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PRESENTED BY

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

This founder pivoted from Covid teachers to five-figure MRR.
5 vibe coding tools. Some of the latest apps for coding with AI.
Yesterday's build board winners, including a tool that replaces 15 browser tabs with a 2-minute API discovery workflow.
30-second growth tip: Turn your building process into a public challenge people follow.

Want your product seen by 210,000 founders and businesses? Sponsor an issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter. Choose between 2 affordable tiers that can fit almost any budget.

The screen recorder that sells itself 🔗

Harry Brodsky didn't originally set out to build a “team knowledge” platform. He built a simple screen-recording app for higher ed in 2019, then Covid made customers out of the teachers using the product. Later, he realized every company has the same problem as teachers, just with onboarding, SOPs, demos, and bug reports. The product that came from this was Kommodo, which now has 100,000+ users and is doing five-figure MRR, bootstrapped with a five-person team.

Kommodo turns recordings into reusable documentation, with AI-generated step-by-step guides, meeting transcripts, and search across your video library. The distribution is built in: people discover it through shared links, seeing the product in action before they ever hit a landing page. They also pull in high-intent traffic with free tools like quick recording and SOP-from-video.

In our interview, Harry unpacks Kommodo's smartest growth decisions, its most painful mistakes, and the lessons founders can apply right away.

Read the full article →

Grow your team without the growing pains. 📈

You've built something real. But once your team starts growing, you’re suddenly drowning in payroll processing, benefits enrollment, and compliance questions you never signed up for.

That's where Justworks comes in. We handle the parts of running a business that don't deserve your attention: automated payroll that actually works, benefits your team will actually use, international hiring without the legal minefield, and tax compliance you can trust. When things get confusing (and they will), our team of small business experts is there 24/7 with actual answers — no automated responses, no AI agents.

Thousands of founders have freed up their time for what actually matters. Whether you're just hiring your first employee or scaling your team, Justworks grows with you, without the growing pains.

Visit www.justworks.com to see how other makers are building without the busywork.

Vibe coding tools to try 🧑🏻‍💻

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.
v0: Type a prompt — v0 drafts production-ready React, Vue, or Svelte components.
Qodo: Boost test coverage fast — Qodo writes unit tests and smart code suggestions.
Bolt.new: Prompt an app — Bolt spins up and deploys the full-stack in one click.

See all 30 tools in the directory →

Bite-sized growth tip 🍪

Turn your building process into a public challenge people follow.

Nomad List was startup #4 in Pieter Levels's "12 Startups in 12 Months" project. Each launch had a built-in audience because people were already watching the experiment unfold.

Yes, the "12 in 12" startup thing is played out in certain ways, but the principle of giving yourself a high-stakes public challenge is still worth its weight in gold. It turns you into character in an ongoing story. It gives people a reason to care about you and anticipate your next move. And it gives you tight feedback loops of goals to achieve.

If you're going to build something anyway, consider packaging it into a public challenge with stakes and a timeline.

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!

	2. apives: Curated API Discovery Platform ,Stop Searching. Start Build I stopped wasting hours searching APIs… so I turned my workflow into a tool (200+ APIs, tested)	▲ 16

	3. InvoiceDojo: Black belt invoice management for freelancers My accountant called so I built a Chrome extension.	▲ 7

	4. Ghost Blog: AI to write and publish content to Wordpress and Twitter Are you scared of Ghosts ?	▲ 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 🐦

Can we all agree to return to "tradwork" as far as social media comment sections are concerned?

—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: Screen recordings doing 5-figure MRR, grow via public challenges, no AI = tradwork