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PRESENTED BY

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

This founder sold his first SaaS for $10k instead of going through a painful pivot.
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: Buy out your competitor’s contracts.

Want your product seen by 220,000 founders and businesses? Sponsor an issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter. Choose between 2 affordable tiers that can fit almost any budget.

Attracting the wrong users led to $18k MRR 💬

Abhishek Chakravarty was working on Botflow, a no-code chatbot builder, when he noticed a strange pattern: a flood of users were signing up, but they were all looking for a cheaper alternative to Typeform. Instead of ignoring them or trying to force a fit, he sold Botflow for $10k and built exactly what they wanted. His new product, Youform, is now at $18k MRR.

Youform is a freemium form and survey builder that found its wedge by positioning itself as the affordable alternative in a crowded market. The growth is classic product-led: free users build and share forms with Youform's branding, which brings in a steady stream of new users who've already seen the product in action.

Inside this interview: how Abhishek pulled 200 users from Reddit, why he launched with a lifetime deal ($35k in revenue), and the case for going head-to-head with a giant.

Read the full article →

AppSignal connects the dots for you. 🤯

Tired of juggling Sentry + Datadog + Loggly? AppSignal combines errors, performance, logs & uptime in one APM. Setup takes 5 mins. Works with Ruby, Node, Python, Elixir & more. 30-day free trial, no credit card. Start shipping with confidence.

Start your free trial today.

Vibe coding tools to try 🧑🏻‍💻

Blackbox AI: Turn questions into code snippets with real-time autocomplete and debugging.
Augment Code: Context-aware AI agent that navigates huge repos and writes fixes like a senior dev.
Cody: AI assistant that understands your entire codebase to write and fix code faster.
GitHub Copilot: Suggests code and entire functions in real-time within your editor.
Pieces: Store snippets of code offline and use a “long-term memory agent” to search, fix, reuse.

See all 30 tools in the directory →

Bite-sized growth tip 🍪

Buy out your competitor's contracts.

SavvyCal wanted to steal customers from Calendly, its main competitor. Problem is, people already paid for annual subscriptions. Switching meant eating that cost. So SavvyCal made them an offer: "we'll credit whatever's left on your existing plan toward your account with us."

This removes the most annoying barrier to switching. It's not about whether your product is better. Most people already know they'd prefer something new. They just can't stomach wasting money they already spent.

The math usually works in your favor, especially if your product will be used indefinitely into the future. So find out what's keeping people locked in, then make it disappear.

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. Offero: Pricing calculator that builds proposals I'm building a pricing tool for freelancers because every proposal app ignores the actual problem	▲ 13

	2. TwoSided.news: TwoSided shows how left and right report the same story. People were arguing about the same news like it was different events	▲ 5

	3. Affispark: Affiliate-in-a-box for SaaS founders and AI builders A rule you have to remember manually is not a real system yet.	▲ 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.

Channing's Tweet Pick 🐦

How will you bend reality this week?

—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: $18k MRR from unexpected users, buying out competitor contracts, high-agency Monday