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

Albert Metz

in Indie Valley· 1mo

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· 1mo

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.

Polina Ross

in Indie Valley· 4w

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…

Albert Metz

in Indie Valley· 1mo

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…

Albert Metz

in BHAG AI· 1mo

E1 · Direction

Anyone can build the thing now. Nobody got better at knowing which thing. The pilot of my second show here — the product I co-founded before Indie Valley existed, and why it goes first. Somewhere right now, a builder is finishing a product in a weekend. AI wrote most of it. The code is clean, the landing page is up, it ships tonight. And nobody on this planet — including the builder — knows whether a…

Polina Ross

in Indie Valley· 4w

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.

Alex Stepankov

in BHAG AI· 1mo

E4 · Patient Zero

We pointed BHAG at the most uncomfortable idea available: itself. What a panel that doesn't care about our feelings said about our market — including the finding I argued with for a week. If you build a lie detector, you strap yourself in first. Anything else is a tell. So before this show existed, we ran BHAG on BHAG. A regular research run — same pipeline anyone can buy, nobody's thumb on the casting…

Albert Metz

in BHAG AI· 1mo

"Cool idea" is what people say instead of no

Compliments end conversations. Customers start them. If everyone loves your idea and nobody signs up, you don't have validation — you have manners. E02 · Politeness is about the difference, and the 5 questions that cut through it.

Albert Metz

in BHAG AI· 1mo

E2 · Politeness

"Cool idea" is what people say instead of no. The 2am doubt is right to ask — here's how to actually answer it, and the list of questions that only ever return compliments. Every builder I know has a project that got 100% positive feedback and 0 users. You know the scene. You show the thing — to friends, to colleagues, in a Slack group, under a launch post. Everyone's warm. "Cool idea."…

Albert Metz

in Indie Valley· 1mo

E3 · The Cheapest Form of Respect

A like costs nothing, which is exactly what it's worth. Why the whole economy here runs on one dollar a month, and what that dollar actually opens. The like is the most inflated currency on the internet. It used to mean someone cared. Now it means: I saw this. Or: I agree-ish. Or: my thumb twitched on the way past. Nobody knows. A signal that can mean anything…

Albert Metz

in Indie Valley· 1mo

The most expensive code I ever shipped worked perfectly

Clean architecture, fast delivery, zero users. We built exactly the wrong thing, brilliantly. 15 years in engineering and the lesson I keep relearning is the same: speed was never the expensive part. Direction was. Full story in E01 · Expensive Mistakes — the pilot of the Indie Valley show.

Marat Metz

in BHAG AI· 4w

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.