Leitmotif and General Philosophy
The guiding principle of my career over the last decade has been simple yet relentless: always ask where economic value will appear tomorrow, stay ahead of the curve, and move aggressively before markets turn into red oceans. I have lived by an experimental approach: trying things super fast, exposing myself fully with skin in the game, and building in public. I have written about this philosophy in my article Autistic Antisocial Money, where I described the necessity of acting outside the accepted frameworks of connivance capitalism and instead operating in the permissionless environment of software, crypto, and now AI. My methodology has been to feed the haters with my shortcomings and reward the fans by letting them join the journey. This approach led me to launch projects such as CheCoin, the first major French memecoin on the Binance Smart Chain with 12,000 holders in two weeks, and Tugan.ai, one of the earliest ChatGPT wrapper products for copywriting and ghostwriting technology.
Early Career: Dropout and First Experiments (2013–2016)
In 2013 I entered HEC after preparatory classes. Within three months I realized it was the school of the world of yesterday. My feeling was that the French elite had built a capitalism of connivance and nepotism, and that all of it would soon be replaced by robots, meaning software. I dropped out.
From 2013 to 2016 I explored online teaching, scaling one of the first elearning businesses before the model was fashionable. In 2014 I launched Pandanote.io, a note-taking application for students. The app reached 40k downloads but failed to find a sustainable market or monetization. It was nevertheless my first experience working with developers and bringing a product to life.
In 2016 I published L’Essentiel de l’Histoire Économique, a manual of economic history that became the number one seller in its Amazon niche. That same year I created my first structured online education business around economics, targeting students. This was before the wave of mainstream online courses.
Direct Response Marketing and Copywriting (2016–2019)
From 2016 I entered the world of direct response marketing with two associates. Our company, Intuition, was dedicated to building offers in direct response marketing while maximizing product quality to increase lifetime value. At that time, the French Direct Response Marketing (DRM) market was a blue ocean, with competitors counted on one hand and Facebook Ads still offering extremely low CPCs.
We scaled lean-style infoproducts: starting with short ebooks, turning them into long guides, then into full courses, communities, and ecosystems. Over this period we generated more than ten million euros in sales, with return on ad spend (ROAS) sometimes exceeding seven.
It was during these years that I began practicing copywriting. Copywriting is the art of writing sales messages that turn visitors into customers, and customers into compulsive buyers. It is the world of Big Ideas : concepts that stimulate, provoke, and capture attention, the true bottleneck of the digital economy. One of the enduring lessons was that a single good sales text can change your life.
The Creation of Tugan Bara and MarketingUnderground.biz (2019–2022)
In 2019 I decided to teach marketing and copywriting under the pseudonym Tugan Bara, inspired by Mikhail Tugan-Baranovsky, the Russo-Ukrainian economist born in 1865. I could just as well have chosen Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, but the resonance of Tugan was stronger.
I launched the R-X program (for Revenus Exponentiels), a subscription delivering weekly teachings distilled from my experience. The product line expanded with Profits Mimétiques and Copy Insider. The customer journey began with a free plus shipping book, La Bible du Marketing Underground, which was offered free but charged around seven euros for delivery. The R-X subscription was initially priced at 9.95 euros per month, later raised to 29.95 euros and then 49.95 euros. Premium one-shot programs were priced at 997 euros.
The clientele ranged from high school students (some of whom earned fifty thousand euros a month at seventeen years old) to retired polytechnicians. The tone was antisystem, libertarian, and transparent. We taught everything in public: copy drafted on Google Docs, funnels built on Clickfunnels, campaigns tested live. At a time when most trainers recycled American advice on YouTube, this radical transparency resonated.
By the end, we had served nearly 8,000 clients with an average TrustPilot rating above four stars. It was the high point of French infopreneurship before the CPF (some absurd government subsidy program for elearning) and unethical closers damaged the industry’s reputation.
CheCoin and the Web3 Era (2021–2023)
In 2021, as the COVID period ended and the crypto bull market peaked, I asked myself a new question: I had been investing since 2017 (especially during the bear market of 2018–2019 where I took big positions) but who actually builds tokens? How are they launched and promoted?
The answer became CheCoin, launched on the Binance Smart Chain as a satirical “communist token.” The project quickly reached a fifty million dollar capitalization. The token then deflated. Our team never sold, neither at the top nor the bottom, and we still hold. Internet commentary accused us of scams and rug pulls without basis, but CheCoin was in fact the first French memecoin, long before the memecoin boom of 2024 with Pump.fun or the presidential tokens like Trump’s $TRUMP or Milei’s $LIBRA. Both horrible ideas.
The bullish thesis in 2021 was that blockchain would replace twentieth-century financial and payment infrastructure and that art, community, and creation would be reinvented through NFTs and community tokens. While payments and finance remain central to crypto, and the U.S. Genius Act of 2025 validates that intuition, most NFT projects did not survive the bear market.
The CheCoin experiment attracted projects to me for advising. I coached and advised around twenty crypto teams, ranging from DeFi protocols to gaming platforms, wallets, NFT communities, and VC funds.
In 2023 I published Token Titans: The Secret Playbook for Building New Web3 Experiences, NFT Communities, and DeFi Protocols, a synthesis of these experiences. It became the leader in its category despite the volatility of the sector.
In parallel, I acquired full ownership of Side.xyz, originally Forkchain, after merging with a SocialFi project. I bought out my associates and pivoted Side into a Web3 marketing and analytics technology.
The positive lessons of Web3 were the speed of innovation, avant-garde marketing techniques, and the accelerated product cycles of two to three weeks instead of years. The negative lessons were the toxicity: threats, calumny, and scams. 90% of entrepreneurs who tried Web3 once never returned, suffering post-traumatic disillusion, as noted by Andre Cronje in his article Why Building in DeFi Sucks.
AI, SaaS, and Fast Cycles (2022–2024)
In March 2023, after the release of ChatGPT, I realized that copywriting itself was about to be demonetized. With two associates I created Tugan.ai, a ghostwriting and copywriting software built on the ChatGPT API. We grew by leveraging three engines: key opinion leaders on Twitter, affiliate marketing through platforms like Rewardful, and churn reduction with Churnkey.
In less than two years we scaled to 60k paying users. In July 2024 we accepted an acquisition offer. It was a full cycle from creation to exit in under two years.
By then the market was saturated with SaaS products, each enjoying a moment of glory before sinking into a red ocean. Sam Altman called it the era of “SaaS fast fashion.” Launching software through APIs and “vibe coding” platforms like Lovable is easy, but maintaining market relevance and justifying recurring subscription pricing has become a nightmare. Lifetime pricing models may replace monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and annual recurring revenue (ARR) as more rational in this environment.
Reach.Cat and The Next Big Sh*t (2025–Present)
In 2025 I launched Reach.Cat, a CPM platform allowing brands to mobilize hundreds or thousands of creators on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, paying only for views. The platform integrates anti-bot and anti-fraud systems by design.
That same year I joined The Next Big Sh*t, a French business and economics newsletter. It has become the first francophone newsletter of its kind, combining my intellectual curiosity with the control of a distribution channel. As Russell Brunson often says, there is traffic you do not control, traffic you control, and traffic you own. Owning it is the goal. At the time of writing, the newsletter has 20,000 daily readers and should exceed 100,000 by 2026.
My thesis now is what I call the “One Person Conglomerate Funnel.” It has three steps.
First, build an audience with content to create authority, reciprocity (as Robert Cialdini explained in Influence), and flex.
Second, maintain a cash cow product generating between one and ten million euros annually to finance lifestyle, media production, and investment capacity.
Third, take equity in companies in exchange for advising, cash, distribution, or combinations of these.
Businesses, Books, and Investments
My software ventures have included Pandanote.io (inactive), Tugan.ai (exited in 2024), Side.xyz (active), and Reach.Cat (active).
My Web3 projects include CheCoin and Side.xyz.
I have published three books:
L’Essentiel de l’Histoire Économique (2016)
La Bible du Marketing Underground (2019)
Token Titans (2023).
My education businesses were Réussir ESH (inactive) and MarketingUnderground.biz under the Tugan Bara persona.
My newsletters include ArnaudLabossiere.com on Substack (here) in English and bonzai.pro/labossiere in French.
Here are some of my investments
Biotech and longevity SPVs : BE Therapeutics, Cyclarity Therapeutics
Web3 and crypto (through SPV and DAOs) : Cookie DAO, CTRL Wallet, Creator Bid, Glyph, Buzz Fun, Glitr, Leea, Amplifi, Diamante, OneClick, daitAI, Hermetica)
Media/ads : Ad360.media, Reach.Cat
And for the full transparency, my crypto holdings include Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Solana (SOL), and Side (SIDE).
I currently reside between Budapest, Hungary and Abu Dhabi, UAE.
Conclusion
My trajectory has been one of searching for blue oceans and arbitraging geography to maximize meritocracy and sovereignty. From dropping out of HEC in 2013 to scaling and exiting SaaS by 2024, from launching the first French memecoin in 2021 to building audiences and investing in 2025, the throughline remains the same: build fast, in public, with skin in the game, and always look for where the next wave of value will emerge.
French Version in Vidéo :