Startups Articles

41 posts

Problem Validation for Indie Hackers: Why You Are Building the Wrong Thing (And How to Know Before You Start) 4/28/2026 The gap between "can build" and "should build" has never been wider. AI tools made shipping trivially fast. That is exactly why building the wrong thing faster than ever has become the new way to fail. Here is a practical validation framework for solo founders who want to work on problems worth solving.
Better Auth vs Clerk vs Supabase Auth: Which Should Solo Devs Pick in 2026? 4/20/2026 Auth is the decision that silently shapes your product for years. Clerk is the polished default. Supabase Auth is the pragmatic bundle. Better Auth is the open-source challenger changing the conversation in 2026. Here is how I pick between them for solo dev projects.
SaaS Churn Is Killing Your Business. Here Is What to Do About It (Without a Support Team) 4/17/2026 A 5% drop in monthly churn can double your LTV. Most solo founders know this but do not have a system for actually fixing it without hiring support staff. This is that system.
Supabase vs Firebase in 2026: I Used Both in Production. Here's the Truth. 4/13/2026 Firebase dominated backend-as-a-service for years. Supabase arrived, added Postgres, and suddenly every indie hacker has an opinion. I have shipped products on both in 2026 and the choice is less obvious than the hype on either side makes it sound.
Developer-Led Growth in 2026: How to Get Your First 100 Paying Customers 4/9/2026 Most developers who build good products still struggle to get paying customers. The product is almost never the problem. Distribution almost always is. Here is what actually works for developer tools and technical SaaS in 2026.
The SaaSapocalypse Is Real: What Smart Developers Should Build Instead 4/8/2026 AI agents are collapsing the build-vs-buy decision that made SaaS valuable. In January 2026, roughly $2 trillion in SaaS market cap evaporated in 30 days. This is not a cycle. It is a structural shift. Here is an honest look at what is happening, which categories are done, and what developers should actually build in a world where agents replace interfaces.
AI Wrappers Are Dead: What Smart Developers Are Building Instead in 2026 4/3/2026 McKinsey reports only 3% of AI startups will survive the next two years. Google just warned that companies built around LLM wrappers have their check engine light on. The average AI wrapper has a 65% churn rate within 90 days. But developers who understand what comes after wrappers are building the most valuable software of the decade. The AI gold rush is not over. The easy money is.
The Micro SaaS Playbook: How Developers Are Building Profitable Products in Weeks, Not Months 4/3/2026 The micro SaaS market is projected to grow from $15.7 billion to $59.6 billion by 2030. Solo developers are shipping in weekends what used to take months. But 70% of micro SaaS products generate under $1,000 a month. The difference is not the idea or the tech stack. It is the process. Here is the playbook for finding, building, and shipping a micro SaaS that actually makes money in 2026.
The AI-Powered Agency: A Developer Playbook for Selling AI Services in 2026 4/2/2026 Y Combinator is telling founders to stop building SaaS and start selling AI-powered services instead. The pitch is simple: use AI yourself and sell the finished work for 10x what the tool costs. Developers are uniquely positioned for this because they can build the automation layer that makes it scale. Here is the practical playbook for starting an AI-powered agency as a developer in 2026.
The Developer Newsletter Playbook: How to Build a Newsletter That Actually Makes Money in 2026 4/2/2026 TLDR grew from a side project to 7 million subscribers and an estimated $5-10M in annual revenue with a team of four people. Bytes built a massive JavaScript-focused audience that funds an entire educational platform. Developer newsletters are quietly one of the most profitable media businesses you can run, and they compound over time in a way that social media never will. Here is how to start one, grow it, and turn it into real revenue.
The One-Person Startup Just Hit a New Ceiling: What It Actually Takes to Scale Solo in 2026 4/1/2026 Sam Altman predicts the first one-person billion-dollar company. Dario Amodei gives it a 70-80% chance of happening this year. Meanwhile, solo founders like Pieter Levels are pulling $3-5M annually with zero employees. The one-person startup is not a lifestyle play anymore. It is a legitimate scaling model. Here is what actually separates the solo founders who scale from the ones who stall.
Speed Is the Only Strategy: Why the Fastest Founders Win in 2026 4/1/2026 OpenAI ships major updates every 4-6 weeks. Anthropic drops features that rewrite the rules overnight. A solo founder built an AI platform and sold it for $80M in six months. The market rewards speed more than it has ever rewarded anything else. If you are spending months perfecting before you ship, you are playing a game that no longer exists.
The Developer Freelancing Playbook: How to Land Clients, Set Rates, and Build a Business That Lasts in 2026 3/31/2026 Freelance developer rates range from $40 to $200 per hour in 2026, but most developers who try freelancing quit within six months. Not because the work dries up, but because they treat freelancing like a job instead of a business. Here is the playbook I wish someone had given me before I took the leap.
Open Source as a Growth Engine: How Developers Are Using GitHub to Build Profitable Businesses in 2026 3/31/2026 Open source is quietly becoming the best free marketing channel for bootstrapped founders. Your GitHub repo is a landing page, trust signal, and distribution engine rolled into one. Here is the playbook for turning open source contributions into paying customers, based on what is actually working in 2026.
You're Probably Undercharging: A Practical Guide to SaaS Pricing for Indie Hackers 3/25/2026 Most indie hackers set their price once, pick something that feels safe, and never touch it again. That one decision quietly caps their revenue for months. Here is what I have learned about SaaS pricing from my own products and from watching dozens of founders get it wrong, including me.
From Side Project to First Dollar: The Realistic Path Most Developers Never Take 3/25/2026 Most developers have three to five abandoned side projects sitting in private repos. Not because the ideas were bad, but because nobody ever treated them like products. Here is the gap between building something and making money from it, and how to close it without quitting your job or burning out.
Building Is the Easy Part Now: Distribution Is the Only Moat Left for Indie Hackers 3/23/2026 AI made building fast and cheap. A chef built a media client in under a week. Developers ship production apps in 72-hour sprints. But almost nobody gets users. The best AI builder with no audience is worth less than a mediocre creator with 50,000 email subscribers. Distribution is the only moat left, and most indie hackers are still optimizing the wrong side of the equation.
The Zero Employee Ops Team: How I Automated Every Non-Coding Task in My Solo SaaS 3/20/2026 Running a one-person SaaS means doing sales, support, marketing, billing, and ops on top of actually building the product. I spent months automating 90 percent of the non-coding work with AI agents and workflow tools. Here is the exact stack and every workflow I built.
AI Washing Is Real: The Layoff Lie and the Junior Developer Crisis Nobody Wants to Fix 3/18/2026 Companies are blaming AI for layoffs that have nothing to do with AI. Sam Altman himself confirmed it. Meanwhile, junior developer hiring has collapsed by 73 percent. These two problems are connected, and the industry is ignoring both of them.
I Turned My Claude Chat History Into a Pixel Art City (and Built the Whole Thing With Claude Code) 3/4/2026 AI Town is a web app that takes your Claude conversation export and transforms it into a living, breathing pixel-art town. Every conversation becomes a building. Every message becomes a person walking the streets. The more you have chatted, the bigger your city gets.
Stop Using Generic Link-in-Bio Tools. Your Portfolio Should Prove Your Work, Not Just List It. 3/4/2026 Linktree and its clones are fine for musicians and influencers. They are the wrong tool for anyone who builds software products. Here is what a maker portfolio actually needs to do -- and why most people have been doing it wrong.
Why Founders Are Bad at X (And What to Do About It) 3/4/2026 Most founders know they should be more active on X. Almost none of them are. This is not a motivation problem. It is a systems problem -- and it has a fixable answer.
XPilot Is Live. An AI Autopilot for Your X Presence. 3/3/2026 After pivoting from MarketingNow, XPilot is live today. An AI autopilot that handles your X presence so you can stay focused on building.
I Killed MarketingNow and Built XPilot Instead. Here's Why. 3/2/2026 I spent months building MarketingNow, watched it flatline, and then built the right product in a fraction of the time. This is the full story of what went wrong, what I learned, and how XPilot was born from those mistakes.
The X Content Strategy for Founders: How to Grow from 0 to 10,000 Followers 2/25/2026 Most founders post on X without a real strategy and give up after weeks of silence. Here is the actual framework -- five content pillars, optimal posting frequency, and a 90-day timeline for what growth actually looks like.
SEO for Indie Hackers: What Actually Moved the Needle for Me 2/23/2026 I spent months doing SEO the way every beginner does: stuffing keywords, building random backlinks, and wondering why nothing moved. Then I changed my approach entirely. Here is what actually drove organic traffic to my projects -- with no SEO agency, no budget, and no tricks...
The Build in Public Playbook: Growing Your Personal Brand on X Without a Marketing Team 2/20/2026 Build in public has become one of those phrases that gets used so often it has almost stopped meaning anything. Here is what it actually means in practice, and how to do it in a way that builds a real audience instead of just performing one.
Your First $1 MRR Beats Your First 1,000 Followers: Why Revenue Validation Matters More 2/10/2026 Most indie makers spend months building an audience before trying to make a single dollar. This is backwards. Here is why getting your first paying customer is more valuable than any follower milestone -- and how to do it this week.
The Death of the Flex: Why Proof of Work Is the Only Metric That Matters in 2026 1/23/2026 The indie maker community is facing a credibility crisis. Screenshots can be faked, revenue claims go unverified, and audiences are starting to notice. Here is why verified proof of work is the only thing that will matter from here on.
Premium vs Non-Premium Domains: What You’re Really Paying For 1/10/2026 Explore the differences between premium and non-premium domains, including pricing models, technical considerations, and product tradeoffs to make informed decisions.
Planning the Chaos: Why I Spent My 27th Birthday Coding 12/30/2025 Group chats are where good plans go to die. Here is why we're building Squad In Sync to fix social logistics for good.
From "Bad Period" to #1 on Product Hunt: How I Built PH Wrapped in 24 Hours 12/28/2025 How a rough patch led to a 24-hour build, a #1 Product of the Day, and a renewed sense of momentum.
Stop Validating Ideas. Start Validating Pain. 12/22/2025 Most founders validate ideas through landing pages and signups. But those signals measure curiosity, not pain. Learn why testing pain points first leads to faster, clearer validation.
Creators Are Losing Hours Chasing Trends. I’m Building a Fix. 12/8/2025 If you create content, you already know the struggle Every creator knows this feeling: You sit down ready to film or write…but first you have to figure out what is trending right now. So you open:Google TrendsYouTube TrendingX exploreReddit Popular A...
Let’s talk about vibe coding 9/27/2025 Hello once again, everyone! My name is Alex Cloudstar, and I am thrilled to share a bit about myself and my journey in the world of technology. For those of you who might not be familiar with me (which is quite likely), I am a seasoned software engin...
The Waitlist Illusion 9/9/2025 The Promise of a Waitlist Every indie hacker has experienced the same enticing thought: “I’ll create a landing page, add a waitlist form, and voilà, I’ll instantly know if my idea has demand.” At first glance, this approach seems brilliant. It appear...
Stop Obsessing Over the Perfect Stack 9/2/2025 The Setup: A Familiar Scene You have a brilliant idea, and excitement bubbles within you. You open your code editor, create a repository, and even design a logo. But then a familiar dilemma arises: “Should I choose Next.js or Remix?” “Do I need TypeS...
🚀 My First Real Startup: The Rise (and Flatline) of CoLaunchly 8/7/2025 I never thought I’d write a post like this. But here we are. This is the story of my first real startup. It’s called CoLaunchly. A tool I built to help devs like me actually market their apps instead of letting them die in silence. Let’s rewind a bit...
The Domain Graveyard Problem (And How to Avoid It) 6/7/2025 If you have been in the indie hacker or startup world for a while, you probably know this feeling. You get a new idea. You get excited.You check if the domain is available. It is.You buy it.Then nothing happens. A year later, you look at your domain ...
How I Got #4 on Product Hunt - My First Launch Story 5/14/2025 Hi! I’m Alex Cloudstar, founder of CoLaunchly.io, a launch co-pilot that helps indie makers and developers market their products better. On May 13, 2025, I officially launched CoLaunchly on Product Hunt. In this post, I want to share how it went, wha...
Letting Go: Lessons Learned from My Startup Journey with Taskpad.io 12/14/2024 Hi, internet friends! Today, I want to share my journey of starting and eventually letting go of my first startup. About six months ago, I launched Taskpad.io, a product designed to help freelancers manage their clients, projects, timesheets, invoice...