Learn from indie hackers
who've been there.
Indie hackers build and grow their own software products, solo or in tiny teams, without outside funding. This is where they share what actually worked: case studies, hard-won lessons, and practical advice pulled from real journeys, no generic fluff.
Journeys
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Andrei Gudiu
Turning Romanian bureaucracy into questions, plans, and a vault you can reuse
ACTE123: A Compiler for the Queue at Vehicle Registration
How repeated trips to vehicle registration became reusable plans, a document vault, and a case for fewer wasted trips
Andrei Statescu
Serial starter behind Naramine and cofounder of HausJam
Naramine: Giving Web Novels a Voice Without Leaving the Page
How a self-described starter turned his own listening itch into a browser extension that reads Wattpad and Royal Road stories aloud, runs its free tier on the reader's own machine, and plans to win over the platforms instead of scraping them
Bogdan
Dabbler
Event Newsletter: A Side Project Built in the Margins
Why I scoped a personalized weekly local-events digest small enough to run alongside two kids and a consulting career
Camil
Turning my own problems into products
SoundScrub: From a Terminal Script to a Product
How a tool for cleaning up holiday footage became a focused app that beats the big editors at one job
Cristian
WordPress product builder at Cozmoslabs
A Decade of WordPress Plugins, Built One Slow Year at a Time
Why Cozmoslabs says no to most ideas, lives on yearly renewals, and treats patience as a strategy
Doru
Building scheduling software for dental clinics
Building Dentor in the Most Regulated Data Class There Is
How a dental booking platform turned a GDPR constraint into a moat, and learned to sell in person
Fineas Silaghi
Security researcher and CTF player running AISafe Labs
Selling Security Where SaaS Cannot Follow
Why AISafe ships into corporate networks and air-gapped deployments, and what that choice does to the company
Flavius D.
Builds systems that make hiring decisions better
Pace: Building the Tool That Makes the Right Interview the Easy One
Why structured interviews win in the research and lose in practice, and how Pace closes the gap
Greg
Bootstrapped CX and NPS SaaS founder at Retently
Building Retently to Last, Not to Spike
How a bootstrapped customer-feedback SaaS treats longevity, customer trust, and independence as the real strategy
Ionut F.
Builds audio plugins as a one-person studio
Laura: A One-Person Studio Selling a Synth Forever
Why a niche audio plugin is a textbook solo product, and a perpetual license is a promise subscriptions cannot make
Mihai Negrea
Ex-Microsoft engineer reading every public tender in Romania
DataDriven: Reading Every Public Tender in Romania, Alone
How an ex-Microsoft engineer turned burnout into a solo company that crawls 10,000 sources, OCRs tender documents on a gaming GPU, and gets 300 firms to pay for the result
Mihai
Building OCR tools for developers
Why I Built a Specialized OCR Engine in the Age of ChatGPT
How OCRskill beats general LLMs on the only two numbers that matter: price per call and error rate
Mile Rosu
Dad of one, co-founder of three
Building Church Software Before I Wrote a Line of Code
Why I picked a slow, offline, unglamorous niche, and why distribution is the part I am solving first
Mircea
From agency burnout to $4k MRR
Renzi: Selling Romanian Landlords Relief From the Tax Office
How a property-management SaaS leads with the one feature that sells and prices against a fine, not a competitor
Mircea
From agency burnout to $4k MRR
The $5 Fax: How a Weekend Project Became a Micro-SaaS
Why I built the simplest possible fax service, and what happened when the channels arrived
Petru
SEO veteran at Kink.com
Oria: Shipping Photorealistic 3D Property Tours With a Big-Domain SEO Mindset
How a Kink.com SEO veteran is launching a Gaussian Splatting product on a zero-authority domain
Raul
Software engineer turned curator and community builder
Building the Anti-Hustle Job Board: $19/year for Calm Companies
How getting fired for caring about culture led to a curated community of sustainable workplaces
Raul
Software engineer turned curator and community builder
ebaza.ro: Bolting a Product Onto Traffic That Already Existed
How a four-year-old parked domain became an insurance product, then a WhatsApp close and a set of bots
Titus Nicolae
Applied scientist turning one room photo into a place you can furnish
HausJam: Start From the Room You Already Have
How an applied scientist and a serial starter set out to build a planner that begins with a photograph, keeps a manual fallback next to every model, and may ship first as a cleaner that runs on your laptop
Valentin Bora
Makes sure your email lands in the inbox
doesmyemail.work: A Free Tool as the Top of the Funnel
How a thirty-second email diagnosis becomes a lead magnet, and the same move grows a psychology app
Vlad
Backend engineer turned indie hacker
Building sisif.ai: an AI Video API
How I went from 0 customers to growing MRR by abandoning traditional marketing
Zoltan Szogyenyi
Chief builder at Bergside, creator of Flowbite
From a Rejected ThemeForest Template to 70k a Month
How Flowbite grew an open-source component library into a bootstrapped, two-person business
Events
View allBehind the site is a real, in-person community: Indie TM. Builders in Timișoara meet up every two weeks to demo what they're shipping, trade tactics, and give each other honest feedback. Each recap below turns those conversations into advice anyone can use.
September 3, 2026
DevPlant Cowork, Timisoara
Indie TM #16: An Army of Bots and a Fax That Must Stay Simple
What we learned at our sixteenth meetup, where Raul opened eBaza's automations and Mircea walked SingleFax into HIPAA Secure, WhatsApp, and a roast about staying simple
August 20, 2026
Cowork Timisoara - The Office, Timisoara
Indie TM #15: Pick a Customer Before Another Feature
What we learned at our fifteenth meetup, where Andrei Gudiu opened ACTE123 and the room asked who pays for a compiler of Romanian bureaucracy
August 6, 2026
Cowork Timisoara - The Office, Timisoara
Indie TM #14: One Photograph, Then the Furniture Moves
What we learned at our fourteenth meetup, where Titus Nicolae and Andrei Statescu opened HausJam and the room argued about who should pay
July 23, 2026
Cowork Timisoara - The Office, Timisoara
Indie TM #13: Teaching the Browser to Read Web Novels Aloud
What we learned at our thirteenth meetup, where Andrei Statescu demoed Naramine and the room rewrote his onboarding
July 9, 2026
DevPlant, Timisoara
Indie TM #12: One Founder, Ten Thousand Sources, Every Tender in Romania
What we learned at our twelfth meetup, where Mihai Negrea opened the books on DataDriven
June 25, 2026
DevPlant, Timisoara
Indie TM #11: An Intent Graph and the Hunt for Users
What we learned at our eleventh meetup, back at DevPlant in Timisoara
June 10, 2026
DevPlant, Timisoara
Indie TM #10: Four Builds and the Reach Problem
What we learned at our tenth meetup, this time at DevPlant in Timisoara
May 28, 2026
Cowork Timisoara - The Office, Timisoara
Indie TM #9: Six Demos and a BYOK Debate
What we learned at our ninth meetup at Cowork Timisoara
April 22, 2026
Cowork Timisoara - The Office, Timisoara
Indie TM #7: News as a Traffic Locomotive
What we learned at our seventh meetup at Cowork Timisoara
April 3, 2026
Cowork Timisoara - The Office, Timisoara
Indie TM #6: From ThemeForest Rejects to 70k/Month
What we learned at our sixth meetup at Cowork Timisoara
March 19, 2026
Cowork Timisoara - The Office, Timisoara
Indie TM #5: SEO Tactics That Actually Work
What we learned at our fifth meetup at Cowork Timisoara
Advice by Category
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Latest Advice
MirceaDo not bury the pay-per-send action under a suite
The room looked at email-to-fax, WhatsApp-to-fax, MCP, HIPAA Secure, an EIN flow, company subscriptions, and a pay-to-unlock inbox, and heard a suite growing on top of upload, number, pay, send. Someone said it was getting complicated, that the product used to be simple. HIPAA Secure can be a paid lane. A received fax can sit behind a $4.99 hold. Those are still one job. A pile of pipes is not. If a stranger cannot finish a fax in sixty seconds, you have left the weekend MVP. Keep the $0.99 action on the first screen. Put the rest behind a door the occasional sender never has to open.
Andrei GudiuEncode the counter as procedure plus scenario, not as a blog post
Andrei did not start from a CMS article about "how to register a car." He started from a physical board that already grouped cases, then noticed that nine to fourteen requirements collapsed to seven shared ones. That observation produced a compiler. A procedure plus a scenario creates a versioned JSON plan of questions, steps, fees, and documents. Each requirement records whether the user needs a copy, an original, or a legalized copy. A blog post goes stale when the counter reprints the board. A recipe can be cloned, versioned, and asked a new question. If you are digitizing a bureaucracy, model the counter's own categories before you write marketing copy. The panel is the schema. The article is the residue.
Andrei GudiuClone the ninety percent that is already the same
Andrei's builder treats transfer-of-registration and first-registration as cousins, not as two products. He clones the shared questions, steps, and fees, then overrides the labels and the required flags that actually differ, parents' IDs at kindergarten, motorcycle plates at 22 lei versus car plates at 56. That is cheaper than maintaining two trees that drift, and it is more honest than a single checklist that lies to half the room. The rule for any procedure product is to find the seven common requirements before you design the fourteenth unique one. Clone first. Override second. If a change to a question does not propagate, you do not have a system. You have a pile of copies.
Andrei GudiuAsk the question that prevents the wasted trip
The Dumbrăvița contract taught Andrei a cheaper product rule than another page of explanation. The town hall stamped a machine translation. The next counter wanted an authorized translation and the English original. The missing question was not "what is a translation." It was "did you already get this stamped," because that answer changes the bag you take tomorrow. Bureaucracy products fail by listing every document in the universe. They work by asking the fork that would have sent you home. If your checklist cannot change after a yes, it is a brochure. Put the expensive mistake, the fourth visit, the rejected copy, into a single required question and let the plan rewrite itself.
Andrei GudiuAsk for the exact value, not a category
Ask for the precise fact that deletes later questions. Exact age removes a tree of "under 14" follow-ups. A typed date is faster than a set of dropdowns for many people. The same rule applies to contextual requiredness. Ask for the raw value and let the plan hide the branches that do not apply.
Open source, built by indie hackers
indie.md is a free, open-source project. Every journey and every piece of advice here was contributed by a builder who learned it the hard way. Add your own story, suggest an edit, or help improve the site: it all happens in the open on GitHub.
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