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

Four failed products later, this founder found a painful developer problem and built it into a $12.5k/month business.
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: Pause signups when you can't handle the growth.

Typing interrupts thinking. GladiaFlow doesn't — one hotkey turns speech into text in real-time, in whatever app is already open. It's open-source, accurate across 100+ languages, and priced for actual usage rather than another flat fee. Try GladiaFlow today.

Four Failed Products Later, She Found a Painful Developer Problem 🧠

Selene Lee spent nearly nine years in academia, completing a neuroscience PhD at Oxford before leaving to build software full-time. The first four products she and her co-founder built went nowhere. Their fifth, SocialCrawl, now makes about $12.5k/month.

SocialCrawl solves an immediate problem for developers. It started as a way for AI agents to access social-media data, then grew into a standardized API for public data across news, e-commerce, and 44+ platforms.

This is Selene's story. She shares how she got the idea, worked with her team to find early users in niche communities, built the software, and much more.

Read the full article →

AI Is Already Building Your Buyer’s Shortlist. Is Your Brand On It? 😱

Long before a buyer reaches your website, they’re already comparing options through AI answers and Google search.

If your B2B SaaS brand isn’t appearing in the sources those systems rely on, competitors can enter the conversation before you do.

Visibility+ from dofollow.com helps SaaS teams improve visibility across AI answers and traditional search through:

Proprietary intelligence that identifies where your brand is underrepresented
Targeted outreach to authoritative sources influencing buyer discovery
Clear reporting that tracks where visibility is improving
A coordinated strategy across AI discovery and traditional search

The goal isn’t to be mentioned everywhere. It’s to show up in the places that shape which brands buyers consider.

See where your brand is missing →

Vibe coding tools to try 🧑🏻‍💻

Hatch: Ditch ChatGPT. Use the most productive AI assistant ever made. Thoughtfully crafted by the founders of Indie Hackers.
Fine: AI-powered rapid application development tech, now integrated as the core engine for HoneyBook.
Bolt.new: Build and scale full-stack applications instantly by simply chatting with an intelligent AI agent.
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 →

Bite-sized growth tip 🍪

Pause signups when you can't handle the growth.

Jen Yip built Lunch Money, a multi-currency budgeting app. Then Intuit shut down Mint, and signups jumped fivefold overnight. Great problem to have! At least until your infrastructure struggles to hold and new users start having rough first experiences.

So Jen paused signups for a week and put up a waitlist. That gave her room to protect existing customers AND made Lunch Money feel a little more in demand. When she reopened, people were even more ready to join. The app now makes $34,000 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. Inide Need: Discover and submit products built by indie makers Launched something useful and heard… nothing?	▲ 16

	2. Mavibot: No-Code Sales Automation Platform I posted a boring intro in a 456k-person community. One line got all the reactions.	▲ 5

	3. Philologica: Traceable AI-assisted manuscript review for researchers A pre-submission review system for high-stakes claims.	▲ 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.

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 🐦

The most life-changing insight I ever had was that if I can crush it for the first two hours of work everyday (or on most days) for months, I will reliably be proud of my progress looking back.

—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: Four failed products to $12.5k/mo, pause signups to grow, one life-changing insight