I'm Nicolas Lecocq, a self-taught founder from Paris. I dropped out of school at 16 to work as a baker, taught myself to code at night with no school and no mentor, and in 2016 launched OceanWP, a free WordPress theme that grew to 500,000+ active installations and generated over $1.5 million in revenue before I sold the business in 2019. The exit looked like a win but it wasn't. I had no system for managing the money and lost most of it in under 2 years to luxury spending, an unpaid French tax bill, and a partnership that went bad. My father got sick, my wife was later diagnosed with cancer, and I spent several years in failed projects and a long depression. In late 2024 I started building again, this time with my wife Maria. We are bootstrapping LinkedGrow, an AI-powered LinkedIn gro...