July 2026.
Here we are. The last episode. Le Grimoire was online, on the Store, real, downloadable. After more than a year of work, of late nights, of coffee and heat waves, I’d done it. The curtain could fall on a beautiful story.
Except no. Because that’s exactly where the hardest part began.
The vertigo of zero
I remember the moment I looked at my dashboard, a few days after going live. Zero views on the Store page. Zero trials. Zero.
And right then, the euphoria of launch gave way to a far more grating little tune. What if no one ever saw it? What if the ones who did see it didn’t like it? What if I’d gotten it all wrong? What if, what if, what if…
It’s a strange thing, to bring into the world an object you’ve poured a year of your life into, and to watch it greeted by absolute silence. It’s not that you’re being criticized. It’s worse: no one knows you exist.
I’d spent a year solving a technical problem. I was discovering that I’d solved the wrong problem. The real one, the one every independent creator ends up facing, wasn’t “how do I build good software.” It was “how the devil are people going to find out it exists.”
A trade I didn’t know
So I went back to school. The hard way.
I discovered SEO, that grand art of making yourself visible on search engines, whose rules I hadn’t even suspected existed. I opened accounts on X and Facebook, me, who is not at all comfortable with social media and who barely ever uses it. At most I follow a few well-made channels on 3D printing or writing advice. And no, I don’t spend my days watching kitten videos. Even if, between us, I do like them.
And now there’s video editing. Something I’ve never done, that I’m just about to discover. I know nothing about it. But I don’t have a choice, so I’m going to learn, the way I’ve learned everything else. On the job, by feel, with stubbornness.
That’s my life right now. Part 7 of the adventure, the one that plays out day to day, now, while you’re reading these lines.
What I really want to build
But there’s one thing I believe in deeply, and it’s maybe the most important part of this whole story.
I’m not part of a big studio. There’s no marketing team, no customer service on the other side of the world, no layers of middlemen. There’s me. And that’s precisely what I want to turn into a strength.
I come from IT support. For years, I’ve been helping care teams in a hospital, where responsiveness and listening aren’t options but a necessity. That kind of work leaves its mark. It teaches you that a user who reports a problem isn’t a chore, but a gift.
So here’s my promise, and the spirit in which I want to keep Le Grimoire alive. A bug? The moment I hear about it, I fix it as fast as I can, without turning a deaf ear. A remark, an idea for improvement? I really listen. I have a Discord, and I plan to run polls there: if a request can help others, we prioritize it together. And if it’s true to the spirit of the software, to this philosophy of respect for the author that has guided everything from the start, I approve it and fold it into the next update.
I don’t want customers. I want traveling companions. People who feel this software is growing with them, thanks to them, and not against them.
So, thank you
If you’ve made it this far, to the end of this series and this slightly crazy story, it means you’re already part of the adventure. Because the challenge I was telling you about, the one of being discovered, is solved exactly like this: one person, then another, stumbling on these words, on this software, and thinking “huh, this thing looks like it was made with heart.”
It’s true. It was.
The three-thousand-year-old novel, meanwhile, is still waiting for me patiently. Aster, Raven, all my characters are there, inside Le Grimoire, ready for me to finally pick their story back up. Now that the tool has been born, it’s about time I got back to it, don’t you think?
But that… that’s another story. Mine. And maybe, one day, a little bit yours too.