🗞 What's New: A casual tweet from Marc Lou turned into a huge meetup

What can a "Hey, let's meet up" tweet do? Well, if it's from Marc Lou, apparently a lot. Here's what you'll find in this issue:

• 100+ indie hackers across Europe joined Marc Lou's meetup at Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris.
• What started as a rundown cottage turned into a viral Airbnb empire.
• $13K MRR. Wesley is a "quadratic freelancer" with 20+ projects under his belt.

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When Marc Lou tweeted about meeting up, his original hope was that 10 or so people would show up. Nope... try 100+! Some of them even hopped on planes to be there.

The vibe? People swapping their indie hacking stories and hacks, taking selfies, and just soaking in the energy of people who probably "get you" more than your closest friends (at least when it comes to career path).

Oh, and Marc even shared some impressive stats from the meetup, including that one founder who showed up hit $3.4M in 2024, with zero marketing.

Read the full article →

Amy and Bryant Gingerich went all-in and purchased 34 acres of land in Hocking Hills, Ohio. The land included forest, waterfalls, rugged cliffs, and a surprising discovery... a hidden cave.

The couple discovered the cave during a hike. They stumbled upon its entrance, which was concealed by dead trees and heaps of dirt.

So, they turned this cavern into a livable luxury rental. For over two years, it's been booked every night except one.

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

1. Market research tool for founders: $150 TTM revenue, 10-100 users, $10K asking price.
2. AI tool helping freelancers track and manage money: $2K MRR, 100-1K users, $45K asking price.
3. AI-powered, full-stack, no-code development tool: $1.7K MRR, 250 customers, $100K asking price.

Wesley has 20+ projects under his belt, all of which are free and open source. He supports himself via donations and quadratic funding. A "quadratic freelancer" is someone who works directly for the public, and is funded by donations boosted by quadratic matching subsidies.

More recently, Wesley has also started sharing funds with project contributors. With a simple scoring mechanism, he calculates a contributor score based on a combination of commits, issues, pull requests, and other contributions. This determines the amount of funding his contributors receive over a certain period for their work.

Read the full article →

The best take on retirement came from Martin Luther King, Jr.

It's worth reading his full speech (“The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life”), but David Brooks gave a good summary in one of his books:

“Your work should have length — something you get better at over a lifetime. It should have breadth — it should touch many other people. And it should have height — it should put you in service to some ideal, and satisfy the soul’s yearning for righteousness.”

—@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 Michal Kankowski and James Fleischmann for contributing posts.

—Channing