From Developer to Entrepreneur with $20M in Bootstrapped Revenue: Julien Salinas, CEO of NLP Cloud (Part 1)

Numerous developers around the world are turning into successful entrepreneurs. Julien provides a textbook case study of a brilliant journey that is a highly repeatable blueprint to follow.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Julien Salinas: I’m French. I live in France. I’m not located in the French Alps. I have a double degree in both business and engineering, especially computer science. I graduated 15 years ago. I initially started working as a consultant and doing product marketing. I was not very happy in my job.

I started coding in my personal time until I realized that maybe it was time to start a real career in programming. That’s what I did. Since then, things have been much easier for me. I did my first startup. Then a second one which is working very well.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to the first startup. When did you start the first startup? What was that first startup?

Julien Salinas: That was in 2015 with a friend. We launched a peer-to-peer lending platform for students. Basically, students could lend money to individuals. In France, it’s quite new. Before that, we didn’t have the legal authorization to do it. Now, we can. We are one of the first startups doing this. It worked but not that well. We did this for two years. I left. My friend is still there. He’s doing a bit better now. At that time, it was very slow. I was the only developer. I was taking care of both business and technical stuff.

Sramana Mitra: When you left this peer-to-peer lending startup, what did you do next?

Julien Salinas: I worked as a developer for a couple of years, especially as a Python and Go programmer. I did this for a couple of years until I had this startup idea.

Sramana Mitra: What was that idea?

Julien Salinas: I had to integrate NLP into my code. It was not that easy even if a lot of progress was made around AI and the way machines could understand and write text automatically. Even for me, as a developer, it was not that easy to integrate this. I first created a small project. It was not something very ambitious to try and sell a small platform for an NLP framework. It worked. That’s when I realized that maybe there was something here.

Sramana Mitra: What form did that traction take? Where were you seeing the traction?

Julien Salinas: My product was a pure MVP with not so many features. I had some interested paid customers. After two months, I had my first paid customer.

Sramana Mitra: How did you find these customers?

Julien Salinas: Reddit.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me more. What did you do on Reddit?

Julien Salinas: The idea was to launch a technical discussion about AI and NLP on Reddit in the right channels and try to engage people. I talked about AI and gently mentioned that I’m the CTO at NLP Cloud. At that time, it was another name. I was very surprised to see that so many people were interested. They didn’t see me as a guy selling. It was great to get some feedback and talk about some technical stuff. At the same time, maybe get my first customer.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. What kind of denomination of payment are we talking about? What kind of money was making off of these projects?

Julien Salinas: It wasn’t much at that time. At that time, the customers were paying $39 for a specific plan. There was only one plan. After three months, I had four paid customers.

Sramana Mitra: Four paying customers after a couple of months. What did you learn?

Julien Salinas: The customers told me what to do next. I was definitely not an AI professional. I knew AI but I was not a Machine Learning Engineer. Very quickly, some guys told me that the offer is great, but it’s way too restricted. I just followed the trend. The guys wanted me to support models, then finetune, and they are able to create their own models.

When you start, you just do everything that people say. I’m a developer so it was quite easy for people to just do it. People were so happy to see that their wishlist was done. They started to become loyal customers. Since then, it’s been the same. Me trying to listen to customers and implement what they ask for. I don’t do it anymore today because I can’t make everyone happy. The strategy is still the same today.

This segment is part 1 in the series : From Developer to Entrepreneur with $20M in Bootstrapped Revenue: Julien Salinas, CEO of NLP Cloud
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