35 startups solo, un million par an, zéro employé (ft Marc Lou)

0:00I made people sign NDAs to not talk about my idea and I threatened one guy with a lawsuit because he said he was going to copy my idea. I end up having banners on Pornhub with my face on them . I gained weight for no reason and people told me to go to the gym. Now I am losing weight without knowing why, and I do not even go to the gym anymore

0:17. I went from 221 to 170 in 90 days. What is the personal price you are willing to pay to achieve what kind of success? Everyone said, "Yeah, with the whole The Family thing, your reputation is [ __ ] when you have money, no one cares about your stuff." Hello friends and welcome to a new episode of Without Permission. Today, we have an exceptional guest. I watch all these videos, I haven't missed a single one in at least a year. Marclou, my friends

0:47, is on the podcast.

0:51Thank you so much. Actually, it makes me really happy. I saw the podcast, I watched it without permission for I don't know how long. It's been 4 years since you launched and I've watched so many episodes that it's really nice to be here. Well, listen, we're also really happy to have you. For those who don't know Marc, because he had the great idea to start by creating content in English. A good idea that Ousama and I didn't have . Marc is an SAS Buudder, uh, zero employees, zero fundraising. Just him, Elia, a few years ago, he was getting fired from all his jobs. He went through a bit of a tough time. He even

1:24got fired by Ty Lopez. He's going to tell us about Ty Lopez, who we saw on the podcast. His thing is to launch dozens of startups, build them publicly on YouTube, on X, keep the ones that work and document everything from A to Z. He has a whoop score of 18 years when he's 32. You're 32 years old,

1:41right? There you go. So, he's going to explain to us how he does it because even I'm curious. Thanks Marc for joining us. We're going to cover a lot of topics. The first question that I would like to ask you, Marc, is how did you end up finding yourself coding in SAS? It was a bit of a mistake. I started out in the world of vicis and I got frustrated because I liked playing with Lego, you know, I like making little things with my hands, but I didn't like the idea of working with people. And so , suddenly, I found myself having to use the s in quotation marks a bit

2:17forced to be able to do things with my own hands, you know. Okay. What kind of basic training did you have? Uh, honestly, it would be really nice to call it training, but I'm supposed to be an engineer. I'm in technology university 3 and, uh, I'll show you my report cards, it's a disaster. And I repeated a year, I got kicked out, they had to take me back because I was kicked out in the middle of the semester and since it's a public school , they can't hold you in the middle of the semester. So they have to keep you for the next 6 months in a free school,

2:48a disaster where I haven't learned anything for 6 years and I have an engineering degree. Okay. So you graduated from engineering school and from that moment on, you said to yourself, I'm going to code SAS or what did you do after school? It started a little earlier, when you were doing an internship at a school and since I was a bit lost, I ended up doing an internship in Hong Kong and that's where I had a realization like, "[ __ ], I want to do something else." I didn't want to follow the traditional model. I had no idea what

3:13entrepreneurship was or anything. That's when I came across Ousama's videos on The Family, which was in English at the time. And that was a kind of little realization for me and, at the same time, I watched the film about the life of Marc Zuckenberg, The Social Network. So, I have this voice in my head telling me that I am also Marc Zuckenberg and so, that's kind of where the entrepreneur's day begins. So cool. You know it feels weird to hear you speak French. I'm so used to hearing you speak English that it's weird. Uh, I might bug out sometimes on some months a bit. It's true that the work

3:47is mostly in English. So it's true that it feels weird sometimes. Yeah, it's huge. Ousama, another person that you inspired to get started, you know. Well, listen, it makes me happy. It was crazy, right? Yeah. At the time of The Family, there weren't any sets yet. It was you, it was the beginning of The Family. So, the videos, there weren't any sets. By the way, it was a quickie, there was maybe a palm tree and it was for me, it

4:09was like, "What the [ __ ]?" Yeah. The funny thing, the really funny thing, is that when you watch the videos, you can see the scenery being built from one week to the next. Yeah. Yeah. No, no, was that when you were doing it in English? No, I was doing it in French at the time, but we switched all of The Family content to English in 2016. So I did it in French for 3 years and then in

4:36English. Why did you give up English? Well, I didn't give up English, I gave up The Family. So, uh, well, after that, you know, things happened organically. I did a podcast with Yomi, so I made content in French. In French, that's it. And then, damn, I'm not awake today. And then, I didn't really do any business content except for myself. So I did it in French and, uh, it's true that I was a bit lazy to go back to English, uh, because I

5:13didn't really have an idea for content. But in fact, I don't really know how to do content for content's sake. I'm good at doing content either when there's someone with me, so most of the people with me are French. So, well, it's in French. Or because I have a business that I want to promote and in that case

5:30, I do the content that goes with it. Uh, I'm definitely going to do a lot more content in English in the coming months. Yeah, because you have a new project that you launched. We'll cover that in the episode; it's a little teaser. But you raised 20 million before we talk about all that. Yeah, I raised 3.5 million for the project and I raised 20 million in solo

5:55GP. But I'll tell you what that means. We'll tell you all about that later. But first, we really need to go into a bit more detail about Marc's journey because it's a pretty exceptional journey. He's gone through some tough times. So Marc, you had this period where you realized you wanted to start out as an entrepreneur. You didn't want to be an employee. What were the first projects you worked on? And what did

6:18that actually lead to? It didn't lead to anything at all. My first project was an app where the idea was a kind of Tinder for athletes. Like , if you want a tennis partner, you can find one on the app. The idea wasn't bad, but the problem was that the execution was terrible. I don't know how to code. So I make an app with bits

6:35of code I downloaded from gitub. Nothing works. It's not even usable. And the worst part is that I actually do the exact opposite of everything that I say in the videos. Like, I have an idea, it is what matters most; I don't want to tell anyone. I did this, no joke, I got people to sign NDAs so they wouldn't talk about my idea and I threatened a guy with a lawsuit because

6:55he said he was going to copy my idea. And that and that, a year of my life goes by like that where I have this kind of complete disillusionment with entrepreneurship and that triggered the rest of the events. Okay. [ __ ], incredible. So from the start, you were obsessed with your idea . You were convinced, you were so convinced that it would work that you went into clashes with guys so that they wouldn't copy you. Yeah. Yeah. In

7:20my head, I was Marc Zuckenberg. And how did you manage to find users for this idea in the end or not? No, no, but the app doesn't even exist. Like, it was on my phone, it was a kind of prototype that I connected to my computer. It wasn't even usable. So there wasn't even an Apple Store, there

7:37was nothing. It was ridiculous. Huge. So, in the end, is this project actually seeing the light of day or not ? It didn't even see the light of day. Uh , when I remember, I think I'm doing a, I forget the name. It's a kind of dual training that you can do in entrepreneurship. I forgot that in Paris and I ran into these guys. The guy who made the masks, maybe you know Air Pur? Uh yeah, yeah, I know about masks. They're masks for bikers. They're things with like four carbon filters and stuff so that no particles get into your lungs when you're riding a motorcycle. And

8:12some guys who raised money and everything, they created a great company, I think they still exist. And the guy, he had some experience in entrepreneurship and I met him during this kind of dual training and he told me something and I'll always remember, he said to me, "But how are you going to find users? How are you going to find people who pay for your app?" And like, in my head, that's when a veil falls and I went home and in the space of 3 days that followed, I threw all the code in the trash, I left my girlfriend at the time because it

8:37wasn't working and I went to Korea. Korea? Why Korea? I have a friend of mine from, not from university, from before, from high school, who was in Korea, who was in the United States, who has an investor who is Korean American who gives him, who tells him: "Yeah, I can, I can give you $ 100,000 if you want to invest, an angel

8:58investment, to invest in your project." You can do it either in San Francisco or in Korea and he chose Korea. Why? I don't know. So, he sends me a message, he tells me: "You're going to do it with me." I say yeah and I'm the decisive pass and we see the message at a given moment when everything falls apart for me and suddenly, suddenly, I get on a plane and I join him in Korea

9:15and we create another company in Korea. Wow and at that time, uh, how do you manage? You know, it's always interesting to see the beginnings, how do you manage in terms of your personal income? How do you manage to survive in this chaotic situation? Yeah, basically , I just finished university, so I moved back in with my parents and I played a double game during the day, depending on when I could. I worked on my app and the rest of the time I was a

9:38waiter at the Soprano café in Paris. Great café, by the way. And so, I made about $ 10 an hour and that allowed me to have, I don't know, maybe € 1,500 or something like that at the end of the month. But since I was living with my parents, I had almost zero expenses, so I put a little money in my bank

9:51account. Okay, that worked. And once you got to Korea, what did you do? That was a bit of a tough phase, as I left my life. I'm in the car, I remember, I see myself in the car with my parents, they take me to the r, I get in, and it's winter and I'm in Paris, it's March. Everything is gray, I feel like a complete defeat. I put myself in each, there's my sister who takes me in her arms like it's going to be okay. I find myself in the view in Korea and then and you know the fact of being in Asia, you have everything that changes, it's

10:19dynamic and everything and suddenly it starts up again slowly. Now I'm not alone anymore, I'm with my buddy. So suddenly, we start a business and we spend the next 6 months basically doing exactly the same thing that I did the year before, but we do it in Korean and English. Huge. The same project. No, it's not the same company at all, but it's not the same project. No, there had to be something that would give us the idea. The idea wasn't B, actually, it was in 2000, in 2017, the idea was to use AI to reverse engineer

10:50the evolution of plane ticket prices. You know, sometimes you book on a Tuesday, it can be more expensive than if you booked it on a Wednesday. And we wanted to try to nail that down to tell the end customer, like, "Wait to buy your ticket, buy it on Thursday at 5 p.m." So you seem like a great idea to me, a cool thing, and everything was cool, you know. And the thing is, we're both engineers and we make exactly the same mistakes, you know. We're convinced that the idea is the most important thing. We shouldn't talk about it too much. We're not making any progress. The only difference is that,

11:22unlike the previous thing, when we had a bit of money, we hired two people. With a team of four, we managed to create a small app that did the same thing, that did what we wanted to do for plane ticket prices. But since the data was too expensive, we did it with the data on gas prices, petrol prices for service stations. So, we had a small map that told you the price of a gas station in Korea, it was cheaper than that one, and if you wait, it might go down and everything. Anyway, that's where we got to after 6 months of work. It's crazy. But what's funny,

11:53you see, is that, at the time, it's true that being afraid to share these ideas was perhaps a mistake because there was still a big technical barrier . But the conclusion that we increasingly have today is that in Lia's time, it's actually not so crazy not to want to share your ideas because it's so easy to reproduce these days that things change, you see. And we laugh about it today. We think, "Yeah, it was silly; you could have shared it, there was no risk." But today, that's

12:23less and less the case. Yeah. But what's funny is that it doesn't change anything because in fact , when you think about it, it's true, well, I was talking about it recently too, I joked that the story of "You tell someone your idea and they think, 'I'm going to stop everything and do it

12:40for you'" was never true before Lia. And I experienced it live at a dinner party at my place not long ago where a guy pitched something to another guy and the guy looked at me and said, " Wait, that's a great idea." And the next day, he pitched it while the other guy was talking and I thought to myself , hey, I've finally witnessed the nightmare of all the people who think they have ideas. But, but, in fact, the corollary of that is that you just have to run faster. And today, in fact, when you have an idea, you have it, you don't talk about it and you run and,

13:10and someone could copy you even though you had the idea. And so, that means that the competition is higher and that what has value is distribution, marketing, image, etc. and that it's more about making a product. So despite it all, keep talking about these ideas. It's better to talk about these ideas to get clients because I never understood the idea of launching

13:27something without talking about it. Because what fascinated me about all these people was always, "Yeah, I'm hiding my idea, but how are you going to get a client if you're hiding your idea?" You make the client sign an NDA, it makes no sense. So, uh, so in fact, it's really the corollary of a new world in which, yes, the competition is

13:47tougher than before. Hm. And, uh, we'll come back to that, Marc. But it's true that you do a lot of publicizing, your start-ups and everything, so that can be a risk. This week, I clearly copied an idea from A to Z that was working on the US market. Uh, I saw a video on Twitter that went viral from a guy who had launched a platform called Kickback AI. And basically, the principle is that instead of having the cloud system, you have an ad instead, advertisers pay to be broadcast and, uh, the guy who agrees to have ads, he takes 50%, you take 50%. So we created exactly the

14:25same model, we called it Idle Pay. So just to say that it's proof that it's getting easier and easier to copy an idea and reproduce it. To come back to your career at the time, Marc, so you're in Korea, you launch this idea with your friend, it doesn't take 6 months, what do you do next? Uh, we diverge with my friend because he has more skin in the game. He's the one who raised the money. So he wants to stick with the idea. I feel it falling apart and see it's going nowhere. And then, I had a kind of weird voice in my head telling me, "

15:00Just do simpler things." And at the same time, I saw a video on Facebook. I forgot the name. Some Quebecers made this. It's basically a pair of gloves that you can put both hands inside. That way, a couple can hold hands when it's cold. I'm in Korea, I just got a girlfriend, I have a Korean girlfriend, I thought, go ahead, you know, maybe there's something to do, you know, we remade the video. The ad went viral on Facebook. Maybe I'll do the same thing again, I'll do it in Korean and maybe it'll work in Korea, you know. And so, well, we bought some spools of wool and

15:32made some little drawings. We went to see a Korean lady who must have been about sixty years old and asked her to make us some prototypes. And so I did that with my girlfriend at the time, except that, of course, it took time. It wasn't software, so it took two months to get something that looked like nothing at all, it was sewn haphazardly. We said to ourselves, let's try to sell them. So, we went, uh , in the, in the, Oh no, no, let's start with, Oh yes, that's it. We started with Facebook Ads, we replicated the video. We launched the video on Facebook, it didn't work at

16:03all. So, we said to ourselves, let's put money into Facebook Ads, but I'm neither an engineer nor a marketer. So I have no idea how Facebook Ads works. I had very little money at the time because I had no more work, I had nothing left. And so, I don't know, I had to spend 200 dollars, zero clicks, nothing at all. Total disaster. We ended up with 30 gloves that we had to sell somewhere. And so, we ended up going to the Forgotten Games which is super famous where there are all the young people who go, the people who do the KOP and we were there in the street

16:34with our glove, my girlfriend and the P holding hands. We had had a beer or two because it was freezing and we needed to be a little bit, you know, outgoing and we saw a sign that said pair of gloves for like 30 bucks and we sold I don't know, maybe 15 or 20, 20 gloves

16:47like that. Holy [ __ ], that was crazy. You still had a level of determination at the time that was high enough to launch projects like that. Yeah, it's funny, I didn't see it like that because for me it was kind of the logical continuation of the thing, you know. I mean, like my big idea, this whole thing, didn't work out, so I had to do something because I didn't have any, there was no way out, actually. I don't have any, my friends have been at university for almost 2 years now, they already have jobs. They've been working for companies for 2 years. They've saved up

17:17money. Some of them are talking about buying houses, and here I am, I can't stop overnight. I'm in Korea, I have rent to pay and everything, so there was a need to do something. Hm. Have you ever had that phase where Sama, where you too were in need of launching a project and you had ideas where you absolutely had to make money

17:39like that and do it fairly quickly? That's the story of my life. It stops one day. Do you ever feel like you no longer need to do that? No, but that's the story of all entrepreneurs. There are always going to be ups and downs, because regardless, even when you earn a lot of money, you still want to

17:59launch new features and new things. Well, there are people who retire from entrepreneurship, I don't know how they do it. I don't know what feeling they have when they stop and enjoy life. But actually, when you're on the adrenaline of doing things, I mean, it goes from the worst John Key on the planet, Elon Musk, who does it with trillions, to the solopreneur who launches a new idea every week. In fact, it's the same drug , right? It's the hardest drug in the

18:30world. Hm. Yeah. It's the hardest drug in the world. And what separates the guys who are hands-on from the others is the ability to take action. And it's true that to go from the idea of "I want to make wool gloves that hold hands in Korea" to launching them and selling them on the street, you still need a hell of a lot of determination and confidence in the project. And I don't

19:01think everyone has that. Yeah. Or view it from the other side. You might think that it takes very little determination and that people are just at zero. Because it's not true that it requires a lot of effort. Everyone who does it tells you that it's not an effort. But it's just that the transition from no effort to effort , the first step is super hard but after the stairs, it's super easy. It's like you have a kind of staircase like that, where the first step seems impossible. And once you've climbed it, you realize that it's flat and that you can walk for miles and...And it's really hard to get someone to do their

19:39first one. I don't know, there must be something in the brain, in biology, that prevents people from doing it. But once they've climbed that, it's still pretty easy to get them to do it. And by the way, the problem is the problem, the inverse corollary, is that doing things is just the first step and then you discover that you have to do smart things. Damn, in fact, you realize that it's not that easy. It's not that the point is not to do things, that's easy, it's to do the right thing. And that's where the real difficulty begins. But it's a difficulty, you have to have already done bad things to understand

20:15that there are good things to do. Yeah, that's true. That's one of those moments. That's one of those moments from The Family. There, The Family videos. When you listen and at one point, you say "Damn the bastard !" That's exactly it. Yeah, you lock on to something new. But yeah. So, uh, Marc, did you watch a

20:36lot of those videos with Ousama? All in 2016. The whole thing from The Family. I saw the set being built. Incredible. And then later, you had a pass with him for a better pass, is that it? No, but there was no better pass at the time. Go ahead, go ahead. That's it, we're really there. So that's 3 years after the gloves era in Korea. There is, there is no better pass. I'm in a phase , it's not great. And it's my wife who

21:07puts me in touch with Ous. Okay. It's weird to say it like that. Oh, and then tell me about it because I'm going to have reputation problems again. There you go. So please tell me because it's not at all what people are going to imagine. Do you want me to quickly skip the 3 years between Korea and the better colon to

21:27understand? Actually, we can come back to that later, but just your meeting with Uma, I'm curious. Well, uh, I'm in Paris, I'm stuck, it's Covid but they've all gone down to zero. I'm in a phase of pseudo depression. I was starting to make a product, an info-product to explain to guys how not to pee themselves when they go to the bathroom . It's not working at all. I make 0 dollars and then my wife sees that it's not working and she knows that I talk about Ousama all the time and so she gives me an assist. She says "You have

21:56a call with Ousama in 3 days at 4." Huge. And so for the record, how did your wife get a cervix? Because you really want to make me look like a weird guy. And it's the podcast, we have to create an end podcast. There's going to be songs. The truth, the truth, is that I don't know, but from what I have, from what she told me, is that she sent you a message on Instagram and you replied " no problem" and you sent a message and

22:24we said "go ahead, stick in 3 days". Yeah, but the message was really touching. I remember it to tell you, I don't remember much in my life but I remember that or yeah, the message really, really, really moved me. What kind of message is that? Because in fact, uh, the message wasn't a message like " By the way, she didn't even ask me out on a date", right? Uh, in the message, she told me...Actually, she just told me your story, she put a photo of your wedding and she told me that no matter what happened, whether it worked or not for you, she would continue to believe

22:59in you, but that she had no idea how to help you technically and that the only thing she could do was love you, that I was probably someone who could help her technically, that she didn't know if she should pay me, or whatever, and that she wanted to know how we could help you, you know. And I told her to forget: forget the money, forget

23:19everything, tomorrow we'll talk to him. "And there you have it, it's really, it was, but the message really touched me, and the part where she says," Yeah, obviously it doesn't work, but I don't know anything about it. You see, it really touched me. She really...it makes me so happy. Plus , it was six years, six years before that. So you remember the whole message

23:52. And she didn't even tell me, you see. She didn't even say, "Yeah, I did that for nothing." Complete silence. She's Korean. Yeah, yeah. She's never going to admit that.

24:07I mean, they really have a world-record ability to hide their emotions in Korea . You have to experience it to believe it. Yeah. And it's interesting to know what Sama said about the collar. But maybe to give us some context, it would be good if you could tell us what happened during those 3 years, why it wasn't working, why you were at the bottom of the pile, and why she sent that message

24:29. Okay. Okay. So after the gloves episode , absolutely nothing happened. My wife and I had no money at all, and we ended up living in a place that costs $ 500 a month and has a hundred million dollars in it, for real. This is not a joke. I make a little money by doing some acting. Like, I'm in commercials in Korea where you have people dancing with pomello and stuff, and I'm in the back, and I was paid $ 100 a day, and I got maybe four or five a month. So that paid a little bit of the rent and, uh, and then, I met a guy named André, who

25:02was really nice, who was my friend who lives in Korea by the way, and he changed my way of seeing things about entrepreneurship a little bit and he said to me: "But why do you spend so much time creating your software?" Why don't you just send an email code and sell it before you've created it? "And in my head, I was kind of product-oriented and all this seemed improbable. I said to myself, well, anyway, I have nothing to lose, I'm already in the hole, why not, I'll try, you know? And that's where my cold emailing phase comes in, so I wanted to work with people who had no idea what

25:29business I wanted to do. My idea was, I'd take the simplest business in the world. I promised B2B businesses something that all wanted more money, and so I said to myself, I'm going to work for escape games and I'm going to help them with a little software to get more customers. So then I sent out this pitch to cold emails in Australia, in Europe, to escape gangs who spoke English. There was one, I'll always remember Daniel, an Australian who answered my email code. She said," Okay , no problem, let's call each other, " and that was short. It was the 43 minutes of the most crazy sales pitch

26:04ever. But like, [ __ ]. I still have the recording. It's terrible. It's terrible . I have zero confidence. I speak English really badly. I stutter, I ask her several times to confirm when she says to me," Okay, let's do it, like, " Are you sure?" You're really, like, zero, nothing. Finally, she ends up paying. So I make my first dollar on the internet after maybe 2 and a half years of entrepreneurship. At that point, I'm like crazy. And that's what kicks off a 2-year phase of a big business. So this business that I grew to 3 to 5K MR. Uh, email marketing, the sale is a marketing product for escape

26:39gamers to get more customers. And I do that, I do that all day long. I send emails, I improve the product, I send emails, I improve the product. In the meantime, we moved to Bali because we were starting to have a little bit of money to travel and we didn't have to stay in Korea. And then in March 2020, Covid arrived, all the escape games and my business went from 5 cases per month

26:58to zero. And just wait to come back to this product, uh, what exactly are you doing to help them get more customers with your SOS? So, it's a...it's...at the time, it's Facebook Messenger, it was really trendy, you know. He was discussing chatbots, and basically, it is a small chatbot that connects to the business's Facebook page. And except for people, business clients, they can play with it, like they can play...you know, like puzzles and puzzles, you know, like you have a micro escape game on Messenger and at the end, if you finish the escape game, it will tell you: "Congratulations, you have won a

27:3010%discount coupon for our escape game. " Damn, what a crazy idea. Look, it works. If there is, it's quite difficult because, so, the problem, the problem is the lbarding for the clients because the escape games, they have to use it, they have to market the thing and so, so, there are a lot of people for whom it doesn't work because, well, they don't do anything with it and there are some clients in, escape games , for whom it works too well. The problem is that after a while I end up feeling like I'm babying them, you know ? And I'm a solo entrepreneur, I have my own computer, and I don't really

27:58know how to move the business forward. I'm stuck at 3,000 to 3,500 per month. I don't understand in my head that I've built a business. So in my head, I see, I think, "Ah, I earn a little more than my engineer's salary, but I work all day long." But I hadn't seen in my head that I had a business that was worth, you know, 50,000, 5,000, 100,000

28:12dollars, that I could potentially sell. And so, I have this kind of phase where I start to have my business in the mode of, "Oh, I can't stand this thing anymore, I can't stand email codes anymore, it's annoying me." And so, in fact, Covid accelerated this phase of getting rid of the business and moving

28:24on to something else. Okay. And why did you target escape games? Where did the idea come from? I have no idea. I just wanted to make games because I've been really, really addicted to games since I was little and I thought, "Hey, escape games." Holy [ __ ], that's huge. Holy [ __ ], even

28:45your journey is really cool, honestly. These are business ideas. Yeah, really cool. And so 2020, Covid, everything stopped. Yeah, I'm still on Ousama's number one step. So I mean, I have the ability to do things, but nothing is smart. Nothing works. Hm. Oh, that worked anyway. 3,500 a month. You've had a taste of the stuff. I told you it's possible. That's for sure. Oh, that's the best thing, honestly, those are the best memories of my life. You know, the time you get a PayPal deposit in your account and you get $ 200. That's your first dollar on the internet. It's incredible. Yeah,

29:24that moment gives you a little shiver. It's so cool. And then Covid hits, 6 months where I do absolutely nothing, I spend my time surfing the web. We return to France, back to France with my wife to get married. Uh, hence the photo she sent to Ousama, we're stuck in France because of Covid, so we can't go back to Bali. And then, it's the phase of collapse where I can't touch my business anymore. So, I'm trying to move on. Uh, I can't anymore, I don't know why I can't see anymore, I can't do software and stuff anymore. It

29:50pissed me off. I'm still bad at coding. So now I want to do something else and I don't know where, why or how. My sister is a doctor and she shows me a TikTok of a guy who explains that to avoid peeing yourself when you go to the bathroom like a boy, he has a little tube that does this under your balls if you want and basically if you pee but don't press down there, well in fact you'll continue to pee

30:15yourself when you walk. Oh, you see what's going on? Interesting, you know? And like, I try that in the bathroom and then, you know, it doesn't change quickly in my head. I'm like, "Damn, that's so cool" and I have this stupid idea to tell myself, " I'm going to monetize it." There's a guy who shares it for free on TikTok, I'm going to make an information product out of it. So, I created a $ 2 PDF, I opened a store on Shopify and I thought to myself, "I'm going to make money with this," and...Except, of course, no one was going to buy my stuff. I don't know how to do marketing

30:44, obviously the email code didn't work for that. I ended up advertising on Pornhub where you can see millions and millions of impressions, but no one clicked and I had my face on Hub. Oh yeah! Oh yeah, damn, I forgot about that. I made some, so I needed a model to take the photo, you know? Like a guy who peed on himself, so he's like, "Oh no!" And so, I used my face. So, I ended up having banners on Pornhub

31:06where you have my face and it sold you. So, no one clicked, no one bought, nothing happened at all. I said to myself, "Okay, I'm not going to give up on this product, I'm going to try to make at least $ 1." So, I printed out stickers, like a QR code on the left and right, you see a guy who peed himself and it says, "Tired of pissing yourself?" And when you scan the QR code, it goes to the website. So, I go to the public toilets in Paris and I stick these stickers everywhere. Except that no one buys them, nothing happens at all. And then, you see, in my head

31:34it starts to look like I'm at my parents 'house, I'm 28, I don't have a penny saved. And so my wife starts to feel like, you see, it's not really working. And that's when she sent a message to Ousse to explain that, you see, she doesn't really know how to help me and that she knows that I've admired her since I started, so we're going for a B better, Better Coloss

31:57before better Colus, and that's it. It's crazy, it's crazy. And I really admire your creativity and your ability to take action on the projects that you've launched. Uh, so did you meet your wife over in Korea back when you were living out there? Uh, why did it work out well with her? And why exactly was it that you decided to marry her a

32:25few years later? It's simple. In fact, I've always had this feeling of having, of having been a little bit, I won't say different, because...but I have, I always have this thing of: I wanted to do things but I didn't feel good, you know, in, in my thing, in my body, to do them. And in fact, she came to me with a kind of velvet cocoon and she said to me "Go ahead, try this, you see, maybe, you see, it could work, you see." And it gave me this thing of saying to myself "[ __ ], but in fact, she's too supportive, she's always happy and go

32:55ahead, go for it." Hm. Okay. Too good. And, damn, yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. You got married , how old were you? 20 years old. It was 2000, Sept 2020, 6 years. I'm 32. 26. Okay. And so this moment comes when you do the better colus with Osama. Osama, do you remember it or not? Uh, the colus. Yeah. Yeah, of course, I remember it. Yeah. What do you say when

33:29he tells you about the Calibo project? What's your first reaction? If I remember correctly, I told him he had a small market problem, that just because there's a need doesn't mean there's a customer, and that's always the problem . I think, maybe I'm making up a memory , but I...I think I told you you were a victim of the "lean startup" or something like that, because at the time that was kind of my...you're the memory, not me, so I'll believe you more, but I don't...I don't remember that part. Anyway, yeah, but well, I remember thinking to myself, damn, another maker. And then, I said to myself, you need to change

34:17your environment and I introduced you to Blondie. That's it. Yeah. I, I remember Blondie's part. Yeah. I thought the goal of the game was to surround you with people who give you a positive spirit. Blondie, for context, at the time, Blondie had created a company with The Family, or rather with me, called The Secret Company. That's what it was called at the time. Then we remembered Z Quest, and Blondie's goal was to create cash-flow businesses

35:00inspired by the muses of Team Feris. And I thought that Marclou had the right profile to connect with them, and there you go, I made the pass. I made the pass. And then you really connected with them, with the whole gang. We didn't see much of each other, since we ended up moving on. Uh, the thing I remember most about the pass is that you told me, I told you the story of peeing on yourself and you said to me, you told me to pause, you looked at me, you said, "But

35:31no matter what you do, just keep going. " Like, you're not afraid to put your ideas out there, just keep going. Oh yeah? And that's the thing that stuck with me and I said to myself, "Okay, that could work later on." Hm. What did that bring to you when he told you that? You said to yourself, uh, I'm

35:48not crazy. Yeah. Yeah. How many times I told myself I'm not crazy thanks to Zama. That's one more time. Uh, the thing is that I was really, again, the environment there wasn't great at all. It's winter, we're in Paris, I'm out of money, I have nothing left, nothing works. My parents are adorable, you're never going to tell me it won't work or anything. But you can look people in the eyes, I've been an entrepreneur for 6 years, I have nothing. I live with them, I'm 27, I'm with my wife, there's nothing. And so, besides, you don't have a university that starts to have a

36:18job, have girlfriends, you know. There's, there's, there's a kind of... it's completely disconnected that after a while. In fact, I'm not where I'm at, like...one day I wake up, I...I don't know why, I cry. Like, normally I control my emotions pretty well, I start to get worked up and I get really annoyed. I'm in my room, I'm banging my fists into the wall and I'm yelling and I honestly never understood what happened at that moment. And I had like 30 minutes where it transformed the next 6 months of my life and I said to myself, okay, go ahead, I have to, I have to, I have to change, you know, I

36:49have to do something else. And so then I said to myself, I'm going to find a job, that would be a good thing. It's the first time I've had a real job. So, I end up sending out applications and all that sort of thing; I apply, I am applying for the position of a software engineer. And then, I come across a kind of, after a few weeks, I find a job and the guy when we get to the pass , he says to me, "Do you want to give Ty Lopez a message?" And like, I apologize. And in fact, I later realized that Tyop had a software

37:19company that wasn't in his name at all, which was called Gengis at the time, and that I had actually applied for a job at that company and was hired by Ty Lopez's software company. And so, for the next 6 or 9 months of my life, I was working, I was getting paid, I was suddenly getting paid $ 10,000 a month, and in my head, I was like, "What the hell is going on?" It was crazy. So we left France, we went back to live in Bali, we got our house back, and at some point we went back to live in Bali , we met Ousama in the airport bathroom

37:49in Dubai on a stopover. No, that's crazy. Or where I tried to use the technique so as not to pee myself when he thought . The story is incredible, though. I put it on Shopify. Yeah, go ahead. Honestly, the story is crazy in terms of simulation. You say, "[ __ ], the guy is telling me about a method to not pee himself," and I run into him in the toilets in Dubai. It's so good. And you're not only that, but I'm

38:15like a goon. Go ahead, go ahead. For the record, it was the first time I'd ever been to Dubai. Oh, and yeah, it's the trip that's going to change my life. You see, our two paths crossed at a very important moment for both of us. That's really funny. And it's beautiful. I remember when you were getting off that plane; for me, you were like my own personal hero, that's what you were to me. So I see you, I'm like, "[ __ ], there's Ousama and you, what the [ __ ] does he want?" Damn, you didn't say that, you were so adorable to me. But in your head, I imagine you see, you

38:49have to, but what does he want? And especially Kusama, you can feel it quickly, right? When he makes you understand that you can piss him off. But he was really adorable, the whole interaction was great, what in the bathroom and in the black gold. So um, that's crazy. And uh, and so you, and so you then go back to Bali, you earn 10K a month with this job. Did you already

39:16know Ty Lopez or not at all? Yeah, yeah. OK. And uh, and so you continue to work for him, in Bali remotely. At that time , what kind of lifestyle did you have in Bali? Uh, it was 2020, end of 2021. Our lifestyle, and even today, is very, very simple. We have a very small villa and everything. And a month after arriving in Bali, I get fired. I pick up one morning, he calls my neck regulated at 10 am. Then I run into the manager, he tells me, "Yeah, well that was cool. Send all your access to the end of the pass. Oh yeah, he tells me

39:49that. He tells me, he tells me, at the end of the pass, all your access like Gitub and company will be removed. Thanks for working for us. Goodbye." Bam, he hangs up. Yeah. Oh [ __ ], we should have asked him why. Oh yeah, that's...Ah, you must be crazy. It must just be a change in strategy at

40:09their place. They didn't just fire you. They must have fired a lot of people. I still don't know, and since then, there's been no contact with any employee, nothing. The company still exists. I don't know. Gangis, for people who want to watch G N G H I S Lopez, he launched quite a few projects, I think. I don't know if everything held up over time, but yeah, it must have been hard for you. You touch the Dream, success, progress and then suddenly everything

40:45stops again. Yeah. After that, it's funny, you see, it actually lasted maybe 7, 7, 8 months I think. Two things happen. Already in my bank account, I have 50,000 dollars that I never had before. So I'm not, uh , I'm poorer, so to speak. And another thing happens, is that I start working as an employee after 5 years of entrepreneurship and I discover what it's like to hold meetings, I discover what it's like to have to get up and do things that aren't for you. And suddenly it creates this little, you know, this little desire deep down inside me that tells me it would be cool to earn a little less money but to

41:16do your plan doesn't take time. And at the same time I also discover, I don't know why, I discover Twitter. Oh, through cryptos, I end up discovering Twitter. So, I got on Twitter at the end of 2021 and I discovered Peter Levels, who is the GOATS of Indie Hackers. I saw that there were guys like me who coded simple apps, who made enough money to live comfortably, who had fun all day long, and I thought to myself: "Oh, that's my playground." So when I got fired, I wasn't really upset because I already had this desire to get back into entrepreneurship in a slightly different way than what I had

41:47done before. Okay. Ah, you've really grown on Twitter since then, since you now have 359,000 followers. What exactly is an indie hacker? Because I see this term everywhere, I can't immediately define it. Indie is a kind of indie musician, you know, a musician like you have Not necessarily beautiful, you're in quiet solo mode. And hacking, yeah, in French, it's true that hacking isn't necessarily a welcome thing, but uh, but on the other hand, hacking is more like, it's cool, you know. It's like, you have a developer who's developed so well that you can hack stuff and make your little apps, it's

42:23cool. Okay. Okay. Okay. So it's more of a movement of developers who are independent and who do things on their own and who create their own space. Exactly. And then, we're ready, we're ready, so at the time, you're either a developer or you're not a developer, there's no middle ground. And at the time, start-ups were either you raise funds, or you're Vy, you go to San Francisco and stuff, or, and it was still very rare at the time, it was either you boost a startup, you're your little You're a small developer, you run your startup, you're hiring employees and all that, with no investment at all. So, there's really a

42:58completely separate world, and this ongoing movement is actually a bit like this emancipation of solo developers who are starting their own companies. Okay. So it's a bit of a countervailing force to the two forms that existed up until now. Okay. Uh, really interesting . And so, once the collaboration with the Lopez company in Bali came to an end, what did you do in order to get yourself back on your feet? What

43:24happened? Okay. Okay, fine. Okay. Uh, I posted publicly on Twitter. I said to myself: "Well, basically, I've just been fired from editing, I'm going to do some stuff, I'm going to launch my little software programs on the internet" and my first thing, my first thing that I did, was a really fancy thing, and it was basically a website where you Say " I'm tired", it'll recommend movies that can match your mood, you know? Like I'm tired, it'll show you action movies, I'm, uh, I'm, uh, you know, you can imagine any emotion, it'll match the movies to your emotion. And basically, that was the beginning of launching I

43:57think 30 or 35 websites up until the end of 2000, so from 2021 until now, I've launched 35 products with the same idea. What other types of emotions were there ? Of course, there was the Horny category, like I'm a little excited, you know. And even if you go to the site, by the way, I think if you click on Horny, there's always the site still works

44:16and there's a little surprise. Huge. And did that work? No, it worked. Uh, there was no monetization, there was There was nothing at all. The idea was really to get myself in a mood where I build a habit of developing a little bit every day, launching things, trying to get people to visit my site. And in fact it works well on News. So in fact, there are people who discover my

44:38Twitter profile via the post on I News. So I go from 5 followers to 50 then to 500 and then I think that in about a year, I gain maybe my first 1000 followers or 1500 followers. Okay. Okay. Okay. Does that help you grow your business, or are you doing it at the start more for the thrill of

44:57sharing? At the beginning, 100%for the thrill. I don't have a business, I don't have any income but I have a bit of money left over. So I'm not looking for anything, you see, I don't have to grind like crazy even though I work a lot. And so I do whatever idea comes to mind. And one of the first things that started making money was a habit tracker like in the mode I read my book today, you click and it gives you, it transforms it into World of Warcraft mode. It gives you, it makes you do quests that you have to do three times in a row,

45:22for example. And if you do it three times in a row, it will give you like 10 pieces of stuff. The 10 pieces of stuff allow you to buy a small plant that will grow in your garden usually. And the idea, basically, is to build a beautiful garden with all its habits, with all your consistency, having done

45:37sports, having read books and stuff. And it goes from zero at the very beginning to maybe 1000, 1000 € per month at a time endowed after a few months. How do you manage to distribute it? Uh, it goes a lot through Launch platforms, so products, hacker news. And then, since I was posting everything on Twitter, after a while, I started getting a few likes on my posts and suddenly people from Twitter discovered

46:01it too. Okay, great. Great. I saw a productivity app that did something similar for focus, I think. It was a bit like a moderotechnique and you could make a tree and a garden bigger like that. It's quite well-known, I think. But it's a good idea. And one of the things that impresses me about you is that during all this time, I suppose you must have maintained a healthy lifestyle. You're very athletic, you're 18 years old. During all this difficult period where you had failures and so on , did you always maintain this

46:41lifestyle or were you always athletic? It was...Yeah, it was gradual. Uh, when I was your age, I was really pumped. I met my wife, I was almost blacked out in Korea. I barely remember the evening . And maybe when we moved to Bali, when you see people with torsos, you see all of Instagram there, everyone is muscular, and suddenly there's this thing like: "Okay, I'll be careful, I'll start surfing." So we start to be careful about exercising, eating a little healthier, and then I read the book. Oh yeah, a really good book called White We Sleep by Matthew Walker . And it explains the benefits of sleep

47:17, how it works, why you can sleep better or worse with the same 8 hours of sleep. And so, I started to take care of my sleep because before, I tended to set alarms and everything to try to work harder. early and grind. And then, I realize that when I sleep for 8 hours, the day after, it goes by

47:32like a letter even if nothing happens. And also, I realize that when I'm tired , I'm unbearable, I'm as detestable as possible, and so suddenly, in fact, you see, these little habits that you build , and so in the long term, right now we have, we have built all our habits of eating well, sleeping well, doing sports every day and so, well, of course, on the Whoop, that counts in

47:53terms of biological age. Yeah, yeah, I'm impressed. Ousama, you've lost a lot of weight lately, right? Yeah, indeed, but I admit that I don't really want to talk about it because it's a No, but I'll explain why. Because in fact, I gained weight without knowing why and people told me to go to the gym. Right now, I'm losing weight without knowing why and I don't go to the gym. So if you want, I wanted to tell you for a moment that this is a

48:24topic that only concerns me and myself. But on the other hand, I admit that the narrative arc where a pill made me lose all the weight I've gained over the last 15 years, and an experimental pill that hasn't come out yet, in which I'm in a clinical trial, uh, that's going to make me laugh a lot, a lot, especially among the guys who've been telling me what to do over the last 15 years. And I think that we're on the cusp of a completely crazy revolution in medicine. It's a topic that I'm looking at a lot, biotechs, biomeds. I plan to invest a lot of money in all

49:04these topics and I think that people aren't ready for the revolution in generative medicine. Uh, I'll give you a really simple example. I I took a medication for my tendons and joints. The MRI before and after, it's unbelievable. It's unbelievable. It doesn't make any sense. So actually, I think it was Mark Anderson who made the joke to Brian Johnson. On Twitter, he told him, "You do all of that and I will take one pill in a few years and I will have the same result." And I feel like One Pill is not far off. I want to be really exposed to these start-ups and be passionate about this topic and

49:54see what comes to market. You see, for example, I'm taking a medication from a company that plans to release the product in 2028-29. That's quite a window into the future. It's one pill a week. And suddenly my metabolism is working again. So, I actually lost weight, I went from 221 to 170 in 3 months and 90 days. It's a real similarity. It's really

50:30221 to 170. Yeah. In 90 days, without changing anything in my diet or my lifestyle. But after that, I was already eating very well anyway, but it's really, it's completely crazy and living it, it's something, because suddenly you realize what a body that works well is. Because they're all there acting all smart and doing something, but in fact they have a body that works well. And when you've been someone for years whose body didn't work well and all of a sudden your body works well, it's, well, it's

51:05addictive. The energy level I have, the level of pleasure I have, it's pretty crazy. By the way, I don't know how you managed to function so well for years while being overweight. Because, to put it into context, people think that you're fat because you eat badly or something, but you had mercury poisoning when you were younger and that slowed down your metabolism, and that's when you gained

51:33a lot of weight. That's it. Yeah. And that's the doctor's theory, you know. The people I'm talking to now are pretty funny because they say that this theory is [ __ ], that it makes no sense, that in fact, if you like, their peach is: "You can't practice medicine without doing a genetic assessment.""You can't give someone a drug without knowing their precise data . And it's really quite a crazy company because it does precision delivery where, in fact, they do your genetic makeup and, uh, they decide from that, uh, what you should take. And, uh, and, when you see the CEO of this company, uh, with whom I'm trying to become

52:23friends, because he's saving my life, you know. Uh, and above all, I try to convince him to let me put some money into his company. Uh, he actually explains something completely crazy to you, which is that according to him, you could categorize humanity into buckets of genetic characteristics and so on. And if you take each drug, in fact, the percentage of people on whom

52:51it should work is more or less high. And in fact, we have this vision, uh, uh, that what works for some works for others. And I discussed a topic with him that made me laugh a lot. I did intermittent fasting for years, listening to all the advice from guys who explained it to you. You do intermittent fasting, you lose weight and so on. And, uh, and I don't know if you remember, I told you with Yomi, I said I have the feeling that every time I fast, I gain weight. And you know, Yomi, he told me," No, that's nonsense, you're in a calorie deficit, you can't

53:31gain weight, it's mechanical, calories and all. "Well, I thought to myself, maybe he's right, maybe I don't know, there's something, you know. But I had this feeling that I was actually gaining weight when I was fasting. And in fact, when I was talking to this guy , he told me:" Yeah, but wait, there's a funny genetic profile that's quite

53:50present in people from the Middle East. People from the Middle East have a gene called the lean cow gene, I think, or I don't remember what, where basically, every time your body is stressed because it lacks food, it stores it. And the more you do intermittent fasting, the more you drive your body crazy because it thinks: "[ __ ], it's starvation, [ __ ], it's a struggle, [ __ ] , I didn't eat enough." I got into a cycle where the less I ate, the more I gained weight, which is completely the opposite of everything those idiots on Instagram might think. You see...And in fact, what people don't understand is

54:26that all these Jimbros who are lucky enough to have the right diet, exercise , etc., and who create a good cycle, it's because they have a body that works well. But there are many dysfunctions that can cause you to be in this cycle and not have the right result. And the fact that we don't genetically test people before giving them treatments, I think that in years to come it will seem prehistoric. And there's genetics, there's the microbiome. You see, for example, I did

54:54a mapping of my microbiome with them. Uh, my microbiome is in a catastrophic, catastrophic state. I literally messed up my microbiome, and so, still talking to him, I asked him, "What do you think it is?" And he tells me, "Well, you ate breakfast cereal as a child, here's the result. You actually ruined your thing. " And when you think that I ate breakfast cereal as a child because my mother was so proud to be able to offer me that, you say, "[ __ ], what a tragedy ." So in fact, we're in a kind of situation where we're being poisoned by the food industry, uh, we don't

55:34understand anything about common sense or this or that anymore. Everyone thinks they have a solution because something worked for them, they're convinced that it's universal. So everyone is judgmental and believes that this is what it is, and in the middle, there's actually a quantum mess where there are people for whom it works, people for whom it doesn't work, and...And in the end, and what's crazy is that if we enter this area of precision medicine, well, in fact, it's going to be over. We will no longer trust anything other than a doctor to give us a diagnosis because the level of diagnosis is inaccessible to a human

56:06. When you see that to decide on my treatment stack, they went through a process where they took into account terabytes of data to decide what to give me. And when you see the results on me especially, well, I'm no longer a resistant solino, my OMA index has collapsed. My CRP, that is to say an inflammation that was at I don't know what 40 and somewhere it is going back down below 0.5 healthy carrier. So my inflammation is dying down. Well, it's really completely crazy. So really thank you to a friend, actually I have a friend who works in a lab that participates in Teskin and who signed

56:49me up and what the [ __ ]. And I think that this company, when it comes to publishing, when they come out of the woodwork and so on, the day they publish this thing, it's a company that's going to be worth a trillion. It's miraculous, the connection. Miraculous. And, I think it's going to be much bigger than Aux. It's going to be much bigger than Margeot. Auxique and Margeau. Everyone told me, "Yeah, you have to take Aux Marjour." Auxques, I had the allergy of the century, Marge

57:17Jourau, I thought I was going to die. Once again, these things work for certain individuals but they do not work for everyone. And it's pretty crazy, this belief that there's a universal solution in healthcare. Yeah, definitely. And to follow up on what you said about young intermittent eaters, I also did a lot of research when I was an online fitness coach because I had a lot of clients who had eating disorders and could eat to the point of filling themselves up and hurting their stomachs but not really feeling like they were finished. What often happens with this type of diet is that, as you said, for part of the day,

57:59you'll put yourself in a big calorie deficit, your brain will psychologically take it as a threat. It will go into survival mode and as soon as you can eat again, you'll eat much more than you need because your body needs to store fat in case you end up in a phase of starvation again. And I think that this is something that must have happened to you and that happens to a lot of people and they don't necessarily understand why they can't regulate their appetite when it's just that they don't have a diet with a regular intake throughout the day. And it's true that there is a judgment from

58:33the Jimbros as you call them on the internet who often think that all you have to do is go to the gym and control your food impulses. But often it's a bit more complicated than that and psychologically it can also play a role in addition to all the genetic aspect that you talked about.

58:46Yeah. Yeah. Sure, sure. Exactly. And uh, and doesn't it freak you out to do an experimental treatment? Anyway, it freaks me out about my life anyway. What do you want me to tell you ? I've had this problem for 18 years and I can't solve it. I thought to myself, well, what do I have to lose anyway? Since I'm in a situation where the risk is that I'm going to be 40 this year and the risk is increasing exponentially, I'd rather solve this

59:17problem like this than not solve it. Okay. And I thought to myself, after all, the forms that you sign in this clinical trial are a laughing matter in terms of disclaimers and stuff, but hey , that's life. Didn't that thing Bran Johnson launched excite you? I think it's a billion, 1 billion, 1 million a year and he tests you. He basically gives you the same treatment that he has. Yeah, but unfortunately, I don't know why I don't trust him, and unfortunately, I had a hunch. I knew a doctor named Claude Dal who passed away not long ago and who was one of the best doctors I've ever known in my life

1:00:01and who told me something about Brian Johnson. He said, "This story is going to end badly because he doesn't realize that with his level of complexity, he's creating things that are going to interact with each other in ways he can't even imagine." And in fact, he announced that he had an autoimmune disease, which unfortunately is eating away at his stomach or his intestines from the inside, I don't remember. And when I read that, I thought about the sentence again and there's one thing I don't like about Brian Johnson, it's

1:00:40his side, well, his life seems boring. So things seem to be a little better since he took mushrooms and got a girlfriend. Uh, I don't know if you think he's changed or not since he took it. I think he looks less pale, less unhappy. Still, it remains a very measured, mechanical thing. I don't want this kind of life. I'd rather have a shorter, happier life than a longer one with this kind of constraint. First

1:01:12of all, because I'm not capable of it. I get depressed. If I don't have people , life, travel. You see, he released a study on travel and the impact of travel on your health that's terrible. I'm not saying otherwise, but it doesn't matter. Well, so much the better. I'm not saying it's better, but that's life. If, uh, traveling a lot costs this much, well, I'm going to travel a lot and it'll cost me this

1:01:36much actually. Yeah. And then I find it funny, because I saw a tweet from a guy who said that the best strategy for living to 120 for Brian Johnson is the mission he's currently on. And I find that so true, because deep down, there are things you can overlook, you know. Take Jetlag for example; you get the impression it is a huge drama and that it should never be done at all. But deep down, working on a project that makes you happy like he does, that gives him a reason to wake up in the morning, that's what will make him live much longer than others,

1:02:07most people. Yeah. Yeah. And it's clear, it's clear, it's clear. You, Marc, do you do things to optimize your health? Do you have routines? So you told us about sleep, which is super important to you. What are you going to do to have a whooping age at 18? I'm curious. Uh, I try to take 10,000 steps a day. Uh, and I do a lot of sports. I do 1.5 hours of sport daily, or 2. I either go to the gym, or I go running, or I do a mix of both every day. And my wife and I also eat super healthy. So, uh, she's the SIO, she's the Stifief Else officer

1:02:44of the house. So, she manages the preparation of things, she makes broccoli and everything. That's really cool because it takes away my stress because it's true that it's still really hard to eat well. And, uh, what else do we do? And yeah, and then yeah, that's it, and sleep too. Yeah, actually, it's really the basics that

1:03:02you master and that you do regularly. Yeah. A little blood test every 6 months. Blood test every 6 months. You often post photos of your places on Instagram . Wait, I'm going to share a little picture. There you go, that is how you get a hoop at 18. No more sleep, no more regular training. Brian Johnson would tell you not to eat pasta. But

1:03:28hey. Yeah. Well, you know, it's so funny. I ate Bran Johnson, everything he said at the very beginning, and I went through a phase where I'm going to eat a lot less carbs, so no pasta, no rice, obviously, no sugar. And in fact, I did almost a year like that and I lost my body fat, it must have dropped to about 7%, you know. My veins were visible everywhere. And in fact, I realized, I said to myself, "[ __ ], life like this is annoying." It's really annoying. I can't just eat vegetables and chicken all the time, you know. So, we reintroduced that. So we still don't

1:04:02eat a lot of sugar because I feel like everything is a bit too sweet now that I've cut down on sugar. But on the other hand, I really missed pasta and stuff. And to be honest, now I have carbs every meal and I feel much better . Yeah, it's clear that it's usually the same for your testosterone and everything, when you eat too many carbs , you're less in shape. Uh, we skipped a little tangent about health, but we're going to continue on your journey , Marc. We stopped after Tai Lopez mentioned that you launched a SaaS tracker which was starting to take off and gain some real traction in the

1:04:48market. You started posting on Twitter regularly. What happened next? What happened? And then I got into a kind of momentum that lasted almost 5 years, until today, where I'm actually enjoying my life. I share anything that comes to mind on Twitter. I try to launch about one start-up every month, and after having done that consistently for five years, it eventually ends up triggering a few things. There are more people following me, there are more

1:05:15people paying attention to what I do. Uh, there are more visitors to my site, so I make more money and that kind of generates a kind of cycle like that which is cool. And in 2023, I launched, I had already launched about fifteen small start-ups and so, I launched a kind of boiler plate for developers. So that was close, it was just before Lia's time. I feel like I'm always doing the same thing with my code. You have code that sends emails, you have code that sends, that manages the creation of accounts and stuff. And so, I created a boiler plate. So it's a kind of package for developers that

1:05:45allows you to do the same thing as me. And then, I went from making, I don't know, maybe between 3 and 5,000 euros per month to 50,000 or 60,000 euros per month, or rather dollars, and it's never stopped since then. Awesome. What I really like about your videos is that you can see that you're super creative and as soon as you have an idea for a project or a start-up, you start coding it and you bring it to life. For example, recently, you created the-you called it shrimp, I don't remember what it was-to make sure that you maintain good posture while you're on your computer. And I think

1:06:23that's really cool. On your Instagram bio link, you've listed all of your start-ups with all the income from each one. Why did you make the decision to be so transparent regarding the results that you have achieved? Because I'm a product of that, actually . What made me want to do this in the beginning was a guy named Peter Levels who was doing exactly that. And so, I thought, well, I'm going to continue what he did. And so, since you search in November 2021, you'll find a tweet from me telling you how much money I made at the end of the month. And I've been doing that from the beginning

1:06:53until today. By the way, did you sell Trust MRR, right? No, I got an offer. I got an offer and I turned it down. I said to myself, "Go ahead, I'm going to try to make over a million with Truster." That's really cool, Truster. You were offered a million to buy it. Yeah. Why did you turn it down?

1:07:12So you proposed 27 months of Trust MR. Okay. Yeah. Well, I have to...Yeah, I have 2 years. I've done 20%of what I was offered. Maybe even a little more now. Maybe even 25%. So I have to keep pushing. Why did I refuse? Because there is one thing: I actually view all of my startups as if they were my own children, and I feel like it is quite strange to sell what I created. It's a bit stupid, I know, but here it is, it's my little creation, and it feels weird to resell what I created. And the other thing is that I hadn't...If you had told me that a year or two ago, I

1:07:50might have done it. But since I've been lucky enough to make a bit of money, I don't need money anymore, at least not in the short term. And so, the financial value was just a value, it just had a financial value for me and I felt like I was losing something that I had created alongside it. So, I said no . Okay, that works. So TR MRR to give some context, it's a platform on which SAS can publish their figures and in particular their MRR so that it's really transparent. And you also launched the possibility of buying or reselling your SAS directly on the marketplace. That's it. That's

1:08:26exactly it. So in the same spirit as what I've been doing since the beginning, I'm launching this, this is the platform, it's coded in 4 hours. I see a tweet, well, once again from Peter Levels who says that there are lots of people who fake their income on the internet. So, I said to myself: " Well, you know, I'm going to make a leaderboard where you just connect your Stripe key, it brings you to a page and like that you see the current income verified by Stripe." And it works well, it takes off, it makes a lot of noise, there are lots of people who are

1:08:50getting involved and then there's a guy who messages me, I say: "I would like to sell my startup." And so, I'm going to add a button for people to sell, you know, put an option like in mode "she has it, she's on sale" and so, well, I continued like that and now you actually have a platform, you can manage Lego documents to NDA, a letter of intent and company. You can chat with the buyer, you can send documents, you can do your du on the platform and when you're done and everything is good , you can go through escro to secure the gene, send the funds and get the

1:09:19code and so on. And that's what's working better now than it did at the beginning, because on these transactions, I take 3%of the transaction and, as a result, if there's a big acquisition—which isn't the case yet, but if there's a really big acquisition—the platform can make a lot of money. And you launched it in September 2025,

1:09:39I see that there's $ 0 on the curve. Yeah, the first revenues arrived in October 2025 on the curve. Yeah. Ah, it was the end of October, I remember. It was around Halloween, uh, the end of October, there were months where it was just the platform and then in January, I launched the acquisition

1:09:54platform. Okay. And uh, do you have a really insider's eye on the secondary market for buying and reselling SAS? Do you see any changes in the valuation of SAS on the secondary market in the light of AI? Do you have any predictions for the future on what this market will bring? So, there have already been 115 acquisitions on the platform. The average multiple is 1.5, which is lower than what many people are thinking of selling. In SAS, you’d usually say 3 to 5. Here, it’s 1.5. So these are Ss that are much smaller and much younger than the big Ss that have been around for 2 or 3 years. There have not yet

1:10:42been any really big acquisitions. The largest acquisition is just under 100,000. So we are sticking with small SASs for now. What I see is that now it is going wild. Finally, you have channels that are created and like the guy creates his channel a week later, he has a client and 3 weeks later it is sold on TR. So in fact this kind of magnifying glass of you create, you sell, you get bought. I feel like it is getting faster and faster. In my opinion, Bolia plays a lot on this. Uh,

1:11:11that's pretty much what I saw. And you, you get a commission every time there is a sale? Yeah, I have two, there are two parts where I am monetized. Here, to list, you pay, you can pay between $ 29 and $ 499 and then when you are, uh, 3%of the total acquisition, it is directed to my account. I am not surprised. People dream about sales multiples. Uh, but that's because the sales multiples that are communicated are always outliers and then people realize that their company, well, it's not Slack. So yes, Slack is sold at 50 times the revenue but that's because

1:11:49it's Slack so it's not for everyone. Okay. Do you think that the trend will continue to decline like Lia's with the fact that more and more projects are being stolen? No, not at all. But I don't know if it relates to the number of products stolen. I don't have the impression that in the era of AI, there are more, or rather that the percentage of products that take off has really increased. I think the volume is increasing but in the end, you're still in the same proportions. Uh, there's going to be a fragmentation in the

1:12:26number of people who can make a living. If people want to look at what's going to happen in the tech world, just look at what happened in the music world. In the music world, it was incredibly hard to become a billionaire but very hard to make a living. Then, it became impossible to be a billionaire but much easier to make a living. And today, the number of musicians who make a living from music in the world has never been higher, but the number of people who

1:12:50become rich from music has not changed. And the way they become rich is lower than before. So it's kind of the same thing, the probability of becoming rich in tech will increase but the probability of becoming really, really rich will decrease and the number of people who make a living from it will increase and the standard deviation will increase. So, in fact, these are phenomena, and I think that AI is ultimately quite neutral on this because, once again, making the product , whether it's made by an agency or by you or a pariah, in the end, it's not

1:13:28just the product that makes you win. You can't win just because you made a product. What are the other variables? Distribution, brand, well, means of acquisition, and also personal energy and a sense of willpower, right? Finally, you see, uh, the problem is that your way of life and your way of wanting to live has a huge impact on your results. For example, Marc, he loves his life, he does 2 hours of sport per day, he lives in Do you live in Bali now Marc? Uh, Cyprus, but we're

1:14:13in Korea half the year. Yeah. OK. You see, he lives between Cyprus and Korea and so on and so, in terms of his lifestyle, his current success is considerable. Because earning € 100,000 per month under these conditions is like heaven. I mean , it's really exceptional. Now, the question is, if Marc were locked in an office for 90 hours a week, if his lifestyle was degraded, if he never saw his wife, if he had no personal pleasures, and if he earned € 100,000 per month, he would find it crap, you know. And the question is, what is the personal price you are willing to pay to achieve what type of success? And we

1:14:59can't draw a picture of this, but here's a simple picture: you have a linear curve like this, which is the amount of money people normally earn in life. And the more you want to stretch this curve towards you and earn the majority of what you need to earn in your life in the shortest possible time , the more kinetic energy you need. And this kinetic energy, well, it's the cost to your life. If you see the lifestyle that I compared to Marc's lifestyle, Marc lives like me. Right

1:15:33now, I am literally working from 8 a.m. to 1 a.m. every single day just to make zero revenue. So you think, yeah, it's really hard, but it's the price to pay to do things that have a chance of really getting out of the gravitational field. And what I encourage people to do is to understand what kind of life they want and what kind of life they want to sign up for. And the real criterion of intelligence is getting what you want in life. Not what someone else wants for you, not what someone told you was the right thing to do, but what makes you personally happy. I see

1:16:11it, I have tried the life, I even completed a training with Yomi. Honestly, my year 2021, 2022, 2023, I loved going live with Yomi. I didn't work very much. Uh no, but it's true. And in fact, I thought to myself, yeah, it was still a lot less full feeling than when I was stressed 120 hours a week. Because in fact, I realize that I'm a stress junkie, that I love big stakes, that I love it and I'm happy to be back in the game since, since December 15th when I had a wakeup call with Claude with Opus 4.8, I said to myself, damn, or 4.5 at the time, sorry

1:16:54. Uh I woke up, I said to myself "Go ahead, you have a chance to be allowed to play the game again." And in fact, uh, during that time, I was lucky enough to be able to have an exceptional result, you know. And so, uh, yeah, you're signing. Afterwards, in life, you have to alternate lifestyles, work styles, Yeah, you have to

1:17:15find the right timeframes. Hm. You had your phase, well, you're someone who's quite an epicurean by nature, I think. Yeah, well, I can say that since December 15th, Picure has gone out the window. It's really...You're having fun with Claude, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm having fun. But yeah, I'm having fun with Claude. Welcome to the ASMR show. Pleasure with Claude. Claude, tell me I'm smart. Yes, that's a very good idea. Ousama, the world is waiting for you. Uh, honestly, yes and no, because in fact it's not the same type of pleasure and it doesn't go in the same direction. But I think it's a bit like people who do

1:18:06high-level sports, where I don't think they enjoy suffering in sports, but they enjoy the potential of the results . And right now, I don't enjoy my live more than that. Literally, I get up in the morning, I work until I'm done. I have a metric, it's the number of times a week that I fall asleep with the keyboard on my head. So right now, I'm in strikes three or four times a week where I'm at the end of my tether and I fall asleep on my desk, you know. And

1:18:38uh, and that actually requires, yeah. It requires that you believe that you deserve something truly exceptional and great. And the truth is that most people who work like that end up with nothing. Finally, the probability that I end up with nothing is still very high, but the journey is interesting. The journey is cool. We'll talk about your current projects in more depth, but Marc, I would like to have your opinion on how you would describe your lifestyle today. Do you agree with what it told me about the fact that you have a more balanced lifestyle than average? Um, and what are your financial goals too? Do you

1:19:19have any targets? Do you want to create an ambitious company that's worth a billion dollars one day, or do you just not care? It's funny, it's been on my mind a little bit right now. There is, there is, because yeah, there's a little part of me that tells me that one day you have to do something a little more ambitious or something. And there's another part that tells me, "My life is cool the way it is now, and I don't know if I want to change that." I said to myself, "If I want a big change, maybe I'll have children." So, yeah, I'm in a bit of a

1:19:44transition phase, not really a financial target. Uh, we're comfortable , so we don't have anything, and like you said, we really don't spend anything. Not because we're worried about spending, but just because my thing is going to the gym and working out for 2 hours, you know. So, I do not have a need for money, and I do not have a need to do very much. But I'm, yeah, I'm a big believer in what you need to know which seat you want to sit

1:20:09in and be happy to be in those seats. That's the most important thing. All seats are OK, but find your seat. Okay. And now, the lifestyle you currently have, you're happy and you're aligned with it. Yeah, seriously. So great. So great. Uh, Ousama, can we go back to your news? There's something new. You left us a great Twitter post

1:20:36that went viral. Yeah. Uh, in English too. What was that yesterday, the day before yesterday? Yeah. Before, no, well, you see, life is made up of encounters. So last December, I decided to resume my studio activity, and I said to myself, "Okay, what can I do well? I'm really good at the 0 to 1 phase. I get bored at the 1 to 1000 phase. I excel at not being the CEO of companies but at finding CEOs. Despite everything, I know how to be the CEO for the first few months, the time it takes to dissect the project and prove the model. And I was lucky enough to be

1:21:28introduced to an extremely powerful Emirati family here, very discreet. I didn't include their names because, first of all, I know that at some point , they're going to receive a letter from Nicolas Colas, and I just want to push that moment back as far as possible. And well, this time, these are people who risk receiving a letter and taking it differently than people who have received letters up until now because they They have considerable means. I met this family, I really became friends with the patriarch, with the son, and I had a shock, a shock. I saw an entrepreneur who started from nothing in the desert, who never had

1:22:16any resources, who really built an empire. And I met people who are passionate about business, but really passionate about business, like we can be. The patriarch is 76, we discussed Fable’s Claude Code, and he showed me a small project with a coding vibe. I was like," What the hell am I doing here, you know? "And in fact, the son said to me," Listen, it's really nice to be alone, but I'm sure you could do a lot of things for us and that we could align our interests. And we want to help you, but we don't want to. We want to see concrete results in our companies. Is there anything that you

1:23:00might be able to do for us that we could provide you some support with? " And I've had a vision for a very long time, which is that companies are failing to make their transformation because they're failing to build the ultimate tool to empower their employees. That is to say, on the one hand, you have models that are made for geeks like us. On the other hand, you have simple chatbots and so on, but you don't have a tool or a way of working that allows you to take a company, take all the processes and say, I'm replacing this process with AI. Here's the pipeline, here's the assessment. So

1:23:38here are the criteria, here's the maintenance, here's the upgrade and so on. And so it's halfway between a product company, a consulting company and so on. It's a bit of a way of working, of not slowing things down. Uh , not slowing things down, they have a product that they're going to deploy in a personalized way for companies and they're going to build personalized software. And uh, and I said to myself Damn, there's something pretty crazy about this family, which is that there are so many companies where I can have fun. So I already have a lot of clients . Uh, I don't need a big team because I

1:24:12just need to bring in people who are pretty good hackers to be able to implement things. And we can create a kind of two-story company. I have a kind of group of 10 to 15 super creative people who do things, and behind us we have an army of people who go into the companies and who deploy them, and who are managed by someone who comes from the consulting world and who knows how to get into companies, support change, etc. And so to create these two floors, and it went very quickly. I pitched it to them 3 weeks ago. We had weeks of very tough NGO because they are extremely tough in

1:24:56business. And finally, I said to myself , but Go ahead; it may not be the best deal you are making from a financial perspective, but you are in the process of changing dimensions. Um, and at the same time, what happened is that with them, I explained my background, what I knew how to do, and they said to me:" Why are you, why are you actively investing more in start-ups? "I would have said, well, first of all because I didn't have the cash and then because of this and they said, well, go ahead, take 20 million and then we'll see what happens. And so in, in 3 weeks, I found

1:25:32myself with 3.5 million to create the best team of engineers in the UAE so that they could, within their conglomerate, find savings, etc., with a very clear and trustworthy business model where they would give me back, in this box there, 15%of the savings that I make them. So I have a huge cash flow opportunity. I think that honestly, if we work hard and don't mess around, this is a company that can grow to 100 million in cash in 24 months. Because we're talking about a giant group with companies where you can work on pipelines. The first pipeline we're working on is 20 million in savings in

1:26:154 weeks of deployment. You see, it's completely crazy actually. So all of a sudden, you have a playing field. And they're, they're super cool. So, I'm also lucky to have the structure of my dreams because I don't have to, you see , I'm in a framework that's great for me because I don't have to manage social, legal, or contracts. You see, I want to buy computers. Today, I want to buy computers and They're the ones who make the orders, the noo. In fact, I have here, we set up an office, they have a construction company, they're the ones who do the work. So they removed 100%of the hassle for me. I

1:26:57didn't even, you know, I told them," Listen, my problem in my previous company was that the guys woke up years later saying that I had misused the money. "I told them," I don't even want to have access to the bank account, I want us to stay friends. "So I told them," You put a guy in charge of the incoming and outgoing payments, you can't tell me, "Oh, actually this money wasn't legitimate, that's not what it is.""So I don't even have that risk. I just need to be creative, attract talent and create things that will last . And the worst thing is that in their vision, each of these people we attract

1:27:30, if they create companies and we spin them off to become companies because we created a tool for them in their group that becomes interesting for other clients, we can spin it off and they can finance it, they can help me get jobs in the region. So it's really, I found the partner of my dreams in fact. Uh, plus they have the values that I like. They are humble, polite, incredibly business-friendly. They understand quickly, they make decisions quickly. Uh, I offered them an American deal that was a hit. I told them," Listen guys, we have an allowance for 8 hours. The guy showed up, we talked 2

1:28:09hours about tough issues. After 2 hours , we were convinced, they made the transfer 4 hours later. "Well, it's completely crazy. And all this happened like that in a few weeks. So it's really cool. So I canceled my vacation. Uh, I'm setting up the office in August . I'm recruiting. The position, as you said, has gone viral. I had 200 applications. I don't want to end up with only French people. I don't want to create a French company. So there's Samuel Cardio, who is the founder of Artifacts, which was sold to Nike for a lot of money and who is, I think, the best guy I know in open source,

1:28:51hardware, and sovereign configuration. And so, he joins the company as VIP Research, and we're going to recruit in Ukraine, we're going to recruit in China, we're going to recruit. Right now, there's a 19-year-old guy in the pipeline, who's Japanese. And so, yeah, so I'm really here to get back on track with quite considerable means, uh, and I really hope to deliver because it's as if life is really giving me another chance to, in the conditions of my dreams, to do something really

1:29:30incredible, you know. Yeah. Yeah, it's wonderful. I have lots of questions. Uh first of all, congratulations on starting this project. Congratulations on reconnecting in Dubai and being able to launch this project with this family. Dude, if you knew how the connection was made. That's what I asked. So I really want to know. We met in a restaurant.

1:29:54No. Yes. Go ahead and tell us. Well, nothing, there's nothing to tell. The guy, we were eating sushi, we started talking, he asked me, he said," Oh, but you're in AI? We have lots of questions about AI. "And he asked me three questions. I answered him, he said," Mashallah, very smart. I never heard an opinion like that. "I explained to him why I thought that Open A in Tropics would be worth zero in the end. Then he laughed and told me that his family was heavily invested in it. And so he said to me," Do you think it would be worth selling? "I said," Well, probably because you've already

1:30:30made a lot, you can't be too gridy, and the risk isn't worth the risk. "And so we laughed and he said," OK, do you want to come to the office and meet my team? "I came and met his team. His team said," Yeah, we're completely lost . What could we do in I? "I built them a prototype in 24 hours. So 24 hours later, I came back and said," Well, look at your thing there, this is what we can do. "Dude, he was like," But wait, we don't have that kind of talent . "And then he came, he sat down, he said to me," Seriously, Habibi, what do

1:30:59we have to do to make you work only for us? "And I said," Oh, that's going to be complicated, I don't want to be an employee. "Then I said to him," Well, we could create a business. "He said to me," We're not used to partnering with people, we prefer to keep 100%of the companies. "And so there you have it, we talked and then we found a mechanism of alignment between him and me where I remain very, very independent. That's

1:31:23super important. I have total freedom. I can propose whatever I want. I can do whatever I want, work from wherever I want, however I want. And on the other hand, he understood. He told me," Listen, I've figured you out, I understood that I can't ask you to do boring stuff. So every time there's something that pisses you off and all that, talk to us and we'll find the talent. We'll put the managers, we'll put the people and then we'll drink tea , we'll be creative and that's it. "And he told me, he said," Yeah, you have to meet my father. "I met his father. His father is incredible. It's one of the

1:31:5710 best meetings of my life by far. Really. Yeah. Yeah. It's on a level, it's on a level with Jeff Buzzo. They're really, I know I sound like a brainiac in the Emirates, but they're really out of this world. They're out of this world in this country. They have ways of thinking, of reflecting. It's like I've found my home. And so, it's really hard. Honestly, I'm not easily intimidated, so I didn't feel

1:32:27very confident in front of my father. When he looked at me with his piercing eyes and said," Yeah, at one point he told me that's really true, "he said," You're 40 years old, you're super brilliant, why aren't you a billionaire ? What's your problem? Why are you so poor? "You know? And it's really exciting to have people like that. I said," Well, listen, because I messed up, because I'm Lebanese, because I don't know how to invest my money, keep my money... "And I said to him," But at the same time, it's a chance for you, because otherwise I wouldn't be working for you, I'd be in competition with you

1:33:01. "And he said," No, no, it's true, it's true. "He said," Don't worry, we're going to invest your money. You'll leave us a portion of your money , we'll give you a portion of your earnings and we'll manage it for you. " I said," That would be great. "So you really see a great connection and now I'm, I'm really into it. And the fact of being able to have an unlimited token budget to be able to have unlimited hardware, an unlimited team, to be able to attract exceptional talent. I really feel that beyond this cost cutting company, which will be the first company and whose management

1:33:41transition I want to make in the next 12 months, that's not my goal. What I like is that they understood that the model was a studio model: we create things, we capitalize on them, we make them, we sell them, we bring them to life, we move on to the next idea, and they're really excited about that. And they really want me in this position of creative partner that they're exposed to. Uh, and so yeah, it's really super, super, super enthusiastic. It's great. And so in 12 months, you'd see yourself making a transition, you wouldn't see yourself even before, even before. In fact, once again, my goal is to create five iconic

1:34:20companies per year in AI, and I've found the perfect partner to do that. It turns out that the first one I do is also a valuable move for them because you see I understand the association that we are experiencing. The guy says, " I have this problem; it's a very serious problem for me. It's a problem that could potentially be worth hundreds of millions a year. Solve it for me. It's kind of your test. If you solve this problem for me, if you create the team and deliver what you promise, then, my friend, I'll give you everything you've done for me—all the BNFs, I'll give them to you, you do

1:34:55what you want with them. Do you want to invest 100 million in a company in the US? We'll invest 100 million. "He tells me, in our family, the only thing we want is for people to deliver. So deliver, and then we'll trust you 100%. So I have 3.5 million to deliver a team . That's still very comfortable. I usually do this with zero. So, you see, it's more...It's easier to pay people than to motivate people to work for free. And I have 20 million to deliver in a start-up. And you see, he wants me to deploy the 20 million. In this message on Twitter, I received crazy

1:35:45start-ups from crazy guys and that's where you see that everyone said:" Yeah , with The Family affair, your reputation, etc. "It's still [ __ ]: when you have money, nobody cares about your stuff, you know. So it's really the" I'm happy about that "and I'm happy that there are lots of entrepreneurs who are rediscovering my phone number, who are rediscovering that they can do business with me. And at least now, I'm in conditions, you know, where there won't be any stories of stuff with partners who come and tell you stuff because in fact I don't

1:36:18touch any of those aspects. You see. And I'm so, so happy to be in a situation where I don't have to manage any of these aspects. For example, I have a stupid thing, but you see, we recruit people, we have to get their visas, we have to do their onboarding, we have to bring them in and everything . I have a guy who's dedicated to me, his name is Hogdi. I tell him, I tell him, we need to do this and he says," Yes, boss, "and boom, it's done. It's like I have a software AI and a human AI. And that's really what I've been missing in my life, because I'm really

1:36:58not good at these things, and I've never...when you're an entrepreneur, unfortunately, you have to manage all this crap. And I've never been in a situation where I don't have to manage it, and it's still a joy. You know, if I need to manage someone, well, it gets done. A legal department, I have lawyers who protect me. It's pretty crazy. And all of this is not in an

1:37:25administrative organization and so on. I mean, the guys own 100%of their company. I have access to the owner, I can talk directly. If he says something , everyone is afraid and executes. You're not in a company where the CEO needs the authorization of the board that meets to...vote. No, no, so he's really, he's really the founder of my dreams. I try to be the founder of others and he's really the founder of my dreams. It's great. And this family, so, you first

1:37:55connected with the son, is that it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And the son introduced you to the rest of the family behind and it's the father who started more or less from nothing and who managed to build the family fortune . Exactly. And the son is so strong. The son is not an heir at all. He built businesses. He's already made the family fortune grow. Whereas his father

1:38:17had already come a long way. So, uh, no, it's something these amirate families. So how were you? Just to put it in context, you were at a restaurant eating sushi and he was at a table next to you and you started talking to him like That. He's the one who talked to me, because in fact we... no, in fact, I was talking about Japan with a friend, and the friend told me ...we were talking, and then he...he turned to me, he said:" Ah, I love Japan and everything. "And then we talked about the deal, I told him what we were doing on the lever deal. He

1:38:50said to me" Ah that's really good and everything but how do you do it? "I said" Well we do a lot in I because otherwise we wouldn't be able to do it. "I took out my computer, I started to show him, he said" That's great. "Then, I tell you, we had the anthropogenic conversation. The anthropogenic conversation made him go crazy, uh, because I think he really liked my way of reasoning and he said to me" Go ahead, you have to come and meet my whole team. So that's

1:39:14crazy. You handled it, huh? You handled it. How long did that take? Well, I met him about five weeks ago. Oh yeah, that went fast. Yeah, it went really fast. But well done, well done for bouncing back. You'll document all of this publicly. Marc, what do you think of all this? Honestly, it's not my area of expertise . So, I prefer to remain discreet and silent because I really don't know

1:39:49enough to say anything valuable. Okay. Okay. Okay. Anyway, yeah, that's great. I'm happy for you. To touch on the recent news in the AI world, "AI

1:40:13eating its own customers" is a big topic right now. They first launched Clud Design and crushed it. Figma lost 50%on the stock market. Right now, they are launching companies in the pharmaceutical sector and they are accused of collecting a lot of data from these companies to create competitors in verticals and they are capitalizing on many markets. So in the pharmaceutical market, they have also launched cloud legal, cloud financial, cloud security. Do you have an opinion

1:40:51on that? Well, anyway, you should never trust a poor person. I mean, they don't have a business model with their model. Of course they need to find a business model and of course they need to steal to create this business model. It's fair game. I mean, it's part of the business world, well, it's part of the game to take other people's ideas and do them better. Now people are waking

1:41:16up and saying, "Oh my god, my data." Yeah, yeah, listen, bro, that's how it is. It's really starting to get on my nerves, especially now that it's in the tropics. I'm already really pissed off at myself for spooking the American government too early with their firming . So now all the models are stuck. We're blocked. They're giving China a real opportunity to win, which, in the long run, isn't the thing that makes me happiest in the world. I'd rather Team America win, but they're shooting themselves in the foot like idiots, and all this is just to justify their valuation. It's not normal for a company with no business model to be

1:41:59worth 1,000 billion. It doesn't make sense. You can spin it any way you want , it's not normal. And because it's not normal, it leads to absurd decisions, because now everyone needs a liquid strategy. For... "That requires a story . The story is about creating businesses, side businesses, and other things. In short, that's really the worst position to be in. The historical example I'm thinking of is when Pepsi almost went bankrupt by creating Pizza Hut, investing in it because Pepsi was distributed in every McDonald's in the world, and McDonald's was like," Wait, you're kidding me, you're competing

1:42:35with me even though you're my supplier. "So Pepsi lost I don't know how much of the market because of that switch, and in Tropic they shot themselves. I decided to send this story over to the family that I am currently working with . The guys had installed Tropic in all their companies. The question they asked me was how to uninstall it in 15 days. And it's a multi-million-per-year contract for Entropic. And that's normal. And we will switch to a local

1:43:07one; we'll build a custom harness. Anyway, it's absurd. I don't know what's gotten into Dario. He already did the same thing with GPT2 when GPT2 came out, he did the marketing. It's so dangerous, we shouldn't go out, we have to talk to the government. I think that , as a good autistic person, he found a marketing method, he said to himself," I'm going to repeat it, repeat it. " Except that now, well now, he's repeated so many times that it's the Pentagon that decides whether or not a

1:43:35model can be used. That's unbelievable. It makes no sense. Especially given where we are with Ia's capabilities, and on top of that, his altruistic side , I'm the one who decides what's good or not, it gets on my nerves. Every time we come across a guy like that, he ends up as a psychopath who wants to kill everyone. So no, really, and it's not my fault; I use his model, it was

1:44:00the best model by far until recently. Now, he's been caught, so much the better, and I hope he'll soon be overtaken. And too bad for them. Anyway , it's really, it's scandalous, this kind of attitude. And I hope that all the companies will have a wake-up call and withdraw confidential data, etc. Because, well, you can't let the guy launch competitors on the pretext that he's taking, stealing your patents,

1:44:30your technical documents and so on. Clearly, it doesn't make sense. It really doesn't make sense. What's the alternative for these companies? Well, it's to start moving towards sovereign solutions. There's Z, which is kind of the current winner with and then in fact you have to be neutral, you have to create an infrastructure where you can plug in any AI and change it. That's the goal. It's really for you to master your Arnas so that you can put the right brain in when you

1:44:58need it and change it on demand. Hm. Zi for the context, it's a Chinese lab. So, they released the GLM 5.2 model. Exactly. CL opus on the scores. So apparently it's 10 times cheaper to use via API. It's open source and it uses Zé plus Nvidia. Is that Marc, are these topics that you follow closely? Are these things that affect you or is this macro thing about LIA and the issues that could arise not really something that interests you on a daily

1:45:33basis? Not crazy. I code with Lia, but I switch between models constantly without thinking too much about it. I don't have any, I miss it a bit, really . My job is to create interfaces that people use, and whether it's Entropic AI or Open AI, it doesn't change much for me. I have the impression that it's becoming so easy to create airlocks that it's going to become standardized in a certain way. I have 15 tables, 15 tabs open on my PC. It feels like I don't know, see, you see Tropique launching 15,000 s Same thing with Open

1:46:05RS, which dances for 15,000 seconds. You have the impression that it's going to be standardized in a certain way. I don't know how that translates, but I have the impression that, you see, it's going to be the same company behind Uber and Airbnb. You see, I have this feeling that you'll interact with Airbnb and Uber but lose your OS through their interface, through the interface of something else, and that's it. Do you think that power will be centralized by a private company in the

1:46:35long term, potentially? Yeah, I can see us using a single thing , a single interface for everything that interacts with other interfaces, but the backend of other services because, OK, I think that for a user, it's really difficult. Who's going to get through it? Well, no. Airbnb, Uber, everyone knows how they work. But every time that you use some new software, you have to, you have to find out, you have to understand how it works. which button to click on which thing and whatnot, and I feel like it's, you know , it slows down the adoption phase of a lot of things. I feel like all that is

1:47:04going to disappear and that it will give way to a UI and nothing else. Okay, what do you think, yeah, I agree. Anyway, I think that models are becoming commodities and that's the value, it's in the application and in the infrastructure. So anyway, they fight and everything, but in the end, they will all converge towards the same thing. So a bit like everything converges in SAS. But that's why there is a real opportunity for the fashionization of the economy. There will be a real surplus for people who are able to put the brand's style, you see. Marc Lou is a character, he's a brand. You use a product, you don't

1:47:52just use the product, you use it through him. And so in fact, paradoxically, what is the most impressive investment that Marc Lou could make is in his personal brand rather than in his thing. Uh, by the way, Marc, if I were you, I would try to find a producer to make a documentary on Netflix before an indie

1:48:14hacker gets his Netflix documentary. And that's what could really make your business explode by far. It happens, well, yeah, that's for sure . Every time you have podcasts and like that on big things, it brings in a lot of people and everything. There's I don't know if you know Starter Story? Yeah, yeah, they made a video that was great and everything and it's true, so after that , it creates a lot of people and all

1:48:41who follow and everything. If you have TR in your hands, what would you do with it? I mean, if I were CEO of Struster R, right? Yeah, it's your site. Well, me, I admit that I still don't understand why people put their MRR on it. Okay. So, a little bit of context, there's this, it gets about 100,1700 visits per month . People use it mainly because, first of all, you get a backlink and also because there's this thing on Twitter ...I see it every time: you have people who post their income and you have people who say" You're a liar ", they post a link" so bad "and on Redit you

1:49:22have the same thing. You have lots of people who say yeah I created my app I made 10k this month here's the proof link of my what I understand is why people need to talk about their Does talking about your income on Twitter bring in customers? I don't understand the thing actually. Yeah. And it brings you customers because you sell something that has nothing to do with your clients, you're selling a training course and you want to show that you're capable of doing it or does

1:49:46it really bring you clients?

1:49:51You put a tweet, you say, I don't know, I made 10k per month with my new SAS that I launched yesterday, it's bound to create excitement. You see, for example, that you said that you raised 3.5 million, there are lots of people who will be attracted and who will look and suddenly you have people who will apply and

1:50:03follow your site. Okay. Yes, yes, if it creates excitement that way, uh, you proactively contact companies to get them to join Trust MRR? No, it's all word of mouth. Well, maybe that's where the mistake is. You should hire 10 Hermes agents and bombard people all day long about why you're not on Trustire. You could do some, you could do some, you who were good at Colmail, you could make hundreds of approaches to Colmail with agents who work 24/7. And you should tell yourself that there's not a single SAS on earth that isn't on it, and you offer the first month free. That's what's funny, is that it's free to list, it

1:50:48costs nothing at all. It's monetized through two things. The add-ons if you want to have visibility and you'll be placed in a place where more people can discover your site or through the marketplace. I what I what I what I what I think about this type of company is that you have to be hardcore at prospecting. In fact, I think that maybe if you want to prospect, maybe you should prospect to find potential buyers, you know, funds or businesses that are used to buying SAS and go get them at, them, because that's how the value of the TRM, MRR too, will increase, for guys who have...but the

1:51:26problem, but the problem is that this is true for all guys who have a small SAS and so on. But if what he said before is true, what you want is the big ones who come and post their real figures, you see. If you already have big ones or what's difficult is to have

1:51:42big acquisitions. No, but precisely, I don't think that the acquisition business model is really your business model, because it's good for, for the, for the" lot " enfruit, but if it really brings in customers, it brings in distribution and trust in the market. You should be more on the side of a pilot trust than that. And then you can develop a whole universe around the fact: to check that the company has the means to serve you in 6 months. You can do campaigns a bit like:" Well, I used this SAS, you see, ” a bit in UGC. I used SAS and then, this SAS, after 6 months, it

1:52:16disappeared because in fact it didn’t earn money and I’m the only idiot who paid, you know. Now I systematically check on Trust MRR. If you become a pilot Trust, the market size is x 1000. Uh, while the side we’re among ourselves, between SAS guys and we’re looking to acquire, it’s great. And if you do what Antoine said, well it’ll make you gain a step, that’s for sure. But it’s a small step compared to the mainstreaming of this

1:52:42business. Because today, you also have a revenue model, that’s it. You have SAS that can pay for advertising on Trust MRR to maximize their chances of being bought. Exactly. OK. And what are the figures? Can you share or not? Yeah, it’s about half, half, half of the revenue It's, uh, it's through advertising and guys who want to sponsor themselves on TRR and the other half is through acquisitions. So people who pay a girl to be listed and people who get 3%of

1:53:11the acquisition. Okay. And they pay for impressions, uh, the guys who want to do ads. How does it work? No, I did it on the fly. It's just you pay, it's $ 4,500 a week. $ 500 a week. Okay. Uh, I have the impression that most of the guys who come to Trust MRR, they would potentially want to get bought out or, in any case, they would be looking for ideas, uh, or they would be looking for ideas for SAS to launch. And so, the more SAS there are that get bought out at a high price, the more potentially you could have an economic model where

1:53:47each new person who wants to list their SAS could pay to do so. Uh, I have the impression that the The overall value of the model is mainly linked to whether or not there are large acquisitions that can be made on the platform. So the challenge is to find out how more acquisitions and larger acquisitions can be made. And because what do you think is the value that people are looking for by publishing their content on TR MRR? Yeah, there's the trusts part, like so that I don't get called a liar, I'm going to put it on trustarer, and people sometimes ask for it on Twitter, like, "Yeah, but if

1:54:34you're not on TR, I don't believe you." So there's that. There's the part, you know, it's going to bring you some traffic, you know, you have your pretty page and everything. There's the portfolio aspect. And the thing is that the project is actually broad. Yeah, I feel like there's also a lot of people who come to get ideas, you know. When I first come to Trust MRR, I look at which SASs have had the biggest growth in the last few months. What could I launch quickly? And so there might be a side, I think you have a paid version for that, right? Where you can see more

1:55:08results or not yet. Sometimes, I randomly put paywalls on the site just to see if it works and if it takes off. It's possible that you've come across one, but yeah, you should at least create a free account to check all the data. After what I thought about your idea, I thought it was to do something where, like, I take, I don't know, the things that are taking off the most and I mix them with AI and I ask it to find business ideas in other areas that would be potentially promising and kind of create a database where, every month, I send you ideas for Start-up, you know, something like

1:55:38that. Hm. And would you monetize that through a newsletter subscription or something like that? Okay. Where is this going? What do you think? Do you think your idea of making the Trust Pilot trustee of SAS is really the best idea? I don't understand how you could monetize that because I don't even know what the Trust Pilot business model is. It's a racket model. It's that once you're the trust agent, you tell everyone that to stay, they have to pay something. And people don't have a choice anymore, they have to stay. It costs a lot to be on TR Pilot. Uh yeah, the thing is, you see, I'm thinking yeah, if you think

1:56:21that people are going to copy your idea because you put yourself on Trust MR, it's great for people who come looking for an idea. It's terrible for the who puts forward his working idea and tells himself, "[ __ ], I don't want 13 MR." So , you still have a tension between what the guy who lists wants and what the people who come to observe want. There is a fundamental misalignment of interests at that level. Now, once again, as I said at the beginning, I'm a little confused that it's a market and that's good because in fact it means that it has value. It's often the

1:56:53things that we don't understand that have value. The things that we understand, well everyone has done it. So there's something and I tell myself that if there is value in showcase, well we have to push it. I always like to ask myself, what is the x10 version of psychopathy of the company that works? It works on this scale, what happens if you do x10 level psychopathy what? And so now, today, you have Trust MR. But why wouldn't you do Trust Privacy, Trust tool that is used, Trust data and all that in Trust MRR where the guy has to come and connect his code, his thing to say that well they

1:57:30don't want people's data, that they respect their privacy, that the Thermopus are good. In AI, you can audit a lot of things on a company, right? And that and so you can create the real trust that people need to be able to use a tool and maybe you'll be so rich to buy Trust.com, what, you really become the layer of trust and

1:57:57audit, uh, between SAS and people. OK. Yeah, that would be the Tenix version. Yeah, indeed. What is the business model of Aquire.com? Well, it's a percentage on things but it doesn't work. Aqucom, it's a small company, right. It's, uh, well again, there aren't that many, there aren't that many companies. for sale, actually. There aren't that many people

1:58:26who want to buy companies, actually. There are a lot of fantasies about the market. But, uh, yeah. But it's complicated to buy a company, you know. You need the money, then you must know how to manage it. Then, finally, if you have the money and you know how to manage a company, why would you bother buying something? You tell yourself, well, it's better to create it, especially in the age of AI, especially in the age of zero barriers. So once again, I think there are a lot of fantasies about the idea of creating something and selling it, that doesn't mean it won't happen, it's just that

1:59:00it's not the best thing to do. Well, if one day I have trust.com, I would say that it was part of a podcast without permission. We'll have a great story to tell. Yeah, I'm sorry, I I have to go, I have lunch. So tell me how you want to cut it, but you can

1:59:18stay together if need be. No, that's fine, let's wrap it up. Yeah. Thank you, thank you Marc for coming on the podcast. We really enjoyed chatting with you. We'll put all of Marc's links in the description. Feel free to tell us what you thought of the episode in the comments. We'll read you. Subscribe and we'll see you next time. Hi

1:59:36everyone. Ciao!