Game over: why we’re shutting everything down after 3 years of indie hacking.

This is the end of Lutains. 3 years of work going up in smoke, thousands of euros lost, and a violent feeling of failure. This decision was made on Saturday, under gray skies to the sound of sirens and stun grenades right below our window. An ending worthy of the biggest Hollywood movies.

Anyway, I promise not to fall into pathos tonight, because as Naval Ravikant would say:

Don't take yourself so seriously. You're just a monkey with a plan.

A decision that’s been brewing for a while.

I’ve talked about this before, but with Aymeric, we’ve felt out of sync with the direction the web has been taking lately. (AI shares part of the blame here, and the way people use it as well, but that’s another topic.) All of this slowly translated into mental and physical exhaustion, warning signs that, as we know, need to be listened to in order to avoid a catastrophe.
This post is meant to be a post-mortem, a way to turn the page on a project started in 2023 for which we had huge expectations. So here are the mistakes we made, and that we swear not to repeat.

Too slow, the wrong target, in a country that's too expensive.

• A snail’s pace.
  Safe to say we didn’t feel concerned by the “Ship fast, fail fast” mantra preached everywhere in indie hacking. Huge mistake!
  We actually wanted to build something big, something different. But the reality is you’re staring at a 15-inch screen, and the level of experience we wanted to offer was probably… unreachable. So we went through dozens of versions that we didn’t even test on the market. A rookie mistake that made us skip the most important topic of all: sales.
• A target that was too tech-savvy… and stingy! (Let’s call it like it is)
  Sorry in advance for this headline, but there’s some truth in it, let’s be honest! The huge issue with indie hackers is that they master AI, agents, and above all, build their own tools in under 48 hours. So they simply don’t need you. At least, not our outside look on their landing page for $100, when they have Claude right at their fingertips. We knew this for months, and we failed to pivot.
• France wasn’t the right country.
  No French-bashing today, but it’s a country with high taxes and a fairly high cost of living. At least for an indie hacker, where making over $2k MRR already puts you at the top. For the two of us, it wasn’t a viable plan from the start. Maybe we should have tried our luck in Asia for our first years, like many do. But we didn’t have the courage to do it, and the end would probably have been identical—just with savings melting away a bit slower.
• Other takeaways in bulk.
  I don’t want to make this post too long, but here are the quick lessons we take away from our experience:
  • (Above all) Don’t fall in love with your product; you lose your objectivity.
  • If you build as a couple, listen deeply to each other. No work is worth straining your relationship.
  • Have a stable place to live. Without income, renting is tough, and that instability becomes heavy.

Quick, some positives!

Because yes, there are some. First, the support of our peers on social media, and I loved having the opportunity to chat with so many of you. We also took the chance to travel and spend time with family with Aymeric, something we could never have done as much with a 9-to-5.
On the business side, even though we saw everything in black a few days ago, we realize we learned a ton. We know how to create an offer, write copy that converts (we did make sales, after all!), build a visual brand, develop apps with integrated AI...
In short, these 3 years weren’t a total loss, and I hope we’ll be able to turn this failure into an asset.

What’s next.

Several options are on the table: a corporate 9-to-5, a career switch, or… entrepreneurship again!
Even if the stability of a salaried job is tempting, we want to prioritize one of the last two options. We want to prove to ourselves that we can succeed in entrepreneurship, but this time, we won’t start from scratch.
Maybe acquiring a business with an existing customer base, maybe joining an incubator to help us… We don’t know yet, but one thing is certain: we are going to look for that meaning, that spark we lost over the past few months, and without which nothing is possible.

A huge thank you to the brave souls who read all the way to the end! And I wish you all the best for what lies ahead . :)