Finally got to meet @benjaminhouy.bsky.social in Aachen last Sunday! He's the indie founder who accidentally canceled $50k/year worth of subscriptions with a single dev error. 😭 Funny story about that disaster: While building his language app, he used production API keys in his development environment. One day, he deleted some test records locally, forgetting this triggered real cancellation callbacks to Paddle. He only caught it by chance glancing at notifications - a few more seconds and he would've lost ALL his customers! What impressed me most about Benjamin: ➡️Never had a "real job" - started with a language learning blog ➡️Taught himself programming to build his successful app ➡️Now pivoting from SEO to influencer marketing as traffic drops The most inspiring part? His resilience after that devastating error. While most would've given up, Benjamin rebuilt and still lives the indie hacker dream with his language learning products. He visited me in Aachen and I showed him around the city - we explored the Dom, the university area, and walked for hours discussing the challenges of an indie founder (for example explaining what we do to our parents). Benjamin's quite the world traveler, having lived in France, Germany, and the UK for several years. P.S. I completely forgot to take a selfie with him, so I recreated one with Canva! 😂 Looking forward to our next meet, Benjamin!
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