🗞 What's New: This side project hit 1.7M users in 4 days

Last issue of the year! Here are a few stories to get you ready for 2025:

• Exa, an AI-powered search engine, went viral and hit 1.7M users in 4 days.
• Check out these new SaaS acquisition opportunities.
• $83K+ MRR. After Amira Irfan's father lost $90K over something that could have been prevented with a simple contract, she launched a legal blog.

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Most founders know the power of side project marketing: Shipping free projects that complement and boost traffic to your main product.

Perhaps the most successful side project of all time is Spotify Wrapped. Spotify released its annual personalized recap in 2016, and today, it is used by 2M+ users. It also routinely increases Spotify downloads by 20%.

Spotify Wrapped is so successful that it's been copied by basically everyone, including Apple Music, YouTube, and The Washington Post. Curiously, though, there has not yet been a version for Twitter (X).

So, Exa, a startup that provides AI apps with high quality web data, launched Twitter Wrapped on December 28. To say it went viral would be the understatement of the year.

Read the full article →

SaaS Watch is a roundup of all the latest micro-SaaS acquisition opportunities. Here are the top three for this week!

1. Tool for receiving early alerts on Stripe disputes to avoid fees and lower your refund rate: 10-100 users, $550 asking price.
2. Tool for automatically submitting your startup to top websites, directories, and communities: 1K-10K users, $7.6K asking price.

• AI NextJS boilerplate with 10 pre-built AI applications: $1K MRR, 100-1K users, $44K asking price.

While working as a business lawyer, Amira Irfan saw how damaging legal pitfalls could be for small businesses. Then, her father lost $90K over something that could have been prevented with a simple contract.

Amira felt a deeper calling to help founders who were often overlooked by traditional law firms, so she left her lucrative career to help make legal protection accessible and affordable. She launched A Self Guru as a blog, and later added legal templates.

Read the full article →

Marc Lou is the Indie Hacker of the Year in my book.

It's one thing to have impressive outcomes like earning a mill in a year, but it's another thing entirely to do it while maintaining a healthy lifestyle and managing a family.

And these stats don't even include all the hate he had to wade through.

—@channingallen

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 Stephen Flanders and James Fleischmann for contributing posts.

—Channing