures financially. That was so fun !

Now working @ lempire, my desire to help people grow their business is fulfilled every day.

Vukasin Vukosavljevic

I started looking for a marketing job during my MBA studies. Young and absolutely convinced that "marketing" meant a corner office at Nike or P&G, slowly ascending that corporate ladder.

So I applied to a few of these big companies. Got rejected from all of them. Not because "they just didn't see my genius". But because they understood perfectly: I was inexperienced, unproven, and, let's be honest, not remotely good enough yet.

But then my phone rang.

It was my university friend. He was working at this scrappy little marketing agency in my city.

"Dude, we need a Copywriter. Someone who can write in English. Maybe without making it sound like a Terms & Conditions page. I don’t have a lot of money to pay what you're definitely not worth right now, but this could change fast if we don't completely screw it up. You in?”

That's how it all started.

The world of content and inbound, growth marketing, GTM, building B2B/SaaS startups - all of it opened its doors to me. And like a 12-year-old me in an ice cream shop, I never wanted to leave that kingdom.

So instead of ascending the corporate ladder, I ascended the marketing ladder. Started as a Copywriter who didn't know what MRR or conversion rates were. Eventually rose through the ranks into leading marketing positions, where MRR and conversion rates are my best pals.

Nowadays, I just describe myself as a guy whose main job is turning marketing channels into absolute chaos (the good kind)… that basically do 3 things:

- Build awareness and an audience that comes to you
- Drive and retain users while accelerating revenue (in a profitable way)
- Build a brand people stick close to (not because they have to, but because they want to)

Currently growing HeyReach as their CMO and sharing all the stories here. Including the messy parts and the 3 AM moments where I question every decision that led me to debug a GTM workflow instead of becoming a doctor like my mom suggested.

For the rest of my track record, just scroll a bit down. 😇

But more importantly, DM me if you wanna exchange war stories on this beautiful disaster we call growth marketing.

VP of Marketing

Leading the team responsible for demand gen and branding for our two products - Big Interview & Skill.

I applied for a job I didn't get… one I REALLY wanted.

7 interview rounds. 2 months. Made it to the final where I didn't close the deal.

And yet, I'd do it all over again.

Back then, I had a solid gig.

But Nordeus? They weren't just another company to me.

When I saw they were looking for an Organic Growth Manager, it felt custom-made. Except for one tiny detail: I had zero ASO (app store optimization) experience.

I figured: worst case, I get practice interviewing. Best case, I join a company I admired for years.

So I went all-in on the application.

I didn't send a generic CV. I created something personalized. First time I'd ever done that.

They responded fast. The interview process was no joke:

1️⃣ Talent Acquisition Lead
2️⃣ Head of Acquisition
3️⃣ Business case presentation to 5+ managers
4️⃣ Head of Community & Game Lead
5️⃣ HR Partner
6️⃣ CEO (yes, the actual CEO)
7️⃣ Final round with UA & Community Heads

I made it to the last round - a riverside walk in Belgrade with two managers. 

Casual vibe, high stakes. I didn't close the deal. The gaps in my ASO knowledge and task prioritization showed up.

But here's what I gained instead:

🚀 Their TA Lead redefined what great hiring looks like

No fluff. No BS. Just clear, warm communication and real feedback. I borrowed Antonija's tactics when I started building my own teams. We're still in touch years later.

Btw, COVID hit during my interview process. My parents got sick. I asked to reschedule a call with a manager who had an insane schedule. They did it without hesitation. Then Antonija called to ask how my parents were doing. And whether Nordeus could help with any healthcare.

In that moment, I thought: "I would go to war for this company."

🚀 CEO who interviews candidates personally

At a company with 100s of employees. I asked him why. His answer? "It matters if you want to build the right culture." That stuck with me. Very tense (I was young 😅) and very cool interview.

🚀 Interviews & growth sessions in one

Talks with their Acquisition and Community Leads were the best. Growth stories, football, gaming, hard questions disguised as casual chat. I didn’t know at the time, but I walked away with a masterclass in how to interview people.

Plot twist: During this process, my current company offered me a new contract.

So if Nordeus had said yes, I would've taken a pay cut to join them. And if I prove myself, their performance-based incentives were amazing.

We call it "sweet torments" in my country. The luxury of choosing between 2 great things.

Honestly? If they'd offered, I would've taken it. Nordeus was the only company 
I'd leave B2B/SaaS for to become a gaming marketer.

But it didn't work out that way. And that's okay. Both Nordeus and I have done some pretty cool things since then, each in our own way.

Sometimes the best outcomes aren't the ones you planned for.

Sometimes they're the ones that show you what good looks like - so you can build it yourself.

Marketing & Growth @ HeyReach | $10M ARR in 29 months, 55%+ profitability | Growth Mentor | Speaker

Our community has been asking for this for a while.

Today, the gates are open.

Introducing the HeyReach Creator Program. 🎉

Built for smooth GTM operators who are already talking about outreach, workflows, and predictable pipeline.

Here's what you actually get:

→ 35% revenue share for year one on every paid user you bring in
→ Free HeyReach account + performance-based rewards as you grow
→ VIP access to new features and the HeyReach inner circle
→ Get featured - we'll amplify your content and drive leads your way

This isn't a link-and-forget program. It's a real partnership.

We don't just want you to promote us. We want to build with you.

Waitlist is open now. Spots are limited (because we're doing this properly, not at scale).

👇 Drop a comment if interested and I'll send you access.

I'm not a founder at HeyReach.

But I try to treat it like I am.

Not because I'm told to. Because I actually care what happens to it.

Running marketing like it’s my business.

‘Think and act like owners’ culture - it’s the best. Worth building, worth protecting.

But this only works if the relationship goes both ways.

People operate like owners. They're compensated like owners. Upside clearly defined and real rewards that actually mean something on the other end.

Without that, you're just asking for unpaid ambition.

The principles I think this culture runs on:

🦥 Passion + compensation

Love your paycheck. But love the business too. Build incentives that reward long-term value creation, not short-term metric manipulation.

🦥 Decentralized autonomy

I don’t like micromanaging, nor being micromanaged. I prefer a web of deserved trust. Freedom to make decisions without bureaucratic overhead.

🦥 Integrity over profit

The famous newspaper test: would I be comfortable if this decision was on the front page tomorrow? Reputation over revenue when they conflict.

🦥 Treat company resources like your own

It's easy to run ads when someone else signs the invoice. I try to treat every dollar like it's coming out of my pocket. Because in a way, it is.

I always tried to operate this way.

I ran away from environments where this wasn’t appreciated.

The culture I want around me starts here.

Step one is always the same: deserve the trust and the autonomy first.

Everything else follows.

Can't prove your LinkedIn content drives pipeline?

Here's the system that will help you do that - accurately.

You're posting. People are engaging.

Your boss asks "so what?" You used to shrug. Now you don't.

1️⃣ Build your target list in Clay

Companies + leads you actually want to close. Credit to Bruno and Clay team for this idea.

2️⃣ Push those leads to HeyReach.io

Run a connection request campaign to your core ICP. No pitch. Just network expansion with intent.

3️⃣ Post content on LinkedIn

You're already doing this part. Keep going. Try to ship stuff that has quality product placement.

4️⃣ Pull post engagers back into Clay

Cross-reference them against your target list. What you now have: a list of warm leads - boom. 🔥 You've just turned "vanity metrics" into qualified pipeline.

5️⃣ Segment smart

For example, did a specific post get traction? Those engagers get a different message than someone who liked your opinion piece.

6️⃣ Run relevant LN outreach with HeyReach

The message writes itself. It’s not cold. You're continuing a conversation they already started.
_____

The metric you now own: "Get X qualified engagements from target accounts."

That's a marketing KPI that makes a CRO nod slowly and say nothing - which is basically a standing ovation.

Send them warm leads to your sales team and become their favorite person in the building.

No sales team? Run outreach yourself. Don't be that soft marketer who goes "that's not my channel" or "I don't know how to do outreach". Figure it out. 😇 

Either way, your LinkedIn content is no longer a vibe. It's a pipeline tool.

Because the gap between "marketing does awareness" and "marketing drives revenue" is mostly a measurement problem.

This closes it.

I almost didn't take the call.

Good thing I have a rule about that.

In fact, most of my hiring decisions looked like wasted time when I first made them.

Until they weren’t.
___

April 2025. Nikola messages me.

"Hey, can you hop on a call with my friend? She's thinking about starting a fractional service. Since you’ve done it, she’d like to pick your brain."

No direct upside for me. Ridiculously busy period. Could've said no.

Said yes anyway.

I checked her profile. Bojana Petkovic. Solid track record. One potential upside though - I could learn from her experience with influencer programs.

Good call. Stayed loosely in touch. Meanwhile, I opened a Notion file: "If Bojana joins us, here's why that could be great."

A few months later, we needed someone to lead ecosystem and partnerships at HeyReach.

You can guess who I called first.

Almost a year in. She's been exceptional.
___

2023. Different company. Same habit.

Consuming everything I could find on LinkedIn ads. Running my first experiment with them. Losing money with impressive consistency.

That's when I found Justin Rowe. Studied his content. Opened a Notion doc: "If I ever run LinkedIn ads, this is how and with whom."

2.7 years later: my HeyReach Ads marathon is on.

Benchmarked Justin against several strong agencies. Compared everything.

Every road led back to him.

20x ROAS after the first quarter. Profitable from day one. Fun to work with.
___

This system has 3 simple parts:

→ Say yes to meetings even when the upside isn't obvious
→ Save what's worth saving: names, impressions, notes
→ Know who you'll need before you need them

For every Bojana call, there are 10 that go nowhere.

For every Justin Notion file, there are 10 you never open again.

That's part of the deal.

But occasionally, more often than you'd expect, the window of opportunity arrives and you already know exactly who to call.

Karma is practical.

So is a well-organized Notion doc, but that's less poetic.

I let my cevapi go cold for this.

Few months back, I'm at dinner with Stan. Founder of frontBrick, one of the sharper ABM operators I know.

He starts with: "Most B2B marketers are doing ABM wrong."

Normally when someone opens with "most people are doing X wrong" - I start mentally preparing my eye-roll. It's basically a reflex at this point.

But Stan has the receipts. $700k+ in pipeline. Clients you've heard of. So I pushed the plate aside and listened.

He broke down his entire ABM system:

1️⃣ Map the market before you touch it

500–5,000 ideal accounts. Hyper-targeted, hyper-relevant. Make it make sense.

2️⃣ Surround the whole buying committee

→ Champion (Director) → needs case studies
→ Decision Maker (VP/CFO) → needs ROI proof
→ Blocker (IT/Legal) → needs security specs
→ End User (Manager) → needs ease of use

When the VP mentions your name in a meeting, you want the Director of Ops to say "Oh yeah, I've been seeing their stuff."

3️⃣ Run ads from personal profiles

People trust faces over logos. Always have.

Run campaigns from founders and execs alongside your brand page. Aim for 10–15 impressions per person over 6+ months.

Short bursts look like noise. Consistency looks like authority.

4️⃣ Trigger outreach on signal

Don't reach out because "it's been two weeks." Reach out when they've clicked your ads repeatedly, visited your pricing page, or just raised a round.

Score leads 1–5. Score 1–2? Keep them in awareness. Score 5 with a real-world trigger? Priority-one outreach.

5️⃣ First touch: a blank connection request

No pitch. No links. No "I noticed we're both in B2B…"

Just a clean invite. Follow up with one short, signal-aware message once they connect. Reference something real. Then stop.

If they don't reply, recycle them into awareness and try again in 3–6 months.

6️⃣ Ditch last-click attribution

Nobody signs a $20k contract because of one ad click. Stop measuring like they do.

Ask: "Which activities influenced this deal over the past 6 months?"

Measure influenced pipeline and closed-won impact. Less satisfying than a single clean number - about 10x more accurate.

The stack behind it:

LinkedIn Ads → Clay (the brain) → HeyReach (LinkedIn outreach) → Instantly (email) → HubSpot (CRM) → Slack (real-time alerts)

AI does the homework. Humans close the deals.

I walked away from that dinner with notes and cold cevapi I don't regret at all.

Nadja and I are now plugging Stan's thinking into our GTM machine.

More on that soon.

2 best growth runs I've been part of had one thing in common.

We found one ace and went all in.

One thing so dialed into what your audience wants, so connected to your product, with better ROI than anything else on your list.

That’s one of my biggest growth lessons from scaling 2 companies past $10M ARR.

Here's what it looked like.

1️⃣ HeyReach, early 2024. Under $500k ARR. We had no marketing.

But something interesting was already happening.

Users were tagging HeyReach on LinkedIn. Sharing their results. Unprompted.

Cold email content was everywhere.

LinkedIn outreach content? Still wide open. No tool really owned it.

So we decided to do something about it:

→ Responded to every user post. Engaged publicly
→ Turned most active users into Outbound Outliers
→ Spotlighted their work everywhere (their authority grew, ours grew with it)
→ Drove them leads. Nothing builds loyalty like that
→ Sent merch. No ask. Just gratitude
→ Added power users in our Expert & Creator programs
→ Boosted their best posts with ads
→ Launched HeyReach Wrapped to tell their stories at scale

Our ace: putting users into the spotlight

Our channel: word of mouth

The result: market leader positioning in a category we helped define with our users.

2️⃣ At lemlist back in 2018, the ace looked different.

Cold email templates barely existed online.

HubSpot ranked for the keywords. You couldn't outrank them. But their templates were generic - no proof, no real sender, no analysis.

We saw a gap we wanted to fill, so we:

→ Added real numbers (both good and embarrassing results)
→ Shared exact templates we used to sell lemlist
→ Explained what worked, what flopped, and why
→ Used them as activation content for new users
→ Shared them in our community (~2,000 members) and on the blog
→ Users started sharing their own after initial hesitation
→ "lemlister of the week" was born
→ Every marketer we hired was running outreach
→ Templates became videos, LinkedIn posts, SEO content

Two endless template mines: ours and our users.

Authority was the ace. Community was the channel.

We bet the whole content strategy on it.

___

The pattern is the same both times.

One thing deeply connected to what the audience wants. One thing that naturally embeds the product. One thing with compounding ROI.

That's the ace.

Everything else is built around it.

Most people guess what a good LinkedIn reply rate looks like.

You don't have to. Here are the numbers from the HeyReach universe.

Q4 2025:

→ 1,167,096 total replies
→ 25.9% average reply rate

Q1 2026:

→ 1,251,846+ total replies
→ 26.1% average reply rate

And Q1 isn't done yet. :)

Two things stand out:

- Consistency. Quarter over quarter, LN delivers predictable pipeline when you run it properly.

- Q1 will beat Q4. More replies, more meetings, more senders figuring it out. The only question is whether you're leaving your share of it on the table.

To run it successfully, you need three answers:

1️⃣ Is your audience actually on LinkedIn?
2️⃣ Can you qualify leads before you reach out?
3️⃣ Can you make your message relevant - not just personalized?

If the answer to 1 is yes, that’s the only must have.

2 and 3 can be learned. Or outsourced.

Let others debate whether cold outreach is dead.

Let them chase likes with their GTM hot takes.

You have the numbers. You know what works.

Go execute. 🫡

taplio

The Battle

Mickael Faivre-Maçon

Vukasin Vukosavljevic

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taplio

The Battle

Mickael Faivre-Maçon

Vukasin Vukosavljevic

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Vukasin Vukosavljevic's LinkedIn Performance

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Performance ScoreVukasin Vukosavljevic's LinkedIn Performance