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

This founder sells companies a design editor they can embed in their apps. Now he’s at $60k 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: Rebrand when your own customers can’t remember your name.

Still using ChatGPT for serious work? Try Hatch instead. From the creators of Indie Hackers, Hatch is thoughtfully crafted to help you get real work done. Use code INDIE30FREE for 100% off your first month.

$60k MRR Selling an Embeddable Editor 🎨

Anton Lavrenov spent years building Canva-like apps for other companies. He wanted to launch his own, but finding customers in that crowded market looked brutal. So he built Polotno, a design editor that companies can embed in their own apps using an SDK. It now does $60k MRR with a team of three.

He spotted the demand for Polotno while maintaining Konva․js, an open-source 2D canvas library. In conversations on Discord, GitHub, and Stack Overflow, companies kept needing design editors for their own users. Polotno lets them add one under their own brand, without building the whole thing themselves.

Check out the full interview! Among other things, it's a great look at how to find a business opportunity in a crowded market by paying attention to what customers keep asking for.

Read the full article →

Simular Releases Sai, Your First Robosecretary Has Arrived🤖

Simular, the autonomous computer company, has released Sai, an AI agent that operates a fleet of computers – up to 100 at a time – to execute desktop tasks end-to-end.

Sai operates computers directly: it reads screens, clicks, types, navigates applications, and plans what to do next. Users can assign work to one or multiple computers, monitor progress remotely, and receive a notification when the work is complete.

Sai is backed by state-of-the-art computer-use technology, surpassing OpenAI and Anthropic on the OSWorld benchmark for real-world task completion, while delivering superior results at 30% lower cost, making it perfect for professionals with ample recurring tasks to automate.

Experience your robosecretary at sai.simular.ai

Vibe coding tools to try 🧑🏻‍💻

Hatch: The next-generation AI assistant for getting real work done.
Fine: AI-powered rapid application development tech, now integrated as the core engine for HoneyBook.
Devin Desktop: The AI-powered IDE you love, now with an integrated Agent Command Center.
Claude Code: A terminal-based coding agent capable of parallel subagent execution and autonomous codebase management.
Qodo: AI-powered code integrity platform for automated testing, cross-repo reviews, and governance.

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. Aura++: Launch your project and increase online aura Ten days after a launch, I stop checking referrers and open Search Console instead.	▲ 25

	2. Earlyhunt: Launch your AI product early, get discovered weekly. Before I invite the next early-access batch, I rerun every input the last batch broke.	▲ 9

	3. Phoenix.vu: AI Coding Agent for Xcode \| Swift & iOS We stopped writing "what is an AI agent" posts. Now our blog recommends our competitors.	▲ 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.

Bite-sized growth tip 🍪

Rebrand when your own customers can’t remember your name.

Ben Peterson and Ryan Sanders launched their HR software for small and medium businesses as Human Services HQ in 2008. It described what they did, but even paying customers couldn't remember the name when talking about the product or referring another business. Good luck getting word of mouth going when happy customers can't tell people what to look up...

They renamed it BambooHR: easy to say, easy to picture. Happy customers could recommend it more readily. Shortly after the rebrand, MailChimp, Pinterest, and Atlassian signed up. Sales became steadier and retention improved. BambooHR now makes nearly $20 million a month with over 30,000 customers.

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 🐦

🤣

—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: $60k MRR with an SDK, customers forget your name?, founders vs vibe coders