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

A course creator's video gave an AI tool its first users. Its founder then quit his job to grow an $18k+/month portfolio.
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: Set up a news alert bot to write timely content.

Want your product seen by 280,000 founders and businesses? Sponsor an issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter. Choose between 2 affordable tiers that can fit almost any budget.

This Founder Built an AI Tool for a Friend. Then It Took Off. 🎬

When a friend building an online course needed a way to make motion graphics without learning After Effects, Anatoly Pashias spent three weeks vibe coding Motionvid, an AI video tool. The friend made a YouTube video about the MVP, sending Motionvid its first users. Search traffic followed, and Anatoly quit his full-time job to focus on it.

Motionvid has grown 40% month over month since a $120k AppSumo campaign, passed 100,000 signups, and reached $7k MRR. Alongside it, Anatoly runs Sally POS, a point-of-sale system used in 400+ restaurants and bars across three countries, plus Framekit, an early AI website builder for creatives. Together, the portfolio brings in more than $18k a month.

I love founders with a knack for building multiple products. And I particularly love interviews that pick their brains. This is one of those interviews. Actionable lessons galore. Check it out!

Read the full article →

AI businesses start here. ⚡

Launch an AI business without building the business.

AI vibe-coding tools have solved the frontend problem. In an afternoon, you can ship a website, a chat interface, or a voice widget — no dev team, no funding round. What they haven't solved is everything behind the button: where the inventory comes from, who signs the supplier contracts, how payments clear, and what happens when a booking fails at 2am.

That's the part Meshhub.ai runs for you.

MeshHub is an execution runtime that connects your AI surface to real suppliers — parcels, flights, hotels, car rentals, local services — through one normalized API. Supplier contracts, authentication, retries, and reconciliation are handled by MeshHub, not by you. Payments run through MeshHub as merchant of record, so you never touch PCI compliance or payout logistics.

Your job reduces to three decisions: pick a category, set your markup, and design the experience your customers see. Every completed order pays you your margin automatically.

Getting started is concrete, not aspirational: install @meshhub/sdk from npm, call searchAndWait and bookAndWait against the sandbox, and you have a working transaction loop before dinner. Your AI coding tool can even self-discover the integration via our llms.txt. No supplier negotiations. No merchant accounts. No fee until you're transacting.

You bring the demand. MeshHub brings the business engine — supply, payments, fulfilment.

Start building your AI business today.

Vibe coding tools to try 🧑🏻‍💻

Hatch: The next-generation AI assistant for getting real work done.
Aider: Pair program in your terminal with AI that commits clean, test-ready code.
Kilo Code: Open-source agentic engineering platform for orchestration across IDEs, CLI, and Cloud environments.
Lovable: Describe your idea — Lovable builds a full-stack app and reusable prompts in seconds.
Sourcery AI: Code review for the AI era.

See all 30 tools in the directory →

Bite-sized growth tip 🍪

Set up a news alert bot to write timely content.

Adriaan van Rossum and Iron Brands built Simple Analytics, a privacy-first alternative to Google Analytics. Their bot watches for stories about privacy, big-tech data breaches, and Google Analytics controversies.

They move fast when news breaks, publishing useful explainers, putting stories in context, and sharing them on Hacker News with a mention of Simple Analytics at the end. Three of their articles earned 158, 191, and 392 backlinks from dozens of domains.

The company now makes $35,000 a 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. Pass4Future: Pass4Future offers Study Material for various IT Exam {Latest 2026} NetApp NS0-077 Practice Questions for Instant Exam Preparation	▲ 8

	2. DFW Video Production Services: DFW Video Production Services Bring Your Brand to Life Through Professional Video Production	▲ 5

	3. Itechs: Practice Exams for Certification Success Ace 1Z0-1163-1 Exam Questions With a Smarter Study Plan	▲ 2

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 🐦

Move fast every week for many, many weeks.

—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: $18k/mo from a friend’s video, 392 backlinks from news, money vs wealth vs poverty