Via Negativa, an Arduino Kit, and Ending the Excuses

This week felt like our official back-to-school moment.

Aymeric and I locked our focus 100% back onto Lutains, set real working hours, and committed to a strict schedule. And surprise, things actually get done. We’ll be ready for a closed beta-testing phase next week. That definitely calls for a small win celebration!

Getting Back on X

I’ll admit, I was dragging my feet.

Every single time I take a break from social media and try to jump back in, the exact same existential question hits me: Is this endless effort even worth it? Most days, I struggle to find any real meaning in it.

But without visibility, a project simply dies in a quiet corner. So you swallow your pride and stop playing the Emperor, that self-sabotaging mode where you only pick the fun, easy tasks on your to-do list while ignoring the rest.

Luckily, my comeback worked unexpectedly well: +80 followers in a few days, pushing us past the 1,100 milestone. How? I rode a ridiculous template trend:

I'm 33.
Indie hacker from France.
Looking to connect with more builders & indie hackers!

Ten seconds to write. Zero intellectual effort. And yet it outperformed posts I’ve spent two hours meticulously refining. Social algorithms are weird, but hey, we take the win.

Streamlining the Offer with Via Negativa

Our target audience hasn’t changed: we’re building for founders who want to nail their upcoming launch. But we were trying so hard to over-deliver that our packages had become bloated and confusing.

The breakthrough came from Aymeric’s reading list. He’s currently into Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, specifically the concept of Via Negativa, the principle that improvement often comes from subtraction, not addition.

So we took a hard look at our offer and asked: What can we cut?

The first casualty was our massive Reddit data report. It was packed with fascinating research, but let’s be honest: nobody has the time or energy to read that. Instead, we’re cutting the fluff and injecting just 2 or 3 critical insights directly inside our landing page roast.

High signal, zero noise, delivered exactly where it matters.

The 6:00 PM Hard Stop

Speaking of books, we’ve introduced a non-negotiable rule into our routine: every day at 6:00 PM, screens go dark, and we read.

It acts as a physical barrier between work and evening. In tech, your attention is constantly sliced into micro-doses of dopamine. Sitting down with a physical book forces your brain to drop into a lower gear. It restores deep focus, fuels our conversations over dinner, and brings back substance. Right now, it feels less like a hobby and more like mental hygiene.

An Electronic Sunday

Sundays are now strictly off-grid. Cooking, sketching, long trail walks... anything that pulls our heads out of software.

This month, we’re venturing into physical hardware. For my birthday, I got an Arduino Starter Kit. I already have a few fun ideas brewing, like building a physical metric counter hooked up to an API (more on that soon). And naturally, putting LEDs on everything, which instantly brings back memories of that glowing keychain project I had to build in middle school technology class. :)

Fair warning: it’s significantly harder than we anticipated.

And we deliberately chose to learn the old-school way: reading the paper manual, getting confused, and troubleshooting by hand. Wrestling with real-world physics without an AI safety net is frustrating, but it feels wonderfully alive.

September is about rebuilding solid habits. October will be our launchpad.

See you next week! 🌿