LeadGuru.io

Badis Kalfalahi was a 25-year-old student at Achèse Paris—described as "the Harvard Business School of France"—when he noticed a gap in the market. B2B companies were spending countless hours building cold-email campaigns that generated low-quality leads. In September 2016, he decided to turn this observation into a side hustle, cold-emailing companies from his student email address offering to handle their entire cold-email operation. The approach worked surprisingly well. "I was contacting clients from my student email and just saying, hey, I'm from Achèse. They were actually very happy to talk to me and I started billing them."

Badis kept initial costs lean. He paid a freelancer $800 on Upwork to build an MVP and bootstrapped the entire operation with money from internships. He didn't raise institutional capital at the start, instead choosing to build a profitable business first. "I actually paid for a MVP, was $800. I did it with a freelancer and that's it." This lean approach meant he could test ideas quickly without being weighed down by investor expectations. He eventually brought in a CTO and a classmate named Guillaume to help scale the product development, but the path would become complicated as the business grew.

LeadGuru's primary growth channel was doing exactly what it sold: running cold-email campaigns. Badis and his team would identify target lists—often pulled from sources like Crunchbase—and send personalized outreach to startup founders and scaling SMEs. He reached out to Nathan Latka through this method after identifying him in a Crunchbase list of HR company founders. "We started from a Crunchbase list of HR company involved with HR, our new startups. We actually ended up with your contact." By the time of this interview, he had built a customer base of 24 clients, each paying roughly $800 per month on average, with some on a newer $40-per-click cost model.

LeadGuru operated with two revenue models: a flat monthly fee ($800 on average, scaling from $1,000 for 500 contacts) and a newer cost-per-click model ($40 per unique click). The service encompassed everything from building contact lists and writing email copy to operating campaigns on an ongoing basis. The business was highly hands-on—Badis admitted it was more consulting and service than pure tech product.

However, revenue remained lumpy and unpredictable. "It's up and down. This is the reason why. The reason is that I've been testing so much stuff." He attempted various experiments, including a model where he only billed clients if their outreach received positive responses—it failed. More critically, he had zero customer engagement or retention plans in place, meaning customers could churn without any proactive outreach to prevent it. By his own admission, "100% of my competitors, they ask for like three months of engagement beforehand before starting anything."

When his CTO left in July after a dispute over equity and compensation terms, Badis made a strategic pivot. Rather than search for a replacement to continue building proprietary technology, he decided to partner with Reply.io, an existing cold-email platform. This allowed him to keep the business running without the burden of product development, though it also meant cementing LeadGuru's identity as a service/agency rather than a venture-scale SaaS company.

At the time of this interview (roughly 8 months after launch), LeadGuru had generated approximately $45,000 in total revenue and was running at roughly $20,000 MRR with 24 customers—though Badis acknowledged the number was volatile. He was contemplating whether to raise capital (he had previously raised €30,000 from family) and had been considering jumping back into product development, but remained undecided.

Nathan Latka, sensing the tension in Badis's positioning, made an unsolicited offer: $60,000 to acquire the entire company. Badis declined on the spot, betting that the business had more potential if he remained committed. His reasoning: the company needed at least another year or two of his focus to truly succeed. Whether through future product development or continued service scaling, Badis was betting on his own ability to push through the tough early stage.