Indie TM #11: An Intent Graph and the Hunt for Users

A conversation about what everyone is building evaporates the moment the room empties out. Intersect keeps it by asking each person to file their intent as typed cards: what they are working on, what they need, what they can offer, what they are questioning, what they are thinking about, and what they have discovered. Once intent has a fixed shape instead of being buried in chat, software can do the introductions a busy human never gets to: cluster the projects, find the topics two people share, and pair a need on one side with an offer on the other. The general lesson is that matching people is only hard while the inputs are unstructured prose, so give the same information a small, fixed schema and the overlaps compute themselves. The next time you reach for a feed, ask instead what the handful of card types are, because typed intent is the thing a machine can actually act on.

Octavian named Intersect’s real constraint without flinching: it is not a missing feature, it is a missing crowd. An intent graph only surfaces a useful intersection when enough people have added enough cards, so with a handful of users the cleverest matching engine finds almost nothing. This is the cold-start tax every marketplace and matching product pays, invisible in a seeded demo and brutal in the wild. The takeaway for anyone building two-sided or network-effect software is that the first job is density, not polish: seed the graph yourself, recruit the first cohort by hand, and only judge the product once it is full enough to fire. Until it is dense, the thing you are testing is not your algorithm, it is your ability to fill it.

Octavian has shipped more than two hundred projects, most of them small tools, since before anyone in Romania called this indie hacking. That volume is not noise, it is the strategy. Every finished tool sharpens your taste, widens the surface area where luck can land, and leaves behind an audience and a reputation that a single big bet never accumulates. Indie hackers tend to over-invest in one idea and agonize over whether it is the one, while the prolific builder simply ships the next thing and lets the portfolio do the arguing. You cannot predict which small tool finds its people, so the rational move is to keep the cadence high and let quantity manufacture both the quality and the lucky breaks. Longevity in this game looks less like one masterpiece and more like a long, unbroken streak of finished things.

eBaza’s new shape is almost embarrassingly simple: a Romanian driver has three recurring obligations that all bite if you forget them, the RCA insurance, the ITP inspection, and the Rovinieta road tax, so eBaza tracks all three per vehicle and reminds you before each one expires. The product is not insurance, it is relief from forgetting, and the value is the avoided fine and the avoided last-minute scramble. There is a whole category hiding in the obligations people carry in their heads and resent: renewals, inspections, filings, subscriptions, anything with an expiry date and a penalty attached. Pull a set of those into one place, remind people reliably before the deadline, and you are selling peace of mind, which is one of the easiest things to charge for once the habit forms. Find the deadlines your users dread and miss, then become the thing that remembers for them.

The room’s roast of eBaza was not about features, it was about two small tells: emojis sprinkled through the interface and a colored left border on the cards that read as a default framework accent rather than a deliberate choice. Neither breaks anything, and that is precisely why they are dangerous. They are the quiet signals that whisper “template” or “AI draft” to a user who cannot articulate why a page feels unfinished. Polish at this stage is mostly subtraction, removing the stock flourishes that come free with the tools you built on, because a stray emoji and an unconsidered accent border are the fastest way to look like everyone else’s first draft. Walk your own interface hunting for the things you did not decide on purpose, and delete them. The credibility you need in a payment or trust flow is built out of exactly these small, unglamorous removals.

Valentin’s redesign of doesmyemail.work takes a dry technical chore, checking whether your mail authentication is set up so messages actually land, and dresses it as a postal inspection: you fill in an inspection request on Form DMEW-1, address an envelope, and the service opens and inspects it from the other end. The metaphor does real work beyond looking charming. It hands a non-technical user an instant mental model of an otherwise invisible process, and it turns a forgettable utility into something memorable and shareable. When your product does something abstract or intimidating, borrowing the language and imagery of a familiar real-world ritual can carry more of the explanation than any paragraph of copy. The craft is to choose a metaphor that genuinely maps to what happens, then commit to it everywhere, because a consistent little world is what turns a tool into a brand people remember.

The new doesmyemail.work leads with a number, thousands of firms studied, and frames part of the site as field research drawn from what the tool has measured across every domain it has checked. That is the quiet, compounding advantage of running a free utility: each check feeds an aggregate dataset nobody else has, and surfacing it turns your own usage into proof, content, and a reason to trust the verdict. A first-time visitor deciding whether to believe a deliverability score is reassured by “we have looked at thousands of these,” and the same research doubles as link-worthy material that ranks. If your product generates data as a byproduct, do not let it sit in a table. Aggregate it, publish it, and let it work as both marketing and a moat. The tool earns the data, and the data earns the next user.