I used to spend hours keeping screenshots in my docs up to date. Click through the app. Screenshot. Crop. Annotate. Upload. Repeat... Starting from today. Never again. 🖼️ Introducing screenshot automation for your docs.

Imagine thinking name validation is a good idea

Can devs please chill 😐

I pray everyday to have this much confidence

i don't need much

3 years ago, I bought myself a base M1 Air after saving $1,000 for over a year. Using that laptop, I built and launched my first startup. Today that startup is doing $15K MRR Spending that much on a laptop hurt... but it ended up being the best investment I've ever made.

I've been creating images for our blog using AI (Midjourney), and the results have been beyond mind-blowing 🤯

Us: We can no longer trust Paddle, so we're moving to @stripe Stripe: no. I'm so tired man — 1/6

Never do customer support before bed 😅

WE MADE IT!!!! 💃 — $50,000 MRR — 2 founders — 2.5 years in business — Still 100% bootstrapped and building in public

I gave it to him.

My initials are unironically W. O. W

WE ARE SO BACK!!!!

I recently found this gem: saaslandingpage(dot)com. It has almost 700 examples of beautiful landing pages from around the web. As someone who struggles to build landing pages, this was something I needed 😋

Senja just hit 300 customers and $7.4K MRR If I could start again from zero, I'd fix these 12 mistakes.

I’m leaving Senja. 3.5 years ago, I wrote Senja’s first line of code. I’d just finished high school, and was thinking deeply about what it was I wanted to do with the next chapter of my life. I learned about Indie Hacking after seeing folks like @tdinh_me, @levelsio, @yongfook and @tibo_maker building in public here on X. I knew instantly that that was what I wanted to do. So I wrote the code, happy to ship a fun side-project. If you told me that 3.5 years ago that we’d be at $800K ARR today, I’d have laughed. But we did it. @helloitsolly DM’d me on X a month after I launched. He had big ideas for Senja, and knew if we worked together, we could take Senja from being a hobby project to being an actual business. It’s been a LONG journey since then. We poured our blood, sweat, and tears into Senja. We stayed broke for a year, burned out a dozen times and almost quit every quarter. But we pushed through and our bet paid off. We built arguably the best product in our space, and our product is used millions of times every week. We’re finally able to pay ourselves decently, and we work a lot less. This has been life-changing and incredibly rewarding. I don’t regret a second of it. But it’s clear to me that my time here has come to an end. Over the last 9 months or so, I’ve really struggled to find a working rhythm. We’d work for a week and feel great, then I’d be completely bummed out the next. The last few months have been very start-stop, and we haven’t been able to move anywhere as quickly as we used to. I’ve tried to get back on track. Coaching, long breaks, going down to a 4-day work week, taking proper care of myself etc etc. But none of it’s worked. It started to become clear to me that this isn’t a temporary dip. I’ve accomplished what I wanted to with Senja. I’ve built something I’m proud of, and I have the financial freedom to show for it. But now it’s clear to me that I need a change. My instinct is, I’ll get significantly more personal growth away from Senja. There’s still so much I want to build, new working dynamics I want to try, and skills I want to learn. I don’t think I can achieve this with the creativity and freedom I want while working here. We considered selling. But Olly and I aren’t convinced that this is the right time. The business is still growing, and there’s still A LOT we haven’t tried. So I’ve decided to step down instead, and sell my shares to Olly while keeping a small stake. We’re still working out the details, but both of us are trying to be as fair as possible to ourselves and the business. So what’s next? In the short term I’ll keep cooking at @SenjaHQ. We have a few mind-blowing things in the works 👀 And later, I’m going to take the skills I’ve gained over the last 3 years, and use them to ship something amazing… something that better aligns with my current values. I’m not 100% sure what that is yet, but I’m happy to start all over and take a bet on myself. Thanks for reading this far, and huge thanks to everyone who’s been following along since day #1. Thank you @helloitsolly and @rotimi_best. Senja would not be where it is today without you. ✌️

I can't believe this is available for free. @posthog has written an insanely comprehensive handbook that shares exactly how their company operates at each level. Engineering, design, marketing, operations etc. LOADS of ideas to steal for SaaS teams posthog.com/handbook

We're in the endgame now 🫡 One more square to $50K MRR.

IndieHacking in Nigeria. A day in the life. ✨ 1. Go to desk 2. Random power cut. Turn on generator 3. We're out of diesel. Fuel prices just 2x'd so no point 4. At least you're laptop is charged ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 5. Boot up computer 6. The Wifi isn't working. No explanation it just isn't. 7. Try your 3 backup SIM cards 8. Hooray one's working @ 10mbps 9. Power comes back on for 5 seconds and goes out again for 3 hours 10. Laptop dies 11. Guess I'm done for today™

Trying again to switch from @cursor_ai to @zeddotdev Cursor is unbelievably slow and janky even on my M3 Mac... Zed is such a breath of fresh air.

I'm honestly so tired of it all. So tired of being on the "high-risk list" for literally everything, even shopping?? So tired of wanting to put things into the world, but not being able to because of where I was born. I want out, and I've never wanted it more.

Introducing Ferndesk The help center that automatically keeps itself up to date.

Underrated: Different favicons for your app and marketing site.

What's the best way to run background jobs with per organization concurrency? Trigger (dot) dev looks sick, but super wary of introducing yet another web service.

B2B hits different 😵‍💫

Other fun misconceptions about names: - people have >2 names - people's names don't have numbers - people's names do not have spaces - people's names do not change - people's names have no "bad" words At senja.io we only have one, unvalidated name field because we know not to assume you can make sense of names.

Respect the hustle

I'm 100% doing this the next time this happens

$1k MRR!!! 🥳 Finally filled in the bar after almost a year of trying 🎉 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Our little startup just crossed $2,000 MRR 🥳 → 11 months to get to $1,000 → 40 days to get to $2,000

If your ads don't look like this what's even the point?

reached $4K mrr! 😄

My SaaS is about to cross $300 MRR, and I still don't have: - password reset - a billing portal - change email - a knowledge base - dark mode Best to worry about these once people actually need them 😅

Senja is now at $10K MRR!!!! Took over a year but we're finally there 🥰

My expectation when starting to build in public: $0 → $5KMRR in 6 months 🤑 Reality: $0 → $100MRR in 8 months 🙈 Building a startup isn't half as easy as I thought it would be 😅

We're running an experiment When someone hit a limit in our app we'd show them this massive paywall with 4 plans and dozens of things to read Now we're only presenting - one plan - with one cta - and as little to read as possible This will either tank or skyrocket conversion

Building a SaaS full-time over the last 2 years has made it crystal clear to me that I do my best work when I have zero distractions. Thanks to Senja, I now have my own little office!

In love with senja.io's new 404 page 💜

I built Cursor for your 🫵 help center Today I'm launching Ferndesk, the fastest way to build a help center that never goes out of date.

Now at $1500 MRR and I'm only just adding password reset 😅

A company with $5M in funding is using my product 🤯

MOM! DAD! WE MADE IT!!!

After over a year of Indie hacking, we've finally hit my first Indie Hacking goal for senja.io... $5K MRR 🥳 Biggest learnings: ##1. Ship fast, fail fast Since we released Senja, I've updated the app over 2,000 times. We're working in a very competitive market with a very low moat, so instead of building just another product, we decided to create the best product in our space. That meant: — listening and building customer requests — trying things nobody else is doing — shipping fast and failing even faster Now we have a product that is one of the best tools in the market, and because our users love the product so much, word of mouth has started to take off. Focusing on product primarily instead of marketing meant that it would take much longer for growth to kick in. But because we have 100s of happy customers and they keep on recommending us, growth is starting to ramp up. We're also constantly experimenting with our marketing. We've tried dozens of things, from shitposting on Twitter to partnering with website builders. A lot of the things we've tried have failed horribly, but the few that worked have worked really well. ## 2. Separate Engineering and Marketing The biggest mistake we've made marketing wise is probably building our marketing site from scratch with code. That meant every change to our marketing site would lead to a back and forth between me and my cofounder. He'd need to change something but couldn't till I was free. Because of this, we couldn't add marketing pages and other resources as quickly as we needed to. Our SEO and content marketing have suffered. Adding a headless CMS didn't help either. Whenever we wanted to try something new, we'd have to build it twice. Once in code, then in our cms. Now we're rebuilding our entire marketing site with (releasing this week!) so that all marketing can be done independently from dev work. ## 3. Start Reporting Up until two months ago, I didn't understand just how powerful reporting is. For most of Senja's life, we tracked signups + customers per day and also asked people where they came from (search, social, ads etc). But we never had concrete reporting in place. To prepare for the road ahead, last week my cofounder and I sat down and spent a day creating reports and my mind has already been blown. Now we know: — which marketing channels are working best for us. — how long it takes the average user to go from signup → upgrade. — how many users go from paywall to upgrade — how many users we can upsell — who our top personas are And much more. If I could go back and do one thing differently, it would be have concrete reporting in from day 1. # Next steps I'm feeling extremely optimistic about the future. SEO is still one of our best performing channels, so we're going to be shipping a lot more help guides, resources and blog posts in the upcoming weeks. We now get over 500 signups per month but less than 10% of them upgrade. So we'll be focusing more on customer success too. We're going to get much more aggressive with our marketing. We'll be: — going toe to toe with our competitors — reaching out to twice as many people through social media, cold outreach et cetera — launching new things every month — running many more experiments — collaborating with many more awesome creators. As always, we'll be sharing every interesting thing we learn and try in public 🔥 The support from the build in public community so far has been overwhelming. We'd never have gotten started without Twitter and Indie Hackers. The inspiration, motivation and critique from the community is what's kept us going for a year. Now I'm feeling better than ever, and I'm ready to take our little business to the next level. Thank you for everything 💜

2 years ago: → Earning $0/mo → 20 followers → Zero experience building/growing a business Today: → Business is making $17K/mo → Building an app with 12,000+ users → 730+ customers, 12,000+ users All started with one tweet:

I spent the first 6 months building my startup without MRR. So, I thought I'd write a post highlighting everything we did to break out of absolute zero. Some notes about: 💜 Finding your selling points ⚡️ Improving onboarding 👀 Acquiring more users indiehackers.com/post/from-0…

Everything is down... Unless, you host all your infra on @Railway metal and @PlanetScale. In that case, you shouldn't notice 🥰

Had no idea it was you 🫠 Friendly fire!

Senja got me my first monitor!

After: → 6 months of development → 1200+ hours of work → 260 signups → 3 pivots Senja has finally gotten its first paying customer!!!!

If you're building anything with AI, set up a tool like Helicone. Just installed it, and now I can see: — Which users are costing me the most money — Cost breakdown by prompt, org, model, price — Which models are the most used — Error rates, etc etc

Senja just got its first agency customer 🥳 +$300 MRR 💰

My favourite icon library is hands-down lucide.dev — 1300+ free icons — Export/Copy as SVG, PNG, JSX, Data URL etc — SDKs for React, Vue, Angular and Svelte 🥰

There are only two kinds of startups. Those that charge $29/mo and those that charge $30/mo

Have more friction? This isn't friction, this is a complete wall!!!

Using @better_auth has been one of my better technical decisions of late. Only took 3 hours to implement: — Email + password login — Team access + invitations — User impersonation — Password reset + changing emails — RBAC etc.

Senja just hit 30,000+ users and $54K MRR. If I could start building @SenjaHQ all over again I would have: 1. Put everything critical on the main domain No app.senja or support.senja or widget.senja etc. Analytics and reporting becomes 10X easier when everything lives on one domain. This isn't something I want to/am going to change now, but I really do wish I had opted for this setup. 2. Never have used an MoR Starting out with Paddle has caused us an unquantifiable amount of heartache that we're still dealing with. - bad support (for us and customers) - horrible UX - so many limitations, even on Paddle billing - slow payouts If you're building anything serious, just use @stripe. Or start with an MoR and move away once you see growth. 3. Simplified our tech stack When we started out I spent waaay to much time dabbling with our tech stack. Tried tools I had never heard of and focused on scalability when we had zero users. You can change your tech/tooling at any time. So keep things stupid simple and add as you grow. 4. Slowed down We've likely shipped more this year, than any social proof tool in the market has in the last 2. But that's been a double-edged sword. We've shipped quickly while barely iterating on what we've already got. And the features we've launched are riddled with bugs. Loads of our documentation is out of date, and we still don't have the SOPs we need written down to empower the rest of our tiny team. The unsexy side of building a big SaaS is doing these things. But it takes slowing down on product work to get there. 5. Invested in myself earlier For the last 2 years building, I've had no steady internet/power because of where I live. It's the norm here, and because of that I never considered doing anything to improve it. I've lost 100+ hours on dealing with crappy internet so far. That's time could have been spent helping our users, building new features or leveling up. Now I'm using @Starlink + @EcoFlowTech + I've built a tiny office to do my work, and I'm shipping faster than ever!

Crossed $750 MRR with @FerndeskHQ!!! → slowly but surely making my way to $1,000 💫

I'm slowly getting better at creating abstract illustrations for my blog with AI (Midjourney). Here are some of the most recent ones:

Dedication is writing a 1000 word long newsletter every week for 3 subscribers 😂

Been grinding nonstop for a week so I almost didn't notice we passed $100,000 ARR for senja.io 🎉

GPT-4 just localized my entire app 👀

✅ $20K MRR The road to $50,000 begins ⚡

No idea why we've been given the boot Even appealed with 6 months of statements from our bank and Paddle. No dice @stripesupport One of the only possible reasons I can think of is that I'm a Nigerian registering with a UK business account If that's the case I'm extremely sad

Stopped working like a maniac and started taking care of my health. Prev: — Wake up by 8/9 — start work with 2 coffees — work non-stop till 9 pm — eat instant ramen for dinner — in bed by 1 am Now: — Wake up by 7 — eat 3 healthy meals/day — work in sprints till 6/7pm — exercise + read daily — in bed by 11 pm tops I wasn't enjoying building over the last few weeks. Fixing my routine made everything fun again!

Building a Zapier integration for my SaaS right now so I can say we support over 5,000 integrations 😂

Today is my last day at Senja. I was going to start this with what posts like this usually do, but I think I'd rather do some honest posting today. The last few weeks have been some of the hardest of my life. Going into this exit, I thought I had a good idea of what it would take. The tasks were simple. I thought all I had to do was sit down, and do them. What I severely underestimated though, was how mentally and emotionally exhausting this would end up being. Senja is all I've known and loved over these last few years. It's what I've spent two-thirds of my waking hours working on and thinking about. I gave it everything I had and more. I never dabbled with any other projects, or took any hobbies seriously since we started on this journey. So "giving it up" ended up being a lot more difficult than I thought. All people know me as is "the guy building Senja." I didn't realize it at the time, but I was NOT ready to go from that, to being the guy who "used to" build Senja. So I immediately moved on to the next thing, even before completing my exit. I think the biggest mistake I made during this entire process was launching @ferndeskhq ***in the middle of it*** Not because Ferndesk isn't what I'm excited to work on next (IT IS!) But because it threw a curveball at an already complex process. All of a sudden, I was working on "the past" while simultaneously working on "the future," and that completely ruined my ability to think rationally and solve the immediate problems at Senja. I thought I could do both, but in reality, it made me execute on both things poorly. I wanted desperately to make progress on Ferndesk. But I also desperately wanted to make progress on the exit. Balls started to drop. People started getting disappointed. On Tuesday, I broke down in my office and spent the day in tears, even though I was at the tail end of my handover. I put too much pressure on myself, and started to crack under it. If it wasn't for the friends I've met along this journey... @itsjustamar, @eobanye and @helloitsolly, I would NOT have pulled through (THANK YOU) So going back, I'd have waited just a bit longer before diving into my next thing :) Anyway, enough whining... I'm grateful. For everything. For this community that inspired me to start Senja in the first place. For the indie hackers that shared all the ups and downs and convinced me to do the same. For my friends and family who've given me their unconditional support. And most importantly, to @helloitsolly who bet on a 17-year old fresh out of high school 3.5 years ago. Would not have gotten remotely this far without you. Heck, I wouldn't have gotten through the last 2 weeks if not for you... Today a new chapter finally begins, and even though I'm pretty tired right now, I get giddy when I think of what's next. With Ferndesk, I'm solving a difficult problem that I'm really excited to crack. It's a far cry from where I want it to be, but that'll easily be solved with a few more weeks of consistent work. So excited to get back on top of it! But more importantly, will finally take a much needed break... Anyway, that's all for now. Thanks for reading ✌️

One year ago I thought charging $10/month for senja.io was way too high. Fast forward 1 year later and someone just paid $990 upfront to use the same product 🤯

Crazy how much of a difference using icons can make.

We've hit $6,000 MRR for senja.io!! May has been the best for growth so far, and I reckon that's because we went all in on marketing & customer success — more experiments — better help guides — improved onboarding — engineering as marketing Next stop, ramen 🍜

I'm really digging this signup page style. Feels like the dashboard is just one step away from being unlocked. Haven't done any tests of my own, but it's really good for conversion from what I've heard!

Half of your performance issues can be fixed by moving all your services to the same region. The other half can be fixed by adding indexes. It's not that hard.

Ferndesk has made its first $1K 🥳

Only one box left 🔥

I don’t agree with this - Senja's launch post had 50 likes - It took us 6 months of daily effort to get the first customer - 6 months later we hit $1K MRR - 1 year later we hit $20K MRR - another year later we hit $50K MRR

The key to making images like these are using image prompts. Format: Image url + object you want to be integrated into the design. This input image + "purple heart" produced these illustrations 👇 Input image // Output

I just launched my SaaS... Now what??? For most solo developers, this is where the journey ends. But we're just getting started. Here's exactly how I plan to hit $1K MRR, $5K MRR and beyond ✍️

If you're building an AI product with Stripe, I highly recommend you check out @AutumnPricing It only took me an hour of dev time to set up subscriptions and metered billing... Was only able to launch early thanks to them!

Finally hit $1K MRR for @ferndeskhq 🥳 It took: - 3 months since launch - shipping every day - talking to customers weekly - multiple iterations on product - lots of concierge support to get there... Here's how I'm going to get to $2k ↓

Are there any good pricing plan names other than - Starter - Pro that don't suck?

It feels CRIMINAL how we've grown without sweating the small stuff — Password reset at $1K MRR — Made app responsive at $7K MRR — Set up caching at $10K MRR — Fixed our pagespeed score at $15K MRR (it was 27 😅) Building a good product comes first. Everything else comes later.

I have no words. Senja, the business I've been working on non-stop for the last 10 months just crossed $500 MRR!!! Some thoughts:

localhost:3000 is now my most visited website 😂

Two years ago, I used to lose my mind if we got 5 new customers in a whole month. Now we're consistently getting 5 - 10 per day 🤯 Compounding growth is real!!!

When I started building Senja as a dev project last year, I was terrified that it would die as just another unfinished side project. Which is why I still can't believe that today, a company valued at $150M is integrating with us as their dedicated testimonial tool. Introducing Senja + Lemcal - get more calendar bookings with social proof! Now @lemcalhq users can get more meetings booked by embedding their video or text testimonials (from Senja or 20+ social media platforms and review sites).

Senja hit $3.5K MRR 🥳 I usually don't share half milestones, but this is _really_ big for us because it's half of our ramen goal 🍜

X doesn't want your links to get clicked. Still can't believe link previews went from this... to this. — Zero context and doesn't look clickable Going to build and ship a micro tool to fix this in a couple hours 🫡 #buildinpublic

I just canceled my Miro and Balsamiq subscription. Creating high-fidelity wireframes with @lovable is so ridiculously fast that I can't justify using a traditional wireframing tool anymore. Forget vibe coding. Vibe wireframing is the future.

Growing up is realizing that none of these are validation: — waitlist signups — likes on your launch post — thousands of visits — hundreds of promises saying they'll use the product The only validation is money in the bank. If nobody's willing to commit, it's not worth doing.

January build in public report 💜 💰 $3940 total revenue! (+46%) 💸 $2643 MRR (+105%) 👀 16.7K visits (+77%) 👋 590 signups (+35%) 🤵 50 new customers (+78%) 💔 1 churn I didn't think it was possible to double on

$100 MRR 🥳 Things are finally looking up for us! Since we: - Improved our UX & onboarding - Doubled down on our unique selling points - Started talking to users in our community ...we've started getting customers with less effort. Next milestone: $200!!!

So this tweet blew up 😅 If you’d like to support a project without crappy name validation rules, I’m currently building senja.io to make testimonial collection, management and sharing fun!

Here are all the tools I use to ship incredibly quickly — Relational DB: Postgres — Vector search: Postgres — NoSQL storage: Postgres — Background jobs: Postgres — Auth: Postgres — Full text search: Postgres — Rate limiting: Postgres — KV: Postgres — Feature flags: Postgres

Heavily considering switching from Vercel to @Cloudflare Pages. Anybody using it in production?

December build in public report 💜 💰 $2,726 total revenue! (+131%) 💸 $1289 MRR (+55%) 👀 9.4K visits (+8.4%) 👋 436 signups (+66%) 🤵 28 new customers (+55%) 💔 1 churn First $2K month!!!!

Almost missed this, but Senja has now crossed $100K in all time revenue 🎉

Are you even a startup founder if you’re not constantly sleep-deprived 😅

Tomorrow, I'm finally sharing what I've been working on over the last month. It's still very barebones, and I'm hesitant to share it. But I was born building in public and I'll die building in public. So see you tomorrow 🫡

I get ~ 1 DM a day from someone asking about my tech stack. I picked it when we where at $0 MRR. Now we're at $13K MRR and not a single thing has changed. Here's what we're using... — Svelte + Sveltekit: Site and Widgets — Postgres + Hasura: DB and API — Firebase: Authentication — AWS S3: Storage — Mux: Video storage and delievery — BunnyCDN + Cloudflare: CDN and image optimization — Tailwind: Styling — Sentry: Monitoring — Vercel: Hosting If I had to start from scratch again, I'd pick this tech stack every single time.

This. changes. EVERYTHING Today I'm launching the Ferndesk GitHub integration 🪶 Write hyper-accurate help docs in seconds using your code Watch me one-shot all 10 of my integration docs

Just shipped what I think might just be the most beautiful testimonial widget ever. → built with senja.io

Product not launched yet but... WE HAVE MRRRRRRRRR!!!!