I quit all I had in France a year ago. Software engineer job, flat in Lyon (France), sold most of my belongings and went in Asia with a one-way ticket and my 50 backpack ~ 9kg inc. the MacBook.
Freedom drove me: the freedom to go wherever I want, whenever I want, doing whatever I want. Leaving France was motivated by the willing to unleash my entrepreneurial spirit.
I wasn’t sure what I was gonna do: freelancing, remote work, indie hacking, etc
The first few months of travel got me thinking a lot, and at a point I met this French entrepreneur (owning 3 digital agencies), during our discussion one point got me thinking for weeks, after I asked him what brought him to his current position: “I kept doing what I loved to do until people where willing to pay me for it”
That triggered this question within me: wtf can I do that I actually love to do?
My life has so many different phases, from bartender in NYC, to carpenter in New-Zealand, to Engineer in the aluminum industry with international customers, to software eng in a French startup. I was like: fk, what’s the common element in this sh*t. What do I love to do. After weeks of background thinking it was cristal clear: I love to solve problems, and I love to build solutions for it.
That’s where I started my indie hacker journey, one year ago. Then, long story short:
- challenged myself for the first saas: created a WhatsApp bot integrating ai in couple of weeks (focusing on audio transcription as pain point)
- Then seeing the potential of AI, created another WhatsApp bot that would integrste everything (text, audio, image, etc) - which didn’t solve any problem, except leveraging WhatsApp to make AI more accessible
- Then created couple of free stuff, worldll•e (a bot posting daily pics representing the world based on the previous day’s news), and another stuff to interact with Karl Marx books
All my projects were drivent by technological curiosity, each of them allowed me to go deeper into using and applying AI (for instance, the “Karl Marx” was my way to use and understand langchain, , embedding, vector databases / pinecone).
First first project was making ~$150/ mo, from AI directories and couple of newsletters it’s been published in.
The second WhatsApp bot was killed, it got spammed in Facebook group in North Africa and India and got me into issues with Meta, ending up with my business account being banned.
Then I came a cross this AI influencer tweet lot of people have seen “we made $70k by selling 1$/min audio of an influencer on telegram”.
I was like: “fck META and WhatsApp, I need to try Telegram. Let’s explore the text-to-speech and custom LLMs and build an AI girlfriend”. I focused on the erotic part of it to differentiate it a bit. First month it made $800. The lots of ups and downs. Most of my traffic is coming from AI directories, since i was one of the first ones to register it on it (did this saas over the week end at first, it was 6 month ago).
It went to $2k, up to $4k at a point, now in between $2.2k and $3k. But I never did marketing, thinking that I don’t like this industry. I always hide myself in technological / features / experience improvement. Always avoiding the marketing. Why? There’s actually a lot of potential in this business. Health, wealth and relationship are 3 axis that will always make money. I had LOADS of times of introspections, hips of downs, some ups of course, here’s what I realised:
- I’ve been through the poorest phase of my life while being in Bali, had no savings left, needed to live on a ~15-30$ / day revenue (still had to pay some services and APIs with it)-> I had to deconstruct my occidental vision or financial security. Learn to live with almost nothing, with max 3-4 days of financial vision (the time Stripe takes to forward incomes to bank account). It totally changed my way of thinking.
- I was missing a goal: I was seeking “financial freedom”. But what is it? How much do I need to generate? Not having a number on it was the best way to not achieve this goal.
- I became dependent of a project I didn’t like: the ai girlfriend. It was (and is) keeping me alive, and somehow blocked myself from pushing it for ethical reasons, and afraid of being labelled as the “ai girlfriend” guy. but really: who gives a sht? Relationships & sex is taboo even though part of our daily life. Still, I went into the tech rabbit hole with always avoiding any marketing and trying to fix/improve the product, that even brought me to another thought:
- Am I afraid of success? Am I afraid of making money? As weird as it sounds, I believe the last 6 months were actually a transition of the employee version of me, dreaming of entrepreneurship, to be an actual entrepreneur. Believing in myself. I’m always harsh on myself, which makes it hard to consider wins, even the smallest ones, but as well pushes me to keep going. In December I had 3 weeks of holiday in Vietnam with a friend, the first self-paid holiday. Not touching the laptop, and money was still flowing in. That’s a huge step.
So now, here I am, got two products with market fit: $150 MRR, and $2.2k MRR. Did the strict minimum for it marketing-wise.
Im in Bangkok since 3 weeks, heading back to Bali next week, and a clearer vision, after months of evolutions, learnings, ups and down. And my goal is simple: Break. This. Fkg. Glass. Ceiling. My. Mind. Created.
How?
1. Growing these two products
- Reduce churn = improve experience
- Increase conversion = rework LP and offers
- Increase traffic = MARKETING
This post is a way for me to be accountable to ANNIHILATE this mind-made glass ceiling.
I’ll be sharing stuff again on twitter, @maelus_ - I’d love to connect with other indiehackers - could even Meetup if you’re in Bali / Bangkok / France, world is small when travelling & indiehacking.
Also, AMA
maelus
Freedom drove me: the freedom to go wherever I want, whenever I want, doing whatever I want. Leaving France was motivated by the willing to unleash my entrepreneurial spirit.
I wasn’t sure what I was gonna do: freelancing, remote work, indie hacking, etc
The first few months of travel got me thinking a lot, and at a point I met this French entrepreneur (owning 3 digital agencies), during our discussion one point got me thinking for weeks, after I asked him what brought him to his current position: “I kept doing what I loved to do until people where willing to pay me for it”
That triggered this question within me: wtf can I do that I actually love to do?
My life has so many different phases, from bartender in NYC, to carpenter in New-Zealand, to Engineer in the aluminum industry with international customers, to software eng in a French startup. I was like: fk, what’s the common element in this sh*t. What do I love to do. After weeks of background thinking it was cristal clear: I love to solve problems, and I love to build solutions for it.
That’s where I started my indie hacker journey, one year ago. Then, long story short:
- challenged myself for the first saas: created a WhatsApp bot integrating ai in couple of weeks (focusing on audio transcription as pain point)
- Then seeing the potential of AI, created another WhatsApp bot that would integrste everything (text, audio, image, etc) - which didn’t solve any problem, except leveraging WhatsApp to make AI more accessible
- Then created couple of free stuff, worldll•e (a bot posting daily pics representing the world based on the previous day’s news), and another stuff to interact with Karl Marx books
All my projects were drivent by technological curiosity, each of them allowed me to go deeper into using and applying AI (for instance, the “Karl Marx” was my way to use and understand langchain, , embedding, vector databases / pinecone).
First first project was making ~$150/ mo, from AI directories and couple of newsletters it’s been published in.
The second WhatsApp bot was killed, it got spammed in Facebook group in North Africa and India and got me into issues with Meta, ending up with my business account being banned.
Then I came a cross this AI influencer tweet lot of people have seen “we made $70k by selling 1$/min audio of an influencer on telegram”.
I was like: “fck META and WhatsApp, I need to try Telegram. Let’s explore the text-to-speech and custom LLMs and build an AI girlfriend”. I focused on the erotic part of it to differentiate it a bit. First month it made $800. The lots of ups and downs. Most of my traffic is coming from AI directories, since i was one of the first ones to register it on it (did this saas over the week end at first, it was 6 month ago).
It went to $2k, up to $4k at a point, now in between $2.2k and $3k. But I never did marketing, thinking that I don’t like this industry. I always hide myself in technological / features / experience improvement. Always avoiding the marketing. Why? There’s actually a lot of potential in this business. Health, wealth and relationship are 3 axis that will always make money. I had LOADS of times of introspections, hips of downs, some ups of course, here’s what I realised:
- I’ve been through the poorest phase of my life while being in Bali, had no savings left, needed to live on a ~15-30$ / day revenue (still had to pay some services and APIs with it)-> I had to deconstruct my occidental vision or financial security. Learn to live with almost nothing, with max 3-4 days of financial vision (the time Stripe takes to forward incomes to bank account). It totally changed my way of thinking.
- I was missing a goal: I was seeking “financial freedom”. But what is it? How much do I need to generate? Not having a number on it was the best way to not achieve this goal.
- I became dependent of a project I didn’t like: the ai girlfriend. It was (and is) keeping me alive, and somehow blocked myself from pushing it for ethical reasons, and afraid of being labelled as the “ai girlfriend” guy. but really: who gives a sht? Relationships & sex is taboo even though part of our daily life. Still, I went into the tech rabbit hole with always avoiding any marketing and trying to fix/improve the product, that even brought me to another thought:
- Am I afraid of success? Am I afraid of making money? As weird as it sounds, I believe the last 6 months were actually a transition of the employee version of me, dreaming of entrepreneurship, to be an actual entrepreneur. Believing in myself. I’m always harsh on myself, which makes it hard to consider wins, even the smallest ones, but as well pushes me to keep going. In December I had 3 weeks of holiday in Vietnam with a friend, the first self-paid holiday. Not touching the laptop, and money was still flowing in. That’s a huge step.
So now, here I am, got two products with market fit: $150 MRR, and $2.2k MRR. Did the strict minimum for it marketing-wise.
Im in Bangkok since 3 weeks, heading back to Bali next week, and a clearer vision, after months of evolutions, learnings, ups and down. And my goal is simple: Break. This. Fkg. Glass. Ceiling. My. Mind. Created.
How?
1. Growing these two products
- Reduce churn = improve experience
- Increase conversion = rework LP and offers
- Increase traffic = MARKETING
- Then going back to what I actually miss and love: Building new stuff. Fkg miss it. We should focus on what work yes, but as well focus on what drives us, and for me it’s the curiosity and the challenges a new product brings. But first, I need to hack and unlock marketing for me.
This post is a way for me to be accountable to ANNIHILATE this mind-made glass ceiling.
I’ll be sharing stuff again on twitter, @maelus_ - I’d love to connect with other indiehackers - could even Meetup if you’re in Bali / Bangkok / France, world is small when travelling & indiehacking.
Also, AMA
maelus
