# Raul

> Software engineer turned curator and community builder

- Canonical URL: https://indie.md/people/raul/
- Products: Calm Companies (https://calmcompanies.club), OG Pilot (https://ogpilot.com), Buzzketeer (https://buzzketeer.com), Git Digest (https://gitdigest.ai)

## Bio

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

- [Building the Anti-Hustle Job Board: $19/year for Calm Companies](https://indie.md/journeys/raul-calm-companies/): How getting fired for caring about culture led to a curated community of sustainable workplaces

## Events

- [Indie TM #5: SEO Tactics That Actually Work](https://indie.md/events/indie-tm-5-timisoara-march-2026/): 2026-03-19
- [Indie TM #7: News as a Traffic Locomotive](https://indie.md/events/indie-tm-7-timisoara-april-2026/): 2026-04-22

## Advice

### 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.

Source: https://indie.md/advice/product-manual-curation/

### 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.

Source: https://indie.md/advice/mindset-personal-pain/

### 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.

Source: https://indie.md/advice/business-ultra-low-price/

### 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.

Source: https://indie.md/advice/seo-pain-point-content/

### 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.

Source: https://indie.md/advice/product-start-simple/

### 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.

Source: https://indie.md/advice/video-content-face-in-corner/

### 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.

Source: https://indie.md/advice/infographics-backlink-strategy/

### 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.

Source: https://indie.md/advice/content-platform-backlinks/

### 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.

Source: https://indie.md/advice/news-driven-seo-spikes/

### 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.

Source: https://indie.md/advice/dont-let-users-return-to-search/