About
Hakim Belanouane is the founder of Dough, the anti-lock Django boilerplate that lets builders swap payment providers, email services, and hosts without losing customers — and keep every app updatable with one command.
An engineer by training (IMT Atlantique, Master's in General Engineering), Hakim spent 2021–2025 building and shipping five products solo — an outbound marketing agency, a cold email deliverability SaaS, a superfan social platform, NFT hedging instruments, and a recommendation-based hiring platform. Owning every layer himself, from Django backends and payment integrations to deliverability and SEO, he ran head-first into the exact problems Dough solves: provider lock-in, maintenance drift, and rebuilding the same auth-billing-email stack from scratch every single time.
He writes about Django, SaaS architecture, AI-assisted development, and shipping fast without getting locked in.
Areas of Expertise
- Django & Python development
- SaaS architecture (payments, auth, multi-tenancy, billing systems)
- Payment & email provider integrations (anti-lock-in design)
- AI-assisted development (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot workflows)
- Cloud & DevOps (AWS, GCP, Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD)
- SEO, GEO (AI search optimization) & B2B lead generation
- Cold email deliverability
- Quantitative finance & portfolio management
Qualifications & Education
Master's in General Engineering (Diplôme d'Ingénieur)
IMT Atlantique, France • 2020
Elite French graduate engineering school with highly competitive admission. Coursework spanning machine learning, data science, graph theory, OOP, database management, network programming, market finance, and portfolio management.
Bachelor of Science in Engineering
University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne, France • 2016
Engineering fundamentals, completed alongside a two-year university degree in Physics & Chemistry (2013–2015).
Professional Experience
Founder
Dough.sh
Jul 2026 - Present
Key Achievements:
Designed a provider-swap architecture where customers and subscriptions survive a payment provider change; built the one-command update system that lets customized apps keep inheriting core upgrades; launched prelaunch with a founding-cohort lifetime model.
Building the anti-lock Django boilerplate for builders who ship more than one product. Dough abstracts 100+ payment providers behind a single interface, 15+ ESP/SMTP options behind a provider-agnostic email layer, and keeps every derived app updatable with one command — no lock-in, no maintenance drift.
Founder — Independent Ventures
Self-employed
Jan 2021 - Jan 2025
Key Achievements:
Took multiple products from zero to live users across SaaS, fintech, and social; grew organic search presence to 200K+ monthly impressions; ran client acquisition campaigns end-to-end at Montstrat; built the multi-product experience — and lived the lock-in and maintenance pain — that directly motivated Dough.
Built and shipped multiple products end-to-end over four years: Montstrat (B2B outbound marketing agency), Emailopener.com (cold email deliverability SaaS), Ekko.bio (engagement-gated social platform for superfans), NFTDerivatives.io (financial instruments for hedging NFT portfolios), and Recomndme.com (recommendation-based hiring platform). Full ownership across product, architecture, development, marketing, and sales.
Quantitative Portfolio Manager Assistant
Federal Finance — Crédit Mutuel Arkéa Group, Brest
Sep 2019 - Oct 2020
Key Achievements:
Built an internal tool for backtesting hedging strategies; contributed to a fund strategy change; led investment proposals; optimized team processes.
Federal Finance is a French asset manager with €42B AuM.
Supported the management of ~€1B AuM in Equity and ~€1B in Equity Overlay: market analysis, SCR monitoring, daily fund management, and investment analysis.