I grew up in Houilles, a suburb of Paris, and my first real encounter with Germany was a trip to Berlin when I was about sixteen. I was visiting my penpal Juliane. I remember thinking I wanted to be there forever. The city felt like an infinite canvas, raw and open and full of possibility. The remnants of the Wall were everywhere, and what struck me wasn’t just the history but how Germany dealt with it. Here was a country that had done the worst things imaginable and then, instead of burying them, built memorials in the centre of its capital. The stumbling stones in the pavement, the Holocaust memorial near the Bundestag, the refusal to let itself forget. I admired that deeply. The ability to reckon with your own past, to stare at it without flinching, felt like the hardest and most important thing a country could do. And Germany had done it.

A user emailed us this week asking for a refund. “Your app doesn’t understand my pronunciation. I used Rosetta Stone before and never had to repeat phrases five or six times.” My first instinct was to investigate. Maybe our speech recognition was broken. Maybe there was a bug. So I pulled up her session data, watched her replays, checked every error log. Nothing was broken. The speech recognition transcribed her correctly. She could see exactly what the system heard. She could even edit the text before submitting.

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.

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?

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.