PRESENTED BY

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

This founder built an audience for 12 years before launching a SaaS. Now his product does $29k MRR without paid ads.
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: Bait your cold outreach with something prospects actually want.

Flodesk Studio is an AI email design app built by the world's top designers — and it's free in beta. Describe what you want, get a beautiful, on-brand email in seconds. Works with any ESP. No credit card needed.

He built the audience first, for 12 years 🐢

Ryan Robinson spent over a decade blogging about SEO before he ever launched a SaaS. So when he and his co-founder Andy Feliciotti shipped RightBlogger's MVP in a weekend during the first week AI hit the mainstream, they didn't launch to crickets. They hit $2k MRR within a week and are now at $29k MRR, plus revenue from a blog, an 80k YouTube channel, and an agency on the side. So much leverage!

RightBlogger is a blog automation platform for marketing teams, agencies, and creators, built to replace the patchwork of tools most content operators cobble together. A post from 2019 and a video from 2023 still send them customers today.

Usefully, this isn't just a story about how to take advantage of a audience, but also of how to build that audience in the first place. And more! Enjoy this one.

Read the full article →

The SaaS growth playbook changed 📈

Five years ago, ranking on Google was enough.

Today, buyers ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity—and still search Google before they buy.

The brands winning today aren't the ones with the biggest ad budgets - they're the ones showing up everywhere buyers look, and that takes authority.

dofollow.com helps B2B SaaS teams build it through:

DR70–90+ backlinks from trusted publications
AI-ready contextual brand mentions
Dedicated strategists in your vertical

Trusted by Surfshark, Pitch, and Experian.

Build authority that compounds

Vibe coding tools to try 🧑🏻‍💻

Hatch: Ditch ChatGPT. Use the most productive AI assistant ever made. Thoughtfully crafted by the founders of Indie Hackers.
Tabine: Code completions from a fast AI model you can run locally.
Continue: Create custom AI copilots in VS Code or JetBrains with one open-source plugin.
Lovable: Describe your idea — Lovable builds a full-stack app and reusable prompts in seconds.
Junie: Chat, refactor, and generate tests across JetBrains IDEs with context-aware AI.

See all 30 tools in the directory →

Bite-sized growth tip 🍪

Bait your cold outreach with something prospects actually want.

Ryan Born was building Cloud Campaign, a social media tool for marketing agencies. But when he tried cold calling them, nobody picked up. So instead, his team tried pitching a profile feature to spotlight each agency's work.

Since agencies love free exposure, tons of them agreed to a quick 30-minute interview. (Plus, they got a backlink out of it.)

Ryan essentially got hundreds of free user interviews with his exact target customer, figured out what they actually needed, and refined the product around that. Cloud Campaign eventually crossed $25,000 in monthly revenue. Getting in the door mattered way more than having a perfect sales script.

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. Backspin: Developers get paid during AI waits. Advertisers reach them We turned AI wait time into a tradeable market. Developers earn, advertisers reach.	▲ 19

	2. Aproov: Match with creators. Get real distribution. Would you rather pay a creator $300 upfront, or give them free access and split the upside?	▲ 10

	3. ForgCV: Create a professional CV instantly without signup I built a free CV builder with no signup — looking for feedback.	▲ 4

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

Channing's Tweet Pick 🐦

This kind of narrative goes viral in startup circles and makes people feel their opportunities will dry up in the very near future.

But we're in a filter bubble! Most of the business world and most consumers are still years behind in the way they use and think about AI.

It's not too late to find real problems people have and build solutions they'll pay for.

—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

You're subscribed to the Indie Hackers Newsletter. Click here to unsubscribe.

🗞️ What's New: $29k MRR without ads, baiting cold outreach, AI accelerating too fast?