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PRESENTED BY

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

This founder ran a side project for 17 years before going all. Now he’s at $3k MRR.
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: Be 10x better at the one feature your competitors can’t copy fast.

Justworks handles HR, payroll, and benefits complexity, so you can focus on building your small business.

This founder waited 17 years to go all in on his startup 🎥

Marcel Fahle kept the same side project alive for 17 years before AI and a sudden wave of customer traction finally made it worth quitting his principal engineer job for. His first customer from 2009 is still on the platform. Bold is now at $3k MRR, with a consulting practice and a 70k-player card game covering the bills while he goes all in on the product.

Bold turns sprawling coaching and training video libraries into AI coaches that answer student questions with timestamped citations from the original recordings. Customers pay $700-$1,500/month, with no free tier (on purpose). Marcel doesn’t want users the AI layer can’t actually pay off for, so he’s priced low-value buyers out of the funnel entirely.

We get into the tactical weeds with Marcel in the full interview. You'll learn how a portfolio can become real financial runway and also how to avoid turning this into an excuse for not giving your main product the attention it deserves.

Read the full article →

Own Google & AI search across your category 🔎

Your buyers aren’t just using Google anymore. They’re asking ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity which vendors are worth evaluating.

If your brand isn’t consistently mentioned across the web, you lose visibility before the sales process even starts.

That’s the new reality of B2B SaaS growth.

At dofollow.com, we help SaaS companies build the authority that drives visibility across both traditional search and AI-generated answers.

We secure high-authority placements and branded web mentions on publications that influence:

✅ Google rankings
✅ AI search recommendations
✅ Category and competitor comparison queries
✅ Buyer trust during evaluation

So when prospects search:

“Best HR software”
“Top cybersecurity platforms”
“Competitor alternatives”
“Recommended tools for enterprise teams”

…your brand is part of the conversation.

We’ve helped companies like Pitch, Surfshark, Allianz, and LegalZoom strengthen their visibility with authority-building campaigns designed for modern search behavior.

Because in 2026, brands that lack authority across the web become invisible everywhere that matters.

See how dofollow.com helps SaaS brands stay visible in both Google and AI search.

Vibe coding tools to try 🧑🏻‍💻

Hatch: Ditch ChatGPT. Use the most productive AI assistant ever made. Thoughtfully crafted by the founders of Indie Hackers.
Augment Code: Context-aware AI agent that navigates huge repos and writes fixes like a senior dev.
Continue: Create custom AI copilots in VS Code or JetBrains with one open-source plugin.
Lovable: Describe your idea — Lovable builds a full-stack app and reusable prompts in seconds.
Cline: Plan, act, and execute tasks inside VS Code with an open-source dual-mode agent.

See all 30 tools in the directory →

Bite-sized growth tip 🍪

Be 10x better at the one feature your competitors can’t copy fast.

Aleem Mawani and Omar Ismail, founders of Streak (a CRM that lives inside Gmail), shipped an MVP that was, in their own words, “10x worse” than Salesforce at almost every standard CRM feature. But on the one thing that mattered (deep, native Gmail integration), they were untouchable.

Users tolerated the missing fields and rough edges because the Gmail piece was so valuable, nothing else compared. That single-feature dominance pulled customers off bigger, more polished CRMs and turned word-of-mouth into Streak’s biggest channel. The company now does $833K+/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. Achiv: Gramarly for Reddit - write viral posts Reddit isn't ignoring you. You're ignoring Reddit.	▲ 8

	2. KashifData: Your clients want reports. Stop building them manually ! Most tools stop at charts .. KashifData finishes the job	▲ 6

	3. Opencals: Shopify for service businesses I found the most underrated B2B lead source for SaaS	▲ 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 🐦

If your paying users would be sad if you disappeared tomorrow, your net worth is a thank-you note.

—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: When to go all-in on your side project, wealth isn't evil, build a 10x better feature