Bonjour ! I’m Benjamin Houy!

Indie founder behind French Together, a language learning SaaS at $10K MRR. Self-taught coder. Recently shut down Lorelight after realizing I was solving a problem that didn’t need a separate tool. Back to focusing on what works: expanding French Together to more languages. I share the wins, the mistakes, and everything in between.

Why I'm Shutting Down Lorelight (And What It Taught Me About GEO)

I’m shutting down Lorelight. Not because it didn’t work. Not because I ran out of money. But because I realized something that probably should have been obvious from the start. Let me explain. What Was Lorelight? A few months ago, I launched Lorelight—a generative engine optimization (GEO) platform designed to help businesses improve their visibility in AI search engines like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity. The pitch was simple: as more people use AI to find information, brands need to optimize for these new platforms. Lorelight would track your brand mentions in ChatGPT, monitor visibility across AI-generated answers, and help you understand what was driving citations in AI search results. ...

October 31, 2025 · 6 min · 1078 words · Benjamin Houy

The unexpected end of the slow, ramp of death

6 months ago, I had just finished creating my first SaaS: the French Together app. My goal was simple: launch it and reach $20k MRR. Writing this, I can’t help but laugh. $20k MRR for a first SaaS? Really? Only 2 types of people would set such an ambitious goal: Someone who never launched a SaaS Someone who launched hundreds of SaaS Let’s find out how it went, shall we? The big launch ...

November 1, 2022 · 9 min · 1874 words · Benjamin Houy

The 27 tools I use to grow my online business

People often ask me what tools I use to build and grow French Together so I thought I would put together a list of my favorites. These are not necessarily the best and trendiest tools, some may even be considered old-fasshioned. But they are the tools that help me build and grow my business. Here they are! Basic tools you need to grow your online business Tech stack The French Together and Grow With Less blogs run on WordPress. Not fashionable but works great and loads fast enough for my needs. ...

October 30, 2022 · 7 min · 1427 words · Benjamin Houy

My SEO traffic collapsed so I built a SaaS (Early 2022 retrospective)

Sometime last year, I decided to turn the French Together course (a self-study French course for English speakers) into a language learning app. This was done in 3 steps: Learning how to code Building the French Together app Launching Here is how I went about each step and what I learned a long the way! Step 1: The decline (or why I learned how to code) After years of growth, my blog French Together started dropping in March 2021. ...

May 9, 2022 · 9 min · 1768 words · Benjamin Houy

A Quick and Easy Win for the New Year (and an Important Check)

2020 is finally over (thank God.) Which means it’s time for some New Year cleaning. You may have articles or copyright notices that reference previous years. Now is the perfect time to update these and make sure they say “2021” and not “2020” or even “2019.” To find pages referencing previous years, head to Google and search: site:example.com intitle:2020 site:example.com inurl: 2020 The first query will give you a list of pages with “2020” in the title such as “The Best Free Software of 2020 - PCMag UK” or “16 Back-to-School Recipes for the Weirdness of 2020”. ...

January 14, 2021 · 2 min · 258 words · Benjamin Houy