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

This founder ran a talent marketplace on WordPress before writing custom code. Now it brings in $2.5M+ per year.
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: Ask your audience what they struggle with repeatedly for content ideas.

What work does your business still do by hand every week? We're selecting three revenue-generating businesses for a hands-on automation pilot. Tell us about the process, and we'll assess whether we can turn it into a working AI-assisted system. Apply for the automation pilot →

He built a $2.5M/year marketplace before writing code 🏗️

David Stepania built ThirstySprout in a way lots of indie hackers consider unsexy: as a two-person agency running on WordPress, no custom platform in sight. He lost money for the first two years and funded the gap with $50K to $100K in personal credit-card debt. Today, the talent marketplace brings in more than $2.5M/year.

David refused to build technology until he had 50 to 100 engaged freelancers and repeatable processes worth automating. Since then, he's added AI into the mix. Claude handles screening, matching, proposals, and analysis, while people make calls that require judgment and taste.

This one is a great case study in doing things that don't scale, and gradually replacing the manual stuff with automation. I'm sure you'll enjoy it!

Read the full article →

The AI app builder for indie hackers, built by an indie hacker ⚙️

Dyad was started by Will Chen 18 months ago as a solo project. It’s bootstrapped and 100% customer-funded, so the team builds for users, not investors.

Dyad is an open-source AI app builder that runs on your desktop. You don’t need to be a developer to build full-stack apps with Dyad. Just tell Dyad what you want, and it turns your idea into a working web app.

Unlike most AI app builders, Dyad is built around giving users control and flexibility instead of locking them into a platform. Use any AI model you want, including leading models from Anthropic and OpenAI, or budget-friendly open-weight models like DeepSeek and Qwen.

You can also import existing apps into Dyad. All the code lives on your computer, so you can frictionlessly switch between Dyad and other favorite tools, like Claude Code and Codex.

Dyad doesn’t try to lock users into its cloud platform because it doesn’t have one. Seamlessly deploy apps to Vercel and Supabase, or anywhere else you want, in minutes.

Dyad is the #1 open-source AI app builder on GitHub, with more than 21,000 stars. The team ships a new release every week based on feedback from the community.

Download Dyad for free, no sign-up required, and start building apps without giving up control.

Vibe coding tools to try 🧑🏻‍💻

Hatch: Ditch ChatGPT. Use the most productive AI assistant ever made. Thoughtfully crafted by the founders of Indie Hackers.
Aider: Pair program in your terminal with AI that commits clean, test-ready code.
Devin Desktop: The AI-powered IDE you love, now with an integrated Agent Command Center.
GitHub Copilot Workspace: The agent-led developer environment for turning ideas into pull requests.
v0: The comprehensive coding agent platform to build and deploy full-stack applications from natural language prompts.

See all 30 tools in the directory →

Bite-sized growth tip 🍪

Ask your audience what they struggle with repeatedly for content ideas.

Colin Gray ran The Podcast Host, a content and services business for podcasters, before he built Alitu. He kept asking his audience what they needed help with, partly because it gave him blog-post ideas.

Editing kept coming up. People wanted faster workflows and better audio quality. After hearing it enough times, Colin had a pretty good signal that podcast editing was painful enough to pay to escape.

So he built Alitu, a tool that automates audio production. It now makes $45,000 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. Clone The App: Discover validated mobile app ideas How a Simple Sleep Sound App Makes $50K/Month	▲ 35

	2. AI Wonderland Inovation: The all-in-one AI platform for building 3D. AI Wonderland Inovation	▲ 8

	3. Qarinah: Evidence-linked project memory for coding agents Agent memory should return evidence, not just a story	▲ 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.

What work does your business still do by hand every week? 🦿

Every growing business accumulates recurring work: researching leads, preparing reports, sorting customer feedback, creating content, following up with prospects.

Some of that work can become a reliable AI-assisted system instead.

We're selecting three revenue-generating businesses for a hands-on automation pilot. After a short feasibility review, we'll spend two focused weeks learning one valuable recurring workflow, building the system, testing it on real work, and handing it over to your team.

The best fit is work that already happens at least weekly and consumes meaningful time or money, or creates missed opportunities. If we don't believe we can build something useful within the sprint, we won't accept the engagement.

Tell us about the work you want to stop doing by hand.

Apply for the automation pilot →

Channing's Tweet Pick 🐦

Big goals are abstract. Daily milestones are concrete. The nervous system responds much better to the latter!

—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: $2.5M after building manually, turn audience pain into products, advice from Tolstoy