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

An anti-AI writer cloned herself. Her YouTube channel now brings customers into a $250k/mo consulting and education business.
5 vibe coding tools. Some of the latest apps for coding with AI.
30-second growth tip: Add a powered-by link that turns every customer into a billboard.

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The anti-AI writer who cloned herself 🤖

Julia McCoy spent a decade selling $1,000 articles and insisting machines couldn't do her team's work. Now an AI version of her appears in YouTube videos that bring customers into First Movers AI, a business she says makes about $250k a month.

She worried the clone would tank her YouTube channel. Her audience named it "Dr. McCoy" and started asking how to get their own. Those questions became a $250/month membership, in-person workshops, and consulting packages costing $7,500–$20,000 a month. The company has about 15 people, with most revenue coming from workshops and consulting.

Getting the face and voice right was only part of it. Julia fed Claude more than 100,000 words of her writing, transcripts, and beliefs to develop what she now sells as "Voice DNA." The first few months went into making the scripts sound like her. As she puts it: "A clone of someone with nothing to say is a very efficient way to say nothing."

A month after her clone launched, someone got her course for free, learned the system, and started a competing cloning business.

In our interview, Julia explains what she decided was still worth protecting, how she turned viewers into high-ticket clients, and the 2.5-year mistake she'd undo first.

Read the full article →

Dela is Muse, built for business. Delegate any task or workflow with your voice. 🎙️

Dela lives on your desktop, one hotkey away, on its own private, dedicated infrastructure. Hold a key, say the task, and it gets done.

Speak it, ship it: "Spin up an ad campaign for our latest product launch, create the assets, and optimize spend daily." One breath, done.
Inbox Zero, 24/7: iMessage, Slack, Gmail, Outlook, and more. Every reply drafted, you approve.
Automate the busywork: workflows and helpers that run on their own, like daily briefings, ad-spend checks, and follow-ups that never slip.
You stay in control: nothing sends, books, or spends without your sign-off.
A real app, not a chat window: Mac and Windows, with everything you need to see and manage what your agent is doing.

You're already doing the work of five people. Delegate like it.

Download Dela and start free with trial credits.

Vibe coding tools to try 🧑🏻‍💻

Hatch: The next-generation AI assistant for getting real work done.
Devin: Autonomous AI software engineer managing local and cloud agent fleets from a single command center.
Junie: Autonomous AI coding agent with advanced planning and deep JetBrains IDE integration.
Snyk Code: Find, prioritize, and auto-fix security issues with developer-focused SAST solutions.
v0: The comprehensive coding agent platform to build and deploy full-stack applications from natural language prompts.

See all 30 tools in the directory →

Bite-sized growth tip 🍪

Add a powered-by link that turns every customer into a billboard.

Mike Slaats built Upvoty to help startups manage user feedback. He put a "Powered by Upvoty" mention in customers' feedback portals, right where their users would see it.

Some of those users wanted the same thing for their own products. They checked out Upvoty and signed up, helping it grow month after month. The report puts Upvoty's peak revenue at $20K+/mo.

Read the full growth report →

Channing's Tweet Pick 🐦

Giving a sh!t isn't a moat but it IS the cost of admission for even competing. An avalanche of vibe coded slop will soon flood every digital market. You'll need to put in 2x the effort to stand out.

—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: An anti-AI writer clones herself, customers as billboards, trying hard = moat?