Our Story

In 2021, I absolutely did not think I would create software. Like many, I discovered cryptocurrencies during their euphoric period. With a friend, we invested... then lost a lot of money during the Bitcoin crash. We wanted to bounce back; my friend had the idea that we should take a training course in dropshipping and SEO to create an online business together. For a month, we learned the basics of SEO, e-commerce, and digital marketing. But we gave up because the market seemed already saturated, creating websites was long and complex, and we felt we had arrived at the wrong timing. Knowing when to give up if the trajectory is not relevant or the timing is not right is a good decision, to avoid falling into the sunk cost fallacy. At the time, I simply thought I had wasted a month of my life. I did not yet know that this training would completely change my future. A few months later, I left my job in maritime transport to take over the family motorcycle saddlery business. In January 2022, I was self-sufficient. Customers were happy. The business was running like clockwork. Then, in the summer of 2022, a simple email from Orange Pages Perso changed everything: the servers were going to shut down permanently. Our site, hosted for over twenty years on a subdomain, was going to disappear. On September 5, 2023, the servers went offline. Within weeks, the phone stopped ringing. Emails ceased. Orders collapsed. Yet, nothing had changed in my work. The quality was the same. Customers remained satisfied. The problem was no longer my job. The problem was that no one could find me anymore. I consulted several SEO experts. The quotes were high. The results were poor. 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 family member, a developer, issued me a simple challenge: "Why don't you learn to code?" I started from scratch. For nearly two years, he taught me the basics. At the same time, I spent hundreds of hours with artificial intelligence to progress faster. Symfony, PHP, JavaScript, APIs, architecture... I learned everything by building. In September 2025, the new site was finally online. But the real problem remained: visibility. That's when everything made sense. The abandoned SEO training in 2021, the two years of coding, the arrival of AI... everything converged towards an obvious conclusion: I didn't just need a better site. I needed the tool I would have liked to have when my business had become...

Invisible. A simple tool. Accessible. Designed for artisans, merchants, freelancers, and small businesses that neither have the time nor the budget to juggle between ten platforms. This is how Leadnist was born. Today, every feature of the platform answers a question I asked myself during the toughest times: "Would this tool have helped me when I needed it the most?" If the answer is yes, then it has its place. Leadnist was not born from market research. It was born from a loss of visibility, a phone that no longer rang, and the conviction that small businesses deserve the same tools as large ones... without the complexity or the costs that come with them. (And thanks to Leadnist, the motorcycle saddlery business is now back in full swing. And I hope that other entrepreneurs in my situation can get back on their feet thanks to it.)