Forem: Loic Moncany

I Shipped More in ListingVid This Week Than in 3 Months—But Distribution Is Still Killing Me

Loic Moncany — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 08:00:03 +0000

I Shipped More in ListingVid This Week Than in 3 Months—But Distribution Is Still Killing Me

Everyone in the builder community is celebrating velocity. And honestly? They're not wrong. But there's a part of the story nobody's telling.

The thing that's trending right now

The narrative is: AI made shipping so easy that any solo founder can now output what a team of 5 used to. Vibe coding, Claude, Cursor — pick your stack. It's genuinely transformative.

My contrarian take: this is 100% true AND completely irrelevant to whether your product succeeds.

What actually happened in my week

I build ListingVid — an AI video generator for real estate agents. This week I shipped faster than I ever have. New features, cleaner onboarding flow, better output quality. The kind of week that feels like progress.

And then I looked at my calendar.

Most of my actual time went to:

Cold outreach to real estate agencies across France and Italy
Researching which market segments actually have budget
Jumping on calls with agents who were curious but unconvinced
Writing follow-up sequences that don't sound like a robot wrote them

The code: a few focused hours. The pipeline: full days.

This is the pattern I've seen repeat across 15 years in digital. SEO tools got easier — distribution didn't. No-code exploded — marketing still required the same grind. Now AI cuts build time to nothing, and people are acting surprised that nobody shows up at launch.

What I actually learned this week

Speed of build ≠ speed of adoption. Agents don't care how fast I shipped. They care if it saves them 2 hours per listing.
The bar for "good enough product" dropped. The bar for "trust" didn't. A real estate agent giving you access to their brand is a big deal. You earn that with consistency and calls, not features.
Outreach is a skill, not a task. I spent 45 minutes on one cold email this week. Not because I'm slow — because the right frame matters.
Your product being easy to build is a competitive disadvantage, not an advantage. If I can ship it in a weekend, so can 50 other people. What's your moat? Mine is understanding the agent workflow better than anyone else building in this space right now.
Distribution compounds slower than code. Every week of consistent outreach builds relationships. There's no shortcut. AI can help draft. It can't replace reputation.

The real question for 2026

If AI makes everyone a fast shipper, what differentiates the winners?

I'd bet it's not the product. It's the founder's ability to talk to customers, understand the real pain, and get in the room.

The bottleneck was never the code. I've known this for 15 years. I still have to remind myself every single week.

Building ListingVid in public — follow the journey at @lmoncany or check out listingvid.xyz if you work in real estate.

Solo founder burnout isn't a time problem — I learned this running 4 SaaS products at once

Loic Moncany — Fri, 10 Apr 2026 08:00:21 +0000

Solo founder burnout is trending again. Every week, someone posts the same story: too much to do, too little time, grinding to a halt.

But after running 4 SaaS products simultaneously this year, I think we're diagnosing the wrong problem.

The burnout conversation is stuck on hours

Most burnout posts read like time management problems. "I work 80-hour weeks." "I have no weekends." "I can't switch off."

And sure, those things are real. But I've watched myself work a calm 45-hour week and still feel completely fried by Thursday. And I've pushed hard 60-hour weeks that felt energizing.

The difference? Attention quality — not time quantity.

What I'm actually dealing with this week

Right now I'm building ListingVid (AI video for real estate agents), OhMyLead (lead gen for indie hackers), EST8 (real estate CRM), and AIAnswer.to (a WordPress SEO plugin for AI citations).

Each one is alive. Each one has users asking questions, features half-finished, and a roadmap that makes sense on paper.

This week I did deep UI work on ListingVid during the morning — the kind of work that requires actual thinking. By noon I was context-switched into OhMyLead onboarding emails. By 3pm I was debugging an EST8 integration. By 9pm I was answering AIAnswer.to waitlist questions.

All of it was productive by time-tracking standards. Zero of it felt like good work except the morning.

The burnout didn't come from the hours. It came from burning my sharpest attention on ListingVid, then expecting to do equally sharp work on everything else.

Attention is the actual finite resource

Time is easy to manage. Attention isn't.

Every founder gets the same 24 hours. But you only get a few hours of actual high-quality thinking per day — the state where hard decisions feel clear and good code happens. After that, you're running on fumes, doing admin, responding to Slack, shipping things you'll regret.

When you're running multiple products solo, the danger isn't overwork. It's distributing your best-thinking windows so thinly that nothing gets the version of you that actually moves the needle.

I've seen founders with fewer products burn out harder than me — not because they worked more, but because everything got the same priority, so everything got mediocre attention.

What I'm doing about it (imperfect, but working)

One product gets the morning slot. Rotating weekly, not daily — context switching daily is the real killer.
The other products get maintenance mode. Async replies, small fixes, no architecture decisions.
I track "attention debt" — if a product went 2+ weeks without my full brain, that's a red flag before it's a crisis.

This doesn't solve multi-product burnout. But it makes it legible. And legible problems are solvable ones.

Takeaways for solo founders juggling multiple things

Burnout audit question: Is your best 2 hours going to the highest-leverage product, or the loudest one?
Context switching daily is expensive. Even 30-minute task switches cost hours of recovery in complex problem domains.
"Working on it" and "thinking hard about it" are different things. Most days you're doing the former and calling it the latter.
Your products don't need equal time. They need appropriate attention at the right moments.
The goal isn't to work less. It's to protect the hours where you're actually good.

If you're building solo and juggling more than one thing, curious how you handle the attention allocation problem — not the time one.

I'm @lmoncany on X. Building ListingVid (AI video for real estate agents) and a few other things in public.

I Built a Lead Gen Tool and Then Used It on My Own Pipeline — Here's What Got Lost in the Noise

Loic Moncany — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 08:00:04 +0000

I Built a Lead Gen Tool and Then Used It on My Own Pipeline — Here's What Got Lost in the Noise

Everyone's debating channels. The people closing deals are watching signals.

r/SaaS blew up this week with a thread: "How are you actually doing lead gen in 2026? Not the theory — the real stuff." Thousands of comments. Cold email defenders, LinkedIn evangelists, paid ads converts. A whole lot of noise.

I read the whole thread because I'm building OhMyLead — a lead gen tool for indie hackers. And what I found was interesting: the debate is almost entirely wrong.

What's actually happening in 2026 lead gen

The conventional wisdom goes: cold email is dying (spam filters, AI-written slop flooding inboxes), LinkedIn is saturated, paid ads are too expensive for bootstrappers.

And yeah, all of that is kinda true.

But here's what the thread buried in the comments: the founders actually closing deals aren't winning because of the channel. They're winning because of timing.

One comment that stuck with me: "I stopped sending 500 emails a week. I send 20 emails a day to people who showed intent in the last 48 hours. My reply rate went from 1% to 12%."

That's not a channel win. That's a timing win.

What I learned dogfooding OhMyLead on myself

I've been building OhMyLead for a few months and I made myself use it on my own pipeline — ListingVid (AI video for real estate agents) and EST8 (a real estate CRM).

What I found when I was honest with myself:

The tool wasn't the bottleneck. My timing was.

I was reaching out to real estate agents when I had bandwidth — usually late afternoon after I'd shipped features all morning. But those agents are most responsive early morning before their first appointments.

I was reaching out to indie hackers on Mondays (felt efficient). But the best conversations happened Wednesday/Thursday when people were mid-week problem-solving mode.

The copy barely mattered. The timing shifted my reply rate more than any personalization trick.

Where I'm still stuck: finding real-time intent signals at scale without becoming a full-time social media monitor. Easy to say "reach out when they signal a pain." Hard to actually catch that signal when you're also the developer, designer, and support team.

Specific things that actually worked this week

Reddit keyword alerts → immediate DM when someone posts about a specific problem. Painful to set up. High conversion.
LinkedIn job posting scrapes → companies hiring for a specific role often have a specific pain you can solve. Catching it early matters.
"Just launched" timing → reach out to people the day they launch something (Product Hunt, IH, etc.). They're in growth mode, receptive, and talking to everyone.
Re-engage with context → old leads who've gone cold? Wait for them to post something relevant, then reply to that — not your old thread.
Fewer, better-timed touches → I halved my outreach volume and doubled my response rate just by being more selective about when I hit send.

The meta-lesson

Lead gen in 2026 isn't about finding a magic channel. It's about collapsing the time between "they have the problem" and "you show up with a relevant message."

The tools that will win — and what I'm trying to build with OhMyLead — are the ones that surface those moments automatically so solo founders can move fast without being glued to 15 dashboards.

Still figuring it out. But the direction is clear.

If you're working on lead gen, outreach, or sales for a small SaaS — hit me up. Always down to swap notes with people in the trenches.

→ @lmoncany | OhMyLead

Everyone Says AI Can Make 30 Days of Agent Content in 1 Hour. Heres What Gets Lost in That Narrative

Loic Moncany — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 08:00:04 +0000

Everyone Says AI Can Make 30 Days of Agent Content in 1 Hour. I'm Shipping ListingVid — Here's What Gets Lost in That Narrative

The hype is real: AI content tools can now help a real estate agent batch-create a month of social posts in a single sitting. Realtor.com just went AI-first on home search. Video generators are turning still property photos into cinematic walkthroughs. It's a legitimate shift. But while everyone's optimizing for volume, I think we're missing what actually moves deals.

What's Actually Happening in Real Estate Marketing

The conversation right now is dominated by AI efficiency. "30 days of content in 1 hour." Automated email sequences. AI-generated listing descriptions. All real, all useful. The technology stack for real estate agents has genuinely leapfrogged where it was 18 months ago.

But there's a trap inside this narrative. When you optimize for volume — more posts, more touchpoints, more content — you start confusing output with outcomes. A busy feed isn't a full pipeline.

Agents are drowning in tools that help them post more. What they actually need is tools that help them convert better.

What I'm Seeing While Building ListingVid

I've been shipping ListingVid, an AI video generator built specifically for real estate agents. The thesis is simple: every listing deserves a video that looks expensive without costing $2k to produce.

While building this, I talked to a lot of agents. Here's what I kept hearing:

The agents who close deals fastest aren't the ones with daily Instagram carousels. They're the ones whose listing hits the MLS with a video that makes you stop, watch, and want to book a showing.

The window of peak attention for a listing is narrow — roughly the first 48-72 hours after it goes live. That's when buyer interest is highest, when the algorithm pushes it hardest, when agents in your network are most likely to share it. A great video in that window does more work than a month of consistency posts.

The "30 days of content in 1 hour" tools are solving a real problem. But it's not the most valuable problem.

Where the Hype Diverges From What I'm Actually Seeing

Building in this space for the last few months, a few things stand out:

Volume is a vanity metric for agents. Posting 30 times a month impresses other agents. One listing video that books 6 showings in 48 hours impresses your broker.
The production quality gap is still huge. Most agents are still posting photo slideshows with royalty-free music. The bar to look premium with AI video is lower than ever — and almost nobody is clearing it.
Agents don't want to learn tools. Every conversation I have confirms this. They want to upload photos, press a button, and get something shareable. The simpler the workflow, the more they'll actually use it.
AI-first home search (Realtor.com's new direction) changes the listing video game. If AI is surfacing listings based on visual quality and engagement signals, a slick video isn't just marketing — it might start affecting discoverability directly.

What This Week Taught Me

The AI content volume narrative is pointing builders toward the wrong problem. I almost fell into it too — there were moments where I thought "should ListingVid also help agents schedule content, do carousels, automate captions?"

No. Stay in the lane. Nail the listing video. Make it so good and so fast that it becomes the obvious first step when a property hits the market.

Sometimes the best product decision is the narrowest one.

Takeaways for Builders in Real Estate Tech

Nail the one highest-leverage moment in your user's workflow, not the whole workflow
Agents are time-poor and tool-fatigued — fewer inputs, better outputs wins every time
Don't let the volume narrative distract you from the conversion narrative
AI-first search is coming; visual quality signals will matter more than they do today
The gap between "agents who look premium" and "agents who don't" is about to get exploitable

Building ListingVid in public at listingvid.xyz. Would love to hear from real estate agents or other builders working in this space — what's the highest-leverage moment you've found in your users' workflow?

Follow along on X: @lmoncany

I Vibe-Coded My SaaS Faster Than Ever — Then Hit the Real Wall

Loic Moncany — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 08:00:03 +0000

The vibe coding discourse has been everywhere this week. YC podcasts, r/indiehackers threads, Twitter debates. The consensus: AI tools have finally made building fast enough that anyone can ship.

They're right. And they're missing the point entirely.

What Actually Happened When I Vibe-Coded My SaaS

I've been building ListingVid — an AI video generator that helps real estate agents create property marketing videos automatically. Classic indie hacker project: real problem, specific niche, small team (just me).

This week I used Cursor + Claude to ship a new video template system. What previously would've been 2 days of work took about 4 hours. The vibe coding advocates are 100% correct on this part. Build speed is genuinely different now.

Then I spent the next 12 hours trying to get 50 real estate agents to actually open the thing.

That's the number nobody puts in their "I vibe-coded an MVP in a weekend" post.

The Bottleneck Moved — Nobody Noticed

Here's what's actually happening in 2026: build is no longer the constraint. Every indie hacker can now ship something functional in days instead of months. That's real.

But distribution didn't get faster. If anything, it got harder, because:

More MVPs competing for the same eyeballs
Buyers are fatigued by "I built this with AI" stories
Attention is the scarce resource now, not code

I've been building products for 15 years. Agency work, SaaS, e-commerce. Every time a new tool lowered the build barrier — WordPress, no-code, now AI — the pattern repeated: build got easier, distribution stayed hard, and the people who won were the ones who treated distribution as seriously as product.

What This Means for How I'm Building Right Now

For ListingVid, I've had to completely rethink where I spend my hours:

Before vibe coding: 70% build / 30% distribution
Now: 40% build / 60% distribution

Concretely this week, after shipping the template system, I:

Reached out directly to 20 real estate agents in active Facebook groups
Set up a simple email sequence for trial signups
Wrote one SEO article targeting "AI video for real estate agents"
Recorded a 90-second Loom showing the product in action

Zero viral moments. Just slow, boring distribution work that actually moves the needle.

The Real Takeaways

Build speed is no longer your competitive advantage — everyone has the same tools
Distribution is now the hard skill — invest in it as seriously as you invest in features
Niche outreach beats broad posting — 20 targeted DMs > 1 LinkedIn post to 2k followers
Show don't tell — a 90-second Loom outperforms any written description for conversion
Iteration loops are shorter now — use the time you saved building to run more distribution experiments

Vibe coding is genuinely useful. I'm not going back. But if you just shipped your MVP and you're waiting for the internet to find you — that's where the work actually starts.

What are you doing for distribution that's actually working right now? Drop it below — I'm actively testing new channels for ListingVid and happy to share what I'm seeing.

Building ListingVid in public — follow along @lmoncany

I am shipping 4 products while everyone panics about AI killing SaaS

Loic Moncany — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 06:55:14 +0000

I'm shipping 4 products while everyone panics about "AI killing SaaS" — here's what gets lost in the noise

Every few weeks, a post blows up: "AI will kill B2B SaaS." A dev vibe-coded a clone of some $200/month tool over a weekend. The comments spiral. Founders get scared.

Meanwhile, I'm over here shipping four products at once. As one person. Because of AI — not despite it.

What's actually happening out there

The "AI kills SaaS" narrative has a kernel of truth: AI is compressing the time it takes to build software features. A solo dev can now ship what used to require a small team. Competitors can clone you faster.

That's real. The panic isn't.

What the panic misses: software value was never in the features. It was in solving a problem someone actually has, repeatedly, reliably. If AI makes the features cheaper to build, it also makes the moat shift — from "we built this" to "we understand this problem better than anyone."

What I'm actually doing this week

I'm running four builds in parallel right now:

ListingVid — AI video generator for real estate agents who hate spending hours on property marketing
EST8 — A modern CRM for real estate, because the existing ones feel like 2012
OhMyLead — Lead gen for indie hackers who are still tracking prospects in Notion spreadsheets
AIAnswer.to — WordPress plugin generating PAA rich snippets + GEO optimization for AI citations

Three years ago this would have been impossible for one person. Today it's difficult but viable — because AI collapses feature development time significantly.

But here's the part nobody mentions: AI gave me capability. It didn't give me clarity.

The hard part this week isn't the code. It's attention. Four active builds means I'm always one context switch away from dropping something important. A bug in ListingVid. A customer message for EST8. A cold outreach sequence for OhMyLead.

AI didn't solve the 24-hour constraint.

What I've actually learned (not theory)

Real problems outlive every tool shift. Real estate agents still hate video production. That problem didn't get easier because AI exists — it got approachable for someone like me to solve.
Capability without focus is just noise. More products in parallel is only viable if you have systems for switching context cleanly. I'm still figuring mine out.
AI speeds up building, not validation. The bottleneck was never "can I build this?" It was always "do enough people want this badly enough to pay?" That hasn't changed.
Clones die fast when the original has distribution. If someone vibe-codes a ListingVid clone over a weekend, they still have zero real estate agent relationships. Distribution is the moat now.
The "AI kills SaaS" posts are mostly written by people who weren't building anyway. The actual builders I know are shipping faster and moving on.

15 years in, the pattern is consistent: what dies wasn't solving a real problem. What survives was.

If you're building something real, AI is probably your biggest advantage right now — not your biggest threat.

What are you shipping this week? Drop it in the comments — I read all of them.

— Loïc / @lmoncany
Building ListingVid | OhMyLead | EST8 | AIAnswer.to

Build in Public Is Broken—But Not For the Reason Everyone Thinks

Loic Moncany — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 06:55:11 +0000

Build in Public Is Broken—But Not For the Reason Everyone Thinks

The founder Twitter drama over the last week has been predictable. "Build in public" is dead. It's free R&D for well-funded clones. It's just an audience of other founders who won't buy.

All true. All missing the point.

I've been building in public for 15 years across 150+ projects—agencies, failed experiments, bootstrap SaaS, product exits. The pattern I see isn't that transparency is broken. It's that most people doing it are shipping fake products.

Why 70% of "Build in Public" Creators Fail

The narrative is that building in public attracts the wrong audience: other indie hackers, other founders, people optimizing for engagement instead of sales.

True. But here's what nobody says: if your product is real and solves a problem, those 70% of non-customers don't matter. What matters is the 30% who see you solving their problem.

The founders making real money from this—the ones building ListingVid, OhMyLead, real products with revenue—aren't complaining about clones or wrong audiences. They're too busy shipping.

The noise comes from people documenting hobbies and expecting customers to appear. Of course they're getting cloned. They haven't proven the idea works yet.

Here's What Actually Works

From shipping products for 15 years:

Ship real, fast. The more you talk before you ship, the more you attract feedback-loop thinkers instead of builders. Move. Push. Get to a point where someone will pay.
Talk to customers, not audiences. "Building in public" doesn't mean Twitter. It means your first 20 customers know your roadmap. That feedback loop is invaluable. Thousands of followers watching you iterate? That's just noise.
Obsess over revenue, not visibility. If you're measuring success by likes and retweets instead of MRR, you're not building a business. You're building an audience. Those are different games.
Expect clones. Celebrate revenue. Well-funded companies will copy your idea. Good. It validates the market. The only question is whether you got paying customers before they did. If yes—you won. Visibility doesn't matter.
Know the difference between "building in public" and "publicly failing." There's a huge gap between sharing your wins and documenting chaos. Real builders share patterns, not excuses.

The Meta: Why This Debate Exists Right Now

The "build in public is broken" discourse exists because the indie hacker playbook of 2021-2023 ran its course. Everyone copied it. Signals degraded. Now founders are overcompensating by going silent.

Wrong direction. The answer isn't silence. It's ruthlessly focusing on real metrics: customers, revenue, product viability.

Visibility is a tool. Use it or don't. But don't use it as an excuse for not shipping. That's where 99% of the discourse falls apart.

The bottom line: Build in public works great when you're building something real. It fails catastrophically when you're building something fake. The "broken" part isn't transparency. It's that most creators are shipping bets, not products.

Ship fast. Talk to customers. Stop obsessing over how many people are watching. That's the 15-year lesson.

What do you think—is the problem the visibility, or the product?

I almost burned out managing 5 SaaS products—here's why delegation is harder than shipping

Loic Moncany — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 06:54:42 +0000

I almost burned out managing 5 SaaS products—here's why delegation is harder than shipping

The meme is that solo founders burn out from overwork. The reality? We burn out from anxiety about overwork.

Last week, I caught myself deep in the delegation trap. ListingVid is shipping fast. OhMyLead is scaling. EST8 needs attention. We have Perfect Skin operations to run. And I was making every decision because "I knew best."

It's a lie we founders tell ourselves.

Why delegation feels impossible

The trend right now on r/indiehackers and Indie Hackers is clear: founder burnout peaks not when you're drowning, but when you could delegate and won't. The friction isn't the work—it's the anxiety.

"No one will understand the vision."
"I haven't documented it well enough."
"They'll make mistakes I'd catch."
"It's faster if I just do it."

All true. Also all irrelevant.

What actually happened when I delegated

I hired someone I trusted. Spent a day training them. Then—and this was the hard part—I stayed out of their way.

The first feature took 30% longer than it would've if I did it. It had two things I'd have done differently. And it shipped.

By week two, they were shipping on par with me. By week three, faster. Because they owned it. And ownership is the thing no amount of solo effort can manufacture.

The ListingVid team now ships features I never would've thought of. The OhMyLead side handles customer support with context I couldn't maintain solo. EST8's operations run because someone else decided they were important—not because I mandated them.

The real cost of solo heroics

Every hour you save by "just doing it yourself" is an hour you don't spend on what only you can do: thinking about what's next, spotting where the market is moving, talking to customers about what actually matters.

That's the bottleneck. Not the execution. The direction.

Burnout isn't about hours worked. It's about feeling like you're running in place. And you'll always feel that way if you're 70% executor and 30% founder.

Three things that helped me actually delegate

Document just enough — not a novel, not perfection. Enough that someone smart can fill the gaps.
Hire for care, not perfection — you want someone who gets frustrated when things aren't right, not someone who'll execute your checklist robotically.
Let them fail small — if you're hovering and catching every mistake, you're still doing the work. Let the learning happen. Course-correct weekly, not daily.

The hard truth

You'll probably think they're slower than you. Statistically, they might be. But you've been drinking a poison called "ego efficiency"—you're fast because you know the system inside out, and you're also the only person who can maintain it.

Real scale? That's when other people get faster. When the system doesn't depend on your speed anymore.

If you're burning out, you're not drowning. You're refusing the lifeboat because you're convinced you should be swimming.

What are you refusing to delegate?

I'm building a lead gen tool while cold email is collapsing — here's what the data actually says

Loic Moncany — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 06:54:41 +0000

Everyone's talking about AI-powered outreach at scale. I'm building OhMyLead and watching that playbook fall apart in real time.

What's happening out there

Cold email benchmarks for 2026 are ugly. Reply rates have dropped significantly for volume-based outreach. Gmail and Outlook now reject emails from domains without properly configured DMARC/DKIM/SPF — not send to spam, reject. The spam complaint threshold that triggers filtering is 0.1%. One bad list can tank your domain for months.

The consensus in r/SaaS and r/b2bmarketing right now: "do less, but do it deliberately." Cold email at scale → reply rates fell unless deeply personalized. Paid ads → expensive and inconsistent. The surviving approach is precision over volume.

The industry's answer to this? AI personalization at scale. Write 500 highly personalized emails with AI. Sounds great in theory.

What I'm actually seeing while building

I've been building OhMyLead specifically to help indie hackers and small teams find better-qualified leads. This week I've been deep in the targeting logic — the step that happens before you write a single word of outreach.

And here's what the data keeps showing me: the constraint isn't the email copy. It's the list.

A founder sending 50 emails to people who actually have the problem they solve is getting better results than teams sending 500 "personalized" AI emails to a scraped list. The personalization is irrelevant if the targeting is wrong. You can't AI your way out of a bad list.

The problem is that building a good list is hard. Real intent signals are buried in noise. "They visited a pricing page" is weak. "They just hired a VP of Sales and their LinkedIn shows they're scaling from 5 to 20 reps" — that's signal. But getting that kind of data at a price indie hackers can afford? That's the actual hard problem.

I'm also running into a less glamorous issue: most "intent data" providers are selling repackaged noise at enterprise prices. The signals that actually work are often manual, contextual, and not scalable in the way people think.

What I've learned from shipping this week

List quality > email quality. Every time. Fix the targeting before touching the copy.
Intent signals need context. A single data point means nothing. Stack 2-3 signals and you have something real.
Small batches win. 30-50 highly targeted emails beat 500 generic ones. The math works out when your reply rate is 15% vs. 2%.
Domain hygiene is now table stakes. If you're doing any cold outreach in 2026 and haven't set up DMARC, stop everything and do that first.
The "AI personalization" narrative is a distraction. The real leverage is in qualification, not in making bad-fit emails sound smarter.

The bet I'm making

OhMyLead is being built around one core idea: help small teams qualify leads before they reach out, so outreach volume stays low and conversion stays high. Less spray, more signal.

If you're doing outbound right now and want to share what's working (or not) — I'd genuinely love to hear it. Find me at @lmoncany or check out what I'm building at ohmylead.com.

Real Estate Agents Do Not Want Better AI Video. They Want One They Would Actually Post.

Loic Moncany — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 09:00:17 +0000

Real Estate Agents Don't Want Better AI Video. They Want One They'd Actually Post.

There's a Reddit thread doing the rounds in r/RealEstateTechnology: "Has anyone found an AI video tool that produces something you'd actually post?" Not "most advanced." Not "best value." Just: would you stake your professional reputation on it?

That question is the whole product problem. And I've been building straight into it.

What's Actually Happening in Real Estate Video Right Now

AI video for property listings is genuinely hot in 2026. Tools are everywhere — you upload photos, get a cinematic walkthrough, add a voiceover, done in minutes. The tech works. Agents know it exists.

And yet most of them aren't using it for real listings.

They'll demo it. They'll think "okay, that's impressive." Then they'll go back to hiring a videographer for $300 or just not doing video at all.

The gap isn't price. It's not even quality in the technical sense. It's professional trust.

Real estate agents live and die by their reputation. Every listing is a public statement about their brand. If a video looks 70% polished, they won't post it — because 70% looks worse than nothing when you're the agent on the cover.

What I've Been Learning While Building ListingVid

I've been shipping ListingVid — an AI video generator specifically for real estate — and this week something clicked.

I was getting feedback from early users that the outputs were "pretty good" but they'd "clean it up manually before posting." That's a polite way of saying: not quite there yet.

So I stopped adding features and started watching what actually made agents hesitate before hitting publish:

Voiceover pacing that felt rushed (the AI was technically correct but felt unnatural)
Caption timing that lagged by half a second (tiny, but visible)
Default music that was fine for a demo but too generic for a real listing

None of these are hard engineering problems. They're polish problems. The kind that only matter when you're trying to build something someone is proud to share.

I spent three days this week just on output defaults. No new features. Just: make the thing feel like it was made by a professional.

What This Taught Me About Building for Professionals

A few things I'm taking away from this:

The trust bar for professional tools is higher than for consumer tools. An agent's output becomes their public portfolio. The acceptable error rate is near zero.
"Technically works" and "I'd put my name on this" are miles apart. Build toward the second one.
User feedback is often politely coded. "I'd just tweak it a bit" = "this isn't ready for production yet."
Polish is a feature, not a finishing touch. Especially in industries where reputation is currency.
The best product insight often comes from why people don't share something — not why they like it in a demo.

The Actual Question Worth Asking

Next time you're building something, don't ask "does it work?" Ask: "Would the person using this be proud to share the output?"

If the answer is "mostly yeah but…" — you're not done.

Still building. Still shipping. Follow along at @lmoncany or try what I'm building at listingvid.xyz.

I Shipped ListingVid While Everyone Was Talking About Vibe Coding — Here Is What Got Lost in the Noise

Loic Moncany — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 09:00:10 +0000

I Shipped ListingVid While Everyone Was Talking About Vibe Coding — Here's What Got Lost in the Noise

Vibe coding is having a moment. YC is all-in. Startups are raising billions. Your feed is full of "I built a SaaS in 48 hours" threads.

Here's my contrarian take: the hype is about the wrong thing.

What's Actually Happening

Vibe coding — describing what you want in plain language and letting AI write the code — is real, and it works. Tools like Cursor, Bolt, and Lovable have genuinely compressed the gap between "idea" and "working thing." For non-technical founders or developers who want to move fast, the productivity lift is real.

The narrative, though, has gotten sloppy. "Anyone can build a startup now" conflates two very different things: shipping code and building a product that earns revenue.

What I Actually Shipped This Week

I'm building ListingVid — an AI video generator for real estate agents. This week I shipped a new feature: agents can now auto-generate a short property walkthrough video from just a listing URL and a few photos. Something that would've taken 3 days of careful dev work two years ago took about 4 hours.

So yes, the speed is absolutely real. I'm not dismissing that.

But the 4 hours of coding was preceded by 3 days of thinking. Talking to agents. Understanding why they hate editing video (it's not the time — it's the skill gap and the embarrassment of bad output). Figuring out the right default settings so the output doesn't look like a PowerPoint from 2009. Getting the CTA placement right.

AI didn't touch any of that.

Where the Hype Diverges from Reality

The "vibe coding unlocks everything" narrative assumes the bottleneck was always technical. For some people, maybe. But for most indie hackers I know, the bottleneck is:

Knowing which problem to solve
Finding people willing to pay for the solution
Understanding why they're churning
Deciding what to build next

None of that gets faster with AI. If anything, it gets more intense — because you're shipping faster, the feedback loop tightens, and the decisions multiply.

What I've Actually Learned Building This Week

AI is a multiplier, not a shortcut. It multiplies your existing clarity. More clarity = faster shipping. Zero clarity = faster wrong turns.
The judgment layer is where the work lives. Which feature? Which customer segment? Which pricing model? AI can't tell you. Your users barely can.
Speed exposes your weak spots. When you can ship in hours instead of days, you run out of technical excuses. What's left is positioning, market fit, distribution. The hard stuff.
Vibe coding is great for MVPs, dicey for production. I use it to prototype fast, then I review everything before it touches customers. Trust but verify.
Your 15-year reps aren't wasted. Pattern recognition from years of shipping doesn't get obsolete — it gets amplified. You know faster when something smells wrong.

The Real Question

Vibe coding isn't the unlock. Clarity is the unlock. AI just makes it cheaper to test whether your clarity was right.

If you're using AI tools to go faster toward a validated idea, you're in a great spot. If you're using them to avoid doing the hard thinking about what customers actually need — you're just burning compute.

What's your experience? Are vibe coding tools helping you ship the right things faster, or just shipping faster in general?

Building in public at @lmoncany — working on ListingVid for real estate agents and OhMyLead for indie hackers who need leads without the chaos.

I shipped 150+ projects in 15 years — here's the IH bubble thing nobody talks about

Loic Moncany — Sat, 21 Mar 2026 09:00:06 +0000

I've shipped 150+ projects in 15 years — here's the IH bubble thing nobody talks about

There's a thread burning up r/SaaS right now: "IndieHackers are in a bubble. Step out of it." 494 upvotes. The comments are full of builders either defending the community or having a quiet existential crisis.

I've been building long enough to have a more boring take: they're both right.

What's Actually Happening

The indie hacker movement created something genuinely valuable — a community of builders sharing transparently, learning in public, and normalizing bootstrapped ambition.

It also created a closed loop where "the community" slowly became a proxy for "the market."

Watch a typical IH build cycle:

Founder tweets daily updates → gets likes from other builders
Launches on Product Hunt → gets upvotes from other builders
Posts on r/indiehackers → gets comments from other builders
Celebrates milestones → in front of other builders

At some point, you're optimizing for community approval. Not for customers.

What I Learned Shipping This Week

I'm building ListingVid — an AI video generator for real estate agents. This week I had calls with three agents in Italy and France.

None of them:

Know what "indie hacker" means
Care about my MRR
Would ever browse Product Hunt
Use GitHub

They had one question: "Does this help me get more listings?"

That's it. That's the whole product requirement.

The sharpest insight from those calls: they don't want "AI-powered video creation." They want "I record a 2-minute voiceover and it comes out looking like a branded agency video." The feature set I'd been excited about — the customization, the API hooks, the multi-format export — was completely irrelevant to them.

The IH crowd would have loved those features. Real customers wanted less, simpler, faster.

The Patterns I Keep Hitting (After 150 Projects)

Builder metrics ≠ customer signals. GitHub stars, PH rank, and IH upvotes feel like validation. They're not. They're peer engagement. Different people, different problems.
"Outside world" customers are boring in the best way. Real estate agents, retailers, service businesses — they're not sexy to post about. But they actually pay. The boring customer is usually the real customer.
The bubble accelerates the wrong things. When your audience is builders, you ship features builders want: API access, webhooks, integrations. When your audience is real customers, you ship what solves the specific annoying thing they complain about every day.
Community as support, not market. IH, indie hackers Slack, SaaS subreddits — use them for motivation, mental health, and avoiding dumb mistakes. Don't confuse their applause for PMF.
The validation gap is widest at the start. Early on, every builder post that blows up feels like proof you're onto something. The real test is a credit card from someone who doesn't know what bootstrapping means.

What I'm Actually Doing About It

For ListingVid, I've started treating IH-facing content and customer-facing development as completely separate tracks. I post on X and LinkedIn about the build (builder audience, relationship/distribution). I do customer discovery calls and iterate product with agents (actual market, actual revenue).

The moment I stopped trying to optimize both with the same content and same product decisions, things got clearer.

The bubble is real. It's also where most of my best peers are. I'm not leaving — I'm just keeping my eyes open.

If you're building something outside the builder bubble, I'd genuinely love to hear how you navigate the gap between community and customer. Hit me up — @lmoncany.

Working on AI video for real estate? Check out ListingVid.