Loïc spent 5 years coding in an underground incubator for literally nobody. Nobody used what he built.
Then one idea clicked. He went from $0 to $750,000 a month with Minea. 100% bootstrapped.
And 7 months ago he walked away from that to start over. His new SaaS, Dropmagic, just hit $1M ARR. That's about $83K a month.
He did it by copying the exact same playbook he used at Minea. So I asked him to break down every single step.
I sat down with Loïc on the Profitable Founder Podcast. Here's the full playbook.
The 5 years in the cave nobody talks about
Before any of the big numbers, Loïc failed. For a long time.
Out of engineering school he built SaaS after SaaS inside his school's incubator. Underground. He told me he didn't see the sun enough. Five years coding for an audience of beta testers who weren't even real users.
His first startup was Emotional Equity, voice analysis for call centers. He was 21. He made every mistake possible.
The switch happened when he stopped asking "what can I build?" and started asking "what problem do people actually have?" He went out, talked to people, found their everyday pain, then built for it.
Year one his friends cheered. By year four his mom was asking if he was sure. By year six it was his brother. At some point you're just alone with yourself. (Anyone who's bootstrapped knows that exact silence.)
Breaking $0 and the first real plateau at $30K
Loïc has a line I keep thinking about: plateaus are just doors you don't have the key to yet.
The $0 plateau is the hardest one, and it has no clever trick. Pure energy.
→ Go on social media (Facebook, at the time)
→ Spread the word, comment everywhere
→ Have long, unscalable one-on-one conversations
→ Get your first sub, then your second, then your third
→ Reinvest every dollar back into growth
His first SaaS that actually worked was Influify, a tool helping e-commerce sellers find Instagram creators. It hit $30K MRR and stalled.
The unlock? He merged with a Facebook-focused competitor and brought in Yomi Denzel, one of the biggest online business creators in France. They killed both original products and launched a new brand: Minea.
From $30K to $750K, one plateau at a time
Minea scans ads on TikTok, Meta and Pinterest, around 1 million ads a day, to show drop shippers which products are winning. Each plateau needed a different key.
$30K → $100K: Yomi did one live explaining Minea. The tool got the "made by Yomi" stamp and spread like wildfire overnight. They captured the French market almost instantly.
$100K → $300K: They got stuck for almost a year, trapped inside Yomi's audience. The fix was finding their real distribution channel. YouTube creators, including big US ones. They translated the app and cracked the American market.
$300K → $500K: Webinars. Yomi is one of the best salesmen Loïc has ever seen. But you can't sell a $50 subscription on a webinar, so they built a high-tier plan at around $400/month (discounted to $300), poured ads into the webinar, and sold it at the end.
$500K → $750K: They noticed beginners churning, not from bugs but because they didn't know how to actually run e-commerce. So they launched Minea Coaching with real one-on-one e-commerce coaches at a higher invoice.
Notice the pattern. Every time they hit a wall, they raised the price and added value for the people willing to pay it.
Why a creator co-founder is the real cheat code
Here's the part Loïc swears by, and it's the spine of his whole playbook.
When he left Minea, he dragged his best friend into a new SaaS called Dropmagic, which builds converting e-commerce stores in 5 minutes using AI. Then they added a third co-founder: a 24-year-old YouTuber named Baptiste.
A creator co-founder gives you two things money can't buy fast:
→ A power user. Baptiste uses Dropmagic every day. He tells the team what's broken, what's good, where to go next. He IS the product feedback loop.
→ Locked-in economics. Because they run videos with him, they know the real conversion, the cost per view, the LTV, the AOV. Without that you're just guessing what to pay other creators.
This is exactly the kind of niche-copying, audience-first move I broke down in my guide on how to build a micro SaaS. Find the channel that works, then stop spreading yourself thin.
Dropmagic's numbers: $1K MRR in 5 days, $5K MRR in 30 days, and $83K MRR by month 6-7. They hit it by shipping one video with Baptiste plus a "sexy" onboarding that built your store live, on screen, with animation. That was the wow moment.
The CEO lesson: stop shipping, start hiring
At Minea, Loïc's hardest personal shift came around the $300K-$400K mark.
He's a dev. He loves the dopamine of shipping. But he almost burned out trying to be everywhere at once. The only way out was to stop coding and start hiring people far better than him.
They moved from "founders are the C-levels" to hiring actual C-level experts. Two were smart friends. For the other two, a CMO and a CTO, they paid a headhunting firm around $30K-$50K and spent 4 months interviewing.
The insight that surprised me most: when you hire a great C-level, you don't get one person. A strong CMO arrives with his media buyer and his content strategist. You're hiring a whole squad, plus a framework you didn't have before. Loïc basically hired his own mentor in marketing.
His other trick for keeping a team at peak: not a flat line of motivation, but high peaks. Every 4 months a public release, announced ahead of time, with Yomi showcasing new features on a webinar backed by ~$200K in ads. Hard deadline, everyone focused, then they breathe.
I interview founders like this every week → Watch the Podcast
The playbook he'd run if he started over today
I asked Loïc: if you had to start from zero right now, what's the exact sequence?
→ Put a creator on the co-founding team to secure a $5K-$10K ARR baseline
→ Month one, test every distribution channel and watch the economics (is CAC lower than LTV?)
→ Once you find the channel that works, close all the others and focus for 2-3 months
→ Start with creators under 10K followers on commission (offer something like 30% for life, no upfront risk)
→ Once the economics repeat, move up to 10K-50K creators who want upfront pay
→ Lock the ones who convert for a quarter, multiple videos
→ Turn the best into ambassadors on your payroll so the tool becomes part of their content
And the deepest rule underneath all of it: focus on making your customer successful and on making them money. If they win, they keep paying. Everything else is a sub-problem.
His last word wasn't about tactics, though. It was about people. You can always pivot the project, but a complementary team you trust is what actually carries you. Be brutally picky about co-founders. It's like getting married.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who founded Minea and how big did it get?
Minea was built by Loïc together with several co-founders and French YouTuber Yomi Denzel, merging two earlier e-commerce SaaS tools into one brand. It scaled from $0 to roughly $750,000 MRR, fully bootstrapped, before Loïc stepped down as CEO after about 5 years to start a new company.
How much does Dropmagic make?
Dropmagic, Loïc's AI store-builder, hit about $83K MRR (roughly $1 million ARR) in just 6 to 7 months. It grew from $1K MRR in 5 days to $5K MRR in 30 days, driven by a creator co-founder and a launch video with YouTuber Baptiste.
How did Loïc break through each revenue plateau?
Each plateau had a specific key: a creator partnership broke $30K, finding the YouTube distribution channel broke $100K, webinars with a high-tier $400 plan broke $300K, and one-on-one coaching broke $500K toward $750K. His repeating move was raising prices and adding value for serious buyers.
Plateaus are just doors you don't have the key to yet. Find the one unlock, focus everything on it, and keep moving.
