I did it! I MADE MY FIRST ONLINE DOLLARS 🥳🥳 And I didn’t launched yet, this is coming from pre-order! Here is how I went from 0 to 1: Back in October 2025, I left France and moved to Bangkok. A few months earlier, my second startup had failed and my relationship had ended around the same time. I had a bit of savings left, and that was pretty much it I picked Bangkok mostly because life there is a lot cheaper. With what I had saved, it gave me some time to build something without having to take a job right away Since I got here, I've launched 2 SaaS projects The first one is a domain name generator. A small app that took me 2 months to built. That’s the first time I’m making an app, so I had to figure out everything from scratch It worked great but I understood something about the kind of product it is: you look for a domain name once or twice a year, not more It's not the kind of tool people come back to every month. So it's been great for learning the ropes and figuring out how to build and ship something on my own, but it's not the thing that's going to take off That was my first real lesson: a product can be well built and still never turn into something you can live off What matters isn't just whether it's doable or useful. It's whether people need it regularly, and whether you're building on something where you actually have an edge So I changed my approach. Instead of looking for a clever idea, I went back to the one thing I do for years: SEO. Before I got into SaaS, I did SEO consulting for some of the biggest French companies, and I ran my own SEO agency for 13 years I decided to build a tool that automates what I've been doing by hand for years: putting together SEO strategies for clients It crawls the site, maps it against competitors, and spots the gaps competitors rank for and you don't. From there it builds a complete SEO roadmap with site structure, keyword clusters and a content plan to turn SEO from a vague to-do into a clear plan you can actually follow Then I started talking about it and doing a few demos, found people who were interested and today I got my first customer: $49 The road's still long and it's clearly a hard one I often feel lonely, there are a lot of obstacles to get through and plenty of moments of doubt But things are moving, little by little. It's the first concrete sign that I'm heading in the right direction!

May 2026 - Month #5: 🏠Expenses: $1698 💸Total expenses since the beginning of my journey: $8334 📈Total revenue: $0 💰Remaining runway: 89% It's been a pretty tough month I've been working non-stop. No fun and little downtime I had a minor health issue and my A/C broke down, which forced me to spend more on runway than planned But my projects are progressing and I'll have some news to share pretty soon!

Day 1 of building SnappyName's SEO Ahrefs profile right now: > DR 0 > 53 backlinks (all spam bait from SEO farms) Now I've got 74 real directories lined up to submit to Let's see what this looks like in 30 days

Noticed a pattern on SnappyName generator page: people land, look at the empty input, have to decide what to type That tiny decision is enough to lose them A blank field is friction So I stole ChatGPT's one-tap chips = Try the tool without typing anything

First months of indie hacking is pure adrenaline Empty inbox = blank playground. Every shipped feature counts double Same energy as 2013 when I launched my SEO agency 13 years later I know exactly where this leads: you build, you iterate, it takes off 🔥

Some mornings, you open the laptop and the chart smiles back

You know the painkiller VS vitamin product concept? A painkiller is the guy who pulls out his card before even reading the landing page. A vitamin is 14-day free trials, 3 follow-up emails and 80% churn But it could get worse. I’ve thought about 2 app categories every maker should avoid building at all costs A perfume An app that smells nice but cures nothing. If it disappeared tomorrow, your user’s day would be exactly the same. It elevates no one, it decorates Ex: a custom iOS icon pack You pay a subscription so your existing apps look different, and you do the exact same thing as before. Free signups, but nobody ever pays The trap: no incremental pivot is possible. You can adjust a painkiller’s pricing, reposition a vitamin as prevention for a future pain But a perfume? The value simply doesn’t exist in the “problem-solving” dimension. The only viable pivot is to throw the product away A candle An app whose underlying tech is being disrupted while you’re cooking it. The whole market is shifting to tech X, and you’re building with what X is replacing Ex: a non-AI translation app, a DeepL clone. Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini translate better, contextually, in any language, for free, in every surface where the user is already writing The trap: You’re building on sand with the tide rising… Your app is already doomed before it’s even fully built The cruel part about perfumes and candles is that at first they smell nice and light up the room a little You only realize you've wasted your time when nobody buys

If I weren't single, I think my gf would go completely crazy seeing me talking to "Claude" all day ("Claude" is a French female given name)

How a $12 domain quietly caps your SEO forever You're vibe coding your link-in-bio app for local shops & restaurants: one URL with menu, booking, address Ready to ship, you need a domain that pops Go Namecheap > "Spotlink" is available in .so Perfect name for your app, right? What you didn't see before hitting the "Buy" button: – 2 established companies already rank on "Spotlink" > your app will never crack page 1 on Google – Every social handle is taken > you're stuck with @Get_spotlink or @Spotlink_app Meanwhile, plenty of better names had the .com free, all handles open, and Google waiting for your app to fill the SERP I built SnappyName because "available" doesn't mean "viable"

My family wants me to come back to France so badly that they’re willing to lend me money to buy a small apartment in France But no, I won’t return to the hell that is France. Accepting this offer would mean giving up on my dream of living off my SaaS, because even if my parents are lending me the money and will be less strict than a bank, I’d still have to pay them back And for that, I’d have no other option but to find a job again So no, it’s a hard pass. I’d rather try the indie hacking adventure until the end of my runway, possibly come back to France at 50 with nothing left in 4 years, and find a job then if I need to My freedom to do what I want is more important than the security of having four walls that will belong to me in 20 years, which would cost me much more than money

I've changed strategy. SnappyName is no longer based solely on affiliation @Namecheap only pay a commission for new customers. Since you're all already Namecheap customers, I'd never make a single dollar🤷‍♂️ So I'm trying a different business model > Domain name generation and real-time verification of extension availability are free and unlimited > Competition analysis on Google and social handles availability checking is "semi-free" = you can use it for free with a quota Let's see what happens!

Starting the day with migrating several apps across 3 VPS A relax bit of work for a Sunday 😄 Who else is on the front lines today?

Now that I’m officially in the indie hacking adventure too, I’m going to do a monthly recap to track my progress April 2026 - Month 4: 🏠 Expenses: $1594 💵 Total revenue: $0 > SnappyName: $0 💰Remaining runway: 91.3% Not giving up, the marathon has only just begun!