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
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Advice & Tips
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."