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

She built a $40k+ MRR SaaS with buying-intent content. Then AI search changed the playbook.
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: Pay influencers to create courses instead of just promoting yours.

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This founder built a $40k MRR SaaS with buying-intent content 🎯

Cecilia Razak built Slides With Friends during the pandemic after her other business needed a better way to run remote meetings, onboard teammates, and keep groups engaged. The interactive-presentation tool crossed $40k MRR through word of mouth and bottom-of-funnel content for people ready to buy.

Then AI search cut into Slides With Friends' traffic. So Cecilia's team shifted its attention to the leads most likely to become long-term customers. They used AI to identify higher-LTV prospects and focused sales on business use cases (in a way where the product could be used as part of an ongoing workflow, and not in a one-and-done fashion). That mattered because customers who bought it for a single fun occasion often churned when their annual plan ended.

This is a great interview for many reasons, but mostly because it gets extremely tactical and specific. So I'd recommend giving it a read and putting some of its insights into action in your own business.

Read the full article →

Your Buyers Are Asking AI. Will Your Brand Show Up? 🤖

Before a buyer ever books a demo, they're already narrowing the list. They're asking AI which products to consider and still turning to Google to compare options.

If your B2B SaaS brand isn't showing up in those answers, you may be eliminated before the shortlist is even made.

Visibility+ from dofollow.com helps SaaS teams improve visibility across AI answers and traditional search through:

Proprietary intelligence that shows where your brand is missing
Targeted outreach to strengthen visibility where buyers are looking
Clear reporting that shows what's working
A strategy built for both AI discovery and traditional search

The goal isn't just more mentions. It's making sure your brand is present when buyers decide who belongs on the shortlist.

See where your brand is missing →

Vibe coding tools to try 🧑🏻‍💻

Hatch: The next-generation AI assistant for getting real work done.
Aider: Pair program in your terminal with AI that commits clean, test-ready code.
Kilo Code: Open-source agentic engineering platform for orchestration across IDEs, CLI, and Cloud environments.
Lovable: Describe your idea — Lovable builds a full-stack app and reusable prompts in seconds.
Sourcery AI: Code review for the AI era.

See all 30 tools in the directory →

Bite-sized growth tip 🍪

Pay influencers to create courses instead of just promoting yours.

Lane Wagner built Boot․dev, a gamified platform for learning backend languages like Python and Go. He started with affiliate deals for devs on YouTube, which brought in users. Then he made the partnership a lot more interesting.

Now Boot․dev pays influencers to build courses inside the product. Which levels them up from mere promoters of the product to co-creators of it. The business now makes $110,000 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. Launch Nest: Launch smarter. Get discovered. Grow together Your Next Product Launch Deserves More Than a Launch Page	▲ 29

	2. Alarmor: Wake-Up App With Puzzles, Not Snooze Buttons. Alarmor: Loud Alarms with Missions — The Alarm Clock Built for People Who Sleep Through Everything	▲ 9

	3. NoobClaw: Run 10 social accounts without hiring anyone Running 5 Social Accounts Ate 6 Hours a Day, So We Built a Desktop Tool That Runs Them in Our Own Browser	▲ 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.

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 🐦

Between these two ways of being curious, ours is far more exciting :)

—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: $40k MRR with buying-intent content, influencers build your courses, 2 forms of curiosity