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PRESENTED BY

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

This founder bootstrapped through eight years of slow growth instead of chasing hype cycles and is now compounding at 15-20% MoM.
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: Steal a proven business model from an adjacent market.

Make migration planning easier with the Azure Copilot Migration Agent. Assess readiness, risk, ROI, and landing zone automation through natural language prompts. Accelerate your migration process with Azure Copilot and have migrations that are better scoped, better justified, and less error-prone. Download the playbook to learn more and get started.

This founder spent 8 years escaping the Airtable clone trap 🇮🇳

Rachit Khator was working at a Fortune 500 company in the US in 2017, watching teams run serious workflows out of spreadsheets and wishing there were a better middle ground. So he quit in 2018, moved back to India, and started Stackby: a no-code platform that feels as simple as a spreadsheet, but is powerful enough for non-technical teams to build custom databases, workflows, and business apps. Eight years later, Stackby is at 7-figure ARR and growing 15-20% month over month in a category where Airtable owns most of the oxygen.

The biggest challenge was positioning. When you’re the second mover, users and search engines want to file you under “Airtable alternative” before you’ve explained your own philosophy. (In the full interview Rachit gets into how he overcame this.)

To me, Rachit's greatest skill is marketing. All the greatest marketers are experimenters, and Rachit is no exception. For example, instead of building a polished marketplace, Stackby manually shipped 20-30 basic templates, tracked organic traffic and duplication, then doubled down only on high-intent categories like CRM, marketing, and project tracking.

The full interview gets into that experiment, the focus-vs-flexibility trap, and why raising too early can weaken the discipline that makes indie products survive.

Read the full article →

Have you been burned by a confident-sounding AI answer yet? 🧯

Cuey cross-checks ChatGPT, Claude & Gemini in one tab to catch hallucinations before they cost you. No copy-pasting. No tab-switching. A free Chrome extension for high-stakes answers you can't afford to get wrong.

Use code HACKERS for 3 months of Pro on us.

Vibe coding tools to try 🧑🏻‍💻

Hatch: Ditch ChatGPT. Use the most productive AI assistant ever made. Thoughtfully crafted by the founders of Indie Hackers.
Codex CLI: Chat in your terminal — OpenAI’s Codex CLI reads, writes, and runs code on the spot.
Snyk Code: Scan and auto-patch security flaws right in your source code.
Claude Code: Command-line AI that reads, edits, and tests your codebase via natural language.
Amazon Q Developer: Build and refactor AWS apps faster with AI that understands your stack.

See all 30 tools in the directory →

Bite-sized growth tip 🍪

Steal a proven business model from an adjacent market.

Noah Kagan, founder of AppSumo (a deals platform where software companies offer steep discounts to acquire new customers), didn’t invent a new business model. He looked at MacHeist, which was bundling Mac apps at huge discounts and selling them like crazy, and asked an obvious question: why doesn’t this exist for web software?

He copied the playbook, swapped the product category, and pointed it at a much bigger market. AppSumo now does $6.67M+/month.

Study what’s already working in a similar industry rather than hunting for an "original" idea.

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. Reconcra: 2-Min Shopify & Stripe Payout Reconciliation Tool From a 20-Year Banking Veteran to building a privacy-first Shopify/Stripe auditor in 7 days. Here is why and how.	▲ 33

	2. Shelf.app: Your apps. Built in seconds. Yours forever. The Nurse Who Built Her Own Handover App at 3am	▲ 10

	3. AI-Powered Web Applications: Smart, scalable, and future-ready AI web solutions. Building the Future of Digital Products with AI & Scalable Software Solutions	▲ 8

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 🐦

Many of the devs I know think they wasted time learning to code, but almost every non-dev I know thinks AI coding is too difficult or confusing. (At least for production apps.)

So make no mistake: being Good At Computer is a superpower in the AI age.

—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: $1M+ ARR vs VC alternative, steal a biz model, learn to code?