🗞 What's New: Bitcoin hits $100K for the first time

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

• Bitcoin is now worth six figures. Here's the path that led to its resurgence.
• AI has officially taken over LinkedIn. The Dead Internet Theory is here.
• $3.6M ARR with a market research company. Daniel Dunose is currently building an AI product that competes with his own product.

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Just two years ago, bitcoin was at $15K, and reeling from one of history’s worst financial crimes. On Wednesday, it hit six figures for the first time, with a high of $103K (although it has since retraced to $97.5K).

The milestone continues bitcoin’s rapid recovery from the brink of death. Although bitcoin might be on a preordained path to glory, it frankly took a series of small miracles to get to this point.

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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 “12 days of ship-mas,” investigative reporting, founder diversity, and more.

Katie Hignett, journalist: I watched the start of OpenAI's “12 Days of Shipmas” with excitement. Well, mostly. The know-it-all inside me wants to remind readers the 12 Days of Christmas start on Christmas Day and not before.)

Channing Allen, cofounder and editor-in-chief: we're increasingly working on pieces that are more investigative and research-intensive. For example, indie hackers like Pieter Levels and Jon Yongfook have been pretty vocal about their thoughts on the online dating scene lately. So we've started doing some outreach and public polling to dig a little deeper on it. We've also got some harder-hitting pieces coming out soon.

James Fleischmann, journalist: This week, I spoke with three founders. One built a 3.6M/yr service company and now, years later, he’s getting into the SaaS game. Another went straight into building a 7-figure SaaS right after breaking out of his $15/hr job. And another built a dev marketplace and sold it before starting her AI SaaS.

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Love it or hate it, LinkedIn is one of the best places for indie hackers to form business connections and land clients.

Now, here’s where it gets a little dystopian: According to research from Originality AI, over 50% of LinkedIn’s long-form posts are now AI-generated.

Originality AI analyzed 8,795 long-form (100+ words) LinkedIn posts using its AI detector to figure out if the posts were likely written by humans or AI. They analyzed posts from the last four years, and found that from January to February 2023, AI-written posts jumped by a staggering 189%.

This makes sense, given that ChatGPT dropped in December 2022.

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Every day, indie hackers post updates about the products they're building. Here's what the community voted to the top yesterday!

	1. SEObot: Fully autonomous SEO robot with AI agents for busy founders. Built a real AI agent running on autopilot	▲ 9
	2. ad:personam AI Media Planner: Transform your campaigns with ad:personam’s AI Media Planner. How I came up with a decent product idea: Simplifying media planning with AI	▲ 9
	3. Iffy: Stop unwanted content without a team of moderators. Crossed 1M moderations	▲ 7
	4. CodeFast: Learn to code in weeks, not months. Reached $200K+ in revenue and 1K students in my first week	▲ 6
	5. Scrumbuiss: Project management, productivity, kanban, dashboard, AI. Meet Scrumbuiss, a modern project management software	▲ 5

Enjoy building in public? Post an update to your product page on Indie Hackers, and it will automatically be added to the daily leaderboard.

In 2015, Daniel Dunose started a digital market research company, DataDiggers. Today, it's bringing in $3.6M ARR. In August 2023, he cofounded Brainactive, a research technology company. Brainactive automates the entire process of market research, from objectives to final report, with assistance from conversational and generative AI.

Brainactive primarily uses a SaaS model with four tiers. It also sells audiences (access to respondents), which it treats as upsell, along with human-assisted sales. It's currently pre-revenue.

Instead of allowing Brainactive to cannibalize his service business, Daniel plans to leverage the product as a competitive advantage.

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