I was living the dream, then my dream collapsed

Benjamin Houy

Everything was going great.

My blog French Together had just hit 357k monthly visitors, the French Together course had exceeded $300k in sales.

Then COVID happened.

My traffic slowly started to decrease, conversions got worse.

I ignored it at first, I guess I was in denial. I kept thinking things would get better and my traffic would magically reappear.

Except it didn’t. It just got worse.

“This is bad Benjamin, your income is way down, mortgage providers are not going to like that. Can you explain what happened? Is it because of COVID?”, my brutally honest accountant asked me.

That’s when it hit me. I couldn’t just keep waiting and hoping things would get back to normal, I needed to act.

So I decided to do something I had wanted to do a very long time: learn how to code and build a SaaS.

The Recovery (And What Came Next)

The good news? I reached my goal. French Together now generates $10K in monthly recurring revenue. I taught myself to code, built the app from scratch, and turned things around.

Traffic did drop significantly—from 200K to 55K monthly visitors. But here’s the counterintuitive part: my income didn’t drop. By focusing on high-intent keywords, improving my funnel, and optimizing conversions, I actually maintained (and grew) revenue with a fraction of the traffic.

But here’s where it gets interesting.

After hitting $10K MRR with French Together, I experienced burnout with the B2C world. Low willingness to pay, high churn, constant customer support—it wore me down. So I decided to try something new: B2B SaaS.

I enrolled in Rob Walling’s SaaS Launchpad course, spent months researching ideas, and launched Lorelight—a generative engine optimization (GEO) platform to help businesses track their brand mentions in AI search engines like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity.

The tool worked. Customers signed up. But they churned.

Why? Because I realized something fundamental: there’s no such thing as “GEO strategy” separate from brand building. The insights Lorelight provided didn’t change what customers needed to do. They would pursue the same brand-building fundamentals whether they had the data or not.

So I shut it down.

What I’m Doing Now

I’m back to focusing on what actually works: building brands through quality, consistency, and genuine value.

French Together is now my main focus again, and I’m excited about what’s next:

Expanding to additional languages beyond French
Rebranding to reflect this broader vision
Launching a mobile app to reach learners where they are
Doubling down on fundamentals instead of chasing shiny objects

What You’ll Find Here

My goal with Grow With Less is to candidly share everything I learn on my journey as an indie founder, including:

What worked.
What didn’t work.
The lessons learned in the process.
The mistakes that cost me time and money (like building tools for problems that don’t need tools).

I believe in building in public and sharing both the wins and the failures. Because sometimes the smartest business decision is recognizing when you’re solving a problem that doesn’t actually need solving.