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PRESENTED BY

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

Amin Memon turned freelance design into a subscription business. Eight years later, Draftss is a multi-seven-figure operation with a team of 70.
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: Repackage the market leader's expensive tool for the customers they ignore.

Still using ChatGPT for serious work? Try Hatch instead.

Built by the founders of Indie Hackers, Hatch is the most productive AI assistant ever made. Use code INDIE30FREE for 100% off your first month.

Amin Memon turned freelance design into a 70-person operation 🏗️

Amin Memon started out by packaging his own freelance design work into a subscription. He figured startups wanted speed and reliability over the usual freelancer mess. Eight years later, his business, Draftss, is a multi-seven-figure operation with a team of 70 serving thousands of founders. He built the whole thing bootstrapped, with no funding and no big "launch moment." So basically he just survived long enough to figure things out.

Here's the model. Companies pay a monthly fee for an on-demand creative and dev team instead of hiring in-house or managing a rotating cast of freelancers. Most of the growth has come from retention and word-of-mouth.

When Amin realized how annoying cold email infrastructure was for his own outbound work, he productized that too. Deliveryman(.)ai is now its own subscription business.

Lots of indie hackers get stuck in the loop of trading dollars for hours. This is a case study on how to break that loop and actually scale a service business. Enjoy!

Read the full article →

Build and monetize your business with Lovable 🩷

Most founders validate their product ideas with surveys. But there's only one wayto truly test willingness to pay: by charging your users.

Lovable lets you launch a full-stack app with customer logins, payments, and a real backend, just by describing what you want in plain English. No long timelines,no heavy resourcing. And since payments are built in, you can monetize it from day one — real money from a real product.

And every app is discoverable by default: real HTML that search engines can read from day one, with a built-in SEO agent that tells you what's working and what to fix next.

Launch your first paying product this week and get $5 off your first month of Lovable with code INHA-05-0626

Vibe coding tools to try 🧑🏻‍💻

Hatch: Ditch ChatGPT. Use the most productive AI assistant ever made. Thoughtfully crafted by the founders of Indie Hackers.
Cursor: AI code editor that predicts your next edit and understands your project context.
Continue: Create custom AI copilots in VS Code or JetBrains with one open-source plugin.
v0: Type a prompt — v0 drafts production-ready React, Vue, or Svelte components.
Qodo: Boost test coverage fast — Qodo writes unit tests and smart code suggestions.

See all 30 tools in the directory →

Bite-sized growth tip 🍪

Repackage the market leader's expensive tool for the customers they ignore.

Turgay Birand, the founder of EditionGuard, didn't bother trying to out-engineer Adobe, even though they're the industry standard for protecting eBooks from piracy. Instead, he noticed that Adobe's pricing and complex setup made it impossible for small and mid-sized publishers to actually use it.

So he just built a simpler, cheaper SaaS layer on top of the same underlying tech and aimed it at the publishers Adobe was ignoring. Today, EditionGuard is doing $25K 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. IndieDeck: One page that proves you actually ship. I need some brutal feedback from fellow indie hackers.	▲ 8

	2. Psilynx: Bring order to your website performance at scale. A quick thank you to everyone here.	▲ 8

	3. Blinklip: AI Video Clipper That Run 100% locally, No Subscription Launched on Product Hunt and landed at #367. Here's what I learned about my AI video tool.	▲ 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 🐦

Whatever you do… don't let this happen to you. For every hour you spend letting AI help code, spend an additional hour letting AI help you market the product.

—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: Freelance to multi-7-figures, profit by repackaging tools, negative ROI on AI?