Our Story

The Story Behind Leadnist

Back in 2021, I had absolutely no intention of creating software.

Like many people, I discovered cryptocurrencies during the market boom. A friend and I invested... then lost a significant amount of money when Bitcoin crashed.

We wanted to bounce back. My friend suggested that we take a dropshipping and SEO course together to build an online business. For an entire month, we learned the fundamentals of search engine optimization, e-commerce, and digital marketing.

But we eventually gave up because the market already felt saturated, building websites was long and complicated, and we had the feeling that we had arrived at the wrong time.

Knowing when to walk away because the direction is no longer relevant or the timing isn't right is sometimes the best decision you can make. It helps avoid falling into the sunk cost fallacy.

At the time, I simply thought I had wasted one month of my life.

I had no idea that this training would completely change my future.

The Turning Point

A few months later, I left my job in maritime transport to take over my family's motorcycle upholstery business.

By January 2022, I was fully independent. Customers were happy. The business was running like clockwork.

Then, during the summer of 2022, a simple email from Orange Pages Perso changed everything: the servers were going to be permanently shut down.

Our website, which had been hosted on a subdomain for more than twenty years, was about to disappear.

On September 5, 2023, the servers were switched off.

Within a few weeks, the phone stopped ringing.

The emails stopped coming.

Orders collapsed.

Yet nothing had changed about my work.

The quality was exactly the same.

My customers were still satisfied.

The problem was no longer my profession.

The problem was that nobody could find me anymore.

Understanding the Problem

I contacted several SEO experts.

The quotes were expensive.

The results were disappointing.

I realized that SEO had become a field reserved for those who could afford it... or for those who knew how to do it themselves.

That's when a member of my family, who is a software developer, gave me a simple challenge:

"Why don't you learn how to code?"

I started from scratch.

For nearly two years, he taught me the fundamentals.

At the same time, I spent hundreds of hours learning alongside artificial intelligence to progress faster.

Symfony, PHP, JavaScript, APIs, software architecture...

I learned everything by building.

The Realization

In September 2025, the new website finally went online.

But the real problem remained: visibility.

That's when everything finally made sense.

The SEO course I had abandoned in 2021, the two years spent learning to code, the arrival of AI...

Everything converged toward one obvious conclusion:

I didn't just need a better website. I needed the tool I wish I had when my business became invisible.

A simple tool.

Accessible.

Designed for craftsmen, local businesses, self-employed professionals, and small companies that don't have the time or the budget to manage ten different platforms.

That's how Leadnist was born.

Why Leadnist Exists

Today, every feature inside the platform answers one question I kept asking myself during the hardest moments:

"Would this tool have helped me when I needed it the most?"

If the answer is yes, then it deserves its place.

Leadnist wasn't born from a market study.

It was born from losing visibility, from a phone that had stopped ringing, and from the conviction that small businesses deserve the same tools as large companies... without the complexity or the costs that usually come with them.

Today

Thanks to Leadnist, my motorcycle upholstery business is now thriving again.

And my hope is that other entrepreneurs facing the same challenges will also be able to regain their visibility and rebuild their business with the help of Leadnist.