Tibo

6 mini-tools launched this week 100k+ impressions generated last one coming tomorrow what a week

went to an indie hackers meetup in Paris last night what I liked most was the conversations - with the people building, breaking, and figuring things out in public met my friends and some genuinely sharp builders, shared what I know, swapped stories, and left with way more energy than I expected I’m not very social by default, so this kind of surprised me lol it was super fun (I had to run out a bit early for family Christmas diner )

I've scaled 4 products past $100k MRR everyone asks for the strategy here's what actually worked: 1. week 1: build something, anything, ship it 2. find 5-10 people, get them to try it 3. become annoying - DM, email, call 4. watch them use it (most won't) 5. ask why, fix it, ship again 6. daily check-ins, daily updates 7. solve their actual problem, not what you think it is 8. keep shipping until they beg you not to change anything 9. that's your signal - now go loud 10. content everywhere, SEO grind, paid ads 11. double down on channels that work 12. cut everything else the gap between $0 and $100k? steps 3-8 most people never leave their code editor you can't build a business without talking to humans

every successful startup has been through this curve even I’ve been on this curve more times than I can count most of those times, I crashed somewhere in the “reality sets in” pit and quit you start with hype you ship... no one cares you try to fix it... still no one cares and slowly, you wonder if you just suck most startups die here not because the founders are dumb, but because it’s insanely hard to keep going when you don’t know if you’re delusional or early for me, I’ve only made it past that little PMF dot a handful of times and those were the ones everyone now calls “obvious wins.” but in the moment, nothing was obvious it felt like pushing a rock uphill while other builders around me were celebrating if you think you’re stuck in the valley too, keep at it. keep experimenting- something might click. but if nothing moves for a while, pause and measure where you’re at. do you actually want to keep going? does the market care even a little? is there a signal worth chasing? this steep curve is mostly inevitable - you just have to figure out, realistically, how long you can sustain being here and how fast you think you can get out some people grind for years before getting out of this pit. respect to them. as for me, I have a simple rule: if a project doesn’t show revenue traction soon enough, I kill it fast. there are many ways to play this game, just make sure you’re choosing yours on purpose

people complain about zero followers but won't spend 20 minutes replying to bigger accounts the math: your tweet gets 50 views, your genuine reply on a viral thread can get 50k people who actually grew to 10k did exactly that for months

my predictions for 2026 1. Google will overtake everyone in the AI race, forcing OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI to specialize. Anthropic is already there. generalist AI won’t win forever. 2. AI agents will buy things for humans on websites like Amazon as reliably as humans do today. once agents get wallets, commerce changes fast. 3. AI security will become a massive problem. not just AI-driven cyber attacks, but a surge of vulnerabilities from vibe-coded apps shipping too fast. 4. people think we’ll be able to clearly label “human-generated” content or trace non-AI media with tags and provenance. I don’t think this will work. many will try but all will fail. 5. people think AI-generated content will ship with built-in receipts showing which model touched what. again, many will try but I don’t think this will stick. 6. robots will scale faster than most expect, especially humanoids. hardware finally starts catching up with software. 7. "Cursor for X" will be the default the mental model. AI won't just live in chat boxes and side panels, but will be embedded directly inside workflows. 8. people think 2026 is the year of generative video. I think that was 2025. 2026 is about world models, prompt-to-3D, and playable generations. 9. text will stop being the default input everywhere, especially for consumer products. for B2B, text stays dominant longer. 10. companies will test product ideas on thousands of AI personas and predict outcomes before writing code. this quietly kills most ideas early. 11. memory will continue to be the moat in AI tools. 12. people think ChatGPT app stores are a big startup opportunity. I don’t see it working. 13. AI-based customer support, onboarding, and customer success will explode. humans handle only edge cases. 14. most AI companies move away from pure seat-based pricing toward hybrid models: seats + tokens + inference. 15. people think agent marketplaces will explode. I’m not convinced. maybe some niches work, but it won’t be a dominant model.

Harvard university has an underrated lecture on building a product that can scale. every indie maker can learn from this! adding my notes below for your help:

more than 50% of founders with $5k+ mrr have fewer than 5k followers yet most people still believe you can’t build a real business without a big audience people even say it about me - tibo gets users only because he has followers but 70% of the users across all my saas don’t come from my audience they come from distribution systems I build - partnerships, SEO, affiliates, UGC from creators who don’t even follow me having followers helps sure - but it’s not the only engine for growth if audience was enough, every creator with 100k followers would be running a $1m business, but they’re not I know hundreds of people who have built a profitable business without having a huge audience on socials if you think lack of followers is your biggest problem, you’re not even in the game yet, you just have a lazy excuse so i'll say it again, having an audience helps for sure, but it is definitely not mandatory

NO WAY!!?? we're talking x10 to x100 in traffic sent to external websites this can completely change the game for many players

so the verdict is Product Hunt still works PostSyncer got 2-3x the new trials per day compared to our previous spike and we're still up for product of the week - let's see how this turns out what's not clear: - is PH bringing the traffic? - or is the traffic coming from us because we push the product very hard during a PH launch? very hard to know

the biggest BS in saas: “don’t raise your prices” 90% of the time, low prices hurt early saas - not help a $9 price tag tells users: “this is probably a weekend project” a $49 price says: “this is a tool built for serious operators” and that one shift changes everything - the users you attract, the feedback you get, and the way people talk about you saw this article recently - the founder doubled their price from $4.99 to $9.99 now on paper that looks risky but in reality, their churn dropped to 3% and remember - the product didn’t change, only the perceived value did bootstrapped founders often think in terms of loss: “what happens if I scare people away?” but fearing losses usually blocks bigger wins we did the same thing with Tweet Hunter. we raised the price from $9 → $49 (over 12 months, while adding tons of stuff) churn went DOWN revenue went UP conversion rate didn't move remember this: - low prices force you to think "cheap" - high prices force you to build "high quality" go premium, and show that to the world

here are 4 startup truths you need to hear today: 1 - your "unique idea" has been built 3 times already someone's building it right now. someone failed at it last year. someone will launch it next month. stop waiting for perfect uniqueness. start executing better than everyone else. 2 - choosing the right market is a cheatcode low revenue can be fixed. a miserable life can't be fixed. pick markets where being yourself is an advantage. 3 - you're optimising the wrong metrics wrong: working time, features shipped, content created. winners track: mrr growth, customer retention, actual conversions. activity ≠ progress. 4 - your network is your unfair advantage (but only if you use it) the best opportunities come from people you already know. just ask. shame = -10k mrr sending 15 more harsh truths to my email list tomorrow. join below

I grew 4 SaaS tools to $100k+ / month here is the playbook: 1. build an MVP in a week, not 3 months 2. ship it to 5-10 people manually 3. get into their DMs, emails, literally everywhere 4. talk to them every single day 5. fix what breaks, understand what they actually use / want 6. build features for their real problems, not yours 7. ship the update, ask for feedback again 8. repeat until they can't live without it 9. once you see stickiness, go public 10. launch, post, do the content 11. work your SEO, start ads, kick off affiliate 12. scale what works, kill what doesn't most founders skip steps 3-9 talk to people or fail