At yesterday's meetup I asked Marc why he's never shipped an AI wrapper 😅 His two most profitable products have almost nothing to do with AI. Everyone else is chasing the AI hype. He just doesn't. His answer had two parts. 1. he builds things he wants to use himself every day. 2. he asks what still won't be replaceable by AI in 5 or 10 years. His example was TrustMRR. Real buyers and real sellers who trust the place. An AI wrapper can die the day OpenAI ships one new feature. But nobody ships a feature that takes your buyers and sellers away. So you pick the niche, and you don't chase whatever is hot this month. With AI there's a new hype almost every single month. You pick, and then you wait. The compounding only shows up years later. And if you don't actually love the thing, you won't stay long enough to see it. There's a word going around in China right now, OPC, one person company. Everyone wants to build one, and with AI making everything fast and easy, everyone wants one that prints money fast. Marc told us he wanted to build a social network early on, right after watching The Social Network. He wanted to get rich. Everyone starts there 🤪 We're both just normal people, zero followers, zero products, no idea how to get users. Honestly we still think about that last part every day. If you're starting one of these, pick something you like and are already a bit good at. Ship one feature in your MVP. See if anyone wants it. If they do, stay on it and listen to the people using it. Then go tell the story yourself and build your own flywheel.

I met my indie hacker hero today 🤩 In 2022 he grew to $500k ARR and documented everything on Twitter. I was so inspired I decided to follow his footpath and that’s partially how I ended up here today! He shortened his family trip to come to the meetup, and he brought me 3 gifts 🥹 He’s very kind and exactly how you’d expect from reading his tweets. Plus he owns a 3 letter .ai domain name. Thanks for coming and for the inspiration Damon ❤️

Announcing Discovery Loop! I am very excited to announce that, along with my longtime friends and collaborators @Sanjay_Ghemawat, @OriolVinyalsML and @quocleix, we are founding Discovery Loop (@DiscoLoopAI), a Public Benefit Corporation whose mission is to automate machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate discoveries and progress. The four of us have worked together for 14 to 30 years, and have helped build some of the world’s most used products, infrastructure and AI models, and we’re excited to turn our attention to this ambitious endeavor. ♾ Learn more at:

😆 meet indie hacker idol we launched the Ship2Market activity, inspired by Marc Lou, an Indie hacker whose product is ShipFast. You build. We ship it to market.