this newsletter is where i share everything i build: the numbers, the wins, the failures. so here's who is writing it.

from stage lights to code

i didn't start in tech. i was a lighting engineer. concerts, festivals, film sets, long nights, heavy gear.

i got to work on movies like anna by luc besson and le grand bain by gilles lellouche, with artists like yvan cassar and no one is innocent, and on festivals like rock en seine and solidays.

that's also where i wrote my first lines of code: lua scripts on lighting desks.

light was my job. and it still follows me: my wife is a photographer, so light is basically a family thing 😅

9 years of apps for someone else

then i switched to code. for 9 years i built apps for my 9-5.

along the way i trained in software craftsmanship: tdd, clean code, clean architecture. writing code that lasts, not just code that works.

but i was always building someone else's product.

why indie hacking

at some point i wanted to build my own things. small products, shipped fast, owned by me.

on july 3, 2026, i shipped my first one. built in a day. 0 sales. killed 3 months later. full story here: https://joffreyio.com/p/i-built-my-first-micro-saas-in-a-day-i-killed-it-3-months-later

it failed. but i learned more in 3 months than in years of 9-5.

funny thing: craftsmanship taught me to build things right. indie hacking taught me that building right means nothing if nobody wants it.

a bit more about me

i'm a father of two, 11 and 5 years old. my wife is romanian and lived in spain for almost 20 years, so our home is a mix of france, romania and spain.

when i'm not coding, i'm cooking or listening to music. usually both at the same time, with the kids asking what's for dinner 😅

i also love to travel. bali, thailand, spain, italy, switzerland, guadeloupe, germany, belgium, and of course romania ❤️

next on the list: japan, china, costa rica, the maldives, the seychelles...

my resolutions for 2026

• get back to sport, 5 hours a week

• quit smoking

• go all in on saas, to change my life and be free

writing them here makes them public. so now you can check on me 😅

what you'll get here

no growth hacks. no "i made 10k in 30 days".

just what i build, what it makes, what i kill, and what i learn along the way.

if that sounds good, stay around. and hit reply, tell me what you're building. i read everything.

on july 3, 2026, i shipped my first product: citeable.

the idea: generate llms.txt and schema.org for your site so ai assistants like chatgpt and perplexity can understand it, and maybe cite it.

the mvp took one day. crawl a site, score it, sell the files behind a stripe checkout.

this is the story of what happened next.

the first proof: my wife's website

my wife carmen is a photographer. i ran her site through citeable.

score before: 72.
score after: 100.

that before/after became the hero of my landing page. it was real, and it was the best thing on the page.

the launch

i prepared everything: hacker news, reddit, product hunt, tinylaunch. then i switched to x-first and wrote a 10-day launch calendar.results: ~100 visitors, 0 sales.

lesson: first time i had to face it. distribution is hard.

the pricing rollercoaster

in 4 weeks i changed pricing 5 times. a one-time tier, then a studio tier at 199€, then 3 plans with a monthly agency offer, then i killed the pro plan and dropped solo to 14,90€, then switched everything to usd.

none of it moved the needle. when nobody is buying, pricing is rarely the problem.

the cold email machine

no audience, so i built outreach. google maps to find local businesses (photographers, lawyers, plumbers...) in 12 french cities, a scan of each site, then a 3-email sequence.

490 prospects in the pipeline. when the sending tool's paid plan ran out, i rebuilt the sender myself with smtp and imap. cost: 0€.

the email that stopped everything

one agency replied. not to buy. to tell me my pitch was wrong.

my emails said llms.txt was "the file ai reads first". then i checked the research. a 2026 ahrefs study: 97% of llms.txt files got zero ai-bot traffic across 137k sites. se ranking: no significant link between llms.txt and ai citations
across ~300k domains. google said it doesn't support it.

my own faq already admitted most ai crawlers ignore it. my cold emails said the opposite, to the audience most likely to know.

i stopped all sending that day, and rewrote the copy to claim only what holds.

btw, i also got my first cold email reply. i'll let you translate it 🫠

why i shut it down

no sales, no replies, and i'd lost trust in the product. so i moved on to my next project: proofbench.

what i'm keeping

• shipping in a day works. the hard part was never the code.

• a real proof case beats any marketing copy.

• don't build outreach before you have something people ask for.

• never claim what you can't prove. the market will check.

• distribution is hard.

next up: building proofbench in public. subscribe to follow along, the wins and the failures.