Reading up on entrepreneurship

Indiehacker A: > I vibecoded Mailchimp in just a few prompts > they raised prices so I built Slopchimp > you can use it too, for $49 / mo Indiehacker B: > I vibecoded Slopchimp > $49 is a price gouging scam > my slop is $5 lifetime

@yongfook

My goal is to retire before I'm 45. But retire doesn't mean I stop working. I love building companies too much for that. It means work becomes a choice. If I woke up tomorrow and didn't feel like working, the bills would still get paid. So I put a number on it: about €10k gross a month, which is roughly €5.5k net (waiting for your tax comment). And that's with inflation taken into account, because €5.5k today is not €5.5k in 15 years. But then what?

@adriaandotcom

I love AI but it killed my very lucrative business model of building profitable side projects and selling them. The building part still works but selling is almost impossible now!

@iannuttall

like sure, maybe i'm 10000% wrong and everything will fail. then again...maybe not. but i guess you can't fail if you never try. 🤷‍♂️

@Shpigford

Linear CEO @karrisaarinen: "I took a break this summer from paying attention to AI. I thought that when I came back, I'd feel left behind. But when I came back, I realized that nothing has really changed. There's new models, there's new techniques, there's new agents. But in the end, making great products, increasing revenue, and building the business—it's still hard. It's clear the tools are getting better, you can do more, you can do it faster. But I think the more important question is: are we actually making better things with these tools? Are our teams getting better with these tools? I don't think that answer is clearly yes. There's a lot of emphasis now on toolmaking and using tools and building systems. But I think in the end, as product people, our job is to make something great."

@lennysan

the only moat left is caring about your project past two days

@wesbos

you know this feeling when you see everyone doing amazing things, and it just drains all your energy as you feel so behind well, today I did a customer interview I showed a new feature, she was blown away people on X are like "meh" real people out there are blown away it refueled my energy 200%, and I now want to ship 10x X is a bubble, remember to get out from time to time and remember 👉 talk more to real people

@tibo_maker

This guy is literally just running Claude Code on someone's GitHub repo and charging $1,500/mo If you have an audience on here you can monetize anything 😉 You can just copy his tweet to Claude Code and do it yourself for free by the way

@illyism

How to make money as an indiehacker in 2026 and beyond? the opportunities seem to be shrinking fast. I've been thinking about this a lot lately. AI is eating whole categories of the SaaS industry. What would I work on if I was starting from scratch? Here are some random thoughts. 1) Software primitives Some of the basics aren't going away. Humans use them to get a job done, or humans use AI to interact with the tool. The AI needs the tool and can't natively do what the tool does. Newsletter managers/deliverers, form builders, analytics software. If the category has existed for 20 years, it will continue to exist. The question here is can you get traction for a product in an extremely saturated space. Maybe there are opportunities in niches. 2) Automate your specialized service This is probably the best time ever to productize a specialized service. Take a domain / service you're an expert in, which previously would require unscalable 1-to-1 attention with a client, and agentify it with proprietary data/skill.md etc. 3) AI value arbitrage There is a short term opportunity in taking things we see at the cutting edge of the X bubble, and packaging it for the non-AI-pilled. Opus 5.5 motion videos would be a recent example. We all know this is possible with AI now, but maybe there's a vehicle to package this for normies in a way that blows their minds and creates value for them. This relies on there being a knowledge gap though, which will shrink fast. 4) Just Do Hard Things (TM) Do things that are genuinely hard, that you would never be able to build before. Build things that previously only a VC-funded company would be able to do, with hurdles from all angles not just tech, but also go to market, regulatory, etc. Doesn't guarantee success but it at least keeps competition away. 5) make a social media scheduling tool just kidding about that last one.

@yongfook

I'm begging you: • Go on google trends • Find problem people are struggling with • Turn those problems into digital assets • Without revealing your name • Without showing your face I shared this with a bartender, he made $31K in a single month. Here's how it works:

@TommiPedruzzi

BREAKING NEWS: @rauchg , CEO of Vercel, has just published his first public skill Which tech CEO will be next to skill-ify themselves? https://www.skills.sh/rauchg/skills/ui-recording-timeline

@andrewqu

this is how Nikita Bier builds viral apps

@tibo_maker

The agents that run my LinkedIn outreach are currently getting a 55% reply rate on cold outreach and are generating hundreds of signups for me completely on autopilot. I packaged the exact system into a skill that works for any harness so you can copy it for yourself.

@speedrunjaen

There is always a .com you can get for $5k that's better the tryblurgh.‌ai you're currently using. The reason you don't see it is (a) lack of imagination and (b) because you're attached to Blurgh, which you shouldn't be, because it's not that great anyway.

@paulg

Introducing collaborators. Each is a mini AI that helps you: Figure out what to build. Find your first users + fans. Make your first $1 on the internet. If you're someone trying to start something new, I think you'll like this. Demo:

@FarzaTV

the revenue from the past 48 hours emphatically says yes. absolutely wild for a tweet I sent out on a whim on a Friday afternoon as I was finishing up for the week. 🎉

@Shpigford

a YC partner who closed millions in founder-led sales just laid out her 8 rules for cold email

@tibo_maker

i think i just started an SEO agency

@Shpigford

i want to get more clarity on my best customers but i always truly do not like getting on calls with customers, did it for a month before and i don’t not like the call part, i just didn’t know if i was really getting anywhere and every day had calls lined up randomly timed. this is the main thing i would need to do to grow my business i think, to nail my ideal customer and see what successful users are already doing in @postbridge_ so i can get more customers like them! for starters ill try DM’ing and emailing directly but i have a feeling the truths are hidden behind a real human call we keep going and the final boss churn never lets up: but i can also choose to NOT get this extra clarity and make a decent guess instead i don’t HAVE to get on a call it’s just a trade off like anything else (me being solo no team is also one)

@jackfriks

💰 Passed $10M/y in revenue + investment gains this year I've always been aggressively increasing my profit margins to as high as possible, especially the last few years, and especially this year where I've reduced my SaaS dependencies to just a handful of companies by vibecoding my own replacements It's now about 94.5% profit! Spend less -> lower costs -> more profit -> more money saved -> more money to invest -> more % returns on investments And at some point that investment return starts to pass by your business revenue which it has for me for about a year now Most of my investments have been simple ETFs like Vanguard S&P500, but also a few lucky stock and startup bets that worked out: Back in 2022, I couldn't get any available GPUs, so I thought it might be smart to buy Nvidia if there's such a shortage and that was a good bet too Then back in 2023 @dannypostma recommended me to invest in the companies we used for our AI inference for our photo AI apps, so I did that too. First I invested in @replicate and then also @FAL From then I just asked every app/service I used if I could invest, like @cursor_ai in 2025 which then got acquired by @spacex recently! My business revenue has remained very stable at about $200K-$250K/mo, but even with that investment returns have now surpassed that Investments fluctuate a lot so some years it's up some years it might be down a lot (who isn't expecting a big crash at some point?), and most investment gains are unrealized (I never sell!), so keep that with a big grain of salt! I keep my revenue/gains together with my profit margin and my sleep score in my situation monitor dashboard, as those are equally important :D Many people in the last decade told me to spend all my money, either personally or with my business to grow it, we don't know how that would have ended up, maybe my companies would be bigger, but I'm happy I did it in my own lean profitable healthy way and it ended up great I think! 🙏😊

@levelsio

If you're under 45，I'm only going to say this TWICE. Elon Musk basically said the EASIEST way to get RICH is to buy the AI bottleneck suppliers to SpaceX. Here are 5 stocks that can 10x in the next few years: 1) $NVDA

@FemmyYohana

AI-native services: a $100B opportunity

@gregisenberg

Just had a long-term multi-year customer cancel their plan. They are also a SaaS company. I pretty much just shrugged and figured, "makes sense, they probably vibe coded a replacement". Don't target developers!

@yongfook

Very very happy to make money with a project that's not reselling AI tokens again! Seems more moat-ey

@levelsio

✨ First hotel bookings revenue from https://hotelist.com! $3,240 in first 2 weeks So about $6,480/mo Much more than I expected!

@levelsio

Woz is back! I am his first customer. He got my career started. I stuffed so many of his motherboards as a kid. While we sat around and watched TV. My dad built custom holders so we could stuff them while sitting on the couch. And a custom set of wires to take away any static electricity. I once got to interview Woz in front of UC Berkeley’s business school. Said they had fewer failures than the ones built in its own factory. What we didn’t discuss is how much love we put into them. They were technology from an alien world. There wasn’t anything else like it in my life. Woz is still the nicest founder I have ever met. And the original nerd. As I get older I realize how special those few hundred hours spent with him were. Not to mention he gave me $40,000 worth of Mac’s to run the school paper on. And I remember thinking to myself, as we sat in the cafeteria of West Valley Community College, “can’t get that kind of education at Stanford.” When @elonmusk talks about putting love into his products, I get that deeply.

@Scobleizer

11pm on a Tuesday, big startup energy

@thsottiaux

Trump calling @JensenHuang live during @theallinpod interview. “The grt thing about Jensen is that he can create the best AI chip in the world but can’t figure out how to put me on speaker phone.” They agree that AI is safe, grt for jobs, economic growth & natl security. 😂🇺🇸🚀

@altcap

I'm 29. Solo founder from Brazil, based in Barcelona. Looking to connect with more marketers & indie hackers!

@giutheginger

Very very true Lots of money if you go IRL industries now Instead of selling tech to tech people who won't buy anything because they just vibe code it themselves

@levelsio

Bending Spoons is the best thing that has happened to overvalued ZIRP companies. They give an off-ramp to founders who will never hit previous valuations with less of a reputational hit than selling to private equity.

@austin_rief

The point is that it catches attention (and makes money) and it's controversial as you can see from the 100+ replies in the post below (which catches even more attention) You have to become a master of getting attention in this time Now that building anything has become quite trivial, catching attention is now the most important skill I think He's creative, the opposite of boring, thinks out of the box, isn't scared of controversy and ships fast and so he has the perfect skillset right now All the attention for these projects also funnel back to him (as followers) and his projects (like TrustMRR) which help to increase revenue later 10/10

@levelsio

Yep. Except: 1. This was about important internal tools. The team was stuck in some architecture nightmare of their own doing (writing it in rails but headless, with graphql api, and a SPA react app, constantly needing frontend engineers for changes). I call this kind of thing 'cosplaying an enterprise production app'. All that complexity was in the way and using straight rails was perfect in that case. 2. I make calls like this all the time. Usually someone on the team asks me to. They see what needs to happen but don’t want to be the bad guy. I’m happy to just make the call if I agree with the premise. Saves enormous amounts of meetings and change management etc. Sometimes this is jokingly referred to as Founder-mode-as-a-service here. 3. For ten years I’ve also run an internal podcast called Context, where I revisit decisions like these and explain the reasoning so everyone can learn from them. This is helpful to give people all the variables that were considered and why this was the choice made given the information available at the time. I want to teach how to make such decisions effectively without needing me. Sunk cost fallacy is a problem. 4. Any notions that Shopify is succcessful despite of me doing this, instead of because of it, will have a hard time making their argument come together I think 😄 the part of 'two weeks later tobi learns about...' is nonsese and the pivot of that project up there happens one of the more successful examples of interventions. But getting the company to work effectively with great architecture and low technical debt baggage into the right direction is literally the job, so guilty as charged I suppose. But there are always cope stories floating around like this because they are more fun, than saying 'somehow we needed tobi to stop doing silly architecture astronautics'. I can totally see that.

@tobi

TL;DR: Owning assets is no longer optional. You have about 3 to 4 years to stack wealth and build real distribution. Once AI takes over half of cognitive work, selling your hours on a laptop won't protect you. In an AI economy, pure salaries get crushed while asset owners capture the entire upside. Own equity, businesses, or real-world reach before the window shuts.

@shiri_shh

If you vibe code a personal website you still need to get a few good inbound links to your domain to get discovered Most personal websites I see have a domain authority of zero. That means you are invisible. But here are 3 easy wins for links: (1) Submit your site to

@nickgraynews

This sums up my efforts with Omarchy perfectly. I've simply choosen to apply a maximum of agency to the quest. And now reality is yielding. Every audacious mission looks impossible until it's done.

@dhh

Oh for sure I think my only moat left post-AGI is: - https://Nomads.com community + data (now free membership) - Me being on @X with an audience - My https://levels.vc investments The rest will be completely and utterly wiped out with no doubt

@levelsio

Let me say it loud and clear so this conversation isn’t controversial—I have met Elizabeth Holmes in person. I’ve had tea and figs with this woman. For the folks in the back: This lady walked so that Nikita, Ashley, Elon, g. Daniel, Tiffany, Ian and SBF could run. Sprint even!

@UnfairMarket

I’ve made $77k last 28 days: I dropped literally all the sauce I know about scaling apps in the article below 👇

@GeorgeLampro20

A brand followed the advice in this article and generated more than $50,000 from ChatGPT, Google and Perplexity-driven traffic.

@alexgroberman

3 years ago I built a test programmatic SEO site that took about 8 hours to build - I found an untapped niche - Scraped a bunch of data - Wrote pSEO directory templates for it (basically madlibs) It's made me $2000 a year ever since with a DR of 9 and just 119 links (all natural) To make that much with the S&P 500 without selling shares I'd need 6 figures invested This costs me $9 for the domain and $60/yr for hosting The crazy part is this: using AI tools I could build a better version of this in 30 minutes! Anybody could.. I have a bunch of these little experiments that for most "normal" people is life changing annual income, but compared to $100k MRR stories on here seem pointless The boring, simple (and hidden) niches are out there if you know where to look

@iannuttall

Codex has changed my life as a solopreneur

@jonnym1ller

working on OpenCode Go has been the hardest thing i've ever worked on - most competitive space on the planet - massive levels of fraud - trying to achieve impossible economics there's a 3% chance we make it all work and if we do everyone will talk about it like it was always inevitable and only a handful of people will ever understand how it very much was not

@thdxr

I just bought a new domain. https://maible.io stay tuned.

@jonathan_wilke

If you want to build programmatic SEO sites (properly), you need to follow Ian. I've followed him for YEARS + he knows his shit better than 99% of folks on here. Highly recommend you stop listening to DR bros + start paying attention to people like Ian who *actually* do this.

@SearchForRyan

Just used @snagged by @rob to get another mega hard to get domain name. He is the best in the biz.

@garrytan

okay. claude's down so i need to do marketing. https://knockoff.co https://granite.co https://keptwell.org https://superfantastictoys.com https://nurb.dev please give me your money. thank you.

@Shpigford

this lines up exactly with my experience in this space. i spent almost a year trying to grow https://replysocial.co (exactly what Marc is building now) and at its best did about $100 in MRR. tough space and all the followers in the world don't really help.

@Shpigford

Looking for an excellent product-facing AI engineer. You will work on the frontier of everything going on in AI/LLMs and work directly with me. Must have interesting side projects you did out of joy. If you know someone excellent, will give you $10K if we hire them. DM me.

@Suhail

Redesigned https://kobbe.io last night. Signups went 5x overnight. Nothing clever: quieter type, one story per section, real dashboard shots instead of promises. Turns out people just want to see the product.

@Mike_Andreuzza

I JUST GOT MY FIRST CUSTOMER FOR https://STALKR.AI 🤩

@marclou

I changed my strategy for this era and I think it's starting to work: - no more focus on sub - no underselling or going after the mass. niche. - go after your audience. if it's people from sf, you can def charge 10x more for quality. - specializing, no slop rule - lifetime option - open-source - give stuff for free, sell specialized stuff - chase after feedback, let ai sort things.

@MengTo

posted this a month ago at $2M ARR. haven't hired a single sales rep since. we're at $4M. the thing doing the selling is the thing you can use: your link in, buyers found, emails sent, calls booked. $30 free 👇 https://explee.com/auto-gtm/x/tw-ag248-c498

@vovudebosh

I lost $5M in startups (i'll tell you the real story)

@gregisenberg

This is the type of in depth sauce most people charge $997 for. You can hand this article to your AI agent and have it build the entire funnel in about 10 minutes. You’re welcome.

@coreyganim

0 to $500k revenue in 2 months building an AI native service company great read for those thinking about what company to build today

@Sohaibashraf97

When something you make get lots of irrational haters, usually you're on to something Omarchy by @DHH passes that test with flying colours 😂

@levelsio

Gave https://tellmeingrams.com a little Tailwind love. The previous version was pure Pico.css but I hit the limits of semantic styles. Also implemented affiliate links like ads a la @marclou and @robj3d3

@Shreedhan

Had a fascinating conversation with the owner of a local arcade/fun park...you know, those places with go karts, putt putt and the arcade games where you spend $1000 and win enough tickets to go home with an eraser. A few interesting things... Their most profitable game is a bass fishing arcade game. As in, $75,000-85,000 a year profitable. 🤯 For that one single game. They've had it for nearly 10 years and 100% of the time it completely destroys all the other games. The next closest game only does $20k a year. Go karts make nearly no money, need adult staff to run and require employing a mechanic. They have to replace the engines in every one every single year. But "go karts are what bring people in, games are how we keep them here". Essentially a loss-leader. The worst part about having putt putt isn't maintaining the turf, or any equipment...it's the landscaping. It basically has to be immaculately maintained like a prize yard...for little kids to make an absolute mess of every day. Spring/Summer is the holiday shopping season of fun parks. They make all their money April-August and then pray it lasts them through the Fall and Winter. It takes at minimum 6-8 people to staff the park, even on slow days. On really busy Saturdays it takes over 20. Staff turnover is intense as it's made up entirely of high school kids. Wanted to chat about the insanity of the tickets-to-prize ratio, but alas School House Rock Live started (we were sitting next to each other on a school field trip for our kids).

@Shpigford

before selling Tweet Hunter for $10m, I had a long talk with @levelsio he almost convinced me not to do it his main reasoning: - getting this money at once is unhealthy - I could get more by not setting both ended up being true so I wonder why he did it with RemoteOk I really hope he goes public with this

@tibo_maker

He made enough to buy the latest MacBook Pro M5 full specs 💻✅ 37K visitors in 2 days btw https://trustmrr.com/startup/brandmymac

@marclou

Lots of startup founders+CEOs love the idea of going on a large podcast. For distribution, fame, status or whatever else. So they hire a marketing team or PR agency to make it happen. Those PR people send an almost identical AI-generated email to me, this: It won't work. I now get closer to 50 pitches like this per month. What works: build something epic, that people (e.g. devs) love. Put your focus there, not on a marketing team spamming every ranked tech podcast on the planet. I used to not send any response to these, but now I'm sending a link to this blog post with more of my thoughts:

@GergelyOrosz

Most "digital transformation" was BS by consultants. Most "AI transformation" will be the same BS. There are very, very few exceptions, when it's not a consultant selling stuff they never did, but someone sharing how THEY did it. Like @clairevo. Who is the real deal, I confirm:

@GergelyOrosz

The 16 Best Books About Marketing, Period.

@RyanHoliday

health insurance is instant depression juice. have looked at cost-sharing plans (@JoinCrowdHealth, etc) but they all have pre-existing condition lockouts that make them a no-go for our family.

@Shpigford

This is what they told @drewhouston about Dropbox back in 2007. This is what they're saying about Omarchy now. You could just spend hundreds of hours setting everything up yourself?! Nerds may know computers, but they rarely know markets 😂

@dhh

Never stop talking about your new projects until everyone finds out!

@levelsio

this guy is on track to make $30k/month if you have a mobile app, you can definitely learn something from this

@andilosing

We tell young people in our society that end of the rainbow is retirement at 65. We ought to tell them that "there is going to be this short but beautiful golden window from roughly age 3 to roughly age 12 where your kids are not only easy (comparatively to bottles & diapers), but are going to be these beautiful little creatures and it will pain your heart to be away from them for too long. So, prepare in your 20's, financially and career wise, to build that flexibility into that chapter of your life". You don't get another shot at living the "golden window". And, for me, leaning hard into that golden window has made everything else in my life feel fairly insignificant in comparison. I have made plenty of mistakes as a father, but what I won't have is the regret of having been distracted and absent from these formative years. In some cases, that has required financial sacrifices (declining a particular career opportunity that would have required relocation), but I personally have zero regrets. I also hear from some ambitious & successful people with a 4 year old that say "I've lost my ambition, I am so immersed in fatherhood". At least for me, and a number of my friends, it comes back. You can't keep an ambitious person down and if you have the fire, hanging at a playground on too many Tuesday afternoons is going to feel like torture after too long. My three boys are approaching 13, 11 & 9, and it's much different than 7, 5 & 3. This summer, for example, they slept until 11am and I hard an unencumbered 6am-12pm to work (being on PT helps), then got another great window 7-11pm, but was able to be present in the heart of the day, then weeks when they were at basketball camp, etc. It gets easier, your time frees up again (there's a sadness to that too), but I'm back to working as intensely as I did pre-kids just because my day to day presence requires fewer hours than it did before (also, my wife is just superbly wonderful). And that is the beautiful gift of entrepreneurship (or at least my sort of business), the ability to deliver still a high level of output but work that around your life rather than the opposite. TLDR, grind before, and grind after. Prepare for the golden window.

@FundamentEdge

i love that @jonathan_wilke has made nearly $100k on http://outbid.lol in less than 48 hours. you can be mad about it, try to copy it, say it's dumb or that it won't last. none of it matters. jonathan caught lightning in a bottle on a whim. the internet is amazing.

@Shpigford

Sometimes I feel like I'm overcomplicating my life trying to build a SaaS company when you can just build a directory site and make like $25,000 in one day lol

@yongfook

Built https://outbid.lol yesterday night as a fun project and the site got 4.5k visitors in the first 12 hours and made $1.4k revenue so far 🤯

@jonathan_wilke

I just hired @bot as my Entrepreneur in Residence for

@iannuttall