Here's what you'll find in this issue:

• This founder bet on one A+ hire. Now he’s running a $340k/year studio with almost no management overhead.
• 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: Launch an affiliate program once door-to-door stops scaling.

Justworks handles HR, payroll, and benefits complexity, so you can focus on building your small business.

Tom Garcy spent two years holding Garcy Studio steady at $340k/yr while quietly cutting his team and workload in half. He's now earning double (or triple) per project hour, and his other startup got acquired in the middle of all this.

Garcy Studio is a boutique branding and digital identity shop with a core team of three. Tom used AI to compress the messy operational parts of agency work: client intake, briefing, task assignment, and project structure. He's also dogfooding an internal product that turns each client into a shared knowledge base the team can query anytime. Add in 99% word-of-mouth growth and a shift toward monthly fees, and you can see why the model holds together.

In our interview with Tom, he walks through the exact decisions that made a three-person studio more profitable, more focused, and easier to run. There's a lot packed into this one! Enjoy.

Read the full article →

Meet Accio Work, the agentic workspace designed to run your business operations end to end. From sourcing products and negotiating with suppliers to managing your store and launching marketing campaigns, Accio Work handles the execution so you don’t have to.

Powered by verified capabilities and deep integrations with business tools, it doesn’t just generate ideas, it takes action. Backed by Alibaba.com’s global supplier network and over 1B products, it seamlessly connects strategy to execution.

Stay in control while everything runs on autopilot.

Let Accio Work — Try One Week Free!

1. Hatch: Ditch ChatGPT. Use the most productive AI assistant ever made. From the founders of Indie Hackers.

2. Cursor: AI code editor that predicts your next edit and understands your project context.

3. Repo Prompt: Generate and edit code across repositories using AI-driven prompts.

4. Tabnine: Code completions from a fast AI model you can run locally.

5. v0: Type a prompt — v0 drafts production-ready React, Vue, or Svelte components.

See all 30 tools in the directory →

Launch an affiliate program once door-to-door stops scaling.

Chekkit, a software platform that helps local businesses manage online reviews and text customers back, started by literally knocking on restaurant doors in Winnipeg and Calgary. Founder Daniel Fayle and his co-founders eventually hit the ceiling of what hand-to-hand sales could do.

So in 2022, they flipped on an affiliate program: outside marketers and consultants get a cut for every customer they bring in. And this is now one of Chekkit's biggest growth engines, pushing them past $166K/month.

Read the full growth report →

Every day, indie hackers post updates about the products they're building. Here's what the community voted to the top yesterday!

	1. LiFast: Autopilot your LinkedIn B2B Marketing I stopped grinding 8hrs/week on LinkedIn and 3x’d my inbound leads	▲ 15
	2. Lumia: An all-in-one AI wellness system for a better life I was using 5 apps to fix my life. So I built one instead.	▲ 15
	3. Opencals: Shopify for service businesses I stopped building onboarding and built AI instead.	▲ 7

Enjoy building in public? Post an update to your product page on Indie Hackers, and it will automatically be added to the daily leaderboard.

AI models have evolved. ChatGPT has not.

We're still using the same old AI assistant products we were using in 2022, even though the models underneath them keep getting better.

It's time for the next generation of AI assistants.

Introducing Hatch, the most productive AI assistant ever made.

From the creators of Indie Hackers, Hatch was thoughtfully crafted to help you get real work done. From floating windows to tagging documents, we've reimagined every aspect of your daily AI assistant to help you operate at a higher level.

Try Hatch free. Use code INDIE30FREE for 100% off for 1 month.

To compensate for no college, I'd personally overinvest in reading (actual literature, not business porn), writing, and conversation.

—Channing

Did you like today's stories? Did they suck? Which ones?

We're constantly changing things up to make this newsletter more useful, so let us know what you think by replying directly to this email. We read every reply!

Special thanks to Yushavel Calderon for the graphic design, and to James Fleischmann for contributing a post.

—Channing