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PRESENTED BY

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

This founder cannibalized his own $400M business instead of going extinct.
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: Pay referrers a cut of revenue, not a one-time bonus.

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.

They intentionally damaged their $400M business to survive AI 💥

Intercom is a 15-year-old, $400M ARR powerhouse. But when ChatGPT dropped, Des Traynor and his team realized their core business (selling seats to human support agents) was on the verge of extinction. So they made a tough call: they intentionally built Fin, an AI agent designed to replace the very seats they were selling. Now, Fin is about to cross $100M ARR on its own.

Fin is an entirely new business built inside the old one. It handles customer service questions autonomously, and Intercom only gets paid when it works. The 15 years of data and customer trust they built with the original product gives them a foundation few new startups can match.

In our interview with Des, he explains how a book he read in 2011 gave them the conviction to intentionally damage their own company. He also breaks down their shift to a pioneering outcome-based pricing model and shares some stark advice for building a business when anyone can clone your product in 10 seconds. Enjoy!

Read the full article →

Stop overpaying price for AWS. Your startup qualifies for up to $100k in free credits 💸

Most founders don't know they can get up to $100k in free AWS credits and never claim them.

Only for Indie Hackers Spendbase, in partnership with AWS, makes the process simple. The qualifications couldn't be more straightforward:

Open to both new and existing AWS customers
Your startup is under 10 years old with a live website

Think about what $100k back in your runway actually means — months of infrastructure covered, a marketing push you've been holding off, or finally bringing on that first engineer.

The founders who move fast are the ones who win. These credits are available now, but availability isn't guaranteed forever.

Don't leave money on the table.

Apply for your credits today!

Vibe coding tools to try 🧑🏻‍💻

Aider: Pair program in your terminal with AI that commits clean, test-ready code.
Bolt.new: Prompt an app — Bolt spins up and deploys the full-stack in one click.
Apidog MCP Server: Let AI assistants read your API docs directly for instant code and test generation.
Tabine: Code completions from a fast AI model you can run locally.
Sourcery AI: Automatically refactor Python code to improve readability and performance.

See all 30 tools in the directory →

Bite-sized growth tip 🍪

Pay referrers a cut of revenue, not a one-time bonus.

Jen Yip built Lunch Money, a personal finance app for people who spend in multiple currencies. When Intuit killed Mint, users flooded Reddit asking for alternatives. Lunch Money kept getting recommended. Not because Jen was posting. Because her users were financially motivated to spread the word.

Her referral program pays 10% of revenue for each referred user. Not a $10 gift card. Not a free month. Ongoing revenue share.

A one-time bonus makes someone mention you once and forget. Revenue share turns users into long-term salespeople who keep recommending you because there's real money in it.

Signups jumped 5x after Mint shut down. Jen had to pause new accounts because demand overwhelmed her infrastructure. The referral program turned a lucky break into an avalanche.

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. AgileTask.ai: AI sprint planning for solo founders and indie hackers Day 5 update — 10 fixes shipped, Crisp live, still €0 MRR	▲ 8

	2. PrivaPdf: Privacy-first PDF converter-tools Built privacy-first Pdf Converter	▲ 6

	3. Myeasypage: Launch your website & bio link in 60 seconds — free, no code Built myeasypage — launch your complete online presence in minutes	▲ 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.

Channing's Tweet Pick 🐦

Our grandparents fought and died in World War II for… a culture of AI-maxxing and looksmaxxing. 🤣

—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

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🗞️ What's New: Ditching a $400M biz to pivot, the age of ai-maxxing, monetizing referrals