1) A market everyone hated, and nobody had fixed
Simo Lemhandez wasn’t a CRM person. He’d just finished an entrepreneurship master’s and was doing Le Wagon when a stranger named Thibaud gave a pitch that stuck with him. Thibaud wanted to go after “the king of SaaS” — Salesforce — using the design language of the tools everyone actually loved using: Notion, Airtable, Figma.
The category looked terrifying on paper. Salesforce alone commands roughly $200 billion in value. But that scale cuts both ways.
“We capture 1% of Salesforce, that’s already $2 billion of market capture.”
The market was massive, satisfaction with incumbents was low, and the competitive set — a handful of dominant players — was thin relative to the size of the prize.
2) Proving the idea before building anything
Before writing a line of code, Simo and Thibaud built a landing page. Just a page describing the CRM they imagined, with no product behind it. They put it on Twitter and LinkedIn to see how the market would react.
In a matter of days, over 7,000 people joined the waitlist. Some wrote long, detailed messages explaining exactly what they hated about their current CRM.
That flood of unsolicited detail became the foundation for everything that followed — a way to formalize their vision before spending a single engineering hour on it.
3) The DM that made it real
The founding story has no dramatic dinner scene. It has a Twitter DM. Simo reached out to Thibaud after the pitch, they grabbed a coffee, and it clicked immediately — a shared vocabulary, a shared read on where software was headed.
They started working together informally, with nothing written down. Months in, momentum built on its own. As Simo put it, they put a finger in the gears and got pulled along.
“We put a finger in the gears, and we were off.”
4) Choosing a wedge instead of the whole category
Rebuilding a CRM from scratch, on a mature market with entrenched expectations, is close to impossible without an enormous feature list. Simo calls this the “email client syndrome” — everyone has opinions about Gmail, but ship a version without Forward and nobody will touch it.
So instead of attacking the whole category, they picked one narrow, real pain point: building contact lists. Salespeople were doing this by hand in spreadsheets. Folk shipped a free Chrome extension that pulled contacts from LinkedIn in one click.
They deliberately kept the extension’s output inside Folk rather than letting it push contacts into competing CRMs — even though that could have been a growth channel on its own, because users loved the extension enough that it became a genuine differentiator pulling people toward the full product.
5) Eighteen months with no revenue, on purpose
For a year and a half, Folk didn’t charge anyone. Access to the waitlist was doled out cohort by cohort, and the team tracked usage and engagement obsessively — weekly and monthly frequency, retention, satisfaction — waiting for a level of “lovability” that would justify asking people to pay.
“The customers vote with their money.”
Five-star reviews and friendly feedback weren’t the bar. The bar was whether a team found the product indispensable enough to pay for it long-term. Monetization only started once usage data — not a roadmap milestone — said it was time.
6) From hand-sent Stripe links to a real pricing model
Folk’s first payments were completely improvised: Stripe payment links generated one by one and emailed to individual customers. There was no billing system, no fixed pricing rule — just a Slack channel where every incoming payment got showered in emojis.
From there, pricing and packaging were built through direct confrontation with customers rather than a pre-built plan. Average deal size started around $200 a year for solo users. As Folk layered in collaboration features for bigger teams, average contract value climbed — while the team fought to keep the product simple enough that a two-person team could still find their footing in it. Growth wasn’t purely linear either: distinct product launches, like the API and a WhatsApp integration, created visible step-changes in the revenue curve.
7) Two people who spoke the same language
Simo brought no CRM expertise to the table — Thibaud brought the ambition and the origin inside eFounders, the startup studio. What they shared was a read on how software should feel, shaped by tools like Notion and Figma rather than legacy enterprise software.
That complementary setup extended into how they raised capital. Their first round came from Accel once usage metrics looked credible; the second, once growth toward $1M ARR was visible, came from Neo.com — backer of Motion, Cursor, and Ramp — alongside over 100 angel investors chosen specifically to fill expertise gaps the founders knew they’d hit.
8) The market they under-served: their own backyard
Folk sold into the US from day one — it’s been the company’s biggest market since the start — but ran the entire go-to-market from France, Spain, and Italian time zones for six years before hiring its first US-based team member.
Simo is candid that this was a missed opportunity to move faster. He now spends recurring multi-week stretches in San Francisco and encourages other founders to do the same — not to relocate necessarily, but to build a real network there, meet investors on the ground, and treat the company as an American company from the outset.
The takeaway
Folk’s path to $1M ARR wasn’t fast, and it wasn’t linear — it was disciplined about sequencing. Validate demand before building. Pick one narrow wedge before attacking a whole category. Let usage data, not a calendar, decide when to charge.
The channels that compounded weren’t the ones that looked scalable on a slide — they were word of mouth, which still drives 60% of signups, and an affiliate network that now touches 2,000 partners and 15–20% of ARR. Nothing about that required an outbound team.
What’s easy to miss in a story this orderly is how much patience it demanded: eighteen months of silence, a pricing model built one Stripe link at a time, and a market — the US — that the founders under-invested in simply because they were somewhere else. Discipline early, distribution second, presence last. That’s often the order that works.
