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

$3M a year before a public launch. How this founder grew workflow software through word of mouth and customer expansions.
5 vibe coding tools. Some of the latest apps for coding with AI.
Yesterday's build board winners, including three product updates from indie hackers.
30-second growth tip: Document your journey while building to attract customers.

This issue is sponsored by SendRaven, email infrastructure for AI agents. Agents send, read threaded replies and run follow-ups through one API or MCP server, with per-key send limits, recipient allowlists and human approval holds built in. Start free with 3,000 emails a month.

$3M a Year Before a Public Launch ⚙️

Jito Chadha built Nventr while working inside family office portfolio companies where everyday work (manual data entry, disconnected systems, etc.) was a headache. His workflow software grew through word of mouth and customer expansions, reaching $3M a year before he'd publicly launched.

Jito started with the repetitive processes where automation could make the biggest dent in time and cost. Once Nventr made someone's job easier, that person became an internal champion for the product. A process going from days to minutes gave teams a pretty good reason to expand.

The full interview is great. Lots of indie hackers grow through social media marketing, which is a difficult/unrelatable playbook to follow. But Jito grew mainly by turning his happy customers into champions, which anyone can do (provided their products are valuable!) Enjoy.

Read the full article →

When you're scalling, you shouldn’t worry about your scraper.🌎

Your scraper gave up. Try ours.

Blocked pages, broken parsers, another proxy provider. Getting the data you need shouldn’t mean spending another afternoon fixing the stack behind it.

Context.dev handles browser rendering, stealth, and automatic proxy escalation in one API. Get Markdown, HTML, screenshots, images, and structured JSON without piecing together another workaround.

You pay for results: 1 credit = 1 successful scrape, with no rendering surcharge, stealth multiplier, or charge for failed requests.

Bring the URLs your current scraper struggles with. Run them through Context.dev and compare the results yourself. Let your hardest pages be the test.

Give your hardest URL to Context.dev.

Vibe coding tools to try 🧑🏻‍💻

Hatch: The next-generation AI assistant for getting real work done.
Cline: The Open Coding Agent: a powerful open-source autonomous runtime for VS Code, JetBrains, and CLI.
Devin Desktop: The AI-powered IDE you love, now with an integrated Agent Command Center.
Snyk Code: Find, prioritize, and auto-fix security issues with developer-focused SAST solutions.
Bolt.diy: Open-source, self-hosted community fork of Bolt.new featuring total model flexibility.

See all 30 tools in the directory →

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. CircleSaaS: A free launch directory for Startups, AI and SaaS products. Does ChatGPT or Claude know your startup exists?	▲ 22

	2. WinRansomProtect: Offline anti-ransomware for Windows WinRansomProtect: Offline ransomware protection for Windows	▲ 5

	3. Earlyhunt: Launch your AI product early, get discovered weekly. I let early-access users see each other's first feedback, and they wrote better feedback.	▲ 3

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

Bite-sized growth tip 🍪

Document your journey while building to attract customers.

Jon Buda and Justin Jackson were building Transistor, their podcast hosting platform, while still working day jobs. They started a weekly podcast, Build Your SaaS, early in development and talked through what they were figuring out: technical problems, pricing decisions, and the messy parts of bootstrapping. Marketing became something they could do while the product was still taking shape.

Listeners got invested. Some founders became advisors, experienced entrepreneurs offered practical advice, and some listeners became paying customers because they'd followed along and wanted to support the business. By their Product Hunt launch, Jon and Justin already had people rooting for them. Within a year, Transistor reached $20,000 in monthly revenue, and both founders quit their jobs.

Read the full growth report →

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 🐦

Nowhere is this more true than in the world of entrepreneurship.

—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 #10742, Spokane, WA, 99201

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🗞️ What's New: $3M/yr through word of mouth, building an audience before launch, agency > IQ