A few days ago, someone asked on Women Make: “ How do you manage your health in addition to your projects? ”. We had a talk about this topic and I shared how I recently changed my habits for the better. I thought that I could write a quick article about it, about my own experience.
After a down period and years of overwork, I started to put in place changes in my life a few months ago. In this article, I’m sharing what are these new habits. I’m not a doctor, I’m not giving specific advice. The only thing I can assure is that I’m going much better.
Admit there is something wrong
Last February, a bad event happened to Vincent and me on social media. We faced many aggressive people on Twitter after someone wrote an angry thread about Threader. We took a hit, it affected both of us a lot. Our morale was down and we were exhausted.
The positive consequence is that the impact it had on us made us stop, think, and talk. The truth is it was “the straw that broke the camel’s back” (fun fact: the equivalent in French would be: “the drop that makes the vase overflow”). After years of overwork and unhealthy work/life balance, we decided to quit our laptops and have a break.
For 2 weeks, we almost didn’t touch our computers, only the minimum. You might think it’s a regular holiday, but for two persons like us who almost didn’t take any vacation in several years, this was a lot to us. That was a first accomplishment: letting go.
We rested. And we talked. We did almost nothing, and it was so good! We went out to visit the place we were currently living in. We realized that we had to make some changes. I think we knew it from some time but kept denying it. The main reason was “We will relax and take a break when our products are enough profitable”. Which is dumb. Because you never rest, end up burned out and can’t finish the race.
Anyway, this grueling event was the trigger for a reflection on our lives. We started a work of deconstruction of our bad habits.
Time for a change
The first step was to admit we couldn’t go on like this. The next one was to put in place new rules and healthier habits. So here’s what I’ve put in place and practiced for the last 6 months.
Social media
This decision was linked to what happened and that I described above. We cut pretty much all social media for several weeks. I was only checking our business-related accounts once every one or two days to be sure everything was going well and answer our customers.
In particular, Twitter is a great tool, but it can also be harmful. I could write a full article on this topic. With time, I started to get back to it little by little. I still don’t check my personal account that often. Some people may think that it’s not great for business (“You need to build an audience”, etc.). But that’s what I needed and I’m good with it.
Regular breaks
Sounds obvious but it was hard for me and it still is 6 months later. “20 more minutes” turns into “1 hour” so easily. I’m still using this app from Akshay Kadam, Away From Keyboard, which reminds me every hour how much time I spent in front of my computer. It doesn’t mean I always respect the one-break-every-hour-rule, but at least I know for how long I haven’t been moving my butt from the chair.
Read
Reading has helped me to think of something else rather than work all the time. It’s a great way for me to take a break and let my brain wander. I also made a change in my kind of reads. I used to read mostly business-related books, which is good to learn, but it felt like I wasn’t resting, rather still working. I switched to a lot of fictions and novels, which I love! For me, it has also been a way to be more creative.
I’m glad that I reconnected with books because I love reading but I kind of “forgot” about it. In March I bought many books and started to read again. To put that in perspective, I read more in a month than in 2018! I know, crazy. And it felt so good!
📚 2019 is the year I read again.
At least my recent burnout would have been helpful for this. I still suck at meditation but reading is a great way for me to relax. 🧘♀️
So far I read more in 1.5 months than in a year! (I know, I haven’t been reading a lot in 2018…) pic.twitter.com/AGY2yiwMSg
We were always talking about trying this and that, but rarely doing it. We decided to buy skateboards since we were talking about it for some time. And it was so much fun! Until I injured my knee… The point is: we have the right to enjoy life and do fun stuff. There are not only work plans but also life plans. Hobbies are a part of it.
Now we go out more often, discover the cities we’re living in, go to the park, have a beer, get breakfast outside, visit monuments near our place, etc. I don’t want to wake up too late, realizing most of my life is done already when I should have taken advantage of it when I was younger.
Sport
Everyone is aware that sport is good for both physical and mental health, I’m not revealing anything new. I got back to sport a few weeks ago after months of inactivity due to my knee injury. I can already see the difference. I feel more tonic, and happier after I ran. I particularly enjoy going after I wake up so I can start the day fresh.
Sleep
I didn’t realize my sleep was so bad. I was having trouble getting asleep, I was waking up many times during the night. I accumulated a debt of sleep for years. When we did our break last February, we took two decisions. 1) remove all screens from our bedroom, and 2) delete our morning clock alarms. The first one allowed to partially fix our sleep. I was impressed by how much impact it had, and I still do. The second allowed to pay off our sleep debt.
For the first weeks, we were waking up almost at noon! I was feeling a bit shameful about it, but the thing is we needed it. With time we woke up earlier and earlier until reaching what I would call a regular hour. Now I know not everyone has the luxury to do that, but it was beneficial to both of us.
I’m currently reading an amazing book about this topic, Why We Sleep: Unlocking The Power Of Sleep And Dreams. I really recommend it. I learned a lot.
Listen to me
I use to ignore my feelings and body signals. When I was tired or anxious, I was adopting the “ignore it and it will pass” method, which I don’t recommend. I’m being more attentive to the signs. When I have a headache or feel tired or anxious, I take a break. I acknowledge that my body is trying to talk to me, that I should listen to it and understand where it comes from.
Sometimes I just need a break. Sometimes I know I need to call it a day. And that’s okay. If I keep forcing I will feel even worse after and get a headache for 2 days. It isn’t worth it and I can start fresh the next day.
Reenlist for 6 months and more
I don’t have any secret sauce and I still have much more work to do. I made huge improvements and I’m happy to see my progress over time. I might add more new healthy habits in my life, though my current goal is to stick to it for 6 more months. I know how easy it can be to plunge back and get back to my bad habits. I know, I sound a lot like an Alcoholics Anonymous member, I’m pretty sure there are some similarities.
Overall I feel in much better shape, both physically and mentally. I sleep better. My global level of anxiety has reduced quite a lot. I’m not less productive. I work less but I don’t progress more slowly. Most importantly, I enjoy life more.
I recently realized it’s been a year already. A year Vincent and I left Paris. A year we became nomads. A year we started our indie journey. I thought it was probably a good time to write a summary of the past year.
Sometimes I feel like I did not accomplish much. So I thought of going over the past year to see what we have achieved. It actually restored my energy and was an opportunity to define what’s coming next.
October 2017, bye bye Paris
October is the month we decided to leave Paris. We were tired of the Parisian startup ecosystem: it just didn’t fit us. The city was too expensive for us and we were not fully taking advantage of it. We also definitely needed some fresh air. We changed both our professional and personal lifestyles by becoming nomads and indie makers.
Neither our families nor our friends understood our decision, but we knew it was what we wanted to do. Since we had a car, we decided to start a Tour de France and discover the beautiful regions of our country.
November 2017, new life beginning
We chose Brittany as our first destination and ended up in Dinard. It’s a region we wanted to see and it wasn’t far from Normandy where we were going to visit our families for Christmas anyway. So far, it’s still one of our favorite destinations among all.
The region is absolutely beautiful; I could make an entire album of their empty beaches in Autumn. There are a lot of places to visit in this area. And kouign amann of course, which is a local pastry mainly consisting of butter and sugar.
Product Hunt was organizing a remote hackathon during November and we decided to take part. It was an opportunity to build something in a month, and we needed the breath of fresh air after spending a year working on a single app. We already had ideas we wanted to work on. The first one was Threader (named Feathure at the time), an iOS app offering a selection of Twitter threads and displaying them nicely in a single view; and Emoji Search bar, an iOS custom emoji keyboard with a search bar to easily find the emoji you’re looking for.
It was probably not a good idea to start two projects at the same time because we hadn’t finish any of them at the end of the month. But at least we had two prototypes, people interested in our products and we did talk publicly about what we were building. In a word: improving.
December 2017, sad Christmas
This was honestly a really tough month. One of our dogs died. We were really close to her. It was devastating to us and we weren’t able to work properly for several weeks. We also came back to visit our families for Christmas and without going into details, it didn’t go well. Yeah, it was definitely a shitty month.
January 2018, back to work
New year, new place. We spent the month in Noirmoutier. Although it is a popular beach resort, it was totally empty at this time of the year. It was really cool to have all the beaches to ourselves. The place is beautiful.
It was also time to get back to our projects. We had built two prototypes during November and wanted to work on them in order to launch. However, we were not satisfied with Emoji Search Bar so we made a v2. We had no idea a keyboard could be that difficult to build. That’s when we understood how good was the work Apple had done on their keyboard. There are many things we don’t see and which are hard to reproduce. It’s easy to create a bad user experience. It wasn’t smooth enough, so we worked more on it. Regarding Threader, we were on the right tracks and hoping to launch the next month.
That month was a mentally challenging too since I lost both my grandfathers within a week. I was coming back from the funeral of the first one when the second one passed away. On top of them passing away, I had to come back and forth between places to attend both funerals and be with my family.
February 2018, Threader’s launch
Vincent and I wanted to try the countryside to see if we’d like it. We cleverly picked the coldest month of the year to spend four weeks in the middle of nowhere in an old and rustic house. It was f***ing freezing! As it turned out, that was definitely too much countryside for us. We were too isolated, it was too cold and the Internet was really bad, which really didn’t help since that’s when we launched Threader.
Our app was validated and published a few days after submitting to the App Store. We officially launched it right after on Twitter. We didn’t have many followers, so it was not explosive (0 RTs and 6 likes on my launch tweet to be exact). However, Chris Messina had already noticed us before, and he offered to hunt us on Product Hunt. The inventor of the hashtag, hunting our Twitter client! It was one of our first moment of glory. It’s obviously what we could call a vanity metric, but still… We were excited! It was also our first launch on Product Hunt.
We received something like 150 upvotes but got feedback and users who are still using the app today. We also got featured in the “New Apps We Love” on the App Store which got us 2,700+ downloads. That was more than a decent launch to us!
February is also the month I wrote my first article, a tutorial to submit your app to the App Store. We bought AppStoreMakers.com with the idea of making it a platform for developers publishing apps on Apple, but we didn’t do much more about it. We might make it rise from the dead someday.
March 2018, discovering the maker community
We joined wip.chat, an online community for makers, and discovered Telegram at the same time. That’s probably the month I spent the most time on it too, so I haven’t always been at the top of my productivity. It was pretty addictive. Thankfully I recovered. 😉
When starting your entrepreneurial journey, you can’t necessarily rely on your family and friends because they don’t understand what you do. Sometimes I really feel like an alien to them. So finding a community of makers, doing the same things we do and supporting us was greatly helpful. We felt less lonely.
We spent the month in Gironde, near the Bassin d’Arcachon. Way warmer and more comfortable than our previous destination, which was a relief. This is definitely a place to visit if you’re an oysters lover. The Bassin d’Arcachon is bordered with small cities and fishing villages. It’s near the ocean, which we were missing at our previous destination.
During this month we mainly fixed bugs, implemented new features and answered the generous feedback we received from our users. We also replied to the bad ratings we received on the App Store. Users often fail to realize there are actual people behind an app. It’s even harsher in our case: we are two indie developers, not a full department of engineers from a big company. Anyway, we replied to each one of them on the App Store and contacted the people we could find on social networks.
Compilation of our best reviews on the App Store
With a lot of patience, we managed to turn several 1-star reviews into a 3, 4 or 5-star review. Our rating on the App Store affects our ranking, so it was important for us to improve it. Today we have a global rating of 4.3/5 and we want to keep increasing it. We also decided to release Threader in the UK.
Regarding Emoji Search Bar we were still unsatisfied and started to leave it aside.
April 2018, the birth of Women Make
We got back to Normandy and spent a few months on the coast, a place we know well and appreciate. After joining a community of makers, I quickly realized I was struggling to find other women in this industry. This is when I created Women Make, originally named WIP Women, since I started it on wip.chat. As an introvert, it was a real challenge for me to gather women and create a place for us. Vincent was very encouraging, which was a huge support.
The most incredible event of the month was when we got featured as an “App of the Day” in the US and the UK! We couldn’t believe two indie developers had been chosen by Apple among so many apps. We immediately released Threader worldwide hoping to be featured everywhere but it was too late. Anyway, we were still so happy. We got countless downloads and stayed in the top 10 of our category for a few days. If you want to try your luck, I wrote a guide to help you get featured on the App Store.
May, one app in a month
Mid-April, we started working on a new app. Our goal was to prove to ourselves we could shorten our “build and launch” phase again by a bit more and make our first sales. We decided to develop a Mac menu bar app. Although we had never done this before, it seemed feasible in a month and I had experience with iOS, which was definitely helpful for MacOS.
We launched IP Man on Product Hunt as well as on Reddit and Hacker News, which was a first time for us. It was honestly scary and comments could be pretty harsh, but we learned to be less sensitive to this with time. We also got featured on the App Store again! While we are still featured in the “Apps For Developers” section, we don’t sell many anymore.
We made about 220+ sales the first month, and then it slowly went down. To this day, we have made a total of 420+ sales, which represents $1.56k turnover. Minus Apple’s cut (30%) we made about $1.1k. We pushed updates along with new features after the launch, so it actually represents more than a month of work in the end.
Threader only had a landing page at the time. Vincent worked to make the threads readable on the website too, which was going to help us get more traffic and make our iOS app more visible.
June, one app in two weeks
After IP Man, we thought we should launch more apps and decided to develop another Mac menu bar app. We basically reproduced the same process, but faster: app development, find a name, create a logo, prepare all the assets (images, screenshots, demo video, descriptions, etc.), make a landing page and… launch. It took us one week this time.
It went well but we got a bit disappointed. We didn’t get featured on the App Store this time and sold a total of 75 units, meaning $264 in sales, which was $184 after Apple’s cut. Not a success. I think it showed us we shouldn’t expect it to work every time. Launching fast can be fun and give you the confidence that you can actually do it, but it’s not necessarily a good long-term strategy. It got us thinking. We had sold our first apps, but we needed to strategize better to eventually make a living out of this.
In the meantime, we enjoyed a nice place for a few weeks, still in Normandy, and it reconciled us with the countryside. We had amazing weather and tried to take advantage of it, which we often forget to do. We took care of a lovely dog and four hens, enjoyed their eggs we collected every morning, learned how to catch them and put them in their house before the night, walked in the meadow with horses running around us, appreciated the fresh fruits and vegetables from the garden and met amazing people.
July, laptop issues
We didn’t progress as much as we would have liked this month. Did I mention we were still traveling with 2 iMacs? We bought laptops but had to send them back before getting new ones. We spent about two weeks without our computers, which was inconvenient for work.
In the meantime, Women Make was growing. I was still spending quite some time animating, moderating, putting women at the forefront and bringing more people into it. I also started a newsletter, which was new to me. The feedback was great, which motivated me to keep working on it. I also realized I had spent a lot of time on this project and, although it’s for a great cause, I should find a way to monetize it, or at least compensate my hard work.
A mistake we made during these last few months is that we neglected Threader. And it cost us. We were about to realize this.
August, an attempt at making IP Man viable and a common blog
We spent the month near Lyon. The city is really nice. We kept a house and took care of two cats. Although there was a pool to cool down, the heat was unbearable and made it really hard to stay focused and be productive. Fortunately, this heat didn’t last the whole month.
As I already mentioned earlier, we tried to better leverage IP Man, our first paid app. We knew there were customers since we had sold a certain amount of copies. So the MVP was validated. We now needed to make it viable and improve the sales in the long term.
Vincent created a new website to make it look more professional than a simple landing page: he made it look nicer, described the features, added testimonials, etc. We had coupons for Google and Facebook so we decided to try AdWords and Facebook campaigns. It was a total fail. We experimented with A/B testing, tried different phrasings, images, settings, etc. until our coupons ran out. But none of them worked.
On the Women Make front, I launched a patreon. It was time to offer people a way to support the work I had been doing since its creation. There are different tiers and I was so thrilled to see Pieter Levels become my first Top supporter!
August is also the month where Vincent wrote his first article ever and inaugurated our blog twomakers.io with it. Since we’re working together, we created it as a way to write about our common entrepreneurial journey. With this first post, Vincent really opened his heart and shared intimate thoughts. The good surprise is that it made it to the front page of Hacker News! As always there were harsh comments. Since it was pretty personal it was harder to take than when you talk about a product you made. But he also got a lot of very nice comments and encouragements.
Unfortunately, we initially forgot to put a link to the signup form at the bottom of his article and added it after the wave of traffic. This blog post got us 9,200+ visitors and the first 70 subscribers to our mailing list.
Threader celebrated its 6-month anniversary. As I said, we realized we didn’t take care of it as much as we should have. Statistics were slowly going down, I wasn’t pushing as many updates as I used to and Vincent had not improved the site much either. We realized it was time to wake up before it was too late and decided to make it our focus again.
September, Threader back in the game
Our original plan was to head to Spain and then Portugal but our host cancelled. Since we were near the Italian border, we decided to get there. I mean, the food is great, you know? That was enough to convince us.
We spent the month on the Adriatic coast, near Pescara. The city is pleasant: not too big, with enough enjoyable places to visit, and near the sea. We had quite a few nice breakfasts there, drank too much coffee although we had quit, and discovered an Italian speciality, the maritozzi, which consists of a sort of sweet bun filled with whipped cream. I recommend the Cremeria Bresciana if you ever go to Pescara.
We got back working on Threader. Vincent created the bot that allows users to compile a thread from Twitter. It was a good way to bring traffic. On my side, I started implementing in-app purchases and Premium features in our iOS app so we could finally generate some revenue from Threader.
We also spent more time animating the Twitter account, finding new users, pushing our best content on different platforms, sharing updates with our users through email campaigns, etc. Traffic was growing, we were getting more attention and we saw well-known people subscribing to our app, including Twitter employees. Threader also made the front page of Hacker News several times. Threader was back in the game!
Women Make was growing too. Thanks to an opportunity offered by Ben Tossell, I decided to organize a 30-Day Challenge with the community. The goal was to build and launch something during October. I was planning to participate myself and was afraid about not being able to animate the event, work on my own project during it, and keep progressing on Threader at the same time. It was definitely a challenge!
October, the Women Make challenge and our first sales with Threader
October was a food-y month: we ate the best pasta, ravioli and pizza of our Italian trip. We spent the month near Viterbo, between Rome and Florence. We experienced what it’s like to live in an Italian village, which was certainly interesting, although a bit too lonely for us. It was great we got to meet our Airbnb host and his daughter who were both really nice. We also had an amazing time in Rome where we just ate and walked non-stop for three days.
Like I said, the Women Make 30-Day Challenge was a… challenge. October was really busy. I decided to work on a podcast interviewing women entrepreneurs while taking care of the community and managing the challenge and its participants. The podcast in itself was quite scary for me. I detailed this experience a bit more in this post.
It was definitely a good way to celebrate the 6-month anniversary of Women Make. 110+ participants joined and dozens of projects were launched at the end of the month. I was truly impressed by the result.
At the beginning of the month, we also launched Premium on Threader iOS. We were so excited to actually sell subscriptions! We were also anxious about the technical aspect, since it was the first time we were doing this. Unfortunately, we had a few bugs, but the users have been cool about it and we fixed them very quickly.
Some of Threader’s links made the front page of Hacker News, we were #1 and #2 at the same time! It was crazy! This got us about 27,000 visitors on the first day, and we reached 550+ people at the same time on the site. However, we noticed that despite the traffic spike, not that many people ended up subscribing to Threader iOS. We knew we had to bring more features to the site, and this became our next goal.
The 12 next months: the year of profitability
Threader got its first Premium users and the traffic is growing. We released an iPad version and we are working towards adding the iOS features to the site. It will allow us to have more paying customers.
Women Make got its first financial supporters and gained a lot in visibility. I can see women are more and more visible in the maker space so that’s a huge win. I’d like to improve the site so it can be used as a tool and an extension of our Telegram group.
We have so many ideas to implement in both of these projects. Whilst we may not be the fastest shippers in the world, but we know our strength is our long-term vision and the care we put in our products. We both think those are the most important aspects.
Whether it’s Threader or Women Make, we could have taken shortcuts to generate more traffic, get more users, make more money faster. But we really have a long-term plan, and we want to build something durable with strong foundations.
Today our #1 goal is to grow the income of these projects. If we want to make a living from our products, we need to generate more cash. 2018 was about turning our back on our previous lives, getting a fresh start, starting our indie journey, developing and launching products, creating an audience, making our first sales, generating our first recurring revenue, and finding our place as entrepreneurs. 2019 will be the year allowing us to rely solely on this source of income.
On the mental side of things, we also have improvements to make regarding our work/life balance. Photos may be misleading, we actually worked way too much and didn’t take the time to appreciate every place we’ve been to. I think it’s even more challenging when you’re working as a couple. Sometimes it’s hard to draw a line between your personal and professional lives. We also moved a lot and are planning to stay longer in each place, so it’s less tiring.
I don’t know if this article will be useful to other people but I’d be glad if it is. A thousand thanks if you’re supporting one of our products: it’s a big deal to us. I wish you a happy new year and to complete your goals in 2019, whether they’re related to work and entrepreneurship or not.
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Thanks to Clo and Anne-Laure for proof-reading this long article.
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During the Women Make 30 Day Challenge last October, I decided to work on a podcast. I’m revealing the first guest and episode today. Women Make recently celebrated its 6-month anniversary so I thought it would be a great opportunity to go over its history and what led me to launch the Women Make podcast.
Create a place for us
I created this community because I want women to have a place to find support in the maker community. Entrepreneurship already has its hurdles to overcome but it is even more difficult as a woman (and every minority in general).
The impact society has on how we perceive ourselves and what we think we are capable of is incredibly important. I know some women need to know everything is possible and to gain more self-confidence. We live in a world where it can be difficult for us to be taken seriously.
This community was created to help women believe in themselves and know they can be entrepreneurs too. Sometimes they just need a little push. Women Make exists so the ones who already took the plunge can rely on other peers living the same journey. It is a place to find the support you need as a woman maker.
Put women at the forefront
My goal with Women Make is to put women at the forefront. Tech and entrepreneurship in general is male-dominated. If we want to be seen as much as men, we need to make some noise and take more space!
I started this community because I was struggling to get in touch with women makers, but also because I wanted to see more of them in the spotlight. Although things are improving, it is still so much easier to find men role models than women ones.
I have been working towards this goal of shining a light on women makers by sharing updates about women on our Twitter account, by helping our members launching on Product Hunt, by pushing them to write and share their progress publicly, by creating a publication for us on Medium, and by organizing the 30 Day Women Make Challenge. And today, I’m kicking it up a notch by launching a podcast interviewing women makers.
Overcoming my fears
Starting a podcast was actually something pretty scary for me. I’m more of the shy kind type, I don’t think I’m the best at speaking as English is not my native language. I had lots of reasons not to do it. But I thought that all these challenges were probably a good reason to actually do it.
So I got to work. I had no idea how to make a podcast so I did my research. I know fear can be paralyzing so I publicly shared my progress in a Twitter thread to make myself accountable. I was slowly but surely getting there. But obviously that was not the hardest part for me.
I was very nervous before the first interview. My hands were sweaty and my voice not as strong and confident as I wish but surprisingly (or not?) it went super well!
And now here we are! I can proudly share with all of you the work I’ve been doing. Of course it’s not “done” since I’ll be running other interviews but I’m super happy I managed to achieve something I was not sure I was capable of.
Launching the podcast!
Today I’m excited to share with you the first episode of the Women Make podcast. My very first guest is Kate Kendall, founder and CEO of CloudPeeps and The Fetch. I’d like to thank her for accepting my invitation but also because she’s been super nice and made herself available very quickly. I hope you’ll enjoy it!
⭐️ Leave 5 stars on iTunes to help the podcast being more visible (if you liked it)
✅ Subscribe on any podcast platform to get notified when the next episode is out
💬 Send me your feedback and guest suggestions on Twitter (my DMs are open)
Last announcement: as a certain number of the members asked me to, I made stickers & shirts for Women Make and I thought this was a good opportunity to reveal them today! Buy 4 stickers and get 25% off!
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Thank you Anne-Laure for proof reading this article.
October was intense. Indeed, it was the month of the Women Make 30 Day Challenge. And it was freaking awesome!
The 30 Day Challenge: 30 days to build and launch
After 110+ participants joined the challenge, we all started working on October 1st with one goal in mind: build and launch something in 30 days.
It has been really inspiring and motivating since day one. Everyone was discussing their ideas, sharing their todo lists and templates, offering their help… That’s exactly the kind of atmosphere I wanted for this challenge: punchy and friendly at the same time.
When someone was having a hard time or was doubting themselves, the community was here to cheer them up. Our common energy was strong and powerful! Since then, it’s been such a delight to see all the members posting updates and sharing their progress publicly.
A podcast for Women Make
Although I’m the organizer of the 30 Day Challenge –and trust me it had its part of work too– I also participated in the challenge myself. I built Women Make because I wanted to create a place for women to find support in the maker community. But I also have a broader goal which is to put women in the forefront.
There are many talented women in the startup scene we don’t hear about, especially in the traditional media. I want to give them a voice. I want their peers to know they are not alone. And I want them to share their advice to succeed in this industry. This is why I decided to start a podcast.
This has been a totally new experience for me. I really did something I wouldn’t have imagine I could have done even a few months ago. I’m so glad I made it! My first guest is still a surprise… but you can signup here to get notified when I will publish the episode, probably next week.
A common launch
Projects listed on womenmake.com
Today is time to reveal our work to the world and I’m so excited about it! I’m so glad that we built our projects alongside, together, by helping and supporting each other. This challenge was also the opportunity to meet new talented women, as many members joined the community last month.
Thanks to all the participants who took part in this adventure. I couldn’t have dreamed of better peers. One thing is sure: you can be proud of what you have achieved these 30 days!
Now is time for you to check all these awesome projects built during the 30 Day Challenge: Games, books, apps, online schools, job boards, blogs, podcasts… Be amazed by the diversity of our work!
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💬 If you haven’t yet, you should join us on Telegram!
Since this challenge was a success, I’ll probably organize a second edition. I know some people couldn’t make it this month so this will also be the opportunity for them to take part next time.
I’d like to thank newCo which hosted the challenge, all the participants who took a part in it and Anne-Laure for correcting this article among other things.
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From being a young developer to getting stuck in a boring job and finally becoming an entrepreneur
I always liked to build, to make stuff. When I was a teen, I use to spend all my free time studying networks and computers. I wanted to be a cyberpunk, hack things and write sci-fi novels. I was the typical shy geek. One day, I met a guy at school who was working at Microsoft during the summer and he started to develop aesthetic websites. I also had done web development for companies and startups during unpaid internships at the age of 13/14. To be honest, it was not my cup of tea. But I saw the possibility to build something for other people to help them share their knowledge, while building something fun at the same time.
My friend had launched a website which went viral in France. “ProfduBahut.com” was a platform where students could audio record their teachers and spread their best punchlines. I started to spend more and more time to coding/building websites. My biggest fear before every launch was the reaction of the people. It made me anxious to see how my friends would react to what I’ve build. I think it’s a serious problem in our generation. As a young entrepreneur, you can spend a lot of time learning to code or reading books. Sometimes it’s easier and reassuring to avoid the reaction of others by postponing your deadline.
This hesitation and the fear pushed me to wait a long time, to mute my ambitions. Instead of launching products, I tried to do normal things and have a normal job. I wasn’t as shy anymore but I felt sick about what I was doing with my life. Somehow I knew I wasn’t on the right path.
A mid-sized town in France has usually one or two life-paths for young people. If you are lucky, you either go to college or pursue medicine. Being an entrepreneur is definitely not something people would pursue, or even consider/support. All I know of entrepreneurship was from my parents’ experience. They ran several flower stores and their business failed. I felt pain from financial issues early on. While the flower stores of my parents weren’t successful my brother opened a restaurant. He showed me the positive impact a successful business can have on the people’s life.
Mindset
France is a country where failure is a taboo. People see it as unwise to start anything and will try to discourage you. The government isn’t helping by painting a very one-sides picture of entrepreneurs who go on television or get press coverage about the big money they raised. Sometimes this attention can be helpful because it gives you some courage to do what you do. You feel validated. You think you have a proof that what you do is important. You can show it to your family and friends. But this is not real. And with this strategy, toxic people are attracted to it and want to be a part of this hype.
It’s absolutely fine if you don’t want to connect with these people. You’ll find more than enough sparring-partners entrepreneurs on the Internet than at any tech conference worldwide. You don’t need to take selfies with Emmanuel Macron or be invited to the station F (the largest European startup incubator founded by a famous French entrepreneur, Xavier Niel) to be a true startup. It’s fine (and probably better for your business) if you prefer to stay focused on your product while others prefer charming investors.
Nowadays, some people put a lot of effort into letting people think this is the only option. But there are actually others. And take money from other people don’t make you a more credible person. This doesn’t mean I don’t respect entrepreneurs who are VC backed. I want to work on hacky things and ship cool products. With Marie, my partner in crime, we decided only bootstrapping our startups could give us the freedom to create and build what we believe in, make our users happy and earn a living from it.
Our very first product
At the very beginning, we worked on our first project for over one year. “Many” was a messaging app allowing you to automatically record short videos when opening the app. We had big ambitions and our goal was very clear: build something better than Snapchat or Instagram. We wanted to prove that two people in a little apartment could build a better service than billion dollar companies. It was our first mobile product and by far the hardest thing we built.
After the launch, Many got featured by Apple. Our hashtag was in the top trend of Twitter. We saw a huge spike of downloads. But, as so often in the app space, the user retention was very low and we lost the motivation to fix this at the end. Honestly, we felt we’ve spent too much time on the app. Shipping it was our last move to get rid of it.
We were kind of exhausted actually, for several reasons. I mentioned the time spent on it, that’s the first one. We also knew that there is basically only one business model for social networks and we didn’t want to raise money after all, even though that was our objective at first. We also discovered a field where the founders of these messaging apps don’t hesitate to spam address books or inflate their growth’s numbers. It seemed like this was actually pretty common and this was definitely not on our roadmap. We always cared about the privacy of the users and always made clean products.
It’s also difficult when you’re talking about the same project every day for more than a year, we were a bit tired of it. You could think that after finally launching it we would be ready for the next step. But we couldn’t. We both needed change. And I think it’s actually fine. “Many” was probably a necessary step so we can continue our journey. We never launched it on Product Hunt or other platforms. Heavy-hearted we decided it was time to shut it down to be able to move to something new.
Moving forward
In July 2017, while “Many” was live, I saw a guy on the Internet shipping a project named Hoodmaps in public. He live streamed all his work on Twitch. I was deeply impressed and couldn’t believe my eyes. You can see a 2 minutes time lapse of this work here:
This is how I discovered Pieter Levels, which I guess most of you know. His lifestyle and work methods promised an alternative to my way of doing things. Paris felt more and more like a prison where I didn’t see any future. A few weeks later we decided to leave Paris. We sold and stored our furniture and began to plan a road trip to discover our country.
One important takeaway of this trip is you can improvise things. You can start without knowing how to do everything. Learning as you go is possible and often the better approach. You don’t need to have all the skills to make it work. You’ll learn on the way. Two Makers will be the place where we share our story of being digital nomads. We will share what we are working on and what we have learned.
Lastly, I’d like to thank Peter Thaleikis for his precious help. He built startup name check, an awesome service to check the names for your next startup faster.
