The app studio is called Monkeytaps and they have 6 apps total, with 3 of their apps (Vocabulary, Motivations, Affirmations) pulling in almost 99% of their revenue.

We’ve entered a new era where venture backed apps with big teams and offices are being outcompeted and crushed by small teams and even single person companies that are agile and integrate AI tools into their workflows.

The average person has barely used AI and has no idea what is happening. Teams are now launching and spinning multiple apps per month with tools like AppAlchemy and Cursor. The mobile apps space is beginning to look a lot more like Ecom where people can test multiple products and find and scale winners.

What’s happening right now it’s very big I think.

Hey indie hackers, I've been lurking here for a while, watching many of you hit those big success milestones.... and today it's finally my turn.

You’ve probably seen the Ghibli AI wrappers making waves lately. Luckily, I was quick enough to be one of the (if not the) first to ship a wrapper around it – and it TOOK OFF!

When I saw the Ghibli AI blowing up, I knew I had to move quick. So within 2 hours, I put together a makeshift automation that worked surprisingly well as an API. It got the job done for the MVP, but of course not scalable in the long run.

Packaged it all together in an app and shared it on X and it went kinda viral.

First nothing happened and I went to have dinner just like any other day and when I was about to go bed: the Stripe notifications kept coming in & was pretty adrenaline-y feeling. Pretty much a dream for every indie hacker.

Honestly, it still feels a bit surreal. I’ve built over 20 projects in the past two years, most of them either failed or never really took off.

And yeah, it’s been prettttyyy financially rewarding – more than I ever imagined when I started.

I spent the next two days working almost 18 hours a day to talk to customers, fix almost everything on production and pretty much maintaining the server, adding new features.

I documented most of it thru a series of tweets on X

If you’re grinding on your own projects and feeling stuck, keep pushing.

All you need is that one win! Worked for me :)

My project if you're interested: https://dreamchanted.com

Hey guys. Just wanted to share what I've been working on for the couple of months. It's called Huzzler - a hybrid between reddit and product hunt. You can add products to your profile, launch them, request feedback, share wins, validate startup ideas and more. There is even a category to find co-founders, find a job as a freelancer or post a job offer yourself.

We've only been around of 1 month but these are statistics:
- 200 registered users
- 1700 active users (over 30 days)
- climbing with about 20 registrations daily now

We reached this mainly by reaching out to founders directly (X and reddit). Feel free to ask any questions you may have.

(The site for those interested: huzzler.so )

I’m aiming to make an additional $40K/year alongside my full-time job. I can invest up to $4K upfront and dedicate ~16 hours per week (sometimes up to 20) consistently.

About me: I’m a senior software engineer and platform engineer with solid experience building and scaling production-grade applications. I’m comfortable with both frontend and backend work, DevOps, automation, cloud infrastructure, etc.

I’m not necessarily looking for a quick win or trendy hustle – more interested in something I can build and grow steadily, ideally with compounding potential. Whether it’s a micro-SaaS, a productized service, automation tool, or something unconventional – I’m open to ideas, approaches, or even success stories.

What would you tackle with my background, time, and budget?

Ever read something and think, “Wait, I’ve seen this before”—but can’t remember where? Then you waste a bunch of time futilely digging through your notes or search history to try and remember where. This problem inspired me to launch Recall, specifically our newest feature — Augmented Browsing — which resurfaces related content from your knowledge base in real time, turning passive browsing into active discovery.

Hello everyone, I’m Paul, co-founder and CEO of Recall. Knowledge management has always been a passion of mine, but one question kept frustrating me:

“Where have I seen this before?”

I’d read something online, recognize a familiar concept, and then waste time searching through my messy notes — only to come up frustrated. I wanted a way to instantly resurface relevant knowledge as I browsed.

Introducing Augmented Browsing — a local-first extension that overlays your browser and highlights keywords stored in your existing Recall knowledge base. This brings utility and real-time connections to what has historically been a very passive knowledge management space.

Since Augmented Browsing is local-first, our keyword extraction doesn’t rely on an LLM — it’s powered by a small model that runs in your browser. We’re constantly refining it to surface meaningful connections rather than just frequent keywords.

Together with our small yet mighty team — we are focused on a series of features that will continue to bring utility to the knowledge management space, so that you are consistently extracting value from the content you consume. This really is just the beginning for us, and we hope this launch resonates with you. Truly excited to hear your candid feedback.

After several delayed launches, we are finally live on Product Hunt today — check it out and let me know what you think: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/recall-augmented-browsing

I started this year with sales.

How I did it ?

• marketing

• calls

• B2B

• niche content

• focus

Let me explain.

I have 9-5, run dev agency and reddit agency, and building my own SaaS.

Also a few months ago I became a father.

I started my journey one year ago. Since that period, I have built more than 15 small bets. Yeah, I know, most of them, didn't make any money, so I left them.

But I learned a lot from failed projects:

• execution over perfection

• speed over perfection

• analytics over guessing

• creating over consuming

• building over overthinking

• simplicity over complexity

If you ask me would I do it again ? I will say, hell yeah.

What is marketing ?

Market your product/idea/service/agency to the right audience. Don't try to sell to everyone. Instead niche, niche, niche.

If you are in B2B, focus on:

• cold emails

• SEO

if you are in B2C, focus on:

• TikTok

• Youtube Shorts

• Instagram

Calls ?

Yes, you must do it, if you want to do B2B. Why ? Because no one know you. Because on one trust you.

Show them that you care, that you can solve it, that you are here for them.

B2B ?

I tried:

B2B

B2C

B2B2C

B2C is fun. B2B is money.

In the beginning, start with B2B, make money, reinvest them into your products and scale your B2C.

Niche content ?

Don't try to create content for everyone. Instead focus on specific group of people.

If you are digital nomads, focus on digital nomads.

If you are pet owner, focus on pet owners.

If you are housekeeper, focus on housekeeper.

This is your main advantage. Build for them. Sell to them.

Focus ?

I tried every marketing channel, you name it, I did it.

I understood simple things. It is better to have 2 or 3 channels that bring:

• money

• customers

Than to have 10 channels that bring nothing.

6 months ago I launched my SaaS and made my first sale. Today we have 200 paying customers and close to $4,000 MRR.

I’m telling you this to show you what is possible if you just get started.

You probably have some ideas but you haven’t gotten around to building them. Maybe the idea doesn’t feel perfect or you’re just not sure about it.

Still, get started.

Building a successful product is all about failing and pivoting. That can only happen if you take action.

Before I built my SaaS I wasn’t sure about the idea. I had 3 ideas I was interested in but one seemed a bit better so I just went for that one.

The initial idea was also different from what the SaaS has turned into now. That’s the whole part about failing and pivoting.

It must change to become great.

If you’re at a point where you have no ideas at all here’s some practical advice for you:

1. Write down industries that you have experience in or understand. This could be marketing, healthcare, baking, or whatever.
2. For each industry, write down all the problems you can think of. Just things that are annoying or stop people from achieving their goals in the industries.

Chances are you’ll run into a real problem to solve and that’s your product.

My goal now is to get to $10,000 MRR in the next 6 months and it would make me happy if you’d join me on the entrepreneurial journey. Reach out in 6 months when you make that first sale and we’ll celebrate it together.

[Not clickbait]

Hi friends! My partner and I have been taking products to market for years, and have been consulting with startups and scale-ups as GTM consultants, and product developers. We have real experience, and real results.

We are expanding this business and we are looking to build reference cases, and will thus work for free.

Is this you?

• "I barely get any signups."
• "People like the product but don’t pay."
• "Nobody’s replying to my outreach."
• "I’m stuck at $1k MRR."
• "I hate sales & marketing and just want a process that works."
• "I just want to focus on building the product."

What would we do?

• [Analyze] → Current situation analysis with a GTM Score & Risk mitigation
• [Plan] → Set a go-to-market strategy
  • Community-Led Growth (CLG)
  • Channel & Partner-Led Growth (CPLG)
  • Founder-Led Sales (FLS)
  • Product-Led Growth (PLG)
  • Marketing
• [Implement] → Create an action plan and do the tasks
  • Done-with-you / Done-for-you

I will respond to questions in DM - so go ahead and get in touch! ✌��

All the best, Alfred

Ran a small Google Ads trial last week to test how it performs for my side project CaptureKit – a web scraping + screenshot API.

Budget: ~$60 total
Daily spend: Around $8–10
Duration: 7 days

Results:

• 7,074 impressions
• 133 clicks
• 14 conversions (new signups)
• ~10–14 new users actually signed in and used the product
• $0 in revenue from the ads (got $80 in the lifetime of the app, which is 3 weeks)

So yeah… not amazing in terms of direct ROI, but it did bring more traffic and real users.
Still trying to figure out if it’s worth iterating on or if I should focus my efforts elsewhere (SEO has been better so far).

Anyone else tried Google Ads for developer-focused products or APIs? Curious if this kind of performance is typical for early-stage stuff.

Would love to hear your experience or tips :)

I see a lot of indie hackers flexing their MRR, shipping nonstop, and grinding on GitHub like it’s the only way to succeed. It gives me FOMO and makes me feel like I’m falling behind. Last time, I burned out but didn’t take a break because I thought stopping would kill my momentum. Now, it’s happening again.

No one tells you that it’s okay to take a break for 10-15 days, step away, and reset. But I’m saying it now: don’t be like me. If you feel drained, pause. Hustle culture won’t tell you this, but you don’t have to burn yourself out to succeed.

Does taking a break really kill momentum, or is it necessary to keep going long-term? Would love to hear your thoughts.

I've posted about Answer HQ, my AI customer service assistant that automates repetitive questions a few times on this sub now, and the most common question I get asked is - with zero marketing budget (and as a boostrapper), how did I acquire my first 10 customers, and how did I get people to trust a brand new startup?

For context: I started Answer HQ last September after getting laid off from my growth engineer role at a well-known AI company (you've heard of it if you're in the space). While job hunting, I built the MVP in my other waking hours.

Preface: I am NOT a marketing/sales person, so this is all advice from a technical/product founder.

Some things that worked for me.

1. Being extremely specific and simple

   I only go for small biz, e-commerce, and early stage startups using Zendesk and Shopify who face repetitive customer questions. That's it.

2. I acquired my first customer through a friend's e-commerce small bi

   My friend's e-commerce store (he sells interestingly shaped vapes) was drowning in repetitive questions, "where do you ship" "what flavors do you offer" were literally the top 2 questions. My MVP was shit but solved his exact problem. He paid for a year upfront ($6/mo special rate, I no longer offer this price) to support me.

3. I went to where my customers are

   Small biz owners are way too busy for most social media but often do visit specific groups for advice - r/smallbusiness, founder Facebook groups, etc. I focused my time there.

   My next experiment is go to in-person meetups, conferences, and hangouts where they also do attend.

4. Your own network

   I reached out to my network (I've been in the industry for almost 10 yrs now) and asked if they were interested - really really uncomfortable as a technical founder, but effective.

5. Biggest challenge is finding a repeatable customer acquisition strategy

   It's still a challenge I face right now - I don't have something massively repeatable yet. I'm experimenting with hiring VAs to help me do outreach, but will take awhile for good results to come

6. What has been working beyond first 10 customers

   SEO. I am getting more and more organic inbound through Google. I got listed in 50+ directories and started writing more blogs.

7. My customers are my biggest advocates

   I am incredibly blessed to have amazing customers that absolutely love my product. I kindly asked if they could post about their honest thoughts about Answer HQ on G2 Crowd, and they did just that. This is better than any marketing that I do personally.

   I also launched customer success stories, with the first one being a Swiss-based boutique espresso machine maker.

Pro tip: at the most basic, your shit has to work. If your app doesn't work, or doesn't work well, you won't find any paying customers.

Biggest struggle: wasting a lot of time and energy trying out different customer acquisition strategies that are repeatable. Still haven't found one that's scalable yet, but hopefully this changes soon!

Hi everyone I previsously made this post:

the previous post (must read to understand this one)

It's not needed to read the previous post but if you don't understand this one, you might give it a quick look.

So yes, I was wrong.

And people replying to my post were right.

I was not building, marketing and sharing my apps the right way.

I thought my problem came from my target (B2B or B2C), but the real issue was.. me!

I was building an app, spending weeks of developpement, and then marketing it, without thinking to the ICP or to a specific target, just yapping around.

Eg: I built a book tracker, not designed and built thinking to a specific readers niche, just built for "everyone", and then when it was nearly finished, I started talking to readers, once again to every readers.

So my waitlist got 4 people to sign up; a failure. I didn't know how to talk to my potential customers, who they were, and where to find them.

After sharing this, I got a lot of feedback, and here is how I'd do things knowing this (taking the same example):

1) before building: find as much readers community as possible in Reddit, Facebook, X

2) Make a first post presenting myself, and then 2/3 days after, write a promotion post in each community to present my idea and gather feedback

3) Start building my idea for the persons in the community where people were the most hyped (1st ICP)

4) Sharing the beta version with them and in all the other communities (if I didn't get banned lol)

5.1) If there is positive feedback and traction: continue in this way

5.2) if there isn't positive feedback and traction: pivot or give up the idea

optional: 6) write a post to cry on my newest failure.

Jokes aside, I'd also share my building process daily in builders/entrepreneurs communities to continue grow my audience (mainly doing this on X if you're interested).

Do you think with this approach I'd had more success with the initial reader app idea?

I'm saying 'initial' here cause I'm planning to pivot, a huge pivot. The app was previously intended to allow the user to record all his readed books, to set a focus timer to read, have a pet to feed, has an EXP system for both user and pet, and I was planning to add a looooot of customization.

Now, the new app will just let users record their books and have stats on their readings (like how many books this year, how many pages, readin speed). It will be a showcase page for your readings, I'll try to make this app free at launch then payed if it got traction, and try to sell it to entrepreneur influencer that are often asked what books they readed (this is the #1 target).

What do you think of this new plan?

I'm much more confident with this one.