Vlad
Backend engineer turned indie hacker
Backend and DevOps engineer who loves writing beautiful code. After 15 years building production infrastructure, went solo to scratch his own itch. Now building sisif.ai, an AI video generation API, and zag, a composable agent development environment in Zig that he uses as his personal harness for agentic coding. Obsessed with distribution and platform-led growth. At Indie TM #18 he showed the swing after cheaper video models cut sisif.ai from about $400 a month to $80-90. A $1 to $3 paywall and pages that ChatGPT can cite now do 2 or 3 sales a day. He is aiming the next clips at children's stories, and the buyer he has to learn is the parent.
Journeys
Events
October 1, 2026
DevPlant Cowork, Timisoara
Indie TM #18: A Dollar Clip, and the Parent Who Buys It
What we learned at our eighteenth meetup, where Vlad opened sisif.ai after cheaper models cut the revenue, and the room told him to charge a dollar and sell the story to a parent
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 3, 2026
Cowork Timisoara - The Office, Timisoara
Indie TM #6: From ThemeForest Rejects to 30 Million Downloads
What we learned at our sixth 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
Advice & Tips
MindsetStop polishing code, start finding customers
As an engineer, your instinct is to keep improving the product. Resist it. A mediocre product with great distribution will outperform a great product with no distribution every single time. Vlad spent months polishing sisif.ai before realizing that nobody knew it existed. The hardest shift for technical founders is accepting that code quality doesn't drive revenue.
MindsetTwitter and ProductHunt are slow for unknown founders
Building in public, Twitter threads, and ProductHunt launches all share the same assumption: someone is already listening. If you have 12 followers, tweeting into the void won't generate customers. Vlad tried the standard playbook for months and got nothing. These channels compound over time, but if you need traction now, you need to go where attention already exists.
DistributionRide existing waves with platform-led growth
Instead of building your own audience from scratch, find platforms where your target users already gather. Vlad built n8n workflow templates (TikTok automation, Instagram Reels) that showcased sisif.ai's API. The templates got thousands of views and drove real signups. The key is contributing genuine value to the platform's ecosystem, not just dropping links.
Business & LegalTiered pricing unlocks hidden revenue
Vlad's single $9/month plan seemed simple and fair. Switching to three tiers ($10/$50/$200) increased his MRR by 4x. The lesson: different users get different amounts of value from your product. A hobbyist and a business running production workflows should not pay the same price. Start with tiers early. You can always simplify later, but you can't recover the revenue you've been leaving on the table.
DistributionDistribution beats product, every time
Vlad had a working AI video API and zero customers. The product didn't change when he started getting signups. The distribution did. If you're a technical founder, this is the hardest pill to swallow: the market doesn't reward the best product. It rewards the product that shows up where buyers are looking. Spend at least half your time on distribution, especially in the early days.
Business & LegalA one-dollar paywall fits a buyer who comes once
After cheaper video models cut sisif.ai from about $400 a month to $80-90, Vlad stopped giving the render away. A paywall of $1 to $3 produced 2 or 3 sales a day. The clip costs him about $0.10, so the dollar still leaves room, and self-hosting puts the margin near 70%. His buyers rarely come back and rarely write. Price the single job. Keep the subscription for the person who is actually running a workflow every week.
DistributionPublic templates a model can cite beat another launch post
Vlad's earlier social posts did not find the buyers. Public templates and SEO pages did, once ChatGPT started citing them. The paying queries were specific, including how to make an AI video for a child. Put a finished example where a model can quote it, in the words the buyer already used. That citation is a channel you can count, the same way you count search.
MindsetA wrapper dies when a better model ships
sisif.ai reached about $400 a month on someone else's video model, then fell to $80-90 when stronger and cheaper models shipped. Sora was the name the room used. The page did not get worse. The model under the page became a commodity. If your product is a thin layer on one provider, write down what your price does the month a lab ships a better one. Own a job the next model does not do by default, or own the machine that runs it.
Business & LegalCharge a dollar while the clip renders
Vlad's clip costs about $0.10 and sells for about $1. A paywall of $1 to $3 turned unpaid traffic into 2 or 3 sales a day. Generation is slow enough that the wait can hold a second offer. Price the single clip when the buyer comes once. A subscription is a poor fit for a person who needed one video tonight.
SEOPublish the page a model can quote
The spike came from public templates and pages ChatGPT could cite, including queries about AI video for children. Write the page that answers the job in the words the person already typed into the model. A template the model can point at is distribution. Keep the page factual and narrow enough to lift.
ProductSell the children's clip to the parent
The room treated the children's clip as a product with a buyer, a moment, and a rule. The buyer is the parent. The moment is bedtime or mealtime. The rule is what the model may draw. Vlad's buyers are one-off and quiet, so a form with a reason to answer is how he learns why they came. A picture book can survive a rough line. A frame that is wrong for a child has to be blocked before it renders. Pick those three, then teach the pipeline to follow a timeline.
DistributionGet 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 domain authority over time.
SEOCreate 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 is how you capture long-tail local search traffic with almost no competition.
MindsetBuild 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 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.