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

• This founder sent 47 custom screen recordings on day one. Now his AI-services portfolio brings in $100k/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: Build free tools that attract links to boost your SEO.

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Aryan Mahajan spent nearly all the money he had on a $4k flight to Dubai, skipped the mastermind he'd paid for, and decided to stay anyway. Four months of maxed-out cards later, he found a video about AI chatbots and took the initiative to build one. Today, at 23, his AI-services portfolio brings in $100k/month in recurring revenue.

The morning after building that first chatbot, Aryan sent 47 Upwork proposals. Each came with a custom Loom (screen recording) showing the prospect's own use case already working. This process eventually became a company called Zoro, which builds AI systems for the operational bottlenecks that keep founders stuck in the middle of their businesses.

I love this interview because it gives a close play-by-play of how Aryan advanced to each new step in his journey. From working with clients to building a product to growing via a build-in-public approach that's brought him 50,000+ LinkedIn followers and 25M organic views. Enjoy!

Read the full article →

Your agents should reason over the web, not wrestle with it.

Context.dev turns any website into clean Markdown, structured JSON, screenshots, and extracted data through one developer-friendly API. No custom parsers, proxy orchestration, browser infrastructure, or broken HTML.

Every request is browser-rendered by default, and 1 credit always equals 1 scrape, with no stealth multiplier or rendering surcharge.

Already used by teams like Mintlify, SiteGPT, and Ferndesk, Context.dev delivers reliable, LLM-ready context so you can stop cleaning web data and start shipping smarter AI products.

Start scraping for free.

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. Junie: Autonomous AI coding agent with advanced planning and deep JetBrains IDE integration.

4. Snyk Code: Find, prioritize, and auto-fix security issues with developer-focused SAST solutions.

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 →

Build free tools that attract links to boost your SEO.

Steve Benjamins runs Site Builder Report, a review site for website builders. Because it makes most of its money from affiliate commissions, ranking for high-value Google searches matters a lot.

So he built Stock Up, a free stock photo search engine. Designers and bloggers started linking to it, which gave Site Builder Report the authority to outrank GoDaddy and Wix, despite their much bigger ad budgets. The site now makes $40,000 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. PaperTrack: Know exactly who's reading your documents — page by page I built PaperTrack because I was tired of sending documents into a black hole.	▲ 26
	2. SaturnSQL: The team SQL editor that schedules queries to Google Sheets PopSQL and SeekWell were shutting down, so I built the replacement myself.	▲ 11
	3. AI Tools Vault: Discover, Compare & Explore the Best AI Tools What I Learned Researching Voice Cloning APIs for a Project	▲ 10

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.

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.

The only trouble with this is it gets really hard to relate to the 9–5 world!

—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