He Sold It. His Co-Founders Wanted To. He Still Feels It.

I was on a coaching call the other day with a guy who's been doing LinkedIn lead gen for five years. He's built a SaaS tool in the LinkedIn automation space, worked with 40 clients, and is about to soft-launch his product. Smart guy. Knows the platform cold.

At some point he asked me about Taplio - he knew I'd been involved - and whether selling it was tough.

I told him the truth.

I didn't want to sell.

The Part Nobody Talks About in Founder Exit Stories

Most exit regret stories follow a predictable script. The multiple was wrong. I sold too early. I left money on the table. The market kept growing after I left. And yeah, all of that can sting. But that's not what I feel when I think about Taplio.

What I feel is something more specific - and if you've ever been a minority partner on something that was working, you might recognize it.

I was brought in on the Tweet Hunter and Taplio side of things. Tibo and Tom built the product - those two genuinely know how to build software in a way I don't. I've said this publicly: my biggest limitation when it comes to SaaS is that I don't have the technical depth to build profitably on my own. I lucked out finding those guys because they could actually build the thing. My job was to promote it. And when I started talking about Taplio, we got thousands of users. That's not me being arrogant - that's just what happened. The same marketing playbook applied to other products we tried got a couple of signups. Taplio got thousands. Something about that product connected.

That's exactly why I didn't want to sell.

I could see where it was going. The trajectory was obvious to me. And I kept thinking: why would we take a little money upfront when we could let this ride for a year and sell it for ten times what we got? That's not hindsight talking. That's what I was saying at the time, internally, to the people at the table.

But here's the problem with being a minority partner: you don't always get a vote that matters.

Too Many Founders, Too Many Different Definitions of Winning

The co-founders wanted out. They had been grinding for a while. One of them is very much a family guy. Another had been chasing a big win for years and this was it. And honestly, I get it. When you're the one doing the technical heavy lifting - actually building the thing from scratch - your relationship with the exit decision is completely different from the guy who's out there promoting it.

For the builders, the exit was the finish line. They'd done what they set out to do: build something people loved, get it to real revenue, and find a good home for it. Done.

For me, the exit was happening in the middle of the story.

I was at the point where I thought we were just getting started. The marketing was working. The product was growing. I was - and this is embarrassing to admit - genuinely convinced we were on a path to something enormous. The word "billionaires" actually went through my head. That's how locked in I was on where Taplio was going.

But I was a minority partner. So what I thought didn't change what happened.

We sold.

And Then the Worst Part Happened

Lempire - the company behind lemlist - acquired Taplio and Tweet Hunter. And they did a genuinely good job with it. They didn't let it die. They didn't strip it down. They picked it up and kept running.

And I still use Taplio every single day.

Think about what that means for a second. I've built and sold multiple companies at this point. After every other exit, I stopped using the product. I don't use Omni. I don't use LeadShark. I don't use the other simple apps we put out. I have zero daily connection to any of them after selling.

Taplio? I open it every day. It's in my workflow. It's genuinely useful to me.

That's not seller's remorse in the traditional sense. That's something worse. It's daily, repeated confirmation that the thing you believed in - the thing you fought to keep - actually deserved to be kept. The market is telling you every morning that you were right. And every morning, someone else owns it.

It took me a solid year or two to get over the PTSD of that. Maybe I'm still not fully over it. I'm not sure.

The Lesson Isn't "Don't Sell"

I want to be clear about something, because this post could easily be misread as an argument against exits. It's not.

Selling is often the right move. I've written about this - sometimes listing your business, even if the number is smaller than you imagined, is the most important thing you can do. It shatters your delusions. It forces you to see the business for what it actually is. There's enormous value in that clarity, even when it hurts.

And in hindsight, the Taplio exit funded things I wouldn't have been able to fund otherwise. It gave me time and resources to build what I'm building now. I'm not sitting here telling you exits are a trap.

What I am saying is that there's a specific flavor of founder regret that nobody really prepares you for: the one where your disagreement wasn't with the market, wasn't with the timing, wasn't even really with the acquirer. Your disagreement was with your own cap table. The people who were supposed to be aligned with you had a completely different answer to the question what is this worth if we just keep going?

And when you're outvoted, you don't get to find out who was right.

Except sometimes you do. And that's its own particular pain.

What This Means If You're Building With Co-Founders Right Now

The guy I was coaching on that call is in the early stages of his SaaS. Soft launching tomorrow, building mostly solo, figuring out whether to double down on the software side or keep growing his service business. I told him what I genuinely believe: the software side is worth pursuing, but you have to go in with clarity about who else is at the table and what they're actually optimizing for.

Most co-founder conversations focus on equity splits, roles, and technical ownership. Nobody talks about exit philosophy upfront. Nobody asks if this works, what does "winning" look like to you - a fast sale, a long ride, or building toward something massive?

That conversation feels premature when you're pre-launch. But it's the conversation that determines everything downstream. Because if you're the guy who wants to build the next HubSpot and your co-founders want to flip it the second it hits a good multiple, you are not building the same company. You just don't know it yet.

I didn't know it until it was too late to matter.

The Other Side of This: Know What You're Actually Good At

There's something else I've had to reckon with through all of this. I said it on the call and I'll say it here: I don't have the technical chops to build software profitably on my own. Full stop. When I was at Taplio, I was the promoter. That's what I brought. That's where I added value.

My strength is marketing and selling. I can take something that works and make thousands of people aware of it fast. That's real. But it means I'm always going to be dependent on a builder - and being dependent on a builder means being subject to their priorities, their risk tolerance, and their definition of when it's time to cash out.

That's why I run Galadon Gold as a coaching program now instead of trying to spin up another SaaS from scratch with a technical co-founder I'm crossing my fingers on. The mastermind format lets me operate inside my actual strengths - connecting with people, giving direct feedback, building frameworks in real time - without needing a technical partner to make the product work. The product is the coaching. And I own all of it.

If you want to see what that looks like, you can check out Galadon Gold here. The whole premise is built around doing this stuff live - not theory, not pre-recorded courses, but actual real-time problem solving on calls like the one I described in this post.

What the LinkedIn Guy Reminded Me Of

The coaching call that kicked off this whole reflection was actually a good one. The guy had genuine expertise - he'd generated his own meetings on LinkedIn for years before anyone was paying him to teach it, which is exactly the kind of practitioner credibility that matters. He wasn't selling a course on something he'd read about. He'd lived it.

He shared something with me that stuck: the filtering is almost always the problem. People think their message isn't working, so they rewrite the copy over and over. But most of the time, the message is fine. The audience is just wrong. He's watched clients with real case studies and genuine social proof go wide - targeting everyone - when they could be punching weight against the exact pain points they've already solved. It's the same mistake I've watched agency owners make on cold email for years. Tight targeting beats clever copy almost every time.

If you want the cold email version of that same principle, the top 5 cold email scripts I give away go deep on targeting before they ever touch messaging. Because that's where the leverage actually is.

He also gave me feedback on my own LinkedIn profile during the call - pointed out that my headline was an opportunity to be more descriptive, more specific about who I'm actually trying to reach. Not just "cold email guy" vibes, but something like I help overwhelmed agency owners finally scale - something that immediately tells the right person they're in the right place, and tells the wrong person to move on. That specificity is a filter. And filters save you from wasting your time on people who were never going to buy anyway.

He mentioned adding a banner CTA - something as simple as "DM me meetings" - to start conversations without any friction. Obvious when you hear it. Not obvious until someone who's done it a thousand times points it out.

That's the value of a second set of eyes from someone who actually works in the trenches. Not someone who's going to give you a framework deck and send you on your way. Someone who looks at your actual profile, your actual message, and tells you what's wrong.

The Thing About Being Proven Right Too Late

I keep coming back to the core of it. The market validated Taplio. Lempire didn't let it die - they ran it well, kept growing it, kept it in the ecosystem. The product I believed in turned out to be the product I was right to believe in.

And I open it every morning.

There's a version of this where that's a success story. Co-founder exits a healthy company with a good acquirer, product keeps growing, everyone wins. Measured purely by outcomes, that's a good story.

But the thing nobody writes about is the version where you're the guy who wanted to stay on the ride. Where the valuation math is fine but the disagreement wasn't really about math. Where you were the most convinced person at the table that you were sitting on something special - and the people who had more votes disagreed, not because they thought the product was bad, but because their version of winning looked different from yours.

That's a lonelier kind of exit. And I don't think it comes with a clean resolution. You don't get to know what would have happened if you'd kept going. You just get the daily reminder that you were right about the product.

If you're in a co-founder situation right now and you haven't had the "what does winning look like to you, specifically?" conversation, have it today. Not when you're getting acquisition offers. Not when someone starts making noise about timelines. Now, when it still feels theoretical, is when it's cheapest to have that fight.

And if you're building alone and trying to figure out how to get in front of the right people - whether that's on LinkedIn, via cold email, or through a combination of both - the best lead strategy guide is a good place to start. The principles don't change much regardless of the channel. Tight targeting, clear offer, low-pressure ask. That's it. Everything else is just execution.

The execution is what separates the people who get meetings from the people who get ignored.

I know which side I want to be on. And I know which side you want to be on too. That's why you're here.