Lee Schmidt

Today, we're shipping real-time graphics. Using Sol 6.1 Ultrafast we can generate custom overlays, diagrams, and even interactive 3D scenes right on a user's screen, no chat. It's a new visual interface for AI. Here's me learning about LLMs + hardware. Demo:

😅 @marclou inspired me by churning from Beehiiv to vibe-code his own newsletter tool so when DataFast hit me with an upgrade popup yesterday, I pulled a Marc on Marc 😭 moved all 23 sites to my own Hetzner server in one morning: 🧰 backfilled 3.6M visitors + 7,600 Stripe/Polar payments across 23 sites 🚀 12x–225x faster queries (benchmarked from 1,152ms → 92ms) 📊 ripped out Recharts for native SVG (bundle 536kB → 96kB) 🔌 custom Stripe, Polar, GSC & ClickHouse connectors 🤖 direct MCP access for my coding agents 🇪🇺 100% first-party on EU Hetzner (no 3rd-party sub-processors, no GDPR headaches, no adblockers) 💸 $0/mo, unlimited events honestly it's just more responsible to self-host your analytics anyway, you own the raw visitor + payment data instead of leaking it to a 3rd party and can ensure you fix all the latest security dependency issues and your Stripe keys don't leak and you can make improvements for your specific stack he was right: once you have a server and an agent, you don't click "upgrade plan" anymore SaaS-pocalypse

What a remarkable privilege it is to make something that someone else finds worth relying on.

Github is now shoving ads into the interface that apparently can't be removed and clutter the UI. No thank you, github.

🥹🥹🥹 200 acquisitions on TrustMRR in less than a year… I can’t believe my startup marketplace started as a vibe-coded revenue leaderboard for founders. Funny enough, the leaderboard died after a month. But I listened to users and built a marketplace after they requested it. “Let’s see”. TrustMRR is now my biggest source of income and my digital product with the highest margins (90%+). The monthly traffic is still growing. Now at 250,000 unique visitors. It’s my anti-AI asset. Trust can’t be vibe-coded. 25,000 buyers can’t be vibe-coded. I’m so happy and proud I listened to my gut and kept trying and trying to get this marketplace off the ground. Godspeed 🫡

signs that your SaaS is vulnerable to be displaced: > unspecialized software > lack of focus from team / founder > minimal domain expertise on the team > price is the only differentiator > no proprietary data or network effects > zero switching costs > it's a feature, not a platform > zero brand equity > no relationships outside the codebase (partners, providers, industry) > non-existent support shoutout to @ahmedgagan11 for identifying an opportunity and crushing the launch 🎉

I promised @ahmedgagan11 I'll buy this if he releases it, and I did. Customer #1 The math checks out - I tried DataFast, but too expensive. I was about to code my own. And even if it would be one shot with CRHQ, I'd spend more on tokens than the cost of lifetime license, plus I get to participate in all the extra value Ahmed will bring by continually polishing the product. I think this is an excellent model for the future of SaaS. I also think it's kinda ironic that while @marclou was busy vibe coding a cheaper version of Beehiiv, Ahmed coded a more affordable version of DataFast :)

Introducing DataBull 🎉 I was paying $39/mo for DataFast just to see which posts made me money. That's $468 a year. Forever. And it goes up as your traffic grows. So I built my own. Same idea: revenue by traffic source. $29 lifetime. Unlimited sites. Unlimited events. Lifetime updates. > databull.app

I’m shook OpenAI voice just got slapped hard I’m in complete disbelief that this new voice model is made by Block and not Elevenlabs et al. I mean Jack literally took it to 11 and solved the turing test for voice. you’ll never know if you’re talking to a machine or human.

I’m shook OpenAI voice just got slapped hard I’m in complete disbelief that this new voice model is made by Block and not Elevenlabs et al. I mean Jack literally took it to 11 and solved the turing test for voice. you’ll never know if you’re talking to a machine or human.

I've changed my mind on cold emails. Currently marketing them all as spam. This has spun 100% out of control.

we're all becoming project managers and your only goal should be to build a system that outsources as much work and decision making for you as possible terminal 0 should be the goal

Vercel has proactively rolled out Firewall-level mitigations for today's Node.js RCE vulnerability, in advance of the official patch release. All traffic for all deployments is automatically protected. We're actively monitoring and rolling out managed runtime upgrades.

I think we’ll see a lot more of this. The attackers were going after the AI keys stored on Railway, because an API key is basically a credit card for compute now. Every company running agents is sitting on a pile of these keys! here’s the 10 minute fix. rotate every key tonight, set a hard monthly spend limit in each AI dashboard, give every agent its own key, and turn on usage alerts so you know the second something spikes. someone should build the tool that finds every AI key a company has, rotates them every week and pings you when spend looks weird. charge $99 a month. every startup running agents needs it yesterday.

This is what happens when you go with second tier platforms instead of Vercel or Cloudflare. Indie hackers love to promote alternatives like railway or VPS providers, etc. Founders: Host your apps on a legit platform.

We are currently shutting down Postiz for all customers. We are afraid @Railway has been compromised; they won't tell us. We have received emails from Anthropic and Stripe that our keys have been compromised. We are digging into it and will get back to you ASAP!

A few thoughts on the @marclou vs @denk_tweets beef 1) Marc initial post was extremely misleading. He claimed we'd 12x our MRR with a price hike. Then shared the actual price increase (20%) in a comment. 2) Nobody likes a price hike. But beehiiv remains competitively priced to almost any serious platform on the market (Mailchimp, Active Campaign, etc..). Indeed, a bunch of people showed up on Marc post saying they realized they were actually overpaying for their email platform after looking at beehiiv pricing lol 3) Marc then goes on to launch MailCheap. Weirdly enough, his tool would actually be more expensive then beehiiv for the majority of our users (his pricing, as well as the claim his tool is 83% less expensive than beehiiv comes with a huge asterisk saying "pricing based on one newsletter send per week"). Again, extremely misleading and borderline 4) This is an extremely fragmented market. There are tons of cheap alternatives. If all you need is send one weekly email to a list of people, and you do not care about growth, monetization, etc..there are like 10 other tools 10x better than MailCheap that are real businesses with real support teams, etc...beehiiv works in the segment of the market serving media brands, creators, editorial content, podcasters, etc... (this is why the largest media companies on earth use us instead of building their own solution, event with a team of dozens of engineers) 5) You can vibe code a tool that sends emails. Can't vibe code a dozen people support team, an ad network (with insane network effect and real people doing the hard work behind the scenes), deliverability at scale, security, etc...due to our positioning as a tool specific for media brands, beehiiv has the biggest moat in the industry 6) Yes, @denk_tweets was a bit harsh with his write up. But @marclou didn't start this in good faith (read points 1 and 3 re misleading claims) 7) I appreciate the hustle indie hackers put in their products, but it's incredible to see how the majority of them completely misses how a business (not a tool) works. Yes, beehiiv raised money. Again we are not building a tool that sends email. It's a full stack publishing platform with network effect and a real moat. That requires the best people on earth. The best people on earth require money. It's fine to raise and run at a loss to build that moat (brand, infrastructure, ad network, recommendation network, etc..) 8) As a practical example, I run my own newsletters on beehiiv. I'm a one person team and this is just a side hustle. Still I get to be sponsored by massive brands like Hubspot Media, Lovable, WisprFlow, etc...And I have a paid recommendation sending subscribers to Time Magazine. Yeah, like a 6k subs newsletters "partnering" with some of the largest companies on earth. 9) Most people looking at this completely miss the nuances and dynamics of building a VC-backed business with a real moat, network effect, etc...people just think of VCs as something bad without even understanding what they are talking about. To make an extreme example, assume you're building a supersonic jet, do you think you can just bootstrap your way into it? Unless you are a billionaire, you will need VC money and that's fine if the company can hit VC scale. And beehiiv can do that 100% (just look at the scale of some of our competitors who have a product that's 10x worse than beehiiv) 10) It honestly makes me sad to think people might make up the wrong idea of beehiiv. I've known @denk_tweets well before joining beehiiv (invested in the company in 2024 and have been a user well before that). Tyler is one of the very few CEOs out there who deeply, ACTUALLY, care about their users and employees. And seeing people giving him shit for something wrote by a dude whose only job is to make as much noise as possible online it's so annoying