Indie Hackers founder newsletter

PRESENTED BY Here's what you'll find in this issue: This founder turned 30 minutes of automation into $150k ARR. 5 vibe coding tools. Some of the latest apps for coding with AI. Yesterday's build board winners, including three new product launches from indie hackers. 30-second growth tip: Pursue partnerships where both sides gain more customers. Want your product seen by 280,000 founders and businesses? Sponsor an issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter. Choose between 2 affordable tiers that can fit almost any budget. This Founder Turned 30 Minutes Into a $150k Product 🖼️ Vikash Kumar Prajapati took a $100 Upwork gig to make 1,800 Photoshop mockups. The client expected it to take two or three days of work. Vikash learned enough JavaScript to automate it, delivered the job in 30 minutes, and charged $300. The script he wrote became Bulk Mockup, which is now doing about $150k ARR. Bulk Mockup batch-replaces Photoshop Smart Object layers for print-on-demand and Etsy/Shopify sellers. If you're unfamiliar with Photoshop, all you need to know is it reduces hours of repetitive setup work to a few button clicks that take minutes. This is a great interview. Vikash shares how, as a contractor, he priced the outcome instead of his time, then used YouTube to reach people already searching for a fix. Don't miss this one! Read the full article → Smart companies scale with Context.dev 🌎 Teams shouldn’t have to choose between lower cost, better coverage, and simpler infrastructure as they scale. Context.dev combines browser rendering, stealth, automatic proxy escalation, and structured web data behind one API. That means fewer moving parts to maintain, fewer vendors to stitch together, and a cleaner path from URL to usable data. Every successful scrape costs one credit, with no separate rendering surcharge or stealth multiplier. And the same API can return Markdown, raw HTML, screenshots, images, or structured JSON. One web-data layer. More pages reached. Less infrastructure to manage. Scale with Context.dev. Vibe coding tools to try 🧑🏻💻 Hatch: Ditch ChatGPT. Use the most productive AI assistant ever made. Thoughtfully crafted by the founders of Indie Hackers. Devin: Autonomous AI software engineer managing local and cloud agent fleets from a single command center. Kilo Code: Open-source agentic engineering platform for orchestration across IDEs, CLI, and Cloud environments. Bolt.new: Build and scale full-stack applications instantly by simply chatting with an intelligent AI agent. Cody: Enterprise AI assistant that understands your entire codebase to write and fix code faster. See all 30 tools in the directory → The Build Board 🪧 Every day, indie hackers post updates about the products they're building. Here's what the community voted to the top yesterday! 1. DiscountHub: Find real discounts and promo codes in one free app DiscountHub just got its biggest update yet. ▲ 12 2. Indiehunt: Launch your product on Indiehunt to get discovered by indies With fewer than 100 users, I killed Mixpanel theater for a 20-minute Monday sheet. ▲ 7 3. ProdQuest: Gamified Platform for Learning Software Engineering ProdQuest v0.1 is now open to everyone. ▲ 6 Enjoy building in public? Post an update to your product page on Indie Hackers, and it will automatically be added to the daily leaderboard. Bite-sized growth tip 🍪 Pursue partnerships where both sides gain more customers. Ori Anavim built Grasshopper Labs, an AI platform for businesses moving bulky goods. Instead of trying to out-market everyone, he looked for companies already serving the customers Grasshopper could help. A warehouse management platform had customers who needed shipping optimization. A freight broker had clients who needed better warehouse coordination. Both partners could make their own offering more useful by sending the right customers to Grasshopper, so the referrals made sense for everyone. That approach helped Grasshopper reach custo