Dominic Monn

Since reaching DR70, I get ~40 backlink requests in my inbox every day (they go to a special super spam). Many of them inquire about my rates for inserting a backlink. This would be dumb to do, but if I converted 25% of these for $25 (cheaper end). 20 BL x 30d x $25 = $15k MRR

Good way to find out what *not* to build is taking a quick glance at acquire.com and checking what the majority of low-revenue listings are about. Used to be – web3 crypto apps, "chat to a PDF", LLM chat UIs. Now: writing assistants, video + image generators, . ..

A year ago, a founder reached out to recruit me as CTO for their competing app. They had just raised $7M and she had over 250k followers on LinkedIn + lots of HR contacts. In her words, they were going to "crush me in 18 months" if I didn't join. Checked their website today 🤭

I'm assuming there must be 1000s of these, but is there an API that lets me make a call to any of the leading AI APIs with the same syntax + pick the model based on a flag / per best availability / cheapest etc?

What's the easiest way to get a small batch of books printed (or print-on-demand)? I bring text and images, their tool lays it out well (or lets me lay it out). High-quality binding and paper choice.

Current obsession: Designing in the digital world, and bringing those creations into the physical world. i.e. 3D printing, working with CNC shops, PCBs etc.

Imagine not being a generalist in 2025

Small tweaks I've been doing at MentorCruise over the past few months to make it better: - Small core team, with pro consultants (currently 50/50) - Focus on very few things, but nail them - I'm the only dev (only project dev hires as needed) - Delete (almost) every backlog

Thinking daily of the guy who installed our ceiling lamps. - Ranks #1 for "install lamps" - Calendly scheduling - Stripe pre-payment - $75 per lamp (all inclusive) - Only works in a 30km radius - Solo biz He told me he does 5-6 of these / day. 5 x ~4 lamps on average x $75 x 20 days = $30k/mo

Hey, I'm getting DDOSed 👋 This happens every few days, large influx of requests from China from thousands of different IPs. They go until the site goes down or I go into Cloudflare's "Under attack mode". Anyone know the @Cloudflare setting to prevent this automatically?

Crucial to find what type of creating suits you: inventing, tinkering, selling, designing, writing, filming. The easiest path to burning out is being pre-occupied with one type of creating, when another one suits you better. E.g. a tinkerer having to monetize and sell.

Indie startups make for horrible places to work for (no moonshot stocks, HR dept., or promotions & training) Most tend to attract pretty mediocre talent that burns them. Even more important as founders to make the offer sweet – great pay, bonuses, time off, flexibility & give responsibility early

PSA – Postmark's click tracking domain has been up and down the past few days. I reported it but got no response for a week (holidays, fair). Turn off click tracking or your users will see this...

Seeing the predatory MoR industry go up in flames when they've had shady business practises and have done more damage to small indie businesses than anyone else 💯

I was in the same boat a couple of years ago. It was when monicalent.com suggested that a small bootstrapped startup can "only afford A players" or will go down in flames. I totally agree now. Hire the best, or don't hire at all.

Whenever folks are frustrated about hiring for their startup, I'm looking at their team and they pick the $5/h outsourced freelancer on Upwork every single time. Folks, an investment in your team is an investment in yourself and your product. Hire THE BEST people you can.

MentorCruise v1 was built on Django 1.11 and I just completed our 4.2.17 (LTS) upgrade. Fairly painless all around! Sign of a great ecosystem, imo

Finally fully switched to Cursor after 10yrs of Jetbrains / Pycharm. A lot of unlearning to do but I think I'm finally there.

Every day I'm praying on this clothing brand's downfall so I can nab their domain.

Which conferences are you attending in 2025?

I have a "best friends" / "met IRL" / "want to meet IRL" list on X that I use to engage religiously, but don't really want in the open. Seems like no option to do the same (have a private feed / private list) here on Bluesky? It's the #1 thing that keeps me from engaging more

MentorCruise revenue in Nov/Dec: 📉 Revenue -5% 📈 Pre-paid credit purchases +400% Everyone gearing up and locking in for 2025 I suppose.

December is either the best or worst month for SaaS, entirely depending on the industry you're in.

The biggest shame in the 𝕏 debacle is that many prolific makers didn't just migrate elsewhere, they switched off social media entirely. For some, I'm lucky enough to have their phone numbers*. Some, I've totally lost contact with. Some are forgotten. *the ones I do know about are doing VERY well

every maker should at least own the first, and find some way to access the other 2

My "5-to-9" after my "9-to-5" is virtual commercial pilot now 🚬 got another delivery to make

Indie Hacking is working the whole weekend and until 11PM to push through a big rollout. Then taking off at 1pm another day to play Microsoft Flight Simulator on release day ✈️

Small SEO site I've been building just to study up on Laravel started getting 1,000 Google impressions just ~7 days after launch 👀 Zero backlinks, launched nowhere. Why doesn't this work for commercial projects 😅

It's really heating up around here

What feed do you use most often? I'm between "Discover" and "Popular With Friends". Neither hits the spot 100%.

On my "make my designs suck less" journey and after the Radical Design course, I've been pointed to this book. Wish me luck!

As a Django developer, it's unreal how much better AI suggestions are in Laravel. I guess this comes down to: - Solid, irregularly changing infrastructure - Great documentation - A lot of people in recent OSS projects - Recency Meanwhile, Cursor will invent Django packages out of thin air.

Built a mini engine from scratch

I don't usually take courses but @mubashariqbal.com recommended me radicaldesigncourse.com and I'm racing through it right now. So cool. So refreshing. Really useful.

“Rewrite this code to be more elegant” GPT-4o w/ Canvas: Rewrites entire code but it never works first try. Cursor Claude: Returns the exact same code 🥹

Watch me go to Twitter jail for namedropping three competitors in one tweet.

Early Indie Twitter was very "heads down" building. The feed was filled with curious findings, MRR successes, new launches, exploratory tangents. I wonder if this can be replicated here? My prediction: The world has changed, not just Twitter, and ultimately the engagement bois will come here, too.

If you want to be ready for the AI search future, maybe it's time to dust off the Bing Webmaster tools...

The indie dev / startup starter kits only have like 20-30 accounts in them, what’s up with that 🧐

How do I find my X peeps on here? 👀