First, thank you for reading this💚. You're the reason why I am here.
Exactly 12 months ago, I told you I'd be your human guinea pig 🧪 — leave the full-time job, try to build another path, and report back honestly.
So… how am I actually doing?
Here's the honest month-by-month. 🧪
🗓 Month 1 — Standard-issue panic.
Sent out résumés. Job-hunted. My efficiency was so low I laughed at my own screen.
🗓 Month 2 — I made myself leave the house.
Started showing up — events, new rooms, new people. Including EthCC in Cannes last year.
🗓 Month 3 — The rooms paid off (and humbled me).
Follow-ups from Cannes started landing. Meeting people in person beat firing résumés into the void, by a mile.
I interviewed at a MiCA-licensed asset fund — one I'm literally a VIP client of. 3 interview rounds. 3 decks written for free. 2 founder conversations.
Then: vetoed by an N+1 who was on their way out the door and had never once met me.
Absurd. Also freeing. I quietly swore I'd only ever job-hunt again the day work comes looking for me. 🐶
🗓 Month 4 — The turn.
A potential client I hadn't spoken to in ages suddenly handed me a 6-month international Go-to-Market consulting project. Decent pay. 21 hours a week.
Grateful to that one.
🗓 Months 5–10 — Compounding, quietly.
I served the client properly. Every extra hour went into two things: sharpening my LinkedIn, and co-building a new consumer brand with my family and friends.
Month 8: first LinkedIn ad income — recurring every month since.
Month 9: a speaking invite from Le Village's founder event in Paris (missed it to a scheduling clash — still stings).
Month 10: that brand, minimiil Gut Power, raised €1,000,000. That moment? Pure joy.
🗓 Month 11 — Now.
I spent most of my working time on minimiil's marketing — building a brand-new consumer category in France for 2026: shot végétal vivant. A daily plant-based probiotic shot, made with organic ingredients and live cultures to support a balanced, diverse gut microbiome🦠. Delicious🫚, refreshing🍐, and 100% dairy-free🍃.
None of this came from a better résumé.
It came from showing up, building in public, nurturing my network for years, and letting compounding do the quiet work.
This is where the show gets good. 🎬
I'm building a French FMCG brand — in France — at a B1 level of French. Watching me doing marketing in French 🇫🇷 will be entertaining at minimum. :)
Two open invitations:
1️⃣ If you know a thing or two about FMCG / CPG in France or Europe and want to give someone a lesson. Please, comments or DMs, I'll take all of it. 🙏
2️⃣ If you're tired of spending your one life building someone else's asset, and you want to see another path — building and compounding your own — follow along. I hope this journey gives you enough courage to take the front seat of your life.
Show is on. Pull up a chair. 🌱
♻️ Like or Repost if someone you care need some "Gut Power" 😉 .
P.S. — minimiil Gut Power is live at La Grande Épicerie de Paris & online.
Claude Fable 5 is the most capable AI model on the planet right now — $10 per million input tokens, $50 output. But if you route your daily work through it, you're quietly evaporating your company's AI budget.
🌟Here's the catch: DeepSeek AI V4 Pro scores 52 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index — about 80% of Fable 5's 65. At roughly 4% of the price (~$0.44 vs $10 per million input tokens)!!
~25x cheaper💵 — but nowhere near 25x less intelligent🧠.
🤔So the question stopped being "What's the best AI model?" It became "What's the best model for THIS mission, at THIS cost?"
The receipts make it undeniable:
🔹 A real long-context task — 800K tokens in, 200K out — costs ~$18 on Fable 5 vs ~$0.50 on DeepSeek V4 Pro. Same task, 36x the price.
🔹 Running the full Artificial Analysis intelligence benchmark costs ~$4,811 on a frontier model vs $113 on DeepSeek V4 Flash — about 42x.
🔹 Engineers on X are reporting that smart model-routing has cut their monthly API bills by well over half — with no real drop in quality.
In marketing automation and daily operations, blindly reaching for the "smartest" model is a trap. The real moat isn't how you write a prompt anymore — it's your model-to-mission routing architecture.
The ROI ladder I build for teams:
🟣 Tier 1 — Frontier (bet-the-quarter work). Claude Fable 5 ($10/$50). It genuinely leads — 80.3% on SWE-Bench Pro, 11 points clear of the field — so it earns its price on multi-day autonomous agents, long-horizon research, and the hardest reasoning. Only there.
🔵 Tier 2 — Workhorse (daily production). GPT-5.5 ($5/$30) or Gemini 3.1 Pro ($2/$12). Strategy, complex copy, deep analysis, briefs.
🟢 Tier 3 — Volume (the regulars). DeepSeek V4 Pro (~$0.44/$0.87) or Gemini 3.5 Flash ($1.50/$9). 90% of daily work — routing, summaries, formatting.
The move smart teams are converging on: use the expensive model as the architect for the hardest 10–20%, and route everything else down the ladder.
The rule underneath it: cost scales with use, not with value.
The wrong default doesn't cost a little more — it multiplies your bill 10–40x.
You'd never put your most expensive partner on data entry. Match the model's intelligence to the mission's risk — that's the real AI ROI in 2026.
Follow Lucy L. for go-to-market AI workflows that actually run — built and stress-tested on real consumer brands scaled to $10M+.
♻️ Repost if your team is paying frontier prices for Tier 3 work. 😉
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A close friend’s boss fired his entire qualified team.
“AI can automate all of it,” he said.
Two months later, the company posted on its official social media:
“Sorry — we listened to AI. We were wrong. Our market offer was completely unrealistic. We heard you, and we’re ready to change.”
Brilliant.
The AI worked.
It automated the apology before it ever automated the business.
AI didn’t replace the team.
It replaced the judgment that knew why the team mattered.
🤷
Naanoimage
🌟Things I learned working with small startups that I never fully learned in big corporations:
→ 1️⃣How to set proper, motivating goals so the team's efforts are aligned and driven — instead of using fear and stress to push people toward the legal and financial borders.
→ 2️⃣Social media followers are most often a vanity show. Real income comes from the channels you own — like email.
→ 3️⃣You influence people with win-win logic and EQ, not titles — that's how you actually move everyone toward a common goal.
→ 4️⃣There's an arbitrage reward for being the first to do something — even selling beautifully designed bento boxes before anyone else in the country.
→ 5️⃣A lot of established KOLs are overly expensive and don't bring the ROI. Nano-KOLs are the much better surprise.
Talking about nano-KOLs — I have to mention Naano, where LinkedIn KOLs have become a real thing.
For enterprises: you choose the creators you work with and pay per click.
For creators: you get paid for posting about the things you're genuinely passionate about — straight to your Stripe account, no back-and-forth changes, no chasing invoices.
Win-win.
And here's the part I respect most: Naano was built by two young fresh grads— [Thomas Marcelle & Alexis Jarre] — one of the first platforms in Europe to turn LinkedIn creators into a real business. When you know how brutal the French 🇫🇷 environment is for entrepreneurs, you've got to give them a real thumbs up. 👏
Don't just take my words for it. :)
Check out yourself:https://lnkd.in/dFHTRq2Y
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I heard a founder on 20VC say he would rather lose 30 years of his life to build a billion-dollar company.
That is his choice.
But what shocked me wasn’t the sacrifice.
It was how many people applauded it.
Somewhere in Silicon Valley, founders started treating rest as weakness.
Recovery as laziness.
Sleep as optional.
Health as a negotiable asset.
And burnout as proof that you are “serious.”
Let’s be honest.
This is not ambition.
This is an ideology dressed up as performance.
Because buried inside that statement is an assumption:
That working more hours produces better outcomes.
The science says otherwise🧠✨
Your best ideas rarely arrive during your 14th consecutive hour at a desk.
They arrive in the shower.On a walk.During exercise.After a great night's sleep.On a weekend when your nervous system finally has room to think.
Creativity requires recovery.
Judgment requires recovery.
Long-term performance requires recovery.
Elite athletes understand this.
Yet many founders still treat recovery as weakness.
As if exhaustion were a competitive advantage.
As someone who built a business from $0 to more than $10 million in revenue, I know what hard work looks like.
There were periods when I worked relentlessly.
But looking back, the biggest breakthroughs rarely came from pushing harder.
They came from seeing more clearly.
And clarity is an energy management problem, not a time management problem.
What concerns me is when a founder’s personal obsession becomes a company culture.
Employees are not extensions of a founder’s anxiety.
They are people with bodies, families, futures, and private definitions of success.
Some people want unicorns.
Some people want children, health, freedom, friendship, love, travel, creativity, and enough money to live well.
That is not “less ambitious.”
That is a different life design.
The most dangerous part of hustle culture is not the hard work.
Hard work is necessary.
The dangerous part is the brainwashing:
Making 99% of people feel guilty for wanting a healthy, happy, meaningful life — so that 0.1% can normalize extreme sacrifice as the price of belonging.
I don’t buy it.
Because if becoming a billionaire costs 30 years of your life, your health, your relationships, and your peace of mind...
Some people would still take that deal.
Many wouldn't.
And both choices are perfectly valid.
The mistake is assuming there is only one definition of winning.🏆
