Creations
From the most recent projects to the oldest. (Reading from bottom to top will give you more context and a smoother storyline).
The Entrepreneurial Era (building apps to become financially independent)
2012 – Programmable game in javascript Terrarium.js: Terrarium.js allows you to program the intelligence of an animal and to introduce it into inter connected terrariums. The goal is to survive and invade all the other players’ terrariums. (It is a port from an old Terrarium.net game developed by Microsoft.)
2012 – Online group coaching tool I partnered with the coach James Short to build a platform that brings people with similar goals together online.
2011 – Crowdtesting with BugSniff: I leverage Mechanical Turk to get people to manual test your website and find flaws.
2011 – Video Testimonial Software: I wanted some video testimonials for my other apps so I made a small app to make the process easy for users to record their tutorial without needing any software other than their internet browser.
2010 – Find a freelancer with TaskArmy: My current attempt to fix the online freelance marketplace world by building the first respectful freelance marketplace 🙂
2010 – Idea management software Improve HQ: It is born from my frustration from waiting on 37Signals to publish their internal idea management app.
2010 – WeekPlan: This is a pet project that was never intended to become a viable business. I like the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People but all the online todo applications seem to focus only on GTD. So I developed this on a Saturday night with Asp.net MVC and jQuery.
2010 – Online coaching tool CoachFire: CoachFire will make coaching mainstream. I quit my fulltime job and stopped working for four months to kickstart this web application. I want to leverage my technical skills to help people who help people achieve their goals.
The Facebook Era (I used to run a Facebook development company).
2009- Dogether: I grew tired of developing games. There is a borderline between entertaining people and wasting their time. I decided to start building applications that add value to people’s lives. Dogether is my transition between the two worlds. Using my experience in facebook and game design, I developer an application that helps people achieve their goals using game features.
2009 – Soccerbet: A betting game for the launch of a European championship translated in French / English / Norwegian.
2009 – Tip Top Flop: An attempt to match the success of Living Social in France with a Top 5 adaptation. I can’t explain why this application never took off.
2009 – Poker: I saw a big opportunity there but I did several mistakes that killed the project. Poker was trending in France and there were no Poker game on Facebook in French. I bought a poker component built in flash and php, translated it in french and integrated it in Facebook. It was very time consuming for me to add new features to the game because I didn’t master the technologies or the codebase. The user base started growing slowly but steadily (I like that) and then I hit a wall. The game wouldn’t scale with more than 16 players simultaneously. Performance issues are hard to fix, performance issues on technologies you don’t have much experience with are near impossible to fix. I paid someone to try to fix it but after 30 days of trying, I gave up (other projects were pulling my attention).
2009 – Compare your friends: Another variation of the questions-about-your-friends theme. We were reusing the same codebase, so it was easy to launch new applications with slight variations.
2009 – ShareTraffic: I created a free link exchange system for Facebook. You add the banner in your application and it shows five links to other applications. For each click done by your users on the banner, you receive X impressions on other applications.
2009 – Confessions: For some reason, I am personally attached to this application. It never performed as well as other applications I published but I always loved the fact that you could answer questions about your friends anonymously.
2009 – Rate Me: This was my attempt to get back on the horse and ride again with a different partner (this time, with a business structure). This application did well too but arrived a little too late in the two months questions-about-your-friends fad.
2009 – Petites questions entre amis: A success story turned into a painful lesson. After three days of development, the application started to get amazing traction. We had 1 million users the first week and the second week we had 1 million users daily, 100% french users. The application was getting 20 millions page views a day. The third week, my partner at the time removed my access to the servers and left with the application. We had no business structure, I had no way to defend my case. I am still sore.
2008 – Papa-Noel: In this application, you list what you would like for Christmas, and friends can check your list out and discuss with you about it (and secretly buy the item from the application). I learned the power of the event based application.
2008 – Chat-Bite: This is the first application in my facebook period. This is the application that turned me from a satisfied employee with side ideas into a wannabe entrepreneur. I remember the excitement of refreshing the facebook statistics page to see the number of users go up each second. I never believed in this application, I never wanted to invest in it on the long term, and yet it has been my most stable and consistent creation. At its peak, it had 50K daily users and was making 15K euros per month in profit.
The Consulting Era (I wanted side projects to play with new technologies).
2008 – Cogitorama: This is a overview of what’s in your mind (not a really a mind map). Regularly, everyday for example, you list 10 things that came up to your mind: anxieties, loved ones, stuff to do, learnings, etc.. Overtime you can see which topics are sticky. It is a great exercise to raise your self awareness in a 20 seconds daily exercise.
2007 – MyPoint: Little blog engine written in .NET.
The Student Era (projects to improve my life).
2005 – My round the world travel blog: I built a custom blog to share my trip with my family and friends. The landing page was a big calendar that would show you which days contain some posts or pictures. I never felt so close to my family and friends than when I was travelling for a year and sharing my experiences via this blog.
2004 – Smart Center: A home automation system based on Microsoft technologies. My mates and I joined the Imagine Cup student contest and won the first prize in 2004.
2002 – Mon petit site: My dad gave me his old floppy disk camera. I build a php website where I would upload and share the pictures of my parties with my friends. I built a forum to discuss with my friends and later on I added the ability to upload videos.
1999 – Tous les moteurs: My first ever website. At the time, Altavista was the best search engine but wasn’t giving all the answers. To solve this problem, there were a lot of niche search engines everywhere. “Tous les moteurs” was a search engine of search engines.
