Repackage your content as push notifications that respect attention

A push notification is usually an interruption, which is why people mute them; Valentin inverts that. He takes short written insights drawn from the app's own social content and sends them as notifications that sit quietly on the lock screen, a sentence or two to be read wheneve…

A push notification is usually an interruption, which is why people mute them; Valentin inverts that. He takes short written insights drawn from the app's own social content and sends them as notifications that sit quietly on the lock screen, a sentence or two to be read whenever the user is ready, not a demand for attention right now. That reframes the notification from a nag into a small gift, and it doubles as a retention loop that pulls people back into a content app without burning the goodwill that aggressive notifications destroy. The principle: the value has to be in the notification itself, not in the tap it is trying to extract. If the user would be glad to have read it even without opening the app, you have a retention channel; if not, you have an unsubscribe waiting to happen.


Turn fuzzy intent into structured cards a machine can match

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 thinki…

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.


A needs-and-offers network is worthless until it is dense

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…

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.


Be prolific, because a large body of small tools compounds

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…

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.


Productize the recurring deadlines people already dread

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…

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.


Strip the small visual tells that make a product look unfinished

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 w…

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.


Wrap a dull utility in a metaphor people already understand

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…

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.


Turn the data your tool collects into visible credibility

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 …

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.


A gaming GPU on solar power can replace a cloud AI service

DataDriven needs industrial OCR, every tender document in Romania, scans included, and cloud pricing made that a luxury: Azure Document Intelligence billed per page, and GPU instances rent at rates designed for venture budgets. Mihai's replacement is a single RTX 3090 in his off…

DataDriven needs industrial OCR, every tender document in Romania, scans included, and cloud pricing made that a luxury: Azure Document Intelligence billed per page, and GPU instances rent at rates designed for venture budgets. Mihai's replacement is a single RTX 3090 in his office running Tesseract plus his own quality-validation classifiers, processing about 1,500 pages per hour, powered by the solar panels on the roof, so the marginal cost per page is approximately zero. A consumer GPU is not a data center, but a solo founder's workload rarely needs one; it needs sustained, predictable throughput on a task that tolerates batch processing. When an AI API is your biggest variable cost, price out the unfashionable alternative of one good machine you own, because the payback period is often measured in weeks.


Paid ads fail when your buyer must meet requirements a click cannot check

Google Ads sent DataDriven a steady stream of visitors who could never become customers: they searched for construction tenders, clicked, and only then discovered that public procurement demands revenue thresholds, staff counts, and certifications they did not have. The ad platf…

Google Ads sent DataDriven a steady stream of visitors who could never become customers: they searched for construction tenders, clicked, and only then discovered that public procurement demands revenue thresholds, staff counts, and certifications they did not have. The ad platform had no way to target eligibility, so the budget bought branding at best and noise at worst. This failure mode generalizes to every market where the buyer must hold a license, a certification, or a track record: regulated industries, government suppliers, professional services. In those markets the qualifying attribute is invisible to ad targeting but often visible in public registries, which is where the marketing budget should go instead. Before spending on ads, ask whether a click can even in principle identify your qualified buyer; if not, the channel is structurally wrong regardless of how well you run it.


Cold email at scale is an infrastructure problem before it is a copywriting problem

Mihai's cold email machine is mostly plumbing: multiple sending addresses spread across several domains, each warmed up automatically by Instantly.ai, which has the accounts send, open, reply to, and click each other's messages until mailbox providers trust them. The whole fleet…

Mihai's cold email machine is mostly plumbing: multiple sending addresses spread across several domains, each warmed up automatically by Instantly.ai, which has the accounts send, open, reply to, and click each other's messages until mailbox providers trust them. The whole fleet costs about $150 per month plus $5 per Google Workspace address, and throughput stays deliberately limited to protect deliverability. The insight indie hackers miss is the ordering: before subject lines and personalization matter at all, the message has to land in an inbox, and that is determined by sender reputation built over weeks. Blasting from your main domain both fails and burns the domain your business runs on. Treat cold email like infrastructure, warmed domains you can afford to lose, low volume, patience, and only then start optimizing the words.


Leave the cloud with a fallback, not a farewell

DataDriven's infrastructure now lives on Hetzner dedicated servers and an office GPU, but Mihai kept an escape hatch in the other direction: when his local hardware has downtime, backend tasks overflow to Azure Batch Low Priority instances for a few hours at modest cost, and a S…

DataDriven's infrastructure now lives on Hetzner dedicated servers and an office GPU, but Mihai kept an escape hatch in the other direction: when his local hardware has downtime, backend tasks overflow to Azure Batch Low Priority instances for a few hours at modest cost, and a Starlink connection is under consideration as network fallback. That design is what makes self-hosting responsible instead of reckless for a company of one. The cloud's real product was never compute, it was the promise that failures are someone else's pager, and when you take that back you must replace it with something: an overflow path, a degraded mode, a documented recovery. Price the fallback into the migration math from the start, because the savings of leaving the cloud are only real if one hardware failure cannot take the product down for a week.


In invoice-first markets, churn is operational, not emotional

DataDriven's churn is high, and almost none of it means the product failed: cards run out of funds, payments get forgotten, and firms that fully intend to continue simply lapse. Romanian B2B buyers want the fiscal invoice before money moves, prefer direct human contact, and dist…

DataDriven's churn is high, and almost none of it means the product failed: cards run out of funds, payments get forgotten, and firms that fully intend to continue simply lapse. Romanian B2B buyers want the fiscal invoice before money moves, prefer direct human contact, and distrust automatic card billing on principle, so the frictionless self-serve subscription that SaaS playbooks assume does not exist here. Mihai's response is to treat payment recovery as a standing operational process, reminders, follow-up calls, re-onboarding, rather than reading every lapse as a verdict on the product. The lesson for anyone selling outside the Silicon Valley payment bubble is to learn how your market actually pays before designing the billing, and to budget real recurring effort for collection. A lapsed card in an invoice-first culture is a to-do item, not a goodbye.


Some revenue models are traps: know why you refuse a success fee

Customers keep offering Mihai a seductive model: charge nothing up front, take a percentage when the tender is won. He refuses, and his reasoning is worth copying. The contract values are public money, and a private platform skimming a percentage of state contracts invites legal…

Customers keep offering Mihai a seductive model: charge nothing up front, take a percentage when the tender is won. He refuses, and his reasoning is worth copying. The contract values are public money, and a private platform skimming a percentage of state contracts invites legal scrutiny, reputational damage, and misaligned incentives to push clients toward the biggest tenders rather than the right ones. If he ever prices on outcomes it will be a fixed fee per successful assisted tender bundled into a subscription, never a percentage. The general discipline is to stress-test a revenue model against the source of the money and the behavior it rewards, not just against revenue potential, and to be able to articulate exactly why you turned down the model everyone suggests. A pricing structure is a position you have to defend for years.


Interview customers about their workflow, never their wishlist

Of the thirty or so customer interviews Mihai scheduled, ten to twelve happened, and in every one he refuses the founder's favorite question. He never asks what features people want; he asks what they do: walk me through the process, how many hours does it take, who on the team …

Of the thirty or so customer interviews Mihai scheduled, ten to twelve happened, and in every one he refuses the founder's favorite question. He never asks what features people want; he asks what they do: walk me through the process, how many hours does it take, who on the team touches it. Feature requests are guesses filtered through what the customer imagines software can do, while workflow descriptions are facts, and the product opportunities sit visibly inside them, the daily bookmark-folder patrol, the hours lost to six SEAP menus. The show-up rate is also part of the lesson: schedule three times the interviews you need, because most will evaporate. Treat customer conversations as ethnography rather than requirements gathering, and the roadmap writes itself from the pain you observed instead of the wishlist you collected.


Give an LLM the table of contents before you give it embeddings

DataDriven serves tender documentation to AI assistants as structured markdown with an explicit table of contents and chapter hierarchy, and retrieval walks that structure first, using semantic search as a supplement rather than the foundation. Mihai distrusts embeddings-only RA…

DataDriven serves tender documentation to AI assistants as structured markdown with an explicit table of contents and chapter hierarchy, and retrieval walks that structure first, using semantic search as a supplement rather than the foundation. Mihai distrusts embeddings-only RAG for long official documents, where a naive similarity search returns fragments stripped of the context that gives them legal meaning. Guided navigation, find the right chapter, then read it properly, mirrors how a careful human reads a contract, costs fewer tokens, and fails more predictably. The broader point for anyone building on LLMs is that documents already contain an information architecture, headings, sections, numbering, and throwing it away to chunk-and-embed is destroying signal you paid to OCR. Preserve structure, navigate it explicitly, and reserve embeddings for the queries structure cannot answer.


Copycats clone your pitch, not your pipeline

When Romanian copycats started advertising "AI agents for public tenders," Mihai did not panic, because he could see what they actually shipped: a GPT wrapper over the same misclassified official data everyone can access. What they cannot clone from his landing page is the part …

When Romanian copycats started advertising "AI agents for public tenders," Mihai did not panic, because he could see what they actually shipped: a GPT wrapper over the same misclassified official data everyone can access. What they cannot clone from his landing page is the part that took years, a crawler covering ten thousand sources, an OCR pipeline reading every document, a hand-built taxonomy, and a retrieval stack that makes the data usable. Even the funded European competitor with fourteen people concentrates on sales rather than technology, which is precisely why he declined to join forces. The reassurance for any founder watching lookalikes appear is that marketing copy is the only layer that copies cheaply; if your advantage lives in accumulated data and infrastructure, every copycat validates the market while inheriting none of the moat. Fear the competitor who rebuilds your pipeline, not the one who rewrites your homepage.


Record videos with your face in the corner

Use Loom or similar tools to record product walkthroughs with your face visible in the corner. People trust faces. These videos work as blog post embeds, YouTube content, and social proof simultaneously. Pages with face-in-corner walkthroughs consistently convert better than tex…

Use Loom or similar tools to record product walkthroughs with your face visible in the corner. People trust faces. These videos work as blog post embeds, YouTube content, and social proof simultaneously. Pages with face-in-corner walkthroughs consistently convert better than text-only pages.


Create infographics for blog posts and backlinks

Infographics get shared and linked to far more than plain text. Create one per major blog post. Use Canva or Figma to visualize your key data points, then offer an embed code below the image so other bloggers can easily reuse it. This is one of the most reliable passive backlink…

Infographics get shared and linked to far more than plain text. Create one per major blog post. Use Canva or Figma to visualize your key data points, then offer an embed code below the image so other bloggers can easily reuse it. This is one of the most reliable passive backlink strategies.


Get backlinks from Blogger, Wikipedia, and YouTube

Create profiles and content on high-authority platforms. Write a Blogger post linking to your product. Add your tool to relevant Wikipedia lists (following their guidelines). Create a YouTube video and include your link in the description. Each of these platforms passes signific…

Create profiles and content on high-authority platforms. Write a Blogger post linking to your product. Add your tool to relevant Wikipedia lists (following their guidelines). Create a YouTube video and include your link in the description. Each of these platforms passes significant domain authority through their backlinks.


Get listed on no-code platforms for free backlinks

Integrate with Zapier, Make.com, n8n, and other workflow tools. Each platform gives you a listing page with a backlink to your domain. The integration itself doesn't need to be complex: even a simple webhook trigger is enough to get listed. This is free, permanent, and builds do…

Integrate with Zapier, Make.com, n8n, and other workflow tools. Each platform gives you a listing page with a backlink to your domain. The integration itself doesn't need to be complex: even a simple webhook trigger is enough to get listed. This is free, permanent, and builds domain authority over time.


Create localized landing pages at scale

Build pages targeting "[product/service] in [city/country]" and "[integration] in [city/country]" combinations. Automate the page structure but keep the content genuine. Each page should have real, location-specific information, not just a city name swapped in a template. This i…

Build pages targeting "[product/service] in [city/country]" and "[integration] in [city/country]" combinations. Automate the page structure but keep the content genuine. Each page should have real, location-specific information, not just a city name swapped in a template. This is how you capture long-tail local search traffic with almost no competition.


Publish to app stores for authority backlinks

Even if your product is primarily web-based, publish a simple mobile wrapper to the App Store and Google Play. The backlinks from apple.com and google.com are extremely high authority. A basic WebView wrapper with push notifications takes a weekend to build and gives you two of …

Even if your product is primarily web-based, publish a simple mobile wrapper to the App Store and Google Play. The backlinks from apple.com and google.com are extremely high authority. A basic WebView wrapper with push notifications takes a weekend to build and gives you two of the strongest backlinks on the internet.


Add internal links between every page

Every page on your site should link to at least 2-3 other relevant pages. Internal linking helps Google discover your content, distributes page authority, and keeps visitors engaged longer. Audit your site for orphan pages (pages with zero internal links pointing to them) and fi…

Every page on your site should link to at least 2-3 other relevant pages. Internal linking helps Google discover your content, distributes page authority, and keeps visitors engaged longer. Audit your site for orphan pages (pages with zero internal links pointing to them) and fix them. Use descriptive anchor text, not "click here."


Add FAQ sections with FAQPage schema to every page

Write real, human-authored FAQ sections for every page on your site. Use FAQPage structured data so Google can surface your answers as rich results. The key is writing questions your users actually ask, not keyword-stuffed filler. Check Google Search Console for queries people a…

Write real, human-authored FAQ sections for every page on your site. Use FAQPage structured data so Google can surface your answers as rich results. The key is writing questions your users actually ask, not keyword-stuffed filler. Check Google Search Console for queries people already use to find you, then answer those directly on the page.


Create Careers, About Us, and team pages to build trust

Google evaluates trust signals when ranking your site. A Careers page, an About Us page, Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, and content showcasing team building experiences all signal that there is a real organization behind the site. Include team photos, company culture, and hir…

Google evaluates trust signals when ranking your site. A Careers page, an About Us page, Privacy Policy, Terms of Service, and content showcasing team building experiences all signal that there is a real organization behind the site. Include team photos, company culture, and hiring information even if you are not actively recruiting. These pages build trust with both search engines and visitors, and attract backlinks from directories that list companies with public hiring or legal pages.


Publish one article per day instead of batching

Publishing one article per day is far more effective than dropping a batch of articles all at once. Search engines treat a sudden burst of content as suspicious, potentially flagging it as spam. A steady daily cadence signals consistent, genuine content production. It also gives…

Publishing one article per day is far more effective than dropping a batch of articles all at once. Search engines treat a sudden burst of content as suspicious, potentially flagging it as spam. A steady daily cadence signals consistent, genuine content production. It also gives each article time to get indexed and start ranking before the next one competes for attention.


Translate every page including the URL slugs

Full translation means translating the content AND the URL slugs. A page at /ro/servicii/ ranks better in Romanian search than /ro/services/. Use hreflang tags to tell Google which language version to show each user. Start with your highest-traffic pages and expand from there.


Write useful content before you have a product to sell

Cozmoslabs started by publishing programming tutorials with no product behind them. That content built domain authority, attracted an audience, and created the SEO foundation that still drives traffic years later. If you start writing only after you have something to sell, you a…

Cozmoslabs started by publishing programming tutorials with no product behind them. That content built domain authority, attracted an audience, and created the SEO foundation that still drives traffic years later. If you start writing only after you have something to sell, you are already behind. The best time to build your content foundation is before you need it.


Publish high-quality articles at low volume

Cozmoslabs still publishes articles, but they prioritize quality over quantity. Every piece is well-researched, genuinely useful, and built to last. High-quality, low-volume content builds trust with both readers and search engines. A single article that answers a real question …

Cozmoslabs still publishes articles, but they prioritize quality over quantity. Every piece is well-researched, genuinely useful, and built to last. High-quality, low-volume content builds trust with both readers and search engines. A single article that answers a real question thoroughly will outperform ten shallow posts competing for the same keywords.


Build products from real client problems, not speculation

Every Cozmoslabs product started with a problem their clients kept running into. They do not build on speculation or trends. When you know a product will take a year to execute, you need to be certain the problem is real. Spot the pattern in client requests, validate that the pa…

Every Cozmoslabs product started with a problem their clients kept running into. They do not build on speculation or trends. When you know a product will take a year to execute, you need to be certain the problem is real. Spot the pattern in client requests, validate that the pain is genuine, and only then commit to building. Being picky about what you build is a feature, not a limitation.


Use search demand to decide what features to build

Before building a new feature or component, check what people are actually searching for. Use tools like Semrush to find keywords with real demand. When Flowbite saw search volume for "avatar tailwind" and "datepicker tailwind," they built those components and captured the traff…

Before building a new feature or component, check what people are actually searching for. Use tools like Semrush to find keywords with real demand. When Flowbite saw search volume for "avatar tailwind" and "datepicker tailwind," they built those components and captured the traffic. Let search data guide your roadmap instead of guessing what users want.


Spend on influencers instead of ads

If your product has any traction, skip paid ads and invest in influencer marketing instead. Pay 1,000 to 2,000 euros per influencer, feature them on your homepage hero section, and prefer American or Australian creators for the English-speaking market. One influencer creates soc…

If your product has any traction, skip paid ads and invest in influencer marketing instead. Pay 1,000 to 2,000 euros per influencer, feature them on your homepage hero section, and prefer American or Australian creators for the English-speaking market. One influencer creates social proof that attracts others. The ROI on a single well-placed creator video outperforms most ad campaigns for developer tools.


Never discount your prices

Resist the urge to compete on price or offer discounts. Low prices scare away serious clients who associate cost with quality. Once you start discounting, customers learn to wait for sales instead of buying at full price. In the digital products space, maintaining premium pricin…

Resist the urge to compete on price or offer discounts. Low prices scare away serious clients who associate cost with quality. Once you start discounting, customers learn to wait for sales instead of buying at full price. In the digital products space, maintaining premium pricing attracts better customers and builds a more sustainable business. Flowbite never discounts, and it has not hurt growth.


Post stories on Reddit, not sales pitches

Reddit rewards authenticity and punishes promotion. When Flowbite launched a new datepicker component, they posted the story of building it, not a sales pitch. Share the journey, the technical decisions, the problems you solved. On X/Twitter, sharing MRR numbers gets engagement.…

Reddit rewards authenticity and punishes promotion. When Flowbite launched a new datepicker component, they posted the story of building it, not a sales pitch. Share the journey, the technical decisions, the problems you solved. On X/Twitter, sharing MRR numbers gets engagement. On Reddit, the same post gets buried. Each platform has its own language. Learn to speak it.


Write on Medium and dev.to with canonical links to your site

Publish articles on Medium and dev.to to reach their built-in audiences, but always set the canonical URL to point back to your own blog. This way you get distribution from the platform while search engines credit your domain as the original source. The content should genuinely …

Publish articles on Medium and dev.to to reach their built-in audiences, but always set the canonical URL to point back to your own blog. This way you get distribution from the platform while search engines credit your domain as the original source. The content should genuinely help the reader, not be a thinly disguised ad. Spammy content gets flagged on both platforms.


Set up analytics before you start scaling traffic

Do not invest in scaling traffic until you have analytics running. Use Microsoft Clarity (free) or Hotjar for heatmaps, rage click detection, and session replays. Watch your bounce rate and average time on site (one minute is a reasonable benchmark to start). If users leave imme…

Do not invest in scaling traffic until you have analytics running. Use Microsoft Clarity (free) or Hotjar for heatmaps, rage click detection, and session replays. Watch your bounce rate and average time on site (one minute is a reasonable benchmark to start). If users leave immediately, more traffic just means more people leaving. Fix the experience first, then scale.


Ride news cycles for organic traffic spikes

When a news story drives sudden search demand for a topic, pages that genuinely answer the underlying question capture a disproportionate share of the traffic. If you see an unexplained spike in analytics, open Google Trends and look for a matching jump in search volume on relat…

When a news story drives sudden search demand for a topic, pages that genuinely answer the underlying question capture a disproportionate share of the traffic. If you see an unexplained spike in analytics, open Google Trends and look for a matching jump in search volume on related terms, then confirm with recent news. Once you know a news cycle is driving the traffic, publish more supporting content while the cycle is still hot. News stories are locomotives: the trick is having something already on the tracks when one arrives.


Optimize for users not returning to search

The most important SEO signal in modern search is whether a user returns to the results page after clicking your link. If they do, Google reads it as "this page did not answer the query" and your ranking erodes. If they do not, it reads as "problem solved" and your ranking compo…

The most important SEO signal in modern search is whether a user returns to the results page after clicking your link. If they do, Google reads it as "this page did not answer the query" and your ranking erodes. If they do not, it reads as "problem solved" and your ranking compounds. This reframes SEO from "rank for keywords" to "fully resolve the intent behind each query." Audit your top pages: does the reader actually get what they came for above the fold, or do they have to scroll through filler and ads? Fix the ones that force users back to search.


Build for a practice everyone agrees is right but nobody does

The richest product territory is the gap between "known best practice" and "what people actually do." Structured interviews are universally accepted as the strongest predictor of job performance, and almost nobody runs them. Double-entry bookkeeping, security key logins, automat…

The richest product territory is the gap between "known best practice" and "what people actually do." Structured interviews are universally accepted as the strongest predictor of job performance, and almost nobody runs them. Double-entry bookkeeping, security key logins, automated tests, pre-commit hooks: same pattern. Look for a practice that experts in your industry agree is correct and operators skip because it is inconvenient, then build the tool that makes the right thing the easy thing. The onboarding pitch writes itself.


Ask specific questions that reveal the real role

Generic interview questions ("tell me about yourself," "what are your weaknesses") produce rehearsed answers and almost no signal. Two questions that consistently produce the opposite are "What does a typical day look like in this role?" and "What separates a great hire from an …

Generic interview questions ("tell me about yourself," "what are your weaknesses") produce rehearsed answers and almost no signal. Two questions that consistently produce the opposite are "What does a typical day look like in this role?" and "What separates a great hire from an average one?" The first forces the hiring manager to describe the real job instead of the job description. The second forces them to articulate the dimension on which people actually succeed or fail. Use the answers to design the rest of the interview. If a hiring manager cannot answer either clearly, the role is not ready to be filled.


Price against the cost of the mistake, not your competitors

For tools that sit on top of high-stakes decisions (hiring, compliance, security, legal), the wrong benchmark is competitor pricing. The right benchmark is the cost of one bad outcome. Pace is built for hiring, where a single bad hire typically costs one to two times the annual …

For tools that sit on top of high-stakes decisions (hiring, compliance, security, legal), the wrong benchmark is competitor pricing. The right benchmark is the cost of one bad outcome. Pace is built for hiring, where a single bad hire typically costs one to two times the annual salary once you factor in ramp, opportunity cost, severance, and team drag. A tool that prevents one bad hire a year is paying for itself many times over at almost any price. Teach your prospects to do that math in the first five minutes of the demo, and pricing objections mostly go away.


Discover the enterprise budget instead of inventing a price

Corporations of a certain size already run a budget line for your category: security, compliance, developer tooling, whatever the shelf is called internally. The money exists and procurement is used to spending it, so the pricing call is less "convince them to pay" and more "dis…

Corporations of a certain size already run a budget line for your category: security, compliance, developer tooling, whatever the shelf is called internally. The money exists and procurement is used to spending it, so the pricing call is less "convince them to pay" and more "discover the number." On discovery, ask what the team already spends on adjacent tools or what last year's budget for the category was, and land inside the familiar range. The absolute number matters less than being in a bucket finance does not have to fight for. Founders who invent a price from scratch almost always land below the budget the buyer was ready to spend.


Price on-prem for the support reality, not the demo

On-prem is not SaaS with a different installer. Once the software lives inside a customer network you lose live logs, hotfix freedom, and telemetry unless you explicitly negotiated for them. Support engineers spend materially more time per customer on debugging, upgrades, and es…

On-prem is not SaaS with a different installer. Once the software lives inside a customer network you lose live logs, hotfix freedom, and telemetry unless you explicitly negotiated for them. Support engineers spend materially more time per customer on debugging, upgrades, and escalations than any SaaS cost model captures, and that time has to be priced in before you name a number. If on-prem is priced like SaaS, the first production incident eats the margin on the account. The safe heuristic is to model a realistic support load per customer per year, multiply by a loaded engineering rate, and treat that number as the floor, not a contingency.


Build your own agent harness, even as a side project

Most developers assume an agent harness is something you buy or install. In practice, a working harness for your own workflow is a weekend project, not a quarter-long one. The payoff is that every future agentic feature you build sits on primitives you actually control: your own…

Most developers assume an agent harness is something you buy or install. In practice, a working harness for your own workflow is a weekend project, not a quarter-long one. The payoff is that every future agentic feature you build sits on primitives you actually control: your own prompt format, your own tool interface, your own logging and trajectory replay. Even if you never ship it as a product, the harness compounds: it is the thing that makes every downstream experiment cheap. And as [Vlad](/people/vlad) put it at the end of his demo, it is genuinely fun to build, which is a signal in itself.


Let users upload a photo instead of filling a form

When your onboarding asks for data the user is already holding on a card or a document, do not make them transcribe it. Let them photograph it and run OCR to pre-fill the fields. Raul's RCA flow replaces a dozen manual inputs with a single photo of the car registration and the c…

When your onboarding asks for data the user is already holding on a card or a document, do not make them transcribe it. Let them photograph it and run OCR to pre-fill the fields. Raul's RCA flow replaces a dozen manual inputs with a single photo of the car registration and the current policy, and every field removed before the user sees value is a measurable lift in completion. The pattern generalizes to anything printed: an invoice, an ID, a label, a receipt. The cost of an OCR pass is now low enough that asking the user to type what a camera could read is a friction you are choosing to keep.


Anchor your price against the cost of the problem

When your product removes a specific, expensive risk, price it against that risk, not against competitors or hours saved. Renzi's homepage leads with "one ANAF fine costs as much as two years of the app." The honest version of that math is not the modest statutory fine but the f…

When your product removes a specific, expensive risk, price it against that risk, not against competitors or hours saved. Renzi's homepage leads with "one ANAF fine costs as much as two years of the app." The honest version of that math is not the modest statutory fine but the full exposure it stands in for: retroactive tax on undeclared rent, daily interest and penalties, and the tax authority's own estimate of what you owe. Against a number that large, a subscription of a few tens of lei a month is a rounding error, and the pricing objection mostly disappears. Find the worst outcome your product prevents, do that math out loud on your landing page, and let it dwarf your price.


Mine your own Search Console data for content gaps

Your Google Search Console data already tells you what Google thinks you rank for, in your users' real words, for free. Pull the full query-and-page table from the Search Console API (it returns up to 25,000 rows per call against the dashboard's thousand or so), then look for tw…

Your Google Search Console data already tells you what Google thinks you rank for, in your users' real words, for free. Pull the full query-and-page table from the Search Console API (it returns up to 25,000 rows per call against the dashboard's thousand or so), then look for two signals. First, striking-distance keywords: queries where you sit in positions four to twenty with plenty of impressions but a weak click-through rate. Google already considers you relevant, and nudging one of those pages from position twelve to position six can multiply its traffic. Second, content gaps: cluster the queries under their shared parent term, and any cluster with real impressions but no dedicated page is a pre-validated brief for an article you have not written yet. It is the cheapest, highest-signal SEO loop there is, and it needs no paid keyword tool.


Keep diacritics in your content, strip them from your URLs

On a Romanian site, the diacritics question has a practical answer. Google treats "programari" and "programări" as equivalent, so writing correct Romanian with diacritics in your body copy, headings, and titles carries no ranking penalty and reads as more credible to a human. Wh…

On a Romanian site, the diacritics question has a practical answer. Google treats "programari" and "programări" as equivalent, so writing correct Romanian with diacritics in your body copy, headings, and titles carries no ranking penalty and reads as more credible to a human. Where diacritics genuinely cause trouble is in URL slugs, file names, and image alt text, where encoding breaks links and tooling. So the rule most Romanian practitioners settle on: diacritics in the content the reader sees, none in the identifiers the machine parses. The same logic applies to any language with accented characters.


For health data, compliance is an engineering posture, not a badge

The moment your product stores diagnoses, treatments, or medical images, you are processing special-category health data under Article 9 of the GDPR, which is prohibited by default and allowed only on a specific lawful basis such as the provision of health care or explicit conse…

The moment your product stores diagnoses, treatments, or medical images, you are processing special-category health data under Article 9 of the GDPR, which is prohibited by default and allowed only on a specific lawful basis such as the provision of health care or explicit consent. That triggers a higher bar than ordinary personal data: a data protection impact assessment, encryption and pseudonymization, access limited to staff bound by confidentiality, and a signed data-processing agreement that makes you the processor to each clinic's controller. A "GDPR Compliant" badge on the landing page is marketing; for health data it has to be a documented engineering and legal reality. When you build a vertical SaaS that touches a regulated data class, the binding constraint is not your feature set, it is the data class, and you should design for it from the first table you create.


Ship a free tool as the top of your funnel

A narrow, free, no-signup tool that solves one frequently-Googled problem is not charity, it is a lead magnet. The whole email-deliverability category (mail-tester, GlockApps, Warmy) gives away the check because running it is itself an admission of a problem the same vendor sell…

A narrow, free, no-signup tool that solves one frequently-Googled problem is not charity, it is a lead magnet. The whole email-deliverability category (mail-tester, GlockApps, Warmy) gives away the check because running it is itself an admission of a problem the same vendor sells the fix for: it self-qualifies warm prospects and ranks for high-intent queries like "does my email go to spam." The indie sequence is to ship the magnet first, let it accumulate search traffic and word of mouth, and only then bolt on the paid layer (monitoring, a plugin, a done-for-you fix). The catch the room raised: a magnet only works if activation is effortless, so the single most important screen is the one where the user gets their answer.


A niche audio plugin is a textbook solo product

Audio plugins are an underrated indie category. A single technical builder can ship one well-scoped effect or instrument on a standard framework like JUCE, which handles the brutal cross-format, cross-platform plumbing (VST3, AU, AAX across Windows, macOS, and Linux) so you can …

Audio plugins are an underrated indie category. A single technical builder can ship one well-scoped effect or instrument on a standard framework like JUCE, which handles the brutal cross-format, cross-platform plumbing (VST3, AU, AAX across Windows, macOS, and Linux) so you can focus on the sound. The economics fit one person: you sell perpetual licenses for 30 to 100 dollars directly to producers, the distribution channels already exist (KVR Audio, Plugin Boutique, YouTube and producer communities), and a perpetual framework license covers six figures of revenue before it costs you recurring money. The moat is not raw engineering, it is taste and DSP craft: a recognizable sound and a brand producers trust. Small, focused, and durable, which is exactly the kind of product that outlasts trends.