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

• This founder built a 7-figure media company instead of going the typical SaaS route.
• 5 vibe coding tools. Some of the latest apps for coding with AI.
• Yesterday's build board winners, including a founder who killed the navbar and built a terminal because founders don’t need hand-holding.
• 30-second growth tip: Give away your entire product for free. Charge for convenience.

An app builder that works. Softr launched their AI app builder for work (think invoice / asset trackers, CRMs, portals). It’s astonishing. Other tools look pretty; Softr builds apps that work with users and data – logins, complex workflows, the lot. Try it with 200 free AI credits. Happy building!

Harry Campbell was an aerospace engineer at Boeing who started driving for Uber on the side. Then he started a second side hustle: blogging about the first one. A year later, he quit his engineering job to go all-in on the blog. Today, The Rideshare Guy is a media empire with seven figures in annual revenue.

The site became the go-to resource for drivers because Harry was one of them. While online forums were full of rumors, he provided practical, tested advice from behind the wheel. That authenticity built a deep moat of trust that competitors couldn't cross.

Here's how Harry went from Boeing engineer to seven-figure media mogul.

Read the full article →

Move from alert to fix, before your customers even notice.

Easy to install. Straightforward to use. Powerful by design.

Start your free trial.

1. Hatch: All-in-one AI workspace for chats, documents, and files that understands your whole project.

2. Codex CLI: Chat in your terminal — OpenAI’s Codex CLI reads, writes, and runs code on the spot.

3. Snyk Code: Scan and auto-patch security flaws right in your source code.

4. Claude Code: Command-line AI that reads, edits, and tests your codebase via natural language.

5. Amazon Q Developer: Build and refactor AWS apps faster with AI that understands your stack.

See all 30 tools in the directory →

Give away your entire product for free. Charge for convenience.

Plausible is open-source. Anyone can download the code, spin up a server, and run it themselves without paying a cent. Most SaaS founders would call this business suicide.

Very few people want to manage their own infrastructure. Self-hosting means updates, security patches, server maintenance, backups. It's a headache. The vast majority happily pay for the hosted version just to avoid the hassle.

Meanwhile, the open-source code builds trust. Customers can verify exactly what’s running. Privacy-focused users can audit it. Developers who self-host today become paying customers when they get busy or start a company with a budget.

So if your product can be self-hosted, consider open-sourcing it.

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. AVENIR: An directory founders where idea lives before reality. Why I replaced the navbar with a terminal	▲ 20
	2. Leado: Find your first users from Reddit conversations. Google search is a mess and it is making Reddit lead gen insane right now	▲ 14
	3. MediaFast!: Market your SaaS on Reddit without being suspended Reddit's #1 spam signal isn't links, self-promotion, or new accounts. It's this.	▲ 9

Enjoy building in public? Post an update to your product page on Indie Hackers, and it will automatically be added to the daily leaderboard.

Think about everything you know about your business: your product pitch, your roadmap, your ideal customer profile, your competitive landscape, your lessons learned. It's probably scattered across Google Docs, Notion pages, and your own head.

Now think about how much of that your AI can actually use when you ask it a question.

None of it.

Hatch is an AI assistant where your docs and your chats live in the same app... and they talk to each other. Write docs about your business, tag them in any conversation, and your AI reads them before it responds. Not a summary. Not a pasted snippet. The whole thing.

Works on desktop, mobile, and offline. A guided tutorial gets you going in 2 minutes.

Try Hatch free: Use code INDIE30FREE for 100% off for 1 month.

This one hits close to home. I'm terrible at decompressing during vacations.

—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