Alex Nguyen
@alexcooldev
Indie Hacker building AI apps:
370K users 🤙 (
40K users 🤌 (
+3 stealth apps, partnered with @rork and @arcads_ai
699 Following 68K Followers
This might be one of the most successful AI marketing campaigns I’ve seen.
Millions of views across every major social platform.
And more importantly, it reached exactly the audience already obsessed with AI.
$112K sounds like a lot.
But compared to what traditional companies spend to get this level of attention, distribution, and cultural relevance?
It actually feels cheap.
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My first 1M views 👀 on Instagram
Proof you can also do it as a millennial 😁
From my experience building multiple apps and reaching 500K+ users across them, execution matters way more than the idea.
Most of my ideas were not unique.
The difference was:
I shipped fast.
I tested fast.
I marketed every day.
I killed what didn’t work.
And I doubled down on what did.
You don’t need the perfect idea.
You need to execute on a decent idea better than everyone else. 😌
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While the agents are running, I can sleep, hit the gym, or even go watch a movie. 😌
Going viral is 100% skill, 0% luck.
You just need to post a few thousand times until you finally get good at it 😌
Going viral is 100% skill and 0% luck.
Saying it’s just luck is cope.
To prove it to you, I’ll go viral tonight. Watch.
After using the latest AI models to code, market, and ship 5 mobile apps, here’s my current ranking:
🥇 Claude Opus 5.5
🥈 GPT-6 Sol
🥉 Grok 4.7
Claude is still my #1# for getting real work done.
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We’re at a point where if you stay off X and the internet for just 1–2 days, you already feel outdated.
AI models and technology are changing by the day and week now, not by the month or year anymore. 😬
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After seeing this review, I stopped worrying about everyone becoming a vibe coder.
X makes it feel like everyone is building apps.
They’re not.
Most people outside this bubble are still non-tech and have zero interest in learning how AI models, agents, or coding tools work.
That’s the opportunity.
If you’re building B2C apps, stop marketing only to builders on X.
Go where normal users are:
TikTok.
Instagram.
YouTube.
Builders talk about tools.
Consumers pay for outcomes. 🙂
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1-star review because the app charged you after the free trial 😭
Bro, that’s the platform charging you. The app literally has no access to your Visa card to charge you directly 🥴
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1-star review because the app charged you after the free trial 😭
Bro, that’s the platform charging you. The app literally has no access to your Visa card to charge you directly 🥴
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You don’t need to build everything from scratch on day one.
Why spend $1M+ building video AI infrastructure before you even know if people want the product?
Don’t build for 1M users on day one when you only have 100 users and $10 MRR.
Vibe code it with Claude Opus 5.5, connect Higgsfield’s API, get Genjutsu, Cinema Studio 4.0, Soul, Seedance 2.5 + top video models, and ship.
Validate first. Build your own infra later.
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1 day left to lock in up to 50% OFF Higgsfield API.
Build your own AI app with our product endpoints, including:
• Higgsfield Genjutsu
• Cinema Studio 4.0
• Higgsfield Soul
Plus all frontier video and image models through the same API.
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I think it has a lot of potential. Instead of chasing virality and views with content that gets huge numbers but converts terribly, I’ve shifted toward content with much higher conversion rates.
For example, this post only got 38K views, but it reached exactly the audience that needs the app, with 98% of the viewers coming from the US. And it helped me get around 5 new subscribers, worth about $250 for my new app.
That’s much more valuable than getting 500K views from other countries with hooks designed purely to farm views.
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First week into clipping here’s my HONEST feedback:
We got 20k views this week and spent $37.40.
Our cpm is a bit high but our slideshows are designed to attract a high intent so it’s not as viral.
We can confidently attribute close to $124 to the clipping. It is most likely more. Our rpms and ROI are great so far but it’s way too early to call it.
So after a week what are my thoughts on clipping:
I’m still very bullish. Clipping is similar to influencer marketing where there is a bit of a cold start problem however the difference is clipping is way cheaper per view. Our goal is to use clipping to get so much top of funnel awareness that it brings down our CPA’s for our ads but it’s showing positive benefits from just the clipping driving conversions.
Here’s what we’ll be changing this next week to scale this campaign faster:
1. More creators/posts: if we just throw more shots at the wall it will increase our chances.
2. testing more formats. We wanted to stay focused on this one specific format for the first week but now that we’ve tested over 30 posts with it, we’re now going to test different formats to see what converts and what doesn’t.
Basically like every marketing channel the way to success is more volume and more variations.
I’ll keep ugs updated.
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Rork is always insanely fast at integrating the latest AI models.
Claude Opus 5.5 is now in Rork
Anthropic's new leader in agentic coding.
Runs 40% cheaper and generates output over 30% faster than Opus 5.
Stop overthinking. Start building.
A website.
An API.
A messy MVP.
A Chrome extension.
An AI agent.
A tiny automation.
A mobile app that solves a problem you actually have in your own life.
It doesn’t need to be perfect.
It just needs to exist.
Ship something.
Momentum changes everything.
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I’m seeing more IG and TikTok influencers start building apps with vibe coding.
Some of them are hitting $10k-$100k MRR faster than most tech builders on X.
Distribution is becoming a bigger advantage than technical skill.
The next wave of breakout founders might not come from tech X at all.
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Users are lazy. The most successful products don’t make people do a ton of work just to get results.
Make your app as effortless as possible. The faster users get value, the better.
This is an AI tool I subscribed to but barely ever use. 🥴
A lot of people still confuse revenue with profit.
Revenue is easy to inflate.
You can spend $100k on paid ads, generate $80k in revenue.
Profit is much harder.
If your margins suck, you won’t survive for long, unless you’re VC-backed or have a ton of cash to burn.
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Reminder: If your app just hit $1K MRR, be proud.
Most apps on the App Store never get there.
Most startups never become profitable.
$1K MRR looks small on X.
In the real world, it's proof that strangers pay for something you built.
That's the hardest part. The rest is scaling.
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What even is Jev? Everyone's talking about it. I went offline for a bit to focus on marketing my new app, maybe 3 days tops, and came back today already outdated lol. Things move way too fast.
This guy used my app for an entire year without paying a cent… and today he finally subscribed 😌
Bro really took the “try before you buy” thing seriously 💀
ASO + organic TikTok & IG are the best low-cost marketing channels for maximizing profit margins.
