Learn from indie hackers
who've been there.
Case studies, hard-won lessons, and practical advice from our community. Every tip is extracted from a real journey, no generic fluff.
Journeys
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Bogdan
Dabbler
Event Newsletter: A Side Project Built in the Margins
Why I scoped a personalized weekly local-events digest small enough to run alongside two kids and a consulting career
Camil
Removes any sound you can describe from your videos
SoundScrub: From a Terminal Script to a Product
How a tool for cleaning up holiday footage became a focused app that beats the big editors at one job
Cristian
WordPress product builder at Cozmoslabs
A Decade of WordPress Plugins, Built One Slow Year at a Time
Why Cozmoslabs says no to most ideas, lives on yearly renewals, and treats patience as a strategy
Doru
Building scheduling software for dental clinics
Building Dentor in the Most Regulated Data Class There Is
How a dental booking platform turned a GDPR constraint into a moat, and learned to sell in person
Fineas Silaghi
Security researcher and CTF player running AISafe Labs
Selling Security Where SaaS Cannot Follow
Why AISafe ships into corporate networks and air-gapped deployments, and what that choice does to the company
Flavius D.
Builds systems that make hiring decisions better
Pace: Building the Tool That Makes the Right Interview the Easy One
Why structured interviews win in the research and lose in practice, and how Pace closes the gap
Ionut F.
Builds audio plugins as a one-person studio
Laura: A One-Person Studio Selling a Synth Forever
Why a niche audio plugin is a textbook solo product, and a perpetual license is a promise subscriptions cannot make
Mihai
Building OCR tools for developers
Why I Built a Specialized OCR Engine in the Age of ChatGPT
How OCRskill beats general LLMs on the only two numbers that matter: price per call and error rate
Mile Rosu
Dad of one, co-founder of three
Building Church Software Before I Wrote a Line of Code
Why I picked a slow, offline, unglamorous niche, and why distribution is the part I am solving first
Mircea
From agency burnout to $4k MRR
Renzi: Selling Romanian Landlords Relief From the Tax Office
How a property-management SaaS leads with the one feature that sells and prices against a fine, not a competitor
Mircea
From agency burnout to $4k MRR
The $5 Fax: How a Weekend Project Became a Micro-SaaS
Why I built the simplest possible fax service and let SEO do the selling
Petru
SEO veteran at Kink.com
Oria: Shipping Photorealistic 3D Property Tours With a Big-Domain SEO Mindset
How a Kink.com SEO veteran is launching a Gaussian Splatting product on a zero-authority domain
Raul
Software engineer turned curator and community builder
Building the Anti-Hustle Job Board: $19/year for Calm Companies
How getting fired for caring about culture led to a curated community of sustainable workplaces
Raul
Software engineer turned curator and community builder
epolita.ro: Bolting a Product Onto Traffic That Already Existed
How a four-year-old parked domain became an insurance funnel, and what the news taught me about SEO
Valentin Bora
Makes sure your email lands in the inbox
doesmyemail.work: A Free Tool as the Top of the Funnel
How a thirty-second email diagnosis becomes a lead magnet, and the same move grows a psychology app
Vlad
Backend engineer turned indie hacker
Building sisif.ai: an AI Video API
How I went from 0 customers to growing MRR by abandoning traditional marketing
Zoltan Szogyenyi
Chief builder at Bergside, creator of Flowbite
From a Rejected ThemeForest Template to 70k a Month
How Flowbite grew an open-source component library into a bootstrapped, two-person business
Events
View all June 10, 2026
DevPlant, Timisoara
Indie TM #10: Four Builds and the Reach Problem
What we learned at our tenth meetup, this time at DevPlant in Timisoara
May 28, 2026
Cowork Timisoara - The Office, Timisoara
Indie TM #9: Six Demos and a BYOK Debate
What we learned at our ninth meetup at Cowork Timisoara
April 22, 2026
Cowork Timisoara - The Office, Timisoara
Indie TM #7: News as a Traffic Locomotive
What we learned at our seventh meetup at Cowork Timisoara
April 3, 2026
Cowork Timisoara - The Office, Timisoara
Indie TM #6: From ThemeForest Rejects to 70k/Month
What we learned at our sixth meetup at Cowork Timisoara
March 19, 2026
Cowork Timisoara - The Office, Timisoara
Indie TM #5: SEO Tactics That Actually Work
What we learned at our fifth meetup at Cowork Timisoara
Advice by Category
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Latest Advice
Mihai The boring, narrow niche is the moat
OCRskill extracts structured data from procurement documents. It is not glamorous, and that is exactly why it is defensible. A narrow, unsexy, high-volume job is one most founders skip while looking for something more exciting, which leaves the field open to whoever is willing to go deep on it. Mihai out-specializes general LLMs on document extraction precisely because he only does that one thing. Boring problems with real, repeated demand are where a solo builder can build something a frontier lab will never bother to beat.
Mihai Own your compute to keep a high-volume API profitable
OCRskill runs on owned bare-metal hardware instead of rented per-call GPUs, and that is the reason the margins hold at volume. Per-call cloud inference is convenient at the start and brutal at scale: your cost grows in lockstep with every request, forever. For a product whose whole job is to be cheap per call and run constantly, owning the compute converts an unbounded variable cost into a fixed one. If your product's economics depend on doing one expensive operation millions of times, model the bare-metal version before you assume the cloud is cheaper.
Mihai For a developer tool, the integration is the product
OCRskill's customers are developers, and what they buy is not the OCR model, it is never having to write brittle string parsing again. The API takes a schema and returns a typed object that matches it. For a developer tool, the quality of the integration (how few steps it takes to go from request to usable data) is the actual product, and the underlying technology is just how you deliver it. Spend disproportionate effort on the API surface, the docs, and the first five minutes. That is the part your buyer experiences and the part they tell other developers about.
Mihai Programmatic SEO works for developer tools too
SEO advice is usually framed around consumer products, which makes technical founders assume it does not apply to an API. It does. Build a page per document type, per use case, per integration, each answering a real question a developer searches before they commit to a tool. Add FAQ schema for the specific technical questions they ask. Developers Google their problems exactly like everyone else, and a tool that ranks for "extract structured data from a PDF" gets found at the moment of intent. Do not skip programmatic SEO just because your buyer writes code.
Mihai When you are far cheaper than the alternative, price sells itself
OCRskill is so much cheaper per call than the general-LLM alternative that the price tag does part of the selling on its own. When you have a real structural cost advantage (a specialized model, owned hardware, a narrower problem), put the comparison front and centre instead of hiding it. A prospect who can see that you cost a fraction of the obvious alternative for the same or better result has most of the buying decision made already. A genuine cost advantage is a marketing asset, not just an accounting one.
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