Product requirements document

Hiring Tristan Berguer

A CV tells you where someone has been. This tells you what happens if you hire them, with the whole CV and portfolio inside it as evidence rather than decoration. Written in the format I would use for any other product.

Doc
PRD-2026-001 · v1.0
Owner
Tristan Berguer
Reviewer
You
Updated
2026-09-13
Status
Open · awaiting reviewer

TL;DR

You need someone who can own product end to end and still open the codebase. I have done it eleven times and sold one of them. Estimated time to first shipped increment: 30 days.

Selected results

€5M →
€7M (from €5M to €7M)
ARR, in three months
Taplio
93% →
40% (from 93% to 40%)
onboarding churn
Taplio
1.5M
users in 18 months
NiceCactus
€12.5M
raised, two companies
NiceCactus · Carimmat

01Context

Most product hires fail in the gap between strategy and shipping. The roadmap gets agreed, the deck is beautiful, and then nothing lands. Teams hire a strategist who cannot ship, or a builder who cannot say no. Being both is unusual, and it is the entire argument of this document.

02Target users

  • Founders from seed to Series B who are still the de facto PM and need their week back.
  • CTOs with no product counterpart, tired of translating between engineering and the market.
  • Product teams with a full backlog and no thesis about which half matters.

Not a fit for organisations that need a process administrator. See §04.

03Goals & success metrics

Metric

First shipped increment

Target

In production, real users on it

By

Day 30

Metric

Roadmap

Target

Halved, with the reasons written down

By

Day 45

Metric

Discovery cadence

Target

5 user conversations a week, running without me

By

Day 60

Metric

Decisions

Target

Documented once, not relitigated monthly

By

Ongoing

04Non-goals

  • I will not be your Jira administrator.
  • I will not write specs nobody reads.
  • I will not run a roadmap built without talking to users.
  • I will not pretend an estimate is a commitment.

05Prior art

Everything below is the evidence for the claims above: eleven products taken from idea to production, ten years of roles, and the tools I actually use. Nothing here is a side project someone else built.

5.1 Portfolio

  • Atyla

    Live

    Visibility inside AI answers

    Co-founder · 2026–

  • uwait

    Live

    Get paid while AI thinks

    Founder · 2026–

  • Senthor

    Live

    The AI crawler paywall

    Co-founder & CEO · 2025–

  • BeeSecure

    Live

    AI security co-pilot

    Founder · 2025

  • Beelink

    Live

    B2B Chatroulette

    Founder · 2025

  • PressPilot

    Live

    AI-written press releases

    Founder · 2023

  • Lootingg

    Ended

    Invest in gaming talent

    Founder & CPO · 2022–2023

  • Buska

    Live

    Social listening for lead gen

    Co-founder & CTO · 2021–2024

  • Peenut

    Ended

    Short-form takes on the news

    Founder · 2020–2021

  • Carimmat

    Ended

    Dating by license plate

    Founder & Product Manager · 2019–2023

  • NiceCactus

    Exit

    Esports SaaS for players and teams

    Co-founder & CPO · 2017–2019

11 products · 7 live · 1 exit

5.2 Track record

  1. Founder & Product Engineer

    Independent

    A deliberate stretch building AI products end to end: research, design, code, pricing and go-to-market, alone or with a co-founder.

    • Senthor, an AI-crawler paywall: co-founder and CEO, live
    • Atyla, measuring brand visibility inside AI answers: co-founder, live
    • BeeSecure, an AI security co-pilot: built solo in 11 days
    • Four products shipped in 18 months, each one coded and priced by me

  2. Interim CEO & Product Manager

    Taplio

    The LinkedIn growth product I was brought in to turn around, with revenue already falling.

    • Started from usage, not from the roadmap: what people searched for most, and where they actually spent their time
    • Rebuilt the features that usage said mattered, and left the rest alone
    • Onboarding churn fell from 93% to 40%
    • That retention is what moved the revenue: ARR from €5M to €7M in three months, +30% over six. Growth came from keeping customers, not from buying more
    • Ran the product-led growth motion and led a cross-functional team of developers and marketers

  3. Product Manager

    lemlist

    Owned lemcal, a Calendly competitor built around ultra-personalisation.

    • Scaled lemcal from €0 to €50k ARR in six months, by making the booking page a piece of personal branding rather than a utility
    • 1,000+ companies migrated from Calendly
    • Directed a technical team of up to four
    • Ran the go-to-market and launch campaigns

  4. Founder & Product Manager

    Carimmat

    A consumer dating app that matches by licence plate. Founded, funded and run.

    • 200,000 users in two years
    • Raised €500k
    • National coverage: TV, radio and print

  5. Co-founder · CMO, then CPO

    NiceCactusSold

    Esports SaaS in Sophia-Antipolis, helping players and teams turn professional. Formerly Esport-Management.

    • 1.5M users in 18 months
    • Raised €12M
    • Grew the team to 50 people
    • Built the first esports insurance, with AXA France
    • Company sold

  6. CMO, then CTO

    Riskattitude

    Natural-hazard startup. Built the website and the Risk@lertes mobile app for iOS, Android and Windows Phone, and ran marketing and communications.

5.3 Capabilities

Product

Roadmap design & execution · User research · Data-driven decisions · Product-led growth · Pricing & monetisation · Go-to-market · PostHog · Stripe · Figma

Leadership

Cross-functional squads · ARR growth & churn reduction · Fundraising (€12.5M) · Interim CEO · Hiring & onboarding

Engineering

TypeScript · React · Next.js · Node.js · React Native / Expo · Python · MongoDB · PostgreSQL · Docker · Infrastructure scaling · LLM products & agents · Scraping & data pipelines

06Proposed solution: first 90 days

Phase

Days 1–30 · Listen, then ship one thing

What happens

Twenty user conversations and every person on the team. Then one real improvement in production, so trust is earned with evidence instead of slides.

Phase

Days 31–60 · Cut

What happens

Kill half the roadmap in writing. Publish the thesis. Agree how decisions get made and who makes them.

Phase

Days 61–90 · Compound

What happens

Discovery running weekly without me. Pricing tested against real willingness to pay. The team ships while I am on holiday.

07Risks & mitigations

Risk

Eleven companies in ten years. Will he stay?

Mitigation

I stay where the problem is hard. Carimmat ran five years and NiceCactus three. Ask about those before assuming the pattern.

Risk

A founder who cannot take a brief.

Mitigation

Two years as a PM at lemlist, inside someone else's product org, with someone else's priorities. Ask them.

Risk

Too hands-on. Will not delegate.

Mitigation

I write code to unblock, not to own. The test is simple: does the team ship when I am away?

Risk

Based in Perpignan, not in your office.

Mitigation

Remote-first for years. The overlap with your timezone is computed on the home page. Relocation is open.

08Rollout plan

  • Week 0: a thirty-minute call. You describe the problem; I tell you honestly if I am the wrong person.
  • Week 1: a paid trial. One real problem, one week, a fixed price. Freelance, or as a pre-hire.
  • Week 2 onwards: contract or offer, with what we learned in week 1 written into it.

Rollback plan: it is a trial. Nobody is trapped, and that is the point.

09Open questions

  • What product decision are you stuck on right now?
  • Who owns product today, and what happens to them when I arrive?
  • What did the last person in this seat get wrong?

Decision

Two buttons, like any other spec review. Both open LinkedIn.

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