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

• One DM from a content creator took this iOS founder from $300 to $12k MRR in two months. His portfolio now does $40–60k/month.
• 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: Bet on a marketing channel everyone else has given up on.

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For years, Florian Vates was the product guy without distribution. He worked at an Austrian agency by day and shipped iOS side projects by night. His first big swing, CORDI, was a two-year perfectionist app that he literally had to twist his friends' arms to try. He killed it, started shipping small-scope apps fast, and plateaued at a few hundred MRR for years.

Then in 2024, a content creator named Charlie Alvarez spotted Florian's Twitter handle buried in an app's settings screen and slid into his DMs. Two months later, MRR went from $300 to $12k. By January, Florian had quit his job. Today his portfolio clears $40–60k/month.

The flagship is MonAi, a minimalist AI expense tracker. After freemium users tanked the reviews, Florian switched to a hard paywall with a free trial and the funnel got dramatically better: a 14% trial-start rate and 40–50% trial-to-paid, both well above category norms. Distribution comes almost entirely from Charlie's Spanish-language Instagram and TikTok.

One of the reasons I love this interview is that indie hackers tend to be product-heavy founders who don't go hard enough on distribution. If you can even slightly relate to that, this one is for you!

Read the full article →

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

2. Lovable: Describe your idea — Lovable builds a full-stack app and reusable prompts in seconds.

3. Qodo: Boost test coverage fast — Qodo writes unit tests and smart code suggestions.

4. Pieces: Store snippets of code offline and use a “long-term memory agent” to search, fix, reuse.

5. Windsurf: AI-powered IDE that anticipates your next move.

See all 30 tools in the directory →

Bet on a marketing channel everyone else has given up on.

Kirsty Sharman, founder of Referral Factory (no-code software that lets any business launch a referral program without a developer), built her entire company on a counterintuitive bet: that referrals would matter more, not less, as consumer trust in ads kept eroding. While other marketers chased shinier channels, she noticed that referred leads convert higher and cost less, but almost nobody could actually set a referral program up without a developer.

So she built the easy button. Referral Factory now powers 40,000+ referrals for its customers and does $458K/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. Psilynx: Bring order to your website performance at scale The Weird Psychology of Performance Scores	▲ 6
	2. Achiv: Content Marketing on Reddit without spam Reddit doesn't hate promotion. Proof: +30 users in 4 days.	▲ 5
	3. ZOL AI Studio: AI fashion creative platform. Generate virtual try-ons and 4 Small brands don’t need “AI magic” — they need faster workflows	▲ 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.

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.

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Correct answer: stop being merely a "software engineer" and become an indie hacker. Entrepreneurship is the most resilient "career" known to humankind.

—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