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

This founder spent months choosing a market. Now his company SavvyCal is at 5-figure 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: Sell lifetime access before your product exists.

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 →

Derrick Reimer spent months choosing a market 📅

After selling Drip, Derrick Reimer took a big swing at a Slack alternative, but it fizzled. Rather than jumping into another idea, he spent months auditing SaaS markets for three things: proven demand, recurring revenue, and room for a effective wedge. That led him to scheduling, a market crowded with free incumbents. Six years later, SavvyCal is a two-product portfolio at 5-figure MRR.

SavvyCal lets users schedule meetings online. The original product, SavvyCal Meetings, focused on making the scheduling process collaborative (with features like calendar overlays that let recipients compare their own availability). Now Derrick is taking the infrastructure route with SavvyCal Appointments, a HIPAA-compliant, API-first scheduling layer for companies that need to embed booking in their own products.

SavvyCal is a great case study on how to enter a crowded market and win. Hope you enjoy.

Read the full article →

One declined card should not kill a sale 💳

Online founders lose good orders when a customer has enough money, but not on one card or account.

HustlePay helps recover those checkouts by letting customers combine cards, digital wallets and bank accounts in one checkout.

Instead of abandoning the cart, the customer can divide the total across available payment methods and complete the order. Merchants gain more completed sales without building or managing an additional payment-operations layer.

HustlePay works with multiple payment service providers, giving merchants more flexibility and reducing dependence on a single provider. Through preferred partner AVPS, qualifying merchants can also receive competitive processing options and a call-first approach when an account needs review.

Indie Hackers readers can use code 50Hustle. HustlePay will cover the first $50 in transaction fees, including PSP fees. More information is available at HustlePay.me.

Vibe coding tools to try 🧑🏻‍💻

Hatch: Ditch ChatGPT. Use the most productive AI assistant ever made. Thoughtfully crafted by the founders of Indie Hackers.
Claude Code: A terminal-based coding agent capable of parallel subagent execution and autonomous codebase management.
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.
Tabnine: Enterprise-grade AI coding agents with total privacy and local control.

See all 30 tools in the directory →

Bite-sized growth tip 🍪

Sell lifetime access before your product exists.

Amar Ghose and Arun Devabhaktuni were still writing ZenMaid, scheduling software for cleaning companies, when they started cold emailing maid services about their problems.

Then, a month before the product was ready to use, one customer sent them a $1,000 check for lifetime access. This money funded more development, and ZenMaid now makes $130,000 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. Leapd: AI that builds and runs your business — 24/7 Free website audit to show up in ChatGPT	▲ 29

	2. Education: Pass your certification exam AB-620 Exam Guide: Topics, Skills Measured, Format, and Preparation Tips	▲ 10

	3. Articarry: Turn home practice into data. Building the adherence layer for pediatric speech therapy	▲ 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.

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 🐦

One of my favorite Seneca quotes 👌

—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: 5-figure MRR scheduling wedge, pre-sell lifetime access, the wisdom of Seneca