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The Idea

In February 2020, Thibault Louis-Lucas lost his job. It was the least of his problems. His second startup, Magicats, a coding app for kids, had collapsed months earlier when a licensing deal with Ubisoft fell through, burning €500k of investor money and leaving him personally on the hook for a €250,000 government loan. His first startup, a chores app called Pistache, had managed 500,000 downloads and no business model. He had taken a CTO job at a scale-up to stay afloat. Covid took that too.

Broke, bankrupt and on French unemployment benefits, he called Tom Jacquesson, his co-founder from business school, and proposed a different set of rules. No investors. No hiring. No twelve-month roadmaps. Ship a new product every week, charge for it immediately, kill anything that doesn't make money. They shipped eleven products in four months. Ten went nowhere. The eleventh was a scrappy tool that surfaced viral tweets and helped people write better ones.

This was the beginning of Tweet Hunter.

The Execution

The lesson?

Tibo's edge was never the idea. Pistache and Magicats had the decks, the funding and the headcount, and both died. Tweet Hunter was product number eleven, built in a week, priced on day one, and then handed to someone else's audience in exchange for a slice of the upside. He stopped trying to pick the winner and built a machine that surfaced one instead. Ten flops aren't a failure rate. They're the search cost.