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

This founder pays affiliates 60% forever. Now systeme․io has 3M accounts.
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: Teach your customers how to use your competitor’s product.

Cyber insurance renewals, SOC2, investor diligence, and enterprise security reviews. Everyone runs your site through a gauntlet of security scans. FreeDAST gives you the same external security grade in seconds, no paywall. Just enter a URL. Vibe coded a site? See your grade at FreeDAST. No signup, no paywall.

This founder pays affiliates 60% forever 🤝

Aurélien Amacker launched systeme․io to roughly 400 paying customers. It hit $1M ARR in its second year. Today, the bootstrapped company has 3M accounts and a 90-person team… and Aurélien only works around 4 hours a day.

systeme․io is a platform that helps online entrepreneurs build sales funnels, send emails, and do other growth-related operations. One of Aurélien's most effectice growth decisions has been to pay affiliates a 60% recurring commission for the lifetime of every customer they refer. He treats this as systeme․io's acquisition budget, which makes sense given his customers are learning to build online businesses and Aurélien's product includes the affiliate tools to help them do it.

The full interview digs into lots of actionable tactics, like how Aurélien built his flywheel, why he cut prices from $27 to $17, and why payment beats compliments as validation. I highly recommend it.

Read the full article →

Your Carrier Logs Every Call 📱

Your carrier has a log of every call, text, and data session you've had. They've been holding it for years.

Who you called. When. How long. Where you were. For founders, that call log is a map of your investor conversations, your co-founder discussions, your client calls, and your legal consultations — all visible to a carrier that sells behavioral data to the highest bidder.

Carriers retain call metadata for years by default. The 2024 AT&T breach exposed call logs for 109 million Americans not because the attacker was sophisticated, but because the data existed and had value. Your carrier's business model involves monetizing the profile they build from your data.

Cape deletes call and text metadata in 24 hours. One price. No hidden costs.

Learn More Here

Vibe coding tools to try 🧑🏻‍💻

Hatch: The next-generation AI assistant for getting real work done.
Bolt․diy: Open-source, self-hosted community fork of Bolt.new featuring total model flexibility.
Claude Code: A terminal-based coding agent capable of parallel subagent execution and autonomous codebase management.
GitHub Copilot Workspace: The agent-led developer environment for turning ideas into pull requests.
Replit: Chat your idea — Replit’s AI builds and deploys the app in one browser tab.

See all 30 tools in the directory →

Bite-sized growth tip 🍪

Teach your customers how to use your competitor’s product.

Turgay Birand built EditionGuard, a service that protects eBooks from piracy. Instead of only explaining his own product, he wrote posts on how DRM works, including how to use Adobe’s pricey enterprise option.

That put him in front of publishers searching for help with Adobe DRM. They came for the tutorial, then found out EditionGuard offered the same kind of protection for a fraction of the cost. The strategy helped take the business from 30 to more than 100 customers and became pivotal to reaching $25,000 in monthly revenue.

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	▲ 24

	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	▲ 7

	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.	▲ 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.

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 🐦

Being a tryhard isn't "cool" but every highly successful founder I've ever known had a phase of going all-in (and many of these "phases" never ended).

—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: 60% affiliate commissions forever, competitor tutorials as marketing, being a tryhard is cool