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 talk to customers, decide what is worth building, work closely with engineering, and carry the number attached to the product. I have done that as a founder, as a PM inside someone else's org, and as an interim CEO of a product that was losing revenue.

Selected results

€0 → €50k
ARR in six months
lemcal
12
products shipped
2016 · 2026
200k
registered users
Carimmat
1
founder exit
NiceCactus

01Context

Many product teams struggle to connect strategy with what actually ships. The roadmap gets agreed, the deck is good, and then little lands. The useful combination is someone who can find the evidence, make the call, and stay close enough to engineering for the decision to survive contact with the build. That combination is the 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.

Best fit where product decisions are still being made rather than only executed. See §04 for the conditions where I do my best work.

03Goals & success metrics

Signal

Shipped work

What good looks like

A first useful improvement in production, once the context is understood well enough to pick the right one

Signal

Priorities

What good looks like

The team can say what we are not doing this quarter, and why

Signal

Customer evidence

What good looks like

A discovery cadence that fits the organisation and keeps running when I am away

Signal

Business metric

What good looks like

One number the product is accountable for, agreed with the people who own the P&L

04How I work best

  • I do my best work when product decisions are grounded in customer evidence, business goals and close collaboration with engineering.
  • I want access to customers. Recordings and tickets are useful, but I make better calls after talking to people directly.
  • I like having one number the product is accountable for, agreed up front rather than argued about afterwards.
  • I adapt to the process a team already has. Whatever the tooling, I care that decisions are written down once and easy to find later.
  • I code to prototype, to unblock and to stay credible with engineers, not to own the codebase.

05Prior art

Everything below is the evidence for the claims above: products taken from idea to production, ten years of roles, and the tools I actually use.

5.1 Portfolio

  • Private MRR

    Open source

    Live revenue across Stripe accounts

    Author, open source · 2026–

  • Atyla

    Live

    Visibility inside AI answers

    Co-founder · 2026–

  • uwait

    Live

    Get paid while AI thinks

    Founder · 2026–

  • Senthor

    Maintained

    The AI crawler paywall

    Co-founder & CEO · 2025–

  • BeeSecure

    Shipped

    AI security co-pilot

    Founder · 2025

  • Beelink

    Shipped

    B2B Chatroulette

    Founder · 2025

  • Buska

    Operating

    Buying intent, found in public posts

    Co-founder & CTO · 2023–

  • PressPilot

    Live

    AI-written press releases

    Founder · 2023

  • Lootingg

    Ended

    Invest in gaming talent

    Founder & CPO · 2022–2023

  • Peenut

    Ended

    Short-form takes on the news

    Founder · 2020–2021

  • Carimmat

    Closed

    Dating by license plate

    Founder & Product Manager · 2019–2023

  • NiceCactus

    Exited

    Esports SaaS for players and teams

    Co-founder & CPO · 2017–2019

12 products · 3 live · 1 exited

5.2 Track record

  1. Founder & Product Engineer

    Independent

    A focused year building and validating AI products end to end, from customer discovery and architecture through code, deployment, pricing and go-to-market.

    • Senthor, a paywall for AI crawlers: co-founder and CEO, my main focus from September 2025 to April 2026. Validated the opportunity and explored fundraising before pausing active development based on market timing
    • Relaunched Buska in April 2026 after rebuilding the product and its positioning, then grew MRR by roughly 40% month over month over the following five months
    • Launched smaller products to test new markets quickly, including Atyla and uwait
    • Private MRR, open source: a self-hosted Android and Node.js system aggregating revenue across several Stripe accounts in real time

  2. Product Manager, then Interim CEO

    Taplio

    Joined as Product Manager in September 2024 to help rebuild Taplio after lempire acquired it, and was promoted to Interim CEO in December, with revenue already falling.

    • Led a five-person team and set the product direction for the turnaround
    • The seven-day trial converted users to paid before the product had delivered enough recurring value: 93% of new trial users churned within their first month
    • Studied the behavior of long-term customers, interviewed retained users and rebuilt activation around the workflows most closely associated with retention
    • First-month churn among new trial users fell from 93% to 40%, and ARR went from €5M to €7M between December 2024 and March 2025, without raising prices or increasing acquisition

  3. Product Manager

    lemlistRecommended for this role

    Joined lemcal’s initial three-person product team, a Calendly competitor built around ultra-personalisation.

    • Owned product, positioning, marketing and acquisition within the initial three-person team, working alongside the engineering team
    • Took the product from concept to €50k ARR within six months of launch, by making the booking page a piece of personal branding rather than a utility
    • More than 1,000 existing Calendly users switched to lemcal
    • Ran the go-to-market and the launch campaigns

  4. Founder & CEO

    CarimmatRecommended for this role

    A consumer app that matches people by licence plate. Founded, funded and run from concept to 200,000 registered users.

    • Owned product, go-to-market, acquisition, fundraising and company operations
    • Built and managed a five-person team
    • 200,000 registered accounts, €500k raised, national television, radio and press coverage, and a Smart Mobility Award at VivaTech
    • Stepped back from day-to-day operations in early 2023 to join lempire

  5. Co-founder · CMO, then CPO

    NiceCactusExited 2019

    Co-founded as Esport-Management, later NiceCactus. Esports SaaS in Sophia-Antipolis, helping players and teams turn professional.

    • As part of the founding team, helped raise €12M and grow the company to nearly 100 employees
    • As CMO, directly managed an eight-person marketing team whose campaigns, partnerships, events and media operations acquired 1.5 million registered users in 18 months
    • As CPO, set product vision, priorities and quality bar in daily partnership with an engineering organisation of roughly 60 people
    • Helped create the first esports insurance, with AXA France
    • Exited in 2019 by selling my shares. The company continued without me

  6. CMO, then CTO

    Riskattitude

    Natural-hazard startup. Ran marketing and communications, then moved into a part-time technical role and built the Risk@lertes mobile app and website while launching NiceCactus.

    • Joined NiceCactus full-time after its funding round

5.3 Capabilities

Product

Customer discovery · Activation and retention · Product strategy · Pricing and monetisation · Zero-to-one · Product-led growth · Go-to-market · PostHog · Stripe · Figma

Leadership

Cross-functional leadership · Product turnarounds · ARR growth · Churn reduction · Fundraising · Hiring and team management · Multi-team product leadership

Engineering

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

06Proposed approach for the first months

Stage

Understand

What happens

The team, the customers, the data and the constraints. What has already been tried, and what the people here believe is true.

Stage

Ship something useful

What happens

A first real improvement in production, once the context is clear enough to pick the right one. Trust is easier to earn with a shipped change than with a plan.

Stage

Clarify and compound

What happens

Priorities and decision rules written down. A discovery and learning cadence that fits this organisation and keeps running when I am away.

07Risks & mitigations

Risk

He runs his own products. Will he be distracted?

Mitigation

A full-time role would become my primary and exclusive professional commitment. My current products require minimal involvement, and Buska can be handed over to my co-founder.

Risk

A founder who cannot take a brief.

Mitigation

Close to two years as a PM at lemlist, inside someone else's product org and someone else's priorities, then a team of five at Taplio. References available.

Risk

Too hands-on. Will not delegate.

Mitigation

I code to prototype and to unblock, not to own the codebase. At lemcal and Taplio the engineers built the product and I did not.

Risk

Based in Perpignan, not in your office.

Mitigation

Remote-first for years, available immediately, and able to align with US working hours during the relocation process. Open to relocating anywhere in the United States once work authorization allows.

08Rollout plan

  • Week 0: a thirty-minute call. You describe the problem; I tell you honestly if I am the wrong person.
  • Then: your normal process. I am happy to work through a real problem of yours as an exercise, written or live, whichever tells you more.
  • If we go ahead: a clear first objective and the metric attached to it, agreed before I start.

If the first call makes it clear I am the wrong fit, I will say so. That is cheaper for both of us than finding out in month three.

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.

✓ ApproveRequest changes