Bonjour ! I’m Benjamin Houy!

Accidental marketer learning how to code and sharing my journey building a language learning SaaS. Founder of French Together. I share the good, the bad and the ugly here but mostly on Twitter. Follow me there

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?...

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....

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

A 10-Minute Guide to Finding Low Competition, High Traffic Keywords

You may have heard of unicorn keywords: low competition, high volume keywords. Some say they are extinct. Others say they are so plentiful in some niches that any blog can easily rank without backlinks. As often, the truth lies somewhere in between. One thing is for certain though, finding them isn’t always easy. Let’s discover how to find these mythical creatures no matter what niche you are in! Note: The techniques in this article will help you find potential low competition keywords but not all of the keywords you will find will be low competition....

July 16, 2020 · 7 min · 1289 words · Benjamin Houy