🗞 What's New: What OpenAI's new o3 model means for indie hackers

Big news in AI today:

• OpenAI just announced o3, a new reasoning model that approaches AGI. Courtland breaks down what this means for indie hackers.
• AI-powered reading opens up tons of new opportunities for indie hackers.
• A $32.5M exit. Eran Galperin says that the best time to sell a business is when you don’t need to.

Want your product seen by over 115,000 founders and businesses? Sponsor an issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter. Choose between 2 affordable tiers that can fit almost any budget.

AI just leveled up again: OpenAI announced o3, their next-generation reasoning model.

We've personally been paying OpenAI $200/month (yikes) for access to their most advanced o1 model, o1-pro-mode. Not only does this mean we have a good idea of how well it writes and reasons (hint: spectacularly), but it also means we have a good intuition for how groundbreaking the new o3 model will be (hint: "AGI" isn't an exaggeration).

We wrote about what o3 is, why it's a big deal, and how founders can unironically use o1 to plan for AGI.

Read the full article →

This issue is sponsored by ReadPartner

ReadPartner boosts your productivity, with news automation and AI summarization of emails, videos, websites, and documents.

With a proven history of industry-leading performance, ReadPartner will help you:

• Summarize emails, YouTube videos, articles, and documents with just one click.
• Automate your news consumption, with personalized digests delivered regularly to your inbox or phone.
• Save over 28 hours of valuable time each month.

Register here to transform your browsing experience! Act now to catch our special New Year’s offer.

What if books weren't just for passive reading anymore? What if you could chat with them, ask questions about the context, get instant summaries, or instantly whip up quizzes on the material?

And that’s just scratching the surface. There's a rising demand for books with interactive, dynamic features, and the current tools aren't really cutting it. Maybe yours can.

Read the full article →

Courtland, here. Every day, indie hackers post updates about the products they're building.

I do my best to go through and comment on the best most authentic posts, and give feedback to people who need it. So I recommend getting in the habit of posting!

Here's what the community voted to the top yesterday:

	1. PolyPal Live Translator: Meeting, training, and lecture live translator. Looking for product-market fit	▲ 14
	2. Upvote Club: Free Twitter (X) engagement from real people. 2K+ actions 48 days after launch	▲ 10
	3. Bannerbear: Image and video generation API. My SaaS portfolio crossed $1M ARR	▲ 6
	4. VisionParser: Custom invoice and receipt OCR that adapts to your business. Listed on Hacker News, and got a good spike in traffic	▲ 6
	5. HowMuchMortgage: Smart mortgage calculator meets AI home visualization. Growth of my first paid product	▲ 4

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

Welcome to From Our Desks, where the people behind Indie Hackers share the stories behind the headlines. This week, we talk newsletter feedback, AI replacing jobs, Fartcoin, and more.

Jay Avery, newsletter editor: Spending the past couple years reading and editing countless founder stories for the newsletter has taught me a lot about creating something amazing that lasts: Iterate constantly. Don't be afraid to change something that isn't working. Ask for feedback from your audience. And be thorough and rigorous in assessing and improving what you've created.

Katie Hignett, journalist: Mostly I don’t worry about AI taking my job. But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t. I was genuinely shocked to find out this week that fintech firm Klarna has reduced its headcount by 1,000 this year because of AI.

Stephen Flanders, journalist: People are just people. It seems like a basic fact, but two stories this week re-drilled it into my brain. The first is the sudden wave of toxicity on the supposedly toxicity-free Bluesky, including a scary situation involving a controversial writer. The second is the memecoin “Fartcoin” hitting a billion-dollar market cap. Yes, you read that right.

Read the full article →

Eran Galperin's first B2B SaaS, Gymdesk, provides management software to gyms and other wellness businesses. In May, he sold the business for $32.5M, a few months after it hit $2.9M ARR.

For founders looking to sell, Eran has this advice:

• Work on your fundamentals: The better the business is, the better the deals you will get for it.
• Start separating yourself from the business.
• Find a good sell-side broker firm, and an M&A lawyer who has experience in your industry.

Read the full article →

AI is coming for speed, quality, creativity, clarity, consistency, efficiency, style, adaptability, coherence, depth, brevity, variety, novelty, elegance, wit, playfulness, analysis, synthesis, and originality.

The only value left will be authenticity.

Adapt or die.

—@csallen

Did you like today's stories? Did they suck? Which ones?

We're constantly changing things up to make this newsletter more useful, so let us know what you think by replying directly to this email. We read every reply!

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