From Developer to Entrepreneur with $20M in Bootstrapped Revenue: Julien Salinas, CEO of NLP Cloud (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What percentage of the customers are in the $10,000 range?

Julien Salinas: Among our paid customers, it’s 10%. Maybe a bit less.

Sramana Mitra: How much of this is what you call major account customers?

Julien Salinas: I don’t have the exact number today, but I think it’s something like 150 to 200 like SAP and Lufthansa.

Sramana Mitra: All the lead generation seems to be happening on your blog.

Julien Salinas: You’re right. Mostly, that’s it. We’re also seeing a lot of customers coming from LinkedIn. We are also doing some proactive outreach, especially on LinkedIn to CTOs and developers. Today, we see more and more customers coming from word-of-mouth. The developer community is big and small at the same time.

Sramana Mitra: Word gets around. Tell me a bit about the company from an organizational point of view. Some customers require non-automated work. How did you grow the company? What was the teambuilding strategy?

Julien Salinas: From the start, I knew what I wanted to do as an organization. It was going to be fully remote. As a developer, I had been working fully remote for a long time and I love it. It’s easier to recruit remote. Especially with system administration and machine learning, it would be a challenge to recruit. Being able to do something remotely was much easier for us. We started growing the team like this.

I don’t have any associates. I’m on my own. Today, we have a 20-person team fully distributed with people in France and US. These are mostly tech guys in AI and machine learning – Python developers, data scientists, and DevOps. Then a couple of people in marketing. We don’t have any serious sales team at the moment.

Sramana Mitra: How many of your team members are in France?

Julien Salinas: Three are in France.

Sramana Mitra: Where are the rest?

Julien Salinas: We have people on the East Coast. We have people in the UK, Germany, and Italy. We now also have some people in Asia, India especially. We try not to be more than six hours difference from France.

Sramana Mitra: What is the profile of the remote developer in the US?

Julien Salinas: Either young people in big cities or people a bit older with a family.

Sramana Mitra: You have bootstrapped this company?

Julien Salinas: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: You started in 2018?

Julien Salinas: 2019.

Sramana Mitra: What has been the growth trajectory?

Julien Salinas: Today, it’s more than $10 million. I’m confident that we’ll be above $20 million at the end of the year.

Sramana Mitra: You’ve made a very nice transition from a hardcore developer to a developer-entrepreneur. Can you talk about that journey? What did you have to learn to make this transition?

Julien Salinas: First, I would say that I was lucky to have studied business a long time ago. For the first time, my business degree served me well. I was not starting from scratch. When it was about growth marketing and social media, I started from scratch. I had to learn tons of stuff.

It came gradually, but it was about being obsessed and reading a lot. When I started, I was reading a book every week and listening to tons of podcasts. Every day, one podcast. Every week, one book. It was also about making tons of mistakes and adjusting on the fly.

Sramana Mitra: I enjoyed listening to you. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 3 in the series : From Developer to Entrepreneur with $20M in Bootstrapped Revenue: Julien Salinas, CEO of NLP Cloud
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