Raul
Software engineer turned curator and community builder
Software engineer turned indie builder and community organizer. After being fired for trying to create a better work culture, he built Calm Companies, a curated list of companies renowned for how they work and for $19/year people get a weekly newsletter for when any of them are hiring. Organizes the Indie TM meetup in Timisoara, Romania, where local indie hackers present, roast, and sharpen each other's products. Believes curation beats algorithms, simplicity beats features, and a landing page with a Stripe payment button is the best MVP.
Journeys
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
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
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
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 Manual curation is a moat, not a limitation
Algorithms can scrape job boards. Nobody can automate the judgment call of "is this company actually calm or just marketing itself as calm?" Raul manually researches every company in his directory, checking employee tenure, real policies, and community feedback. That process is slow, but it's the entire value proposition. What feels like a bottleneck is actually what customers are paying for.
Mindset Build from personal pain, not market research
Raul didn't do market research or competitive analysis. He built exactly the thing he wished existed when he was fired and job hunting. Personal pain gives you an unfair advantage: you know the problem deeply, you can tell real solutions from fake ones, and you won't lose motivation when growth is slow because you genuinely care about the problem.
Business & Legal Price so low it removes all friction
$19/year sounds like leaving money on the table. But consider the alternative: a $19/month subscription requires convincing someone your product is worth $228/year, handling cancellations, dealing with failed payments, and competing with every other subscription fighting for budget. At $19/year, the price is never the objection. Raul's conversion rate proves that removing friction can beat optimizing price.
SEO SEO blog posts that solve real pain points drive organic growth
Raul wrote 25 blog posts, all addressing problems he'd personally experienced. They rank well because they're genuinely helpful, not because they're optimized for keywords. "Signs of a toxic workplace" and "how to recover from burnout" are searches people make when they're frustrated, and content written by someone who's been through it resonates differently than generic advice. Write fewer posts, but write them from real experience.
Product Start with a spreadsheet, not a SaaS
Raul's entire business started as a personal spreadsheet shared with friends. He didn't buy a domain, set up payments, or write a line of code until real people asked him to keep going. A spreadsheet forces you to do the work manually, which teaches you what the actual product is. If your idea can't survive as a spreadsheet first, it probably won't survive as a SaaS either.
Mindset Buy relevant domains early and let their authority age
Raul bought epolita.ro and several other Romanian domains four years before they earned a cent, and the quiet accumulation of domain age and authority is part of why they rank now. A relevant domain is a cheap, asymmetric bet: small holding cost, and a real payoff if the market or a news cycle eventually heats up around it. You cannot manufacture domain age later, so the time to acquire the domains for markets you believe in is now, even if you will not build on them for years. Patience is a legitimate SEO strategy when the asset is appreciating in the background.
Business & Legal Build the product where the traffic already lives
epolita.ro was already pulling high-intent insurance traffic, so Raul built the RCA quote flow onto that same domain instead of launching a fresh site that would start from zero. The hardest part of most products is getting in front of people who want them; if you already have an audience or ranking pages in an adjacent space, the fastest path to revenue is to put the product where that attention already lands. Look at the traffic you already have before you go chasing new traffic. Monetizing an existing audience beats building a new one almost every time.
SEO Internal linking is the first lever when a page starts ranking
The moment epolita.ro started ranking, Raul's first optimization was internal linking: connecting related pages with descriptive anchor text. It is the cheapest, fastest SEO lever there is, and it works precisely when a page has authority worth distributing. A ranking page is a source of link equity you can route to the pages you want to lift next, and descriptive anchors tell Google what those pages are about. Before chasing new backlinks, make sure the authority you already have is flowing through your own site. Internal linking is the first move, not an afterthought.
Product Never let a call to action lie about what it does
Raul's RCA flow had a button that promised to "see the price" and then, on click, just pushed the user deeper into the funnel instead of showing a price. That gap between what the button says and what it does is a small dishonesty, and each one teaches the user to distrust the next button you ask them to press. In a flow where trust is the currency, a CTA must do exactly what it claims. Either deliver what the label promises right there, or rewrite the label to match reality. A misleading button buys one extra click and costs you the user's belief in everything after it.
SEO For apps, a marketplace listing beats most content backlinks
For an app, a backlink from a relevant marketplace or directory is worth more than most content-driven backlink tactics, because the marketplace's entire purpose is to send qualified, ready-to-buy traffic to tools like yours. That link carries authority and high intent at the same time, while a generic guest-post link carries neither. If your product is an app, prioritize getting listed where your buyers already shop over grinding out articles purely for links. The best backlinks come from pages whose job is to route buyers to you, not from content you wrote to game a ranking.
Product 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 text-only pages.
SEO 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 strategies.
Distribution 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 significant domain authority through their backlinks.
SEO 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 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.
SEO 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 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.
Product 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 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.