🗞 What's New: How 5 vibe-coded games went viral w/out big audiences

Today's issue gets tactical, so I really enjoyed putting it together:

• How 5 vibe-coded AI games went viral, despite their creators having tiny audiences.
• Are you comfortable with AI-related terms like “MCP,” “CoT,” and “context window?” As an indie hacker in 2025, you probably should be!
• This AI-driven tool that converts audio content into written formats makes $120K+/mo. Here's how you can build something similar.

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Ever since Pieter Levels' AI flight simulator exploded online, critics have dismissed it as just another case of a big influencer leveraging his massive following.

A problem with this take:

He's not the only indie hacker who's vibe coded a viral AI game — and many of these vibe coders have had tiny audiences! So why aren't we focusing on them and learning from their examples?

I think we should. So I took 5 “small” indie hackers who've gone viral with their AI games and studied their marketing approaches to identify factors beyond audience size that helped them stand out among all the noisy marketing around AI games.

The tactics they used, like “piggybacking” on trending posts, apply to more than just AI games, so I think you'll find this write-up really valuable.

Read the full article →

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Every week brings a new AI term to learn: “Chain of thought.” “Vibe coding.” “Model Context Protocol.” And so on.

Like it or not, being an indie hacker in 2025 means you should probably be keeping up with all this AI jargon — whether you're a coder or non-technical.

So here's a glossary of all the AI terms you're likely to come across in the indie hackers community on any given week:

Read the full article →

I think this take will be correct for at least 12–18 months, despite the CEO of Anthropic's obviously biased prediction today that AI will be writing 90% of the code "in the next 3 to 6 months."

—@channingallen

We analyzed how two podcasters turned their frustration into a million-dollar idea.

They were tired of spending thousands on agencies to produce accurate show notes, so they decided to leverage their tech skills to solve the tedious problem themselves. With a clear vision and plenty of help from AI, they created Castmagic, a tool that transformed messy conversations into clean content.

Here's a step-by-step playbook of how their solution quickly caught fire, hitting $1 million in annual recurring revenue within nine months — with tips on how you can do the same.

Read the full report →

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 James Fleischmann for contributing a post.

—Channing