🗞 What's New: Grok 3 is out. You should care as an indie hacker.

Looks like Elon Musk is falling back to Plan B after trying — and failing — to buy OpenAI: good old-fashioned competition.

• Grok 3 just launched, and it's probably worth trying out as an indie hacker. (Regardless of how you feel about Musk.)
• One Twitter poll, 28 days, and one Dutch auction later, this indie hacker flipped a side project for $24k+.
• $450k+/yr from two agencies: how this founder faked it till he made it as a freelancer.

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xAI has released its latest flagship AI model, Grok 3, claiming it outperforms GPT-4o on several benchmarks.

The standout feature? DeepSearch, which analyzes internet and X content, making it particularly interesting for indie hackers active on X.

While the model shows promise with enhanced reasoning capabilities — or "maximal truth-seeking capabilities," as Elon Musk xAI phrases it — consider the platform risks and unclear pricing before building anything mission-critical on top of it.

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We get it: Chat moves fast. Important updates get buried. Blockers go unnoticed. Progress becomes unclear.

That’s where a friendly teammate like DailyBot comes in. It automates reminders, reports, and team check-ins, so your team stays in sync without the chaos.

Because a little structure doesn’t slow things down. It keeps everything moving forward. And when your team has clarity, they can actually move fast.

From Twitter poll to profitable exit in just one month: Josh Pigford (Baremetrics founder) just showed indie hackers a masterclass in building and selling fast. He created Optic, a competitor monitoring tool, shipped six major updates in two weeks, and then sold it through a Dutch auction that had 278 people watching in real-time.

The wild part? The buyer spent $24k on a month-old SaaS with barely any revenue. Here's how Josh pulled it off, and why there's a growing market for ready-to-scale starter projects.

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Another trick here:

Don't put all your friends in the same bucket.

If you're an entrepreneur, you have (1) "real friends" and (2) "deal friends."

Even if you have high standards for both kinds of friends, they should be different standards.

—@channingallen

When Ramphis Reyes started freelancing, he had a simple strategy: say "yes" to every opportunity, even if he didn't know how to do the work yet. He'd figure it out later. That scrappy mindset helped him build ARCTOS, an agency now bringing in $300K annually.

In this founder story, Ramphis shares his journey from employee to freelancer to agency owner, including the exact steps he took to build his team, why he hired a project manager at 10 clients, and the hard lessons he learned about contracts and getting paid.

Read the full article →

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 Yushavel Calderon for the graphic design, and to Michal Kankowski and James Fleischmann for contributing posts.

—Channing