🗞 What's New: Japan wants indie hackers

Here's what you'll find in this issue:

• Japan's startup scene is now globally ranked the tenth best for founders.
• Will AI eliminate no-code tools entirely?
• $7K MRR. Thomas Sanlis pivoted a previous product and launched a Product Hunt competitor.

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Japan’s new Digital Nomad Visa offers six months for founders to explore its booming startup scene.

Tokyo is powered by a booming startup culture, pro-founder policies, and a new wave of innovators ditching corporate jobs. Indie hackers can hit up events, team up with startups, help old school companies get agile, or even snag a startup visa to kick things off in Japan.

Here's how to take that step.

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AI is promising to lower barriers and truly democratize software development. "Generate code with a prompt!" "Build entire apps in minutes!" The possibilities seem endless.

But Before AI became the talk of the town, the role of democratizing software development fell squarely on the shoulders of no-code tools like Airtable.

By discarding no-code for AI, are we falling into a trap? Even if the cost of creating software approaches zero, will that suddenly ignite a widespread desire to build?

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Welcome to From Our Desks, where the people behind Indie Hackers share the stories behind the headlines. This week, we talk Thanksgiving travels, AI reasoning, loneliness among founders, and more.

Channing Allen, cofounder and editor-in-chief: Courtland and I flew to our childhood home outside of Atlanta to hang with family and old friends. On most trips like this, we spend more time working than socializing, but this time we took a couple half-days off for a change. I think Michal Kankowski's writeup on the loneliness epidemic among founders may have had something to do with it.

Stephen Flanders, journalist: My Strava story on its API changes was the first time I really dug into the app, and it was a revelation in multiple ways…

Katie Hignett, journalist: AI “reasoning” became a trend in AI this week, with two Chinese companies releasing models to rival OpenAI’s new o1 family. The models to consider their responses step-by-step, providing much better answers to difficult questions than older models.

Darko Gjorgjievski, journalist: Two things that that caught my attention this week were that X became more aggressive with attracting advertisers and AI companies like Claude got more invested in "agentic AI."

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Thomas Sanlis built a product directory years ago, and put it on autopilot while it brought in an easy $2K per month. But then, he saw an opportunity: Dissatisfaction with Product Hunt was growing.

So, he pivoted the directory into a product launch platform. Now, Uneed is bringing in nearly $7K MRR.

As the site grew, he started receiving tool submissions through a Google Form. The volume of submissions quickly became overwhelming, which led him to implement a waiting list. He decided to offer a paid "skip the line" option, and that helped skyrocket his platform.

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Michal Kankowski, Rishikesh Sreehari, and James Fleischmann for contributing posts. —Channing