Self-Taught Developer Earning $12K/Month From a Simple App

Benjamin Houy is the creator of French Together, an app to help people speak and understand French 🇫🇷

In a recent interview, he reveals…

French Together started as a blog 10 years ago while I was studying in Germany and became my full-time job over the next few years.

You can see an early version of the blog from 2014 here 👈

Benjamin writes in the interview…

When the COVID pandemic struck, I decided to turn my main product (an interactive ebook) into a proper web app…

Back when I was a kid, I learned a bit of C++, Python and PHP but never really got deep into it. Somehow, there was always a point when I would lose interest and switch to something else.

😕 However, during the pandemic…

My SEO traffic started declining. I ignored it at first, telling myself it would get better. Months went by with my traffic declining a little more every month.

After a while, I had to face the inevitable: my traffic wasn’t coming back. What I took for a simple seasonal change was in fact a shift in the market.

I found myself backed in a corner with only 2 choices: let the business die, or reinvent it.

He chose the second path…

My initial goal was to take all the content and features of the ebook I was selling and put them in a web app…

After 2 months or so, the app was built and I was eager to get feedback so I contacted all the people who had purchased the ebook in the last 12 months and offered them free access.

🚀 Even after launching the app…

My income dropped. That’s because I switched from selling an ebook with an optimized and tested marketing funnel to selling a SaaS [software as a service], something I had never done before.

After a while though, I got used to SaaS marketing and my income started increasing… I’m now at roughly $12k MRR and hope to double it within a year.

Elsewhere he mentions…

The large majority of my sales and traffic come from SEO…

My funnel is pretty simple: people search for some French-related keywords, find the French Together blog and then either sign up for the newsletter or start a free trial directly.

💬 Benjamin’s advice for others…

Don’t overthink it. It’s easy to spend years or even decades dreaming of starting, only to find yourself full of regrets. Start now with the skills and knowledge you have, learn as you go.

You don’t need the perfect idea, you just need to offer something people are happy to pay for.

I suspect there are opportunities to do what Benjamin has done but for other languages.

His app looks simple enough, wouldn’t be too hard to build yourself or outsource 💪

Benjamin’s main advantage though was his 10-year-old blog that already ranked for a lot of relevant keywords. So you’d either need to build up a blog like that yourself or find some other marketing channel.

If you’re a developer, you could find established language-learning blogs and offer to build apps for them, see if you can figure out a revenue share 🤝