PRESENTED BY

Here's what you'll find in this issue:

This founder grew to $125k MRR completely solo. Jason Zigelbaum built Zigpoll without VC or a cofounder, adding nearly half a million dollars in annual revenue in six months.
5 vibe coding tools. Some of the latest apps for coding with AI.
Yesterday's build board winners, including three new product launches from indie hackers.
30-second growth tip: Skip the UI and deliver your product as a chat message.

Still using ChatGPT for serious work? Try Hatch instead.

Built by the founders of Indie Hackers, Hatch is the most productive AI assistant ever made. Use code INDIE30FREE for 100% off your first month.

He grew to $125k MRR completely solo 📈

Jason Zigelbaum built Zigpoll alone. He funded it with savings, spent two years grinding before hitting real traction, and never brought on a co-founder or investors. He started 2026 at $1M ARR and just crossed $125k MRR in June. He added nearly half a million dollars of annual revenue in six months!

Zigpoll is a customer feedback platform that started in e-commerce and is now moving into SaaS. Asking a single question on a thank-you page ("What almost stopped you from buying?") can teach you more than a $15k CRO audit.

Jason's distribution strategy isn't that complex. He leans heavily on the Shopify App Store to find buyers exactly when they're looking, which drives a ~third of signups. Interestingly, another 14% of signups now come directly from GEO (i.e. ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini recommending the product).

Check out Jason's case study! It's great for anyone trying to scale a SaaS product on a light budget.

Read the full article →

Your next email — designed in seconds, not hours. ✨

Flodesk Studio is the AI email design app built for people who actually care how their emails look.

Describe what you want, and Studio generates a beautifully on-brand email — curated colors, typography, and layouts crafted by the world's top designers, not scraped from the internet.

Refine it in chat, drag and drop, or adjust every pixel by hand. You stay in control the whole time.

Built by the world's best designers, accelerated by AI, finished by you. It works inside Flodesk — or export to any ESP you're already using. Mailchimp, Beehiiv, wherever. Bring the design, keep your platform.

Studio is free in beta. No credit card required.

If you're running a business and sending email, this is worth 60 seconds of your time.

Try Flodesk Studio free →

Vibe coding tools to try 🧑🏻‍💻

Hatch: Ditch ChatGPT. Use the most productive AI assistant ever made. Thoughtfully crafted by the founders of Indie Hackers.
Cursor: AI code editor that predicts your next edit and understands your project context.
Continue: Create custom AI copilots in VS Code or JetBrains with one open-source plugin.
v0: Type a prompt — v0 drafts production-ready React, Vue, or Svelte components.
Qodo: Boost test coverage fast — Qodo writes unit tests and smart code suggestions.

See all 30 tools in the directory →

Bite-sized growth tip 🍪

Skip the UI and deliver your product as a chat message.

Keith Perhac was running a CRO agency, helping businesses figure out why their website visitors weren't buying. Crunching data manually was brutal, so his team built internal scripts to automate it.

Instead of rushing to build a SaaS dashboard, Keith tested the waters by sending clients their analytics results in a simple chat message. He skipped login screens, UIs, "user flows," etc.

And it turns out, clients loved it. This early validation gave him the confidence to build out SegMetrics, a full marketing analytics platform, in a quick two-week sprint. It hit $1k MRR in its first month.

Read the full growth report →

The Build Board 🪧

Every day, indie hackers post updates about the products they're building. Here's what the community voted to the top yesterday!

	1. Metareignity: The first Fully Autonomous Algorithmic Agentic Enterprise. Goodhart's Law Is a Math Problem — And We Can Prove It With 10 Lines of Python.	▲ 10

	2. ClipGG: 14 free tools to make content creation faster. Finally sharing the toolbox I originally built for myself.	▲ 7

	3. Dramily: All-in-One AI Short Drama Platform, From Spark to Hit Series I built an AI production workspace for short-drama creators.	▲ 6

Enjoy building in public? Post an update to your product page on Indie Hackers, and it will automatically be added to the daily leaderboard.

AI assistants are evolving. Hatch is the next generation. 🧠

AI models have evolved. ChatGPT has not.

We're still using the same old AI assistant products we were using in 2022, even though the models underneath them keep getting better.

It's time for the next generation of AI assistants.

Introducing Hatch, the most productive AI assistant ever made.

From the creators of Indie Hackers, Hatch was thoughtfully crafted to help you get real work done. From floating windows to tagging documents, we've reimagined every aspect of your daily AI assistant to help you operate at a higher level.

Try Hatch free. Use code INDIE30FREE for 100% off for 1 month.

Channing's Tweet Pick 🐦

Dismissing someone's success because of their audience is like dismissing an athlete because of their muscles.

—Channing

We'd love your feedback! 🙃

Did you like today's stories? Did they suck? Which ones?

We're constantly changing things up to make this newsletter more useful, so let us know what you think by replying directly to this email. We read every reply!

Special thanks to Yushavel Calderon for the graphic design, and to James Fleischmann for contributing a post.

—Channing

Indie Hackers | 522 W Riverside Ave #6526, Spokane, WA, 99201

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🗞️ What's New: $125k MRR completely solo, MVP as a chat message, audiences are like muscles?