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PRESENTED BY

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

This founder rebuilt his entire product from scratch instead of going back to a 9-to-5.
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: Make demo footage of a real customer using your product.

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

A year of zero growth to save his business 📉

Brennan Dunn was watching RightMessage crash and burn. So he bought out his business partner and made a brutal call: rebuild the entire product from scratch while still supporting existing customers. For a full year, paying customers got zero new features while he burned through savings. Now, a little over a year after relaunching, he's at $30k MRR as a solo founder with two kids under five.

RightMessage personalizes websites in real time using email data and survey responses. Instead of showing everyone the same generic page, SaaS founders see SaaS-specific content and e-commerce owners see AOV (average order value) messaging. As is the case with many indie hackers, Brennan built it for himself first, solving a conversion problem at his previous company before turning it into a product.

In our interview with Brennan, he shares how a full rewrite, better positioning, and one smart growth channel brought RightMessage back.

Read the full article →

Did you get through your support today? 🧐

It feels like a drag, doesn't it?

Bug reports. Refund requests. The same questions again and again. And a few emails you’re not even sure are worth answering (like VCs reaching out… looking at you, Russ!).

Support tools didn’t help. They added AI that replies wrong, cluttered workflows, and layers of settings.

Now you’re managing the tool more than helping your users.

Fernand brings it back to simple.

A fast inbox, an AI chat that actually uses your product context, and a clean knowledge base, all in one place. It integrates with Stripe, GitHub, and Linear so you have the right context when replying.

No setup maze. No feature overload. Just something that works, priced transparently at $29/month.

If support still feels like a chore, try Fernand.

Vibe coding tools to try 🧑🏻‍💻

Hatch: All-in-one AI workspace for chats, documents, and files that understands your whole project. From the Indie Hackers team. :)
Kilo Code: Open-source AI assistant that orchestrates complex tasks, writes, and self-repairs.
Cline: Plan, act, and execute tasks inside VS Code with an open-source dual-mode agent.
Amazon Q Developer: Build and refactor AWS apps faster with AI that understands your stack.
Cursor: AI code editor that predicts your next edit and understands your project context.

See all 30 tools in the directory →

Bite-sized growth tip 🍪

Make demo footage of a real customer using your product.

Roy Lee needed to show people that Interview Coder actually worked. So he recorded himself using it during a real technical interview with Amazon. Typically, demos involve simulation or scripted walkthrough, but here, he showed an actual high-stakes interview with one of the biggest tech companies in the world.

That video did more than any polished marketing ever could. It answered every objection instantly. Does it really work? Here's proof. Is it detectable? Watch me not get caught. Is it fast enough? See for yourself.

Most product demos are sterile. Perfect lighting, ideal conditions, cherry-picked scenarios. They feel like marketing because they are. But real footage feels like evidence.

If your product works under pressure, prove it under pressure! Record a real customer using it in a real situation with real stakes. The messiness is a feature. It signals that you're not hiding anything.

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. IbexAI: Finds high-intent leads on LinkedIn How to find your first paying user	▲ 32

	2. KashifData: AI Data Analysis, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence Why pay $100/hr for data analysts? I automated the whole job for $9. Test it for free.	▲ 12

	3. LU: AI Travel App - find your travel inspiration Are you already addicted to travel apps?	▲ 11

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 🐦

If you haven't read a book in a while and don't know where to start, I wrote this reading guide a couple years ago. Maybe it'll help!

—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: $30k MRR after 0 growth for 1 year, how to make a demo, go read a book!