Mircea
From agency burnout to $4k MRR
Developer with 25+ years of software engineering experience who turned client-work expertise into micro-SaaS products. Built SingleFax (no-signup online fax service) and Blahphone (browser-based international calling). Believes the best products solve one problem extremely well.
Journeys
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
Events
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
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
Advice & Tips
Product Lead with the one feature that sells, not the feature list
Renzi tracks rent, invoices, contracts, and documents, but it sells because it pre-fills the annual tax declaration for Romanian landlords. Mircea leads with that one painkiller feature and lets everything else be supporting cast. Most products bury their single most compelling feature inside an even list of ten, which dilutes the one thing that actually drives the purchase. Find the feature that closes the sale, put it in the headline, and let the rest live on the spec page. Lead with the painkiller, not the inventory.
Business & Legal Sell relief from a specific, escalating, dated risk
Renzi's buyers are not shopping for software, they are afraid of ANAF, and the product sells relief from that fear. A specific, escalating, time-bound risk (a tax deadline with growing penalties and a tax authority that now sees your bank and your Airbnb income) is one of the strongest reasons a person ever buys anything. When your product removes a concrete, dated consequence, make that consequence the center of the pitch. People act on a clear, looming risk far faster than on a list of conveniences, and the more real and imminent the risk, the smaller the price feels.
SEO Fix the bounce rate before you pour traffic into a page
Mircea worked on Renzi's bounce rate before working on growing its traffic, because sending more visitors to a page people abandon just scales the waste. A high bounce rate means the page is failing the visitors it already has, and more traffic only multiplies that failure. Diagnose and fix why people leave (slow load, unclear value, a mismatch with the query that brought them) before you invest in bringing more of them. Growth poured into a leaky page is money spent to lose users faster. Patch the bucket, then turn up the tap.
Mindset Run the same proven playbook on a new boring market
Renzi is Mircea running the SingleFax playbook again: a boring market, a narrow product that kills one specific pain, sharp positioning, and SEO that catches people already searching for the problem. Once you have a repeatable way to find and ship these, the playbook itself becomes the asset, not any single product. Indie builders often treat every new product as a blank page; the faster path is to codify what worked last time and point it at the next boring, underserved market. The second product is easier than the first because you are no longer inventing the method, only the application.
Business & Legal Local regulatory knowledge is a moat competitors lack
Renzi is hard to clone from outside Romania because its value is wired to local tax rules, deduction rates, and the quirks of ANAF's portal. Deep, country-specific regulatory knowledge is a real barrier: a larger foreign competitor cannot easily acquire it, and a generic global tool cannot match the precision. A market that looks too small or too local to bother with is often exactly the one a solo builder can own, because the same narrowness that caps the size keeps the giants out. Local and regulated is not a limitation, it is a moat.
Product Build the simplest version first
Mircea built SingleFax in a weekend by refusing to add anything beyond the core action: upload, enter a number, pay, send. No user accounts, no dashboards, no analytics. If your v1 takes longer than a week, you're building too much. Strip it down until a complete stranger can use it in under 60 seconds.
Product Remove all friction: no signup, no subscription
Every form field you add, every account creation step, every subscription commitment is a point where customers leave. I removed all of them. No signup, no login, no monthly plan. Just pay and use. For occasional-use products, this is the difference between making money and making nothing.
SEO SEO for 'how to' queries drives purchase-intent traffic
Most indie hackers target broad keywords like "best fax service." Instead, target the specific "how to" queries your customers actually search for. "How to fax documents to the IRS" attracts someone who needs to fax right now, not someone comparison-shopping. Mircea's 9 blog posts drive nearly all of SingleFax's organic traffic, and these visitors convert at a much higher rate than any other channel.
Business & Legal Add a premium tier based on what customers ask for
Don't guess what people will pay for. Wait for them to tell you. Mircea never planned SingleFax's $99 lifetime tier. Customers asked for it by email, he built it in an afternoon, and it became a significant revenue stream. The best product roadmap is your inbox.
Mindset Agency experience is a superpower for shipping fast
If you've spent years building software for clients, you already have the hardest skill in indie hacking: the ability to ship. You know how to scope, build, deploy, and handle payments. Stop thinking of agency experience as a disadvantage. Mircea built SingleFax in a weekend because he'd already solved every technical problem it required, just for other people's businesses.
Distribution 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 the strongest backlinks on the internet.
SEO 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 fix them. Use descriptive anchor text, not "click here."
Business & Legal 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 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.
SEO 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 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.