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PRESENTED BY

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

This founder rebranded for a different market instead of squeezing his existing customers. Now he’s broken through a four-year 7-figure plateau.
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: Don’t ship your MVP if the “M” can get someone fired.

AI hallucinations can cost you. Cuey cross-checks ChatGPT, Claude & Gemini in one tab. No copy-paste. No tab-hopping. A free Chrome extension for high-stakes answers you can't afford to get wrong. Use code HACKERS for 3 months of Pro on us.

This founder sat at a 7-figure plateau for four years 📉

Jesse Schoberg’s DropInBlog hit seven figures, then stayed there for nearly four years. Growth had ripped from 2019 to 2021, but the business eventually found its ceiling. Jesse just broke through it, not with a new feature or clever growth hack, but by changing who the product was for.

The fix was to stop treating DropInBlog like a plug-in for small sites and start selling it like infrastructure for serious content teams. Instead of squeezing the same customers harder, Jesse rebranded upmarket, changed the pricing, and rebuilt the positioning around buyers with bigger content operations.

DropInBlog is a headless blog CMS that drops into existing sites across React, Next.js, Laravel, Express, and dozens of hosted platforms. It powers 2,000+ blogs, including public companies and recognizable ecommerce brands, while still being run by three cofounders and a small team.

In our interview, Jesse explains the “Max MRR” ceiling that finally made the plateau make sense, how the rebrand changed the customers DropInBlog could attract, and why a new feature called Mention Boost is helping smaller customers beat bigger brands in LLM citations. Worth reading if your SaaS has traction but the next tier of growth keeps refusing to appear.

Read the full article →

Grow your team without the growing pains. 📈

You've built something real. But once your team starts growing, you’re suddenly drowning in payroll processing, benefits enrollment, and compliance questions you never signed up for.

That's where Justworks comes in. We handle the parts of running a business that don't deserve your attention: automated payroll that actually works, benefits your team will actually use, international hiring without the legal minefield, and tax compliance you can trust. When things get confusing (and they will), our team of small business experts is there 24/7 with actual answers — no automated responses, no AI agents.

Thousands of founders have freed up their time for what actually matters. Whether you're just hiring your first employee or scaling your team, Justworks grows with you, without the growing pains.

Visit www.justworks.com to see how other makers are building without the busywork.

Vibe coding tools to try 🧑🏻‍💻

Hatch: Ditch ChatGPT. Use the most productive AI assistant ever made. From the founders of Indie Hackers.
Kilo Code: Open-source AI assistant that orchestrates complex tasks, writes, and self-repairs — all inside VS Code.
Junie: Chat, refactor, and generate tests across JetBrains IDEs with context-aware AI.
Repo Prompt: Generate and edit code across repositories using AI-driven prompts.
Bolt.new: Prompt an app — Bolt spins up and deploys the full-stack in one click.

See all 30 tools in the directory →

Bite-sized growth tip 🍪

Don’t ship your MVP if the “M” can get someone fired.

Pradnya Desh, founder of Advocat AI (software that helps sales teams generate and negotiate contracts), ignored the standard startup playbook of “launch fast, fix later.” She was an attorney building a tool that touches legal data, and a buggy MVP meant exposing customers to real contractual risk. So she held the line, hired strong engineers first, and built on a structured knowledge graph instead of bolting onto generic machine learning.

That patience bought her the one thing competitors couldn’t fake: trust from buyers whose careers depend on accuracy. Advocat AI now does $80K+/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. SaasOffers: Unlock $500,000+ in SaaS Credits for Your Startup SaaSOffers.tech just hit $3K MRR and I'm launching on Product Hunt today. Wild week.	▲ 78

	2. Pterocos: HTML CSS JS Code Editor with AI chat Pterocos: HTML CSS JS Online Editor with AI Builder	▲ 16

	3. Recurflux: Payment recovery and churn prevention for SaaS RevenueCat users have been ignored long enough.Seriously.	▲ 12

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 🐦

It's official: we're changing the name of our community to "Indie God-Emperors" 😉

—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 | 120 Westlake Avenue N, Seattle, Washington 98109

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🗞️ What's New: Breaking a 7-figure plateau, indie god-emperors, dangerous MVPs