In an ideal world, we live close to our friends and work in our dream job. We'll have achieved our goals. Unfortunately, I haven't (yet) achieved this holy trinity.

I recently left Canada and was looking for a way to keep in touch with my friends in Montreal. On the other hand, I (like many people of my generation) have a social network addiction problem and I try as much as possible to abstain from Instagram, Facebook and all the others.

Another problem I have with social networks is an absence of “ realness ”. Sure, everyone sends each other photos of vacations or outings or great experiences they've had, but we all know that it doesn't always reflect reality. Just because you're smiling on a beach in Bali doesn't mean you don't need to talk to your friends or that you're not completely lost in your life.

It's this feeling of being lost that also drove me to find a way to express myself. I want to know how my friends are doing and if I can help them, but I was also looking for a platform to express myself and vent what I'm keeping to myself.

Scanning alternatives to social networks, without reinventing a new one, I quickly realized that e-mail was something that everyone uses and that (except for marketers) remains a very simple way of communicating. You can send text, images and links. That's all there is to it.

The first version of la Pépite was very simple. It consisted of two Google Forms: one to answer the questions and a second to choose who you wanted to hear from. To make things easier, I then used a script to send the right answers to the right people.

The added bonus was the AI-generated taglines and the different colors for each user. This really added something, but wasn't suitable for a larger group of users.

Without Klara, I'd never have been able to make such good progress on the project. It was thanks to her workshops that I learned what I was really looking for in this project.

She also made all the mock-ups for the site and helped me create an artistic direction.

In addition to the visual aspects, she was also the one who helped me stay on course and not give up when the mental load became too much.

For the time being, I intend to continue and improve the project. As long as people are willing to participate, I don't intend to stop. On the other hand, I don't know how long the concept will last.

Although I've managed to stabilize the platform, it's still costing me a lot of energy to think about questions, develop new features, manage the things that need to be done and sell the idea to my friends.

Of course, I'd like to get more people involved too, but I don't know if the concept holds up well enough for that.

In any case, I'd like to keep bringing my friends together, and ideally I'd like to organize more physical events in the future.

Apart from the technical bits of the project (setting up file servers, separate environments and managing e-mails), I'm also learning a lot about how to take an idea and turn it into reality.

Bringing ideas to life is something I really want to do full-time at some point, but I haven't yet found the right way to do it without seeming to force people to like what I do. Just because you're passionate about your project and constantly talking about it doesn't mean that others will like it as much. On the contrary, it can even have the opposite effect in some cases.

Another thing I've learned thanks to la Pépite is that numbers aren't always the most important metric, and that 20 people who participate honestly in your project will always be better than 200 who have no interest in it.

I'm also becoming increasingly aware of the importance of giving participants a voice. They're the ones who get the most out of our projects, and they often have good points to bring to the project.

Unlike my other sites, I decided against using a CMS for La pépite. The main content type being newsletters, I needed to be able to view them in a very specific way before sending them out. A customized back-office interface was therefore mandatory. I think that if I had used a pre-made tool on the market, I would have been limited.

The snag with this approach is that I systematically had to create the most basic functionalities (creation, deletion, modification) for all my content types myself, and although I've created my own framework to do this, careless mistakes still often happen.

Another specificity of La pépite is the fact that I create e-mails from the back office (newsletters, invitations and reminders) via a template editor and send them en masse using the Resend cloud tool. I had a lot of trouble making them pleasing to the eye while respecting the constraints of e-mail templates.

Working with e-mails also poses a problem when it comes to viewing them on the site. If I want to keep their style without creating two templates (one for the site and one for the e-mail clients), I have to use an iframe, which is far from ideal and causes loading problems when viewed on the site.

A big thank you to Klara, Charlotte, Ronan and Mélanie for having and continuing to accompany me on the project.

And a big thank you to everyone else who took part too, without you La pépite wouldn't be of any interest 🫶🏻