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PRESENTED BY

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

This founder built a $3M/yr portfolio on free YouTube videos.
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: Failed to launch a product? Build the review site for that whole category instead.

Your product can be the best on the market and still lose to a competitor who had their security in place when you didn't. YSecurity is the on-demand security team for startups that handles SOC 2, pentests, and the buyer's questionnaire. Senior security engineers, no in-house hire. Get 8 hours free.

How a last-place engineering student built a $3M/yr portfolio 🎬

Jacky Chou scored dead last on an engineering midterm in a class of 300+, went home, Googled “how to make money online,” and started building. He now runs a portfolio out of Vancouver that includes an SEO agency (Indexsy), a cluster of SaaS tools (LocalRank․so, Trackings․ai, IndexChex, RankTack), and a short-term rental in Lisbon. TTM revenue: $3M, with March alone at $246.8k. You can verify because he publishes the numbers every month.

The model is a flywheel. Agency cash funds SaaS development, audiences cross-pollinate across products, and he refuses to pay for traffic. His first SaaS, LocalRank, hit nearly $20k MRR in its first week of launch, riding the back of two years of daily YouTube uploads he’d already been stacking.

In our interview, Jacky breaks down the move that powered his biggest launch: two years of daily YouTube uploads before LocalRank existed. Plus a few more actionable lessons. Enjoy this one!

Read the full article →

Zoho WorkDrive 6.0 adds AI-powered intelligence to enterprise content management 📣

Enterprise teams generate large volumes of content, but most files remain difficult to search, organize, and operationalize at scale.

Zoho WorkDrive 6.0 changes that.

WorkDrive 6.0 transforms traditional file storage into intelligent enterprise content management. The platform enables teams to ask questions inside documents, PDFs, audio, and video files, generate summaries from meetings and media, and automate workflows directly from content.

Built for enterprise collaboration and governance, WorkDrive 6.0 combines AI-powered content intelligence with workflow orchestration and secure access controls. Through Zoho MCP, organizations can connect workflows across 950+ business applications while maintaining centralized governance and compliance controls.

WorkDrive 6.0 is designed for organizations looking to make enterprise content searchable, actionable, and automation-ready.

Vibe coding tools to try 🧑🏻‍💻

Hatch: Ditch ChatGPT. Use the most productive AI assistant ever made. Thoughtfully crafted by the founders of Indie Hackers.
Codex CLI: Chat in your terminal — OpenAI’s Codex CLI reads, writes, and runs code on the spot.
Snyk Code: Scan and auto-patch security flaws right in your source code.
Claude Code: Command-line AI that reads, edits, and tests your codebase via natural language.
Amazon Q Developer: Build and refactor AWS apps faster with AI that understands your stack.

See all 30 tools in the directory →

Bite-sized growth tip 🍪

Failed to launch a product? Build the review site for that whole category instead.

In 2012, Steve Benjamins tried to launch his own website builder and couldn’t get traction in a crowded market. So he flipped the script and started Site Builder Report, a site that reviews and ranks the website builders he was competing with. It now does $40K/mo from affiliate commissions and outranks GoDaddy and Wix in Google for “best website builders,” despite their tens of millions in ad spend.

The failed product was the market research. He already knew the category cold; he just pointed that knowledge at buyers instead of trying to win them.

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. Achiv: Gramarly for Reddit - write viral posts Reddit Self-Promo case study: Achiv beat my intuition on the same post: 4x views - copy strategy in 10 minutes.	▲ 14

	2. Aillowpages: The AI Tools Search Engine — Age of Intelligence I built an AI Tools Search Engine solo — 2500+ tools, zero VC, zero team	▲ 8

	3. Psilynx: Bring order to your website performance at scale Why Performance Monitoring Alone Is Not Enough	▲ 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 🐦

If you’re building in AI and feel late, you’re probably just spending too much time on tech Twitter.

Out in the real world, people are still figuring out whether they even like this stuff.

—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: Last-place student to $3M, pivoting failed products, you're still early to AI