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

• This founder added a paywall to discourage support requests. His first iPhone app brought in $41k in gross August sales, mostly from lifetime purchases.
• 5 vibe coding tools. Some of the latest apps for coding with AI.
• Build Board updates, including a free Reddit tool from Link Mesh's founder.
• 30-second growth tip: Buy the traffic before you write the blog posts. Test which searches bring buyers before investing months in SEO.

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Rasty Turek planned to give away Vaultaire, his first iPhone app for encrypting private photos, videos, and files. Then he put a few features behind a paywall at the last minute. Not to try to build a business but in the hope that charging would deter people from bombarding him with support and feature requests. ("Maybe if I charge them, they'll leave me alone.")

In August, the app brought in $41,425 in gross App Store sales, mostly from lifetime purchases.

He built the first version solo in about three weeks with coding agents… after never having built an iOS app before. To find users, he tested channels ranging from Pinterest to paid search. About 60% of downloads come from App Store optimization.

Charging at all was only his first pricing surprise. Later, he nearly doubled prices, expecting fewer buyers to offset the increase. But what happened instead?

Read the full article →

This issue is sponsored by Softonic Publishing Center

Softonic lists popular, publicly available software so people can download it safely - original files, untouched. With over 130 million monthly users actively searching for software, if your app is public, it is probably already listed and getting downloads. Softonic Publishing Center is where you take control of it, and grow.

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• Access a dashboard with traffic, downloads, regions
• Check out how your competitors are doing
• Run self-serve ad campaigns directly from the platform

Developers who claimed their apps saw about twice as many visits from LLMs. As AI assistants become a primary discovery channel, being the verified source matters.

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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. 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 →

Every day, indie hackers post updates about the products they're building. Here are three picks from the October 25 Build Board, with upvotes checked on October 26.

	1. CircleSaaS: A free launch directory for Startups, AI and SaaS products. 4 things people got wrong about CircleSaaS when they first saw it	▲ 20
	2. Link Mesh: Semantic AI Internal Linking Plugin for WordPress Struggling to get your first customers? Try ThreadSignal, a free Reddit tool from Link Mesh's founder.	▲ 4
	3. FounderPulse: One action a day. The one that grows your business. Drop your product + who it's for. I'll reply with where those people are asking for it this week	▲ 3

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

Buy the traffic before you write the blog posts.

Before spending months trying to rank on Google, pay to find out whether those searches bring buyers.

Muhammad Younas, founder of virtual events platform vFairs, used paid ads to test keywords and customer pain points while validating demand.

Borrow that approach: run a small search campaign around a problem your product solves. Watch for signups or sales. A keyword that attracts readers might still be useless for attracting customers.

Read the full growth report →

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.

Level up with Hatch.

You can't have self-improvement without accepting that, at some level, your self is the problem.

—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