I spoke to Max about his experience with complete transparency at Buffer and how he managed to get his first paying customers for his side project PixelMe.
A lesson in early-stage B2B growth

"You just have to think about what you really want to achieve with a side project...I really wanted to have a sort of laboratory to be able to experiment with ideas..."
Today really excited to share this conversation with Maxime Berthelot (@Maxberthelot). Maxime is Product Manager of Growth at Buffer and Co-Founder of PixelMe. If you follow the SaaS universe on Twitter you might have seen his inspiring tweets tracking PixelMe's growth:
In less than 5 months we passed 3,000$ MRR and reached +61 NPS with our side project @pixelme, with the amazing @TomBenattar! and still using @ChartMogul the perfect analytics reporting tools 🙌🚀🔥 One more step toward my personal goal of having multiple sources of income! 💪


Max, along with his co-founders Tom Benattar (@TomBenattar) and Jérémie Doucy (@jdoucy), have done an incredible job of validating and launching their concept to the world -- their approach to generating interest and initial signups is a textbook example of a low-budget growth strategy for B2B.
If you're thinking about launching something new -- whether a side project or a full-scale startup -- there's a lot you'll learn from this story.
Topics covered
"Don't think too much, and just go...if you want to, just start."
Here are just a few of the questions I asked Maxime about his experience building and scaling products:
- How did you manage to validate your idea without writing code?
- How did you get those important first few paying customers?
- What's your view on the radical transparency at both Buffer and PixelMe?
- How do you balance your time on PixelMe with your primary job?
Listen to the episode
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