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

This founder used open source and SEO to build three AI apps while keeping his day job. They now bring in $7k MRR.
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: Recruit famous users to bootstrap credibility.

A declined card should not kill a sale. HustlePay lets customers combine cards, wallets and bank accounts in one checkout, helping founders recover abandoned carts without extra payment operations. Use code 50Hustle and HustlePay will cover the first $50 in transaction fees, including PSP fees. Start recovering more sales today.

Three AI apps, one full-time job 🤹

Ramsri Goutham Golla is a full-time data scientist who also runs three AI side projects: a quiz generator, a meme generator, and a motion-graphics tool. Together, Questgen․ai, Supermeme․ai, and AiArtist․io have 2.5M+ registered users and bring in roughly $6k to $7k MRR. The portfolio peaked at $100k ARR in 2025.

Ramsri open-sourced Questgen, then used the GitHub repo and SEO content to bring in traffic before pointing people who did not want to self-host to the SaaS. Meanwhile, Supermeme hit Product Hunt's #1 spot and brought in more than 2M registrations.

We interviewed Ramsri and he shared his playbook with us: everything from how he turns open-source projects into SaaS funnels, to why SEO and Product Hunt played different roles across the portfolio, to how he competes when the biggest AI companies ship adjacent features. It's a great read!

Read the full article →

The 2026 SaaS growth loop for SaaS teams 📈

Ads turn off. Authority doesn't.

In 2026, buyers discover SaaS in two places:

Google
AI answers

If you're not visible in both, you're not even in the conversation. Your competitors already are.

dofollow.com helps B2B SaaS teams lock in organic demand with high-authority backlinks and AI-ready brand mentions.

What you're actually paying for: • DR70–90+ backlinks from sites like Canva, HubSpot and Monday • Contextual brand mentions designed to surface in AI answers • A strategist embedded in your category • Live dashboard, reporting, and continuous link monitoring

This is how teams like Surfshark, Pitch and Experian compound growth while others keep buying clicks.

Build demand that compounds →

Vibe coding tools to try 🧑🏻‍💻

Hatch: The next-generation AI assistant for getting real work done.
Apidog MCP Server: Expose your API specifications, live requests, and mock data directly to AI coding assistants.
Augment Code: Agentic software development at organizational scale.
Roo Code: Discontinued AI coding agent for VS Code.
Snyk Code: Find, prioritize, and auto-fix security issues with developer-focused SAST solutions.

See all 30 tools in the directory →

Bite-sized growth tip 🍪

Recruit famous users to bootstrap credibility.

Chris Best built Substack, where writers publish paid newsletters. Early on, he went after well-known journalists and got them to launch there. Their readers discovered Substack along with them.

That gave Substack brand awareness without buying ads. The big names brought audiences, which attracted more writers, which brought in more readers. By 2024, Substack had 3 million paying subscribers and was making more than $1 million 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. Hivemind: AI strategist built from Myosin's top marketing minds Your DMs are not a flowchart. Wagent's founder knows it, and his homepage forgot to say so.	▲ 7

	2. Education: Pass your certification exam AI-103 PDF Questions: A Practical Azure Exam Study Guide	▲ 6

	3. Statum: Browser game Building Statum — a text-based geopolitical strategy MMO (looking for feedback and your take on browser games)	▲ 5

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 🐦

Mood matters in business! And if you're starting something new, you'll probably have more things to be in BAD moods about than good ones.

—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: 3 AI apps while employed, open-source SaaS funnels, bad mood bad business