🗞️ What's New: $30k MRR in 8 months, integrations before partnerships, gambling addiction = good?
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Here's what you'll find in this issue:
- This founder built an AI tool to replace his SEO consulting work and sold it to his existing audience. Now he's at $30k MRR.
- 5 vibe coding tools. Some of the latest apps for coding with AI.
- 30-second growth tip: Build integrations with big platforms before asking permission.
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An SEO consultant builds his replacement. It hits $30k MRR. 🤖
SEO consultant Paul Vengeons trained a chatbot on the methods he'd spent years using with clients. Then he sold subscriptions to the audience he'd built teaching SEO in French. Eight months in, ChatSEO had reached $30k MRR.
The bot uses his methods, live search-volume data, and a site's search performance to recommend keywords to target. Thousands of people already trusted Paul's advice… ChatSEO simply let them apply it to their own websites. His team charged from day one and made around €7k in the first month, almost entirely from his followers.
But everything wasn't rosy. X ads brought in signups at roughly €10 each, but none had become paying customers at the time of the interview. And keeping subscribers also proved difficult. Monthly churn fell from about 20% in spring to 10% by August, but that still meant losing about one in ten subscribers every month.
"If I started over, I'd work on keeping customers before trying to get more of them," Paul says.
Read how Paul assembled his 3-person founding team, priced ChatSEO, and turned his SEO audience into its first paying customers.
Describe the problem. Get the software that fixes it. 🧩
A business idea feels simple until the list starts: a website, lead capture, a CRM, content, publishing, and one custom workflow that makes the idea different. Before the first customer conversation, the founder is already assembling a tech stack.
Beyonder offers a smaller place to begin. It is an AI living software factory where founders start with ready AI apps or [describe a problem in plain words] and get it built as a new module.
Everything runs on the same data. A website visitor becomes a lead, and the lead lands in the CRM by itself. A module added next week already sees the same customers. No webhooks, no glue code, no stack to keep in sync.
The ready apps cover the work of getting noticed: a website, content ideas from trends, short clips from long videos, and posting to X and Threads. Every inquiry they bring in ends up in the same CRM, so the founder's time goes to conversations with customers, not to wiring tools.
There's no need to plan the whole business upfront: start with one workflow, put it in front of a real person, learn what is useful, and add the next capability only when the business needs it.
Whether the goal is testing a new idea or building systems for clients, Beyonder gives founders a faster way to go from problem to working software.
Vibe coding tools to try 🧑🏻💻
Hatch: Ditch ChatGPT. Use the most productive AI assistant ever made. Thoughtfully crafted by the founders of Indie Hackers.
Lovable: Describe your idea. Lovable builds a full-stack app and reusable prompts in seconds.
Qodo: Boost test coverage fast. Qodo writes unit tests and smart code suggestions.
Pieces: Store snippets of code offline and use a "long-term memory agent" to search, fix, and reuse code.
Windsurf: AI-powered IDE that anticipates your next move.
Bite-sized growth tip 🍪
Build integrations with big platforms before asking for permission.
Ryan Kulp and his partner bought a Shopify app called Notify and rebuilt it as Fomo, a widget that shows real customer activity on websites. It went on to reach a reported peak of $88k a month in revenue.
Fomo started connecting with larger platforms without waiting for formal partnerships. Our growth report credits integrations and co-marketing with bringing in users and helping Fomo get better partnership terms. A working integration with actual users is a much better conversation starter than a cold pitch.
Channing's Tweet Pick 🐦
Startup life really is all about gambling on yourself though. VCs can spread their bets across portfolios, but founders have to go all-in on themselves.
We'd love your feedback! 🙃
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Special thanks to Yushavel Calderon for the graphic design, and to James Fleischmann for contributing a post.
