DEV Community: Loic Moncany

Feeling helpless building your 13 figures business and rule the world ?

Loic Moncany — Fri, 29 May 2026 08:30:59 +0000

A developer built “feed-the.cat”.

That’s it.
A website with a single button that lets strangers feed his cat remotely.

You press the button.
The cat gets food.

People watch the cat eat live.

And somehow it feels more genuine than 90% of the “AI SaaS” products flooding the internet right.

No:
“I scaled to $47k MRR in 12 days”
AI-generated guru threads
fake urgency
growth hacks pretending to be innovation

Just:
“Hey, wanna feed this cat?”
The best part?
Donations go to animal shelters.

While everyone debates whether AI will replace human work, someone built a global distributed cat-feeding infrastructure that makes people smile and helps real animals.

Internet at its best.
Stop overthink. Start building useful things and be genuine about it.

The Unsexy Side of Vibe Coding: Saying No Is the Real Feature

Loic Moncany — Wed, 20 May 2026 12:25:18 +0000

The Unsexy Side of Vibe Coding: Saying No Is the Real Feature

Saw a post on r/indiehackers this week that stopped my scroll: "What's the biggest thing you shipped this month?" The top answer wasn't a launch or a feature drop. It was "I finally told my beta users no to a request they'd been pushing for 3 weeks." That hit harder than any "I built this in a weekend" thread.

The context

We're in the middle of a vibe coding gold rush. AI-assisted development is everywhere — Claude, Cursor, v0, you name it. The narrative is speed. Ship in hours, not weeks. Iterate live. Let the LLM handle the boilerplate while you focus on the vision. And honestly? It's real. I've cut my prototyping time by 70% on some tasks.

But there's a shadow side nobody's posting about. When the cost of building drops to near zero, the cost of deciding what to build becomes everything.

My week in the trenches

I'm building ListingVid right now — AI-generated property videos for real estate agents. One agent has been waiting on the next version. Patiently. And all week I've been fighting the same enemy: scope creep from my own brain.

Add a Canva integration? Easy, the AI could draft that in an hour. AI voiceover? Tempting, agents love voice. What about auto-posting to Instagram? That's distribution, that's value. Every idea sounds like a quick win. Every single one would delay the thing I actually promised.

Here's the unsexy truth I logged in my notes this week: most of my productive hours weren't spent coding. They were spent closing browser tabs, deleting AI-generated feature stubs, and talking myself out of "just one more thing."

The agent doesn't care about my stack. She cares that her next listing video looks like it cost €500 and took a professional videographer half a day, except she made it in 10 minutes between showings. That's the only metric.

What I'm actually learning

Saying no is a feature. Every "no" is a feature shipped on time. Every "yes" to a distraction is a bug in your roadmap.
AI makes it easier to build the wrong thing fast. The bottleneck was never typing speed. It was always judgment. AI doesn't fix judgment — it amplifies whatever direction you point it in.
Your users have one problem. Solve that one. The agent wants great videos, fast and cheap. She doesn't want a platform. She wants an outcome. Everything else is noise until that outcome is bulletproof.
Vibe coding needs vibe product management. If you're not disciplined about scope, you'll vibe-code yourself into a bloated mess that solves nobody's main problem.
Shipping is a contract with yourself. Breaking it teaches you to stop trusting your own estimates. Keeping it builds the muscle that actually scales.

Vibe coding is a superpower. But superpowers without discipline make messes, not products.

What did you say no to this week so you could actually ship?

—
Building in public from near Milan. Currently focused on ListingVid — AI property videos for real estate agents. Find me on X.

After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand — and I'm not surprised

Loic Moncany — Wed, 20 May 2026 12:25:08 +0000

After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand — and I'm not surprised

The Hacker News post hit 800+ upvotes in hours. Developers are quietly admitting what many of us have been feeling: letting AI write all your code feels great until it doesn't.

I've been vibe coding hard while building ListingVid, my AI video tool for real estate agents. The speed is unreal. Features that used to take days now ship in hours. But last week, I spent three full days refactoring 20 minutes of agent-generated code. The logic worked. The architecture was a tire fire.

Here's where the hype diverges from my actual experience.

The context

We're in a weird moment where "vibe coding" has become a personality trait. There's pressure to let the agent handle everything — to treat engineering judgment as overhead rather than value. The narrative is that AI replaces the craft. My 15 years building digital products tells a different story.

What I actually shipped this week

I rebuilt a core video processing pipeline in ListingVid. The first version was agent-generated and "worked" — videos rendered, uploads completed, notifications sent. But the error handling was nonexistent. Retry logic was duct tape. The code that handled file cleanup? It didn't. I found orphaned files eating storage because the agent never considered failure modes.

So I rewrote it. Slower. More carefully. With actual thought about what happens when S3 times out or FFmpeg crashes mid-render.

The real lessons

AI excels at exploration, not foundation. Let it prototype. Don't let it architect your data layer.
"It works" is not "it's done." Agent code often passes the happy path and dies on edge cases you haven't thought of yet.
Your judgment is the product. The 15 years of shipping, breaking things, and fixing them at 2am — that's what AI can't replicate. It can generate code, but it can't generate the scar tissue that tells you where the bugs hide.
Speed now costs time later. Every shortcut the agent takes is debt you'll pay with interest. The question is whether you're building a prototype or a business.
The best use of AI is augmentation, not replacement. I still use it constantly. But I use it for boilerplate, tests, and exploration — not for the parts of the system that need to be reliable.

I'm not going back to zero AI. That would be stupid. But I'm done pretending that vibe coding is a substitute for engineering. It's a tool. A powerful one. But tools don't replace judgment — they amplify it.

If you're building something that needs to last, own the foundations. Let the agent handle the noise. You handle the signal.

Follow me at @lmoncany for more unfiltered builder notes. Currently shipping ListingVid — AI video generation for real estate agents who are tired of paying €500 per property video.

I Shipped More in ListingVid This Week Than in 3 Months—But Distribution Is Still Killing Me

Loic Moncany — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 08:00:03 +0000

I Shipped More in ListingVid This Week Than in 3 Months—But Distribution Is Still Killing Me

Everyone in the builder community is celebrating velocity. And honestly? They're not wrong. But there's a part of the story nobody's telling.

The thing that's trending right now

The narrative is: AI made shipping so easy that any solo founder can now output what a team of 5 used to. Vibe coding, Claude, Cursor — pick your stack. It's genuinely transformative.

My contrarian take: this is 100% true AND completely irrelevant to whether your product succeeds.

What actually happened in my week

I build ListingVid — an AI video generator for real estate agents. This week I shipped faster than I ever have. New features, cleaner onboarding flow, better output quality. The kind of week that feels like progress.

And then I looked at my calendar.

Most of my actual time went to:

Cold outreach to real estate agencies across France and Italy
Researching which market segments actually have budget
Jumping on calls with agents who were curious but unconvinced
Writing follow-up sequences that don't sound like a robot wrote them

The code: a few focused hours. The pipeline: full days.

This is the pattern I've seen repeat across 15 years in digital. SEO tools got easier — distribution didn't. No-code exploded — marketing still required the same grind. Now AI cuts build time to nothing, and people are acting surprised that nobody shows up at launch.

What I actually learned this week

Speed of build ≠ speed of adoption. Agents don't care how fast I shipped. They care if it saves them 2 hours per listing.
The bar for "good enough product" dropped. The bar for "trust" didn't. A real estate agent giving you access to their brand is a big deal. You earn that with consistency and calls, not features.
Outreach is a skill, not a task. I spent 45 minutes on one cold email this week. Not because I'm slow — because the right frame matters.
Your product being easy to build is a competitive disadvantage, not an advantage. If I can ship it in a weekend, so can 50 other people. What's your moat? Mine is understanding the agent workflow better than anyone else building in this space right now.
Distribution compounds slower than code. Every week of consistent outreach builds relationships. There's no shortcut. AI can help draft. It can't replace reputation.

The real question for 2026

If AI makes everyone a fast shipper, what differentiates the winners?

I'd bet it's not the product. It's the founder's ability to talk to customers, understand the real pain, and get in the room.

The bottleneck was never the code. I've known this for 15 years. I still have to remind myself every single week.

Building ListingVid in public — follow the journey at @lmoncany or check out listingvid.xyz if you work in real estate.

Solo founder burnout isn't a time problem — I learned this running 4 SaaS products at once

Loic Moncany — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 08:00:21 +0000

Solo founder burnout is trending again. Every week, someone posts the same story: too much to do, too little time, grinding to a halt.

But after running 4 SaaS products simultaneously this year, I think we're diagnosing the wrong problem.

The burnout conversation is stuck on hours

Most burnout posts read like time management problems. "I work 80-hour weeks." "I have no weekends." "I can't switch off."

And sure, those things are real. But I've watched myself work a calm 45-hour week and still feel completely fried by Thursday. And I've pushed hard 60-hour weeks that felt energizing.

The difference? Attention quality — not time quantity.

What I'm actually dealing with this week

Right now I'm building ListingVid (AI video for real estate agents), OhMyLead (lead gen for indie hackers), EST8 (real estate CRM), and AIAnswer.to (a WordPress SEO plugin for AI citations).

Each one is alive. Each one has users asking questions, features half-finished, and a roadmap that makes sense on paper.

This week I did deep UI work on ListingVid during the morning — the kind of work that requires actual thinking. By noon I was context-switched into OhMyLead onboarding emails. By 3pm I was debugging an EST8 integration. By 9pm I was answering AIAnswer.to waitlist questions.

All of it was productive by time-tracking standards. Zero of it felt like good work except the morning.

The burnout didn't come from the hours. It came from burning my sharpest attention on ListingVid, then expecting to do equally sharp work on everything else.

Attention is the actual finite resource

Time is easy to manage. Attention isn't.

Every founder gets the same 24 hours. But you only get a few hours of actual high-quality thinking per day — the state where hard decisions feel clear and good code happens. After that, you're running on fumes, doing admin, responding to Slack, shipping things you'll regret.

When you're running multiple products solo, the danger isn't overwork. It's distributing your best-thinking windows so thinly that nothing gets the version of you that actually moves the needle.

I've seen founders with fewer products burn out harder than me — not because they worked more, but because everything got the same priority, so everything got mediocre attention.

What I'm doing about it (imperfect, but working)

One product gets the morning slot. Rotating weekly, not daily — context switching daily is the real killer.
The other products get maintenance mode. Async replies, small fixes, no architecture decisions.
I track "attention debt" — if a product went 2+ weeks without my full brain, that's a red flag before it's a crisis.

This doesn't solve multi-product burnout. But it makes it legible. And legible problems are solvable ones.

Takeaways for solo founders juggling multiple things

Burnout audit question: Is your best 2 hours going to the highest-leverage product, or the loudest one?
Context switching daily is expensive. Even 30-minute task switches cost hours of recovery in complex problem domains.
"Working on it" and "thinking hard about it" are different things. Most days you're doing the former and calling it the latter.
Your products don't need equal time. They need appropriate attention at the right moments.
The goal isn't to work less. It's to protect the hours where you're actually good.

If you're building solo and juggling more than one thing, curious how you handle the attention allocation problem — not the time one.

I'm @lmoncany on X. Building ListingVid (AI video for real estate agents) and a few other things in public.

I Built a Lead Gen Tool and Then Used It on My Own Pipeline — Here's What Got Lost in the Noise

Loic Moncany — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 08:00:04 +0000

I Built a Lead Gen Tool and Then Used It on My Own Pipeline — Here's What Got Lost in the Noise

Everyone's debating channels. The people closing deals are watching signals.

r/SaaS blew up this week with a thread: "How are you actually doing lead gen in 2026? Not the theory — the real stuff." Thousands of comments. Cold email defenders, LinkedIn evangelists, paid ads converts. A whole lot of noise.

I read the whole thread because I'm building OhMyLead — a lead gen tool for indie hackers. And what I found was interesting: the debate is almost entirely wrong.

What's actually happening in 2026 lead gen

The conventional wisdom goes: cold email is dying (spam filters, AI-written slop flooding inboxes), LinkedIn is saturated, paid ads are too expensive for bootstrappers.

And yeah, all of that is kinda true.

But here's what the thread buried in the comments: the founders actually closing deals aren't winning because of the channel. They're winning because of timing.

One comment that stuck with me: "I stopped sending 500 emails a week. I send 20 emails a day to people who showed intent in the last 48 hours. My reply rate went from 1% to 12%."

That's not a channel win. That's a timing win.

What I learned dogfooding OhMyLead on myself

I've been building OhMyLead for a few months and I made myself use it on my own pipeline — ListingVid (AI video for real estate agents) and EST8 (a real estate CRM).

What I found when I was honest with myself:

The tool wasn't the bottleneck. My timing was.

I was reaching out to real estate agents when I had bandwidth — usually late afternoon after I'd shipped features all morning. But those agents are most responsive early morning before their first appointments.

I was reaching out to indie hackers on Mondays (felt efficient). But the best conversations happened Wednesday/Thursday when people were mid-week problem-solving mode.

The copy barely mattered. The timing shifted my reply rate more than any personalization trick.

Where I'm still stuck: finding real-time intent signals at scale without becoming a full-time social media monitor. Easy to say "reach out when they signal a pain." Hard to actually catch that signal when you're also the developer, designer, and support team.

Specific things that actually worked this week

Reddit keyword alerts → immediate DM when someone posts about a specific problem. Painful to set up. High conversion.
LinkedIn job posting scrapes → companies hiring for a specific role often have a specific pain you can solve. Catching it early matters.
"Just launched" timing → reach out to people the day they launch something (Product Hunt, IH, etc.). They're in growth mode, receptive, and talking to everyone.
Re-engage with context → old leads who've gone cold? Wait for them to post something relevant, then reply to that — not your old thread.
Fewer, better-timed touches → I halved my outreach volume and doubled my response rate just by being more selective about when I hit send.

The meta-lesson

Lead gen in 2026 isn't about finding a magic channel. It's about collapsing the time between "they have the problem" and "you show up with a relevant message."

The tools that will win — and what I'm trying to build with OhMyLead — are the ones that surface those moments automatically so solo founders can move fast without being glued to 15 dashboards.

Still figuring it out. But the direction is clear.

If you're working on lead gen, outreach, or sales for a small SaaS — hit me up. Always down to swap notes with people in the trenches.

→ @lmoncany | OhMyLead

Everyone Says AI Can Make 30 Days of Agent Content in 1 Hour. Heres What Gets Lost in That Narrative

Loic Moncany — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 08:00:04 +0000

Everyone Says AI Can Make 30 Days of Agent Content in 1 Hour. I'm Shipping ListingVid — Here's What Gets Lost in That Narrative

The hype is real: AI content tools can now help a real estate agent batch-create a month of social posts in a single sitting. Realtor.com just went AI-first on home search. Video generators are turning still property photos into cinematic walkthroughs. It's a legitimate shift. But while everyone's optimizing for volume, I think we're missing what actually moves deals.

What's Actually Happening in Real Estate Marketing

The conversation right now is dominated by AI efficiency. "30 days of content in 1 hour." Automated email sequences. AI-generated listing descriptions. All real, all useful. The technology stack for real estate agents has genuinely leapfrogged where it was 18 months ago.

But there's a trap inside this narrative. When you optimize for volume — more posts, more touchpoints, more content — you start confusing output with outcomes. A busy feed isn't a full pipeline.

Agents are drowning in tools that help them post more. What they actually need is tools that help them convert better.

What I'm Seeing While Building ListingVid

I've been shipping ListingVid, an AI video generator built specifically for real estate agents. The thesis is simple: every listing deserves a video that looks expensive without costing $2k to produce.

While building this, I talked to a lot of agents. Here's what I kept hearing:

The agents who close deals fastest aren't the ones with daily Instagram carousels. They're the ones whose listing hits the MLS with a video that makes you stop, watch, and want to book a showing.

The window of peak attention for a listing is narrow — roughly the first 48-72 hours after it goes live. That's when buyer interest is highest, when the algorithm pushes it hardest, when agents in your network are most likely to share it. A great video in that window does more work than a month of consistency posts.

The "30 days of content in 1 hour" tools are solving a real problem. But it's not the most valuable problem.

Where the Hype Diverges From What I'm Actually Seeing

Building in this space for the last few months, a few things stand out:

Volume is a vanity metric for agents. Posting 30 times a month impresses other agents. One listing video that books 6 showings in 48 hours impresses your broker.
The production quality gap is still huge. Most agents are still posting photo slideshows with royalty-free music. The bar to look premium with AI video is lower than ever — and almost nobody is clearing it.
Agents don't want to learn tools. Every conversation I have confirms this. They want to upload photos, press a button, and get something shareable. The simpler the workflow, the more they'll actually use it.
AI-first home search (Realtor.com's new direction) changes the listing video game. If AI is surfacing listings based on visual quality and engagement signals, a slick video isn't just marketing — it might start affecting discoverability directly.

What This Week Taught Me

The AI content volume narrative is pointing builders toward the wrong problem. I almost fell into it too — there were moments where I thought "should ListingVid also help agents schedule content, do carousels, automate captions?"

No. Stay in the lane. Nail the listing video. Make it so good and so fast that it becomes the obvious first step when a property hits the market.

Sometimes the best product decision is the narrowest one.

Takeaways for Builders in Real Estate Tech

Nail the one highest-leverage moment in your user's workflow, not the whole workflow
Agents are time-poor and tool-fatigued — fewer inputs, better outputs wins every time
Don't let the volume narrative distract you from the conversion narrative
AI-first search is coming; visual quality signals will matter more than they do today
The gap between "agents who look premium" and "agents who don't" is about to get exploitable

Building ListingVid in public at listingvid.xyz. Would love to hear from real estate agents or other builders working in this space — what's the highest-leverage moment you've found in your users' workflow?

Follow along on X: @lmoncany

I Vibe-Coded My SaaS Faster Than Ever — Then Hit the Real Wall

Loic Moncany — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 08:00:03 +0000

The vibe coding discourse has been everywhere this week. YC podcasts, r/indiehackers threads, Twitter debates. The consensus: AI tools have finally made building fast enough that anyone can ship.

They're right. And they're missing the point entirely.

What Actually Happened When I Vibe-Coded My SaaS

I've been building ListingVid — an AI video generator that helps real estate agents create property marketing videos automatically. Classic indie hacker project: real problem, specific niche, small team (just me).

This week I used Cursor + Claude to ship a new video template system. What previously would've been 2 days of work took about 4 hours. The vibe coding advocates are 100% correct on this part. Build speed is genuinely different now.

Then I spent the next 12 hours trying to get 50 real estate agents to actually open the thing.

That's the number nobody puts in their "I vibe-coded an MVP in a weekend" post.

The Bottleneck Moved — Nobody Noticed

Here's what's actually happening in 2026: build is no longer the constraint. Every indie hacker can now ship something functional in days instead of months. That's real.

But distribution didn't get faster. If anything, it got harder, because:

More MVPs competing for the same eyeballs
Buyers are fatigued by "I built this with AI" stories
Attention is the scarce resource now, not code

I've been building products for 15 years. Agency work, SaaS, e-commerce. Every time a new tool lowered the build barrier — WordPress, no-code, now AI — the pattern repeated: build got easier, distribution stayed hard, and the people who won were the ones who treated distribution as seriously as product.

What This Means for How I'm Building Right Now

For ListingVid, I've had to completely rethink where I spend my hours:

Before vibe coding: 70% build / 30% distribution
Now: 40% build / 60% distribution

Concretely this week, after shipping the template system, I:

Reached out directly to 20 real estate agents in active Facebook groups
Set up a simple email sequence for trial signups
Wrote one SEO article targeting "AI video for real estate agents"
Recorded a 90-second Loom showing the product in action

Zero viral moments. Just slow, boring distribution work that actually moves the needle.

The Real Takeaways

Build speed is no longer your competitive advantage — everyone has the same tools
Distribution is now the hard skill — invest in it as seriously as you invest in features
Niche outreach beats broad posting — 20 targeted DMs > 1 LinkedIn post to 2k followers
Show don't tell — a 90-second Loom outperforms any written description for conversion
Iteration loops are shorter now — use the time you saved building to run more distribution experiments

Vibe coding is genuinely useful. I'm not going back. But if you just shipped your MVP and you're waiting for the internet to find you — that's where the work actually starts.

What are you doing for distribution that's actually working right now? Drop it below — I'm actively testing new channels for ListingVid and happy to share what I'm seeing.

Building ListingVid in public — follow along @lmoncany

I am shipping 4 products while everyone panics about AI killing SaaS

Loic Moncany — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 06:55:14 +0000

I'm shipping 4 products while everyone panics about "AI killing SaaS" — here's what gets lost in the noise

Every few weeks, a post blows up: "AI will kill B2B SaaS." A dev vibe-coded a clone of some $200/month tool over a weekend. The comments spiral. Founders get scared.

Meanwhile, I'm over here shipping four products at once. As one person. Because of AI — not despite it.

What's actually happening out there

The "AI kills SaaS" narrative has a kernel of truth: AI is compressing the time it takes to build software features. A solo dev can now ship what used to require a small team. Competitors can clone you faster.

That's real. The panic isn't.

What the panic misses: software value was never in the features. It was in solving a problem someone actually has, repeatedly, reliably. If AI makes the features cheaper to build, it also makes the moat shift — from "we built this" to "we understand this problem better than anyone."

What I'm actually doing this week

I'm running four builds in parallel right now:

ListingVid — AI video generator for real estate agents who hate spending hours on property marketing
EST8 — A modern CRM for real estate, because the existing ones feel like 2012
OhMyLead — Lead gen for indie hackers who are still tracking prospects in Notion spreadsheets
AIAnswer.to — WordPress plugin generating PAA rich snippets + GEO optimization for AI citations

Three years ago this would have been impossible for one person. Today it's difficult but viable — because AI collapses feature development time significantly.

But here's the part nobody mentions: AI gave me capability. It didn't give me clarity.

The hard part this week isn't the code. It's attention. Four active builds means I'm always one context switch away from dropping something important. A bug in ListingVid. A customer message for EST8. A cold outreach sequence for OhMyLead.

AI didn't solve the 24-hour constraint.

What I've actually learned (not theory)

Real problems outlive every tool shift. Real estate agents still hate video production. That problem didn't get easier because AI exists — it got approachable for someone like me to solve.
Capability without focus is just noise. More products in parallel is only viable if you have systems for switching context cleanly. I'm still figuring mine out.
AI speeds up building, not validation. The bottleneck was never "can I build this?" It was always "do enough people want this badly enough to pay?" That hasn't changed.
Clones die fast when the original has distribution. If someone vibe-codes a ListingVid clone over a weekend, they still have zero real estate agent relationships. Distribution is the moat now.
The "AI kills SaaS" posts are mostly written by people who weren't building anyway. The actual builders I know are shipping faster and moving on.

15 years in, the pattern is consistent: what dies wasn't solving a real problem. What survives was.

If you're building something real, AI is probably your biggest advantage right now — not your biggest threat.

What are you shipping this week? Drop it in the comments — I read all of them.

— Loïc / @lmoncany
Building ListingVid | OhMyLead | EST8 | AIAnswer.to

Build in Public Is Broken—But Not For the Reason Everyone Thinks

Loic Moncany — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 06:55:11 +0000

Build in Public Is Broken—But Not For the Reason Everyone Thinks

The founder Twitter drama over the last week has been predictable. "Build in public" is dead. It's free R&D for well-funded clones. It's just an audience of other founders who won't buy.

All true. All missing the point.

I've been building in public for 15 years across 150+ projects—agencies, failed experiments, bootstrap SaaS, product exits. The pattern I see isn't that transparency is broken. It's that most people doing it are shipping fake products.

Why 70% of "Build in Public" Creators Fail

The narrative is that building in public attracts the wrong audience: other indie hackers, other founders, people optimizing for engagement instead of sales.

True. But here's what nobody says: if your product is real and solves a problem, those 70% of non-customers don't matter. What matters is the 30% who see you solving their problem.

The founders making real money from this—the ones building ListingVid, OhMyLead, real products with revenue—aren't complaining about clones or wrong audiences. They're too busy shipping.

The noise comes from people documenting hobbies and expecting customers to appear. Of course they're getting cloned. They haven't proven the idea works yet.

Here's What Actually Works

From shipping products for 15 years:

Ship real, fast. The more you talk before you ship, the more you attract feedback-loop thinkers instead of builders. Move. Push. Get to a point where someone will pay.
Talk to customers, not audiences. "Building in public" doesn't mean Twitter. It means your first 20 customers know your roadmap. That feedback loop is invaluable. Thousands of followers watching you iterate? That's just noise.
Obsess over revenue, not visibility. If you're measuring success by likes and retweets instead of MRR, you're not building a business. You're building an audience. Those are different games.
Expect clones. Celebrate revenue. Well-funded companies will copy your idea. Good. It validates the market. The only question is whether you got paying customers before they did. If yes—you won. Visibility doesn't matter.
Know the difference between "building in public" and "publicly failing." There's a huge gap between sharing your wins and documenting chaos. Real builders share patterns, not excuses.

The Meta: Why This Debate Exists Right Now

The "build in public is broken" discourse exists because the indie hacker playbook of 2021-2023 ran its course. Everyone copied it. Signals degraded. Now founders are overcompensating by going silent.

Wrong direction. The answer isn't silence. It's ruthlessly focusing on real metrics: customers, revenue, product viability.

Visibility is a tool. Use it or don't. But don't use it as an excuse for not shipping. That's where 99% of the discourse falls apart.

The bottom line: Build in public works great when you're building something real. It fails catastrophically when you're building something fake. The "broken" part isn't transparency. It's that most creators are shipping bets, not products.

Ship fast. Talk to customers. Stop obsessing over how many people are watching. That's the 15-year lesson.

What do you think—is the problem the visibility, or the product?

I almost burned out managing 5 SaaS products—here's why delegation is harder than shipping

Loic Moncany — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 06:54:42 +0000

I almost burned out managing 5 SaaS products—here's why delegation is harder than shipping

The meme is that solo founders burn out from overwork. The reality? We burn out from anxiety about overwork.

Last week, I caught myself deep in the delegation trap. ListingVid is shipping fast. OhMyLead is scaling. EST8 needs attention. We have Perfect Skin operations to run. And I was making every decision because "I knew best."

It's a lie we founders tell ourselves.

Why delegation feels impossible

The trend right now on r/indiehackers and Indie Hackers is clear: founder burnout peaks not when you're drowning, but when you could delegate and won't. The friction isn't the work—it's the anxiety.

"No one will understand the vision."
"I haven't documented it well enough."
"They'll make mistakes I'd catch."
"It's faster if I just do it."

All true. Also all irrelevant.

What actually happened when I delegated

I hired someone I trusted. Spent a day training them. Then—and this was the hard part—I stayed out of their way.

The first feature took 30% longer than it would've if I did it. It had two things I'd have done differently. And it shipped.

By week two, they were shipping on par with me. By week three, faster. Because they owned it. And ownership is the thing no amount of solo effort can manufacture.

The ListingVid team now ships features I never would've thought of. The OhMyLead side handles customer support with context I couldn't maintain solo. EST8's operations run because someone else decided they were important—not because I mandated them.

The real cost of solo heroics

Every hour you save by "just doing it yourself" is an hour you don't spend on what only you can do: thinking about what's next, spotting where the market is moving, talking to customers about what actually matters.

That's the bottleneck. Not the execution. The direction.

Burnout isn't about hours worked. It's about feeling like you're running in place. And you'll always feel that way if you're 70% executor and 30% founder.

Three things that helped me actually delegate

Document just enough — not a novel, not perfection. Enough that someone smart can fill the gaps.
Hire for care, not perfection — you want someone who gets frustrated when things aren't right, not someone who'll execute your checklist robotically.
Let them fail small — if you're hovering and catching every mistake, you're still doing the work. Let the learning happen. Course-correct weekly, not daily.

The hard truth

You'll probably think they're slower than you. Statistically, they might be. But you've been drinking a poison called "ego efficiency"—you're fast because you know the system inside out, and you're also the only person who can maintain it.

Real scale? That's when other people get faster. When the system doesn't depend on your speed anymore.

If you're burning out, you're not drowning. You're refusing the lifeboat because you're convinced you should be swimming.

What are you refusing to delegate?

I'm building a lead gen tool while cold email is collapsing — here's what the data actually says

Loic Moncany — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 06:54:41 +0000

Everyone's talking about AI-powered outreach at scale. I'm building OhMyLead and watching that playbook fall apart in real time.

What's happening out there

Cold email benchmarks for 2026 are ugly. Reply rates have dropped significantly for volume-based outreach. Gmail and Outlook now reject emails from domains without properly configured DMARC/DKIM/SPF — not send to spam, reject. The spam complaint threshold that triggers filtering is 0.1%. One bad list can tank your domain for months.

The consensus in r/SaaS and r/b2bmarketing right now: "do less, but do it deliberately." Cold email at scale → reply rates fell unless deeply personalized. Paid ads → expensive and inconsistent. The surviving approach is precision over volume.

The industry's answer to this? AI personalization at scale. Write 500 highly personalized emails with AI. Sounds great in theory.

What I'm actually seeing while building

I've been building OhMyLead specifically to help indie hackers and small teams find better-qualified leads. This week I've been deep in the targeting logic — the step that happens before you write a single word of outreach.

And here's what the data keeps showing me: the constraint isn't the email copy. It's the list.

A founder sending 50 emails to people who actually have the problem they solve is getting better results than teams sending 500 "personalized" AI emails to a scraped list. The personalization is irrelevant if the targeting is wrong. You can't AI your way out of a bad list.

The problem is that building a good list is hard. Real intent signals are buried in noise. "They visited a pricing page" is weak. "They just hired a VP of Sales and their LinkedIn shows they're scaling from 5 to 20 reps" — that's signal. But getting that kind of data at a price indie hackers can afford? That's the actual hard problem.

I'm also running into a less glamorous issue: most "intent data" providers are selling repackaged noise at enterprise prices. The signals that actually work are often manual, contextual, and not scalable in the way people think.

What I've learned from shipping this week

List quality > email quality. Every time. Fix the targeting before touching the copy.
Intent signals need context. A single data point means nothing. Stack 2-3 signals and you have something real.
Small batches win. 30-50 highly targeted emails beat 500 generic ones. The math works out when your reply rate is 15% vs. 2%.
Domain hygiene is now table stakes. If you're doing any cold outreach in 2026 and haven't set up DMARC, stop everything and do that first.
The "AI personalization" narrative is a distraction. The real leverage is in qualification, not in making bad-fit emails sound smarter.

The bet I'm making

OhMyLead is being built around one core idea: help small teams qualify leads before they reach out, so outreach volume stays low and conversion stays high. Less spray, more signal.

If you're doing outbound right now and want to share what's working (or not) — I'd genuinely love to hear it. Find me at @lmoncany or check out what I'm building at ohmylead.com.