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PRESENTED BY

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

This founder built software for his own rental company instead of chasing a startup idea. Now he's doing $15M+ ARR.
5 vibe coding tools. Some of the latest apps for coding with AI.
Yesterday's build board winners, including the story of why we (the IH founders) decided to build a new AI assistant.
30-second growth tip: Turn every collaboration invite into a signup flow.

Still using ChatGPT for serious work? Try Hatch instead. Built by the founders of Indie Hackers. We designed it to be the world's most productive AI assistant. Use code INDIE30FREE for 100% off your first month.

He built it for himself, then 70 countries showed up 🎚️

Roy van den Broek started his own AV rental company at 16, got fed up with the spreadsheet-and-duct-tape software the industry was using, and built something better for himself. He had no plan to sell it. Five other rental companies asked to use it, then more kept asking, and Rentman quietly became a SaaS business.

He bootstrapped for eight straight years before taking outside money and is now sitting between $15M and $20M ARR.

The product handles the messy middle of running a production company: equipment rental, crew scheduling, quoting, logistics, invoicing. Roy bet early on cloud software when competitors were still shipping clunky on-premise tools. This of course became the wedge that spread Rentman through a tight-knit community of rental shops, freelance crews, and trade show regulars.

I love interviews like this that show the huge opportunity that comes with bringing new tech to old industries. Lots in here for bootstrappers! Enjoy.

Read the full article →

Grow your team without the growing pains. 📈

You've built something real. But once your team starts growing, you’re suddenly drowning in payroll processing, benefits enrollment, and compliance questions you never signed up for.

That's where Justworks comes in. We handle the parts of running a business that don't deserve your attention: automated payroll that actually works, benefits your team will actually use, international hiring without the legal minefield, and tax compliance you can trust. When things get confusing (and they will), our team of small business experts is there 24/7 with actual answers — no automated responses, no AI agents.

Thousands of founders have freed up their time for what actually matters. Whether you're just hiring your first employee or scaling your team, Justworks grows with you, without the growing pains.

Visit www.justworks.com to see how other makers are building without the busywork.

Vibe coding tools to try 🧑🏻‍💻

Hatch: Ditch ChatGPT. Use the most productive AI assistant ever made. From the founders of Indie Hackers.
Lovable: Describe your idea — Lovable builds a full-stack app and reusable prompts in seconds.
Qodo: Boost test coverage fast — Qodo writes unit tests and smart code suggestions.
Pieces: Store snippets of code offline and use a “long-term memory agent” to search, fix, reuse.
Windsurf: AI-powered IDE that anticipates your next move.

See all 30 tools in the directory →

Bite-sized growth tip 🍪

Turn every collaboration invite into a signup flow.

Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht, founders of Canva (an online design platform anyone can use to make graphics, presentations, and videos without learning Photoshop), wired collaboration straight into the workflow. To share a Canva project with a teammate, the teammate has to create an account. Every invite is a recruitment.

That single design choice, repeated millions of times a day, turned word-of-mouth into Canva's biggest growth channel and helped push the company past $170M/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. Filleo: Shopify AI Product Building Agent I'm 17 & I built an "Agentic AI" to kill the 15-minute Shopify listing grind	▲ 35

	2. LiFast: Autopilot your LinkedIn B2B Marketing Spent 15 hours weekly on client LinkedIn, cut it to under 1 hour somehow	▲ 21

	3. Hatch: Next-generation AI assistant for real work How Hatch started	▲ 7

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 🐦

Of all the people who resent having to market their creations, about 0% spend time scouring the Internet for the unmarketed creations of others.

—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 | 120 Westlake Avenue N, Seattle, Washington 98109

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🗞️ What's New: $15M+ ARR for rental company software, why we built Hatch, get rich from word-of-mouth