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

• This founder ignored original ideas and built where competitors already made $20k to $80k/month. Now two APIs bring in $6.4k 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: Keep a frustration journal while using your competitor’s product.

Still using ChatGPT for serious work? Try Hatch instead.

Built by the founders of Indie Hackers, Hatch is the most productive AI assistant ever made. Use code INDIE30FREE for 100% off your first month.

Jonathan Geiger spent three years building side projects on nights and weekends before leaving his job. His first product sold for $7k; a later one reached $127 MRR and sold for $15k just 2.5 months after launch. Now SocialKit and PostPeer, his fifth and sixth products, bring in $6.4k MRR combined.

Jonathan's got a rule I really like: If he can't find two or three competitors making roughly $20k to $80k a month, he won't build. Competitors already earning revenue are proof that customers will pay. Jonathan then looks for a small wedge, such as faster support or getting ahead of the AI-agent curve, instead of trying to out-feature everyone.

And that's not where his playbook ends! Enjoy this one. It's full of actionable insights.

Read the full interview →

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.

1. Hatch: Ditch ChatGPT. Use the most productive AI assistant ever made. Thoughtfully crafted by the founders of Indie Hackers.

2. Devin: Autonomous AI software engineer managing local and cloud agent fleets from a single command center.

3. Kilo Code: Open-source agentic engineering platform for orchestration across IDEs, CLI, and Cloud environments.

4. Tabnine: Enterprise-grade AI coding agents with total privacy and local control.

5. v0: The comprehensive coding agent platform to build and deploy full-stack applications from natural language prompts.

See all 30 tools in the directory →

Keep a frustration journal while using your competitor's product.

Derrick Reimer built SavvyCal to compete with Calendly, a scheduling tool he'd used for years. Before he wrote a line of code, he started keeping notes every time Calendly annoyed him: clunky screens, missing features, little moments that interrupted his workflow. Those notes became SavvyCal's roadmap.

People found sending Calendly links awkward, so he made scheduling feel more collaborative. Makers needed to protect focus time, so he built better availability controls. Instead of guessing what to build, he had a running list of problems and the reason each one mattered. SavvyCal hit $10,000 in monthly revenue within a year and now makes $458,000 a month.

Read the full growth report →

Every day, indie hackers post updates about the products they're building. Here's what the community voted to the top yesterday!

	1. SignalsHunt: Find your first paying client. This week. “I’ll just post on Upwork” is not a client strategy. Here’s what I built instead.	▲ 40
	2. Restryde: An AI Recovery tool for failed stripe payments New startup: Restryde.	▲ 18
	3. NG QRCode: Boring QR codes get ignored. Artistic QR codes get scanned. Most QR codes work. The problem is that nobody notices them.	▲ 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.

Picked this tweet because I've always thought people who build and innovate new technology should also be the most savvy about how to consume and cope with it.

—Channing

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