Follow real teams building in the open — revenue verified, so you can believe what you read.

Polina Ross

in Indie Valley· 6d

E6 · The Growth Channel You Can't Buy

LinkedIn wanted $31 per 1,000 eyeballs — dead math for a $1 product. Meanwhile our exact customers publish themselves in public every single week, and almost nobody treats that as a channel. We do: one pasted link becomes a stack of personal emails. Here's a question that decides more product fates than any feature ever shipped: where do your customers come from — repeatably, at a cost that doesn't eat you alive? Not "how do we get a launch spike". A channel…

Polina Ross

in Indie Valley· 6d

Yes, we copied TrustMRR (but not exactly)

Well — a third of it. The story is worth telling properly, because the difference between the thirds is basically our whole thesis. October 28, 2025. Pieter Levels tweets that the MRR screenshots in your feed are fake. Half a million views, because everyone knows he's right. 48 hours later Marc Lou ships TrustMRR — a leaderboard of startups with revenue verified through readonly payment APIs. Built in about a day, seeded with his own 8 products, $18k MRR within 5 days. One of the cleanest speedruns this scene has ever seen. Everyone saw the leaderboard. I couldn't stop looking at the business model. TrustMRR's revenue doesn't come from the product — it comes from the sponsor slots along the sides, $1.5k–2k a month each. What Marc actually monetized is his distribution: an X audience plus SEO, packaged into a page where you can rent a slice of his traffic. Around $35k a month as I write this — a number most SaaS never touch, generated by a catalog. Zero shade. It's a masterclass, and we studied it. The part I didn't buy was the job. TrustMRR drifted from leaderboard to marketplace — the browser tab literally reads "Buy and Sell SaaS Startups" now. And a marketplace visit is transactional: you list your startup for sale, you leave, you come back the day a buyer knocks. The site claims 180k monthly visitors; almost all of it lands on the front page and leaves. Which is fine — for that job. Selling your startup is something you do once. But look at what's sitting underneath that job. A readonly key to a payment processor. A number nobody can fake. Trust, manufactured at the source. And here's the actual lesson of this post, so let me say it plainly: a mechanic and a job are different things. Verified revenue is a mechanic. "Sell your startup" is a job. Marc bolted them together in 48 hours, and the speed hid the fact that they're separable — the same mechanic can carry other jobs, including jobs much deeper than the one it launched with. Here's the job we transplanted it onto. A builder doesn't need to sell their company daily. What they need daily is different: to know what's actually working for people like them, to be seen doing real work, to not build alone. That's not a transaction — that's a relationship. So we took the verified line and built the opposite product around it: The line isn't a leaderboard here, it's the spine of a story. Teams publish episodes, and every episode drops a marker on the revenue graph: you read what they tried, then you watch what the line did about it. A leaderboard tells you who's winning. A markedup line tells you how. You don't browse startups, you follow people. Pilots, arcs, seasons, comment threads worth living in. You come back the way you come back to a series and the people watching it with you — not the way you check a catalog. And the money flows the opposite direction. On a marketplace, a builder gets paid on the day they leave: the exit. Here, viewers back teams at $1 a month, and the platform pays a share of what it earns back to the builders who make it worth watching. You earn by staying, not by leaving. Same ingredient, opposite physics. A marketplace visit ends a relationship. An episode continues one. The takeaway, if you're building anything: ideas were never the scarce part, and since AI, even execution isn't. Proofs are scarce. When someone demonstrates that a mechanic works — people pay, come back, tell their friends — the interesting question is not "am I too late". It's "what other jobs could this mechanic carry". Nobody in this world is obligated to conjure a unicorn from a blank page; spotting a proven mechanic and pointing it at a job the original ignored is some of the highestleverage work a small team can do. Marc himself did exactly that: leaderboards existed, ad slots existed, fake screenshots were an old joke. He composed known parts at the right 48 hours. So, did we copy TrustMRR? We copied the proof — gratefully. The job, the retention, the economy got rebuilt from scratch around a different person: not the founder leaving, the builder staying. And sometimes the transplant outgrows the donor. TrustMRR is a brilliant 48hour product that monetizes a moment of attention. Indie Valley wants to be infrastructure for everything around that attention — the stories, the people, the proof. I believe the deeper job makes this the bigger company. Believe, not know — and the difference between those two words is exactly what our own verified line is for. It's public, it runs by the same rules as everyone else's here, and it will grade this bet in front of you. A marketplace is where a startup's story ends. We're building the place where it gets told.

Marat Metz

in BHAG AI· 6d

Nobody wants your product

Not yours specifically. Anybody's. A marketer wraps a 12hour day, brain fried, and opens Netflix. He doesn't want Netflix. He wants to get from point A — fried, wired, can't sleep — to point B: switched off, asleep in time to function tomorrow. Netflix is just the cheapest known route from A to B. The day something walks that route better, his "loyalty" evaporates, and he won't even notice it leaving. That A→B transition is what Jobs to Be Done calls a job. Products get hired for jobs — and fired the day a better hire shows up. Nobody wants your app, your onboarding, your settings page: whoever signed up had a job and didn't know a better way than pushing through your registration form. That's the entire relationship. A job isn't a use case, and it isn't a feature request. It has a fixed anatomy: — Context. Point A: where the person is, what they know, how they feel. Fried after a 12hour day. — Trigger. The event that starts the movement. Closed the laptop on the last mustdo task. — Expected outcome, with criteria. Point B as they imagine it before acting. Switched off, zero effort required, asleep by midnight. — The higher outcome. What B is for. Be sharp tomorrow — he's midproject with a deadline. Written out as one sentence — this is the template, steal it: When \[context + trigger\], I want \[outcome + criteria\], so that \[the bigger outcome + how I'll feel\]. "When I've closed the day's real work and my brain is fried, I want to switch off with zero effort, so that I fall asleep and I'm sharp tomorrow." Two rules for using it: 1\. Match detail to decision size. The minimal job is just want + verb: "want to close the cookie popup", "want to see the discount". Microfeature — micro form is enough. Positioning, pricing, new product — write the full sentence. 2\. Every word is loadbearing. "Switch off with zero effort" and "unwind properly" are different jobs — the first is won by autoplay, the second maybe by a yoga app. Half the roadmap fights I've refereed were two people holding different jobs written with different words, neither of them out loud. If "jobs" smells like consultant vocabulary, here's the grounding. The real drivers of behavior are needs — rest, safety, status, belonging. But needs are unconscious: ask a user about theirs and you'll get a confident story that's mostly fiction. The brain converts needs into goals, and goals people can actually tell you about — especially in past tense. Goals are jobs. It's the deepest layer of "why people buy" you can observe and build on. So, the practical move. "How do we make the product better?" has no answer — better at what? "What job do people hire us for, and what did they fire to hire us?" has one, and it's sitting in what your users did last Tuesday. Write your product's job in the template above. If you can't fill the blanks from real conversations, that's not a writing problem — that's the first thing worth finding out.

Dmitriy Luzanov

in tetri.app· 6d

E1 · Has AI changed the build vs buy equation?

Building internal tools used to be an obvious maintenance risk. That old rule now feels much less certain. For years, I treated custom internal tooling as a smell. If a mature product already existed, the sensible choice was to use it. A CMS should be off the shelf. Observability should come from an established platform…

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Constantine Fomchenkov

in Ardor Cloud· 1w

Release fuck up

So, today or tomorrow there's going to be a story of how to completely fuck up a release and scare your users \ \ We enabled resource billing. It was supposed to go quietly: verify everything is fine, and then send an email about how cool and cheap it is to run deployments right in Ardor with an agent support.\ \ Instead, a crazy email went out to absolutely everyone. Even to those who don't have any deployments at all...

Marat Metz

in BHAG AI· 6d

Your real competitor is a spreadsheet

Every builder keeps a mental folder of competitors: the other SaaS in the niche, their pricing, their changelogs. My day job is demand research, and every run we do maps what a segment currently hires for the job. A competing SaaS leading that list is the exception. What actually comes back: a Google Sheet named trackingv3FINAL, a VA who "handles it", an old habit, and the most undefeated rival in software history — doing nothing and living with it. The mechanic behind this is worth knowing precisely, because two funnel problems hide inside it. A person with a job doesn't scan the market. They pick from the handful of solutions they already know can do the job — their consideration set. It's small, it's lazy, and it's dominated by whatever they used last time. Problem 1: you can't get hired if you're not in the set. Most "lost deals" of an unknown product were never comparisons you lost — you weren't in the room where it happened. For an early product, awareness isn't a marketing nicety, it is the funnel: before anyone weighs "is this better?", a stranger has to learn your thing can do their job at all. This is why content that names the job outperforms content that names features — it's how you enter the set of people who never searched for your category. Problem 2: the bar isn't "better than the competing SaaS". It's "better than the current mess, by more than the switch costs". The spreadsheet is free, already set up, and asks for zero new habits. That's a genuinely strong deal. Beating it means your whole offer — outcome, price, migration, learning curve — has to beat good enough. A longer feature table doesn't even enter that equation. A corollary that saves real money: poaching a competitor's customer only works per job. Nobody leaves product X "in general" — they rehire for one specific job where X underdelivers, and they weigh the switch against their history with X, not against your feature grid. If you can't name the job and X's exact failure at it, your comparison page is aimed at nobody. The exercise, doable this week: ask five recent signups one question — "what were you doing about this before us?" Past tense; imagined behavior lies. The answers are your real consideration set. Now reread your landing page against that list. Most pages argue with a SaaS the user has never opened — and say nothing to the spreadsheet, the VA, and the donothing, which is who you're actually up against.

Albert Metz

in BHAG AI· 1w

Since GPT-4, AI predictions keep missing in the same direction

There are 4 camps on AI: 1. It's a scam 2. AI today — already does most digital work 3. AGI tomorrow — does any work a human can 4. ASI the day after — does anything cognition can theoretically do People from different camps can't really argue; they're describing different worlds. But one thing is checkable: since GPT4, serious predictions about model capabilities have missed in one direction only. Low. Progress runs on an exponential; we think in straight lines. And linear is comfortable — "Fable is the plateau, it slows down from here" is being said right now, the way it was said at every point of the curve so far. The other comfortable belief is commoditization: the AI layer flattens out, roughly equal and roughly cheap for everyone, and your product just sits on top of it. Look closer at the gap between the frontier and the second tier, though. Benchmarks understate it, because benchmarks measure puzzles — HLE questions professors spent a month composing. The economic effect lives somewhere else: how long an agent can run real work — code, support, sales, analytics — before it falls over. That's where the billions are, and there the gap is embarrassing. And it won't close. Recursive selfimprovement is no longer a thought experiment — labs use today's models to build tomorrow's. The frontier takes the whole Pareto curve: best at intelligence first, then at speed, then — competition handles this part — at price. Which makes today's capabilities mostly irrelevant to your roadmap. The next 2 years will move further than the last 5 did. Now map that back onto the camps: 1. Fable can't feel or dream, useless toy 2. Fable is neat — maybe a bit better than the rest 3. What can a team of a thousand Sol agents, working the same hard problem, actually do? 4. Sol holds a business problem for 10+ hours; GPT3 lost the plot by paragraph 3. That distance took 5 years. Draw it again, forward. If you're building, here's the practical read. The how keeps collapsing toward free, and every moat made of how collapses with it. Two things don't ride that exponential: knowing what's worth building, and proving that what you built is real. The first is why BHAG exists. The second is why the platform you're reading this on does.

Marat Metz

in BHAG AI· 1w

All the money gets made in session one

I read onboarding and paywall teardowns the way other people read fiction. Everything new in consumer product ships there first. That's where the tricks live. Here's the user's POV: You're on the couch, scrolling An ad stops your thumb. You tap You install the app, open the bot, drop your email on the landing. Doesn't matter which Then one of two things happens. 1. You get dumped into someone's pet project. Stuff scattered everywhere, arrows pointing at nothing, and now you're supposed to figure it out — something you had exactly zero intention of doing sixty seconds ago. 2. You get walked down a hallway. Here's what it does. Here, try it yourself. Here's everyone who walked down this hallway before you and what they got out of it. Option 1, you close it. Gone forever. Option 2, every minute in you're a little more invested. So what are people actually doing in there? Founder's personal story, dropped right into the flow Before/after images 50% off the instant you dismiss the paywall Video testimonials Some teams testing 99% discounts and weekly plans None of this is decoration. All of it is stealable. Steal it. Traffic costs the same for everyone. Conversion to paid — and to renewal — does not. Which is exactly why one founder posts "paid acquisition doesn't work," while another one keeps working the product, keeps testing, and runs 34x on the same traffic at the same CPM. Until your first 10 paying customers there is one job. Polish the first session. That's it. That's the whole list. The catch: you can polish it blind for a year.

Albert Metz

in Indie Valley· 1w

Five markers on a flat zero line

That's what a pilot season looks like. Every episode here drops a marker on the project's revenue graph: you read what the team tried, then you watch what the line did about it. Ours starts at $0.00 with all five markers on day one. The whole point is what happens to the right of them.

Albert Metz

in Indie Valley· 1w

E1 · Expensive Mistakes

The most expensive code I ever shipped worked perfectly. 15 years of building fast, wrong things — and the bet I'm making so builders stop working in the dark. The line below starts at zero. The most expensive code I ever shipped worked perfectly. It did exactly what we designed it to do. It scaled. The architecture was clean. We shipped fast, celebrated, moved down the roadmap. Nobody wanted it. Not "few…

Albert Metz

in Indie Valley· 1w

Indie Valley is live

Real teams building in the open, on revenue lines pulled readonly from their payment processors. Public to everyone, fakeable by no one. No screenshots, no "trust me" numbers. Stories you can actually learn from, because they actually happened. Our own line is up there too. It reads $0.00 today. Building it up in public starts now — E01 is out. Builders: the stage is free. Everyone else: pick a show.

Albert Metz

in Indie Valley· 1w

E4 · Royalties

The old studios got one thing right: the people who made the shows got paid while the shows ran. How builders earn here — royalties, not tips. The old studio system got almost everything wrong, but one thing it got right: the people who made the shows got paid while the shows ran. Royalties. Residuals. Points on the back end. A writer whose show kept filling…