27-year-old founder only needs $106/mo to get by. You can cut costs too.

27-year-old Nithursan Mahendran started indie hacking in university and never stopped. In fact, he's never had a real job.

And it isn't because his products are bringing in buckets of money; it's because he keeps his costs low enough that he can survive without much revenue.

Let's take a peek at his finances.

Making his first dollar online

During the lockdowns, Nithursan started writing online and was surprised when he started making money from it — roughly $700 per article from Medium’s partner program.

So he started taking it seriously. He wanted to track his daily writing habit, so he built his first app — a Chrome extension for tracking writing habits.

That’s where it all started, back when he was in university. He eventually shut the product down, but it had already flipped a switch in his mind that couldn't be unflipped. He had become a die-hard indie hacker.

Since graduating, Nithursan hasn’t worked for anyone; he builds products full time.

He currently has five in the works: MoAIJobs, Chat My Brain, Wandpen, Real Work From Anywhere, and he just launched a job board boilerplate this week.

His focus is MoAIJobs, a job board for AI jobs that makes money via one-time payments from companies. It started as a 2-hour challenge on Twitter when he found some SEO potential.

Low costs are an unfair advantage

He had built job boards before, so he knew what he was doing. He used Next.js for the app, shadcn for UI components, TailwindCSS for styling, and Postgres (Supabase) for the database, and Lemon Squeezy for payments. Then, he seeded it with a scraper built with Node.js.

Two hours later, he launched it. It got initial traction when Robert Scoble shared MoAIJobs with his 500k followers on X. It also got picked up by multiple newsletters, including Ben’s Bites.

Even with all this word of mouth, it took him nearly two months to make his first dollar on it.

And that’s okay. Nithursan knew job boards were hard. Even Pieter Levels shut his AI job board down when it didn’t get traction.

But he built it anyway, because he has an unsung advantage: He's a beginner who happens to have very low expenses. That means he doesn't need a ton of traction for a product to contribute significantly to his portfolio and lifestyle.

Keeping costs at $106/mo

Let's dive into Nithursan's advantage of having nearly non-existent expenses.

When it comes to his businesses, he's on the free tier for everything he uses. That leaves only one monthly expense:

• Hosting: $6

With what he's currently bringing in, that leaves him with a 99.4% margin.

He does have the occasional non-recurring expense, like hiring a content writer on Fiverr for $50. But it's rare.

His personal expenses are similarly light.

• Groceries: $100

That's it. He buys groceries for his family, and occasionaly he might have to buy something else that they need. He lives with his parents and doesn't buy anything for himself.

How to cut costs

When you're only spending $106 per month, you don't need a ton of revenue. It's Nithursan's superpower right now.

When you're bootstrapping, you can't afford to burn money like VC-funded startups. You pay out of your own pocket, so extending runway is crucial.

He doesn't budget or use any fancy apps to keep his expenses down; he just has no interest in consumerism. He has two luxury items: a Macbook and an iPhone. Everything else is a "strict 'no'".

He rides his bike wherever he needs to go in his tiny village. He doesn’t take trips. He doesn’t go out. He doesn't pay rent. And he lives in Southeast Asia, where the cost of living is low.

He says those last two points are the big ones. They're why he's able to spend his time bootstrapping. They allow him to do a lot with a little bit of revenue.

Cut costs, then focus on earning more

That being said, he says there's something more important than saving, and that’s earning.

Instead of trying to save more, put your focus on trying to earn more.

He says that, when saving money, you are limited to what you earn. But if you put that energy into earning, you aren’t limited anymore. There are “infinite possibilities” if you set your mind to earning more.

And that’s exactly what he’s doing with MoAIJobs.

Hitting a revenue milestone: $1k+

Nithursan freelances to keep the lights on, helping entrepreneurs fix their codebases. But he may not have to do that much longer. Last month was his best month yet with MoAIJobs, bringing in $1094

Someone pinch me. I just hit a milestone that would have felt like a dream when I wrote the first line of code for this project: $1k/mo!

Here what he’s bringing in each month:

• Freelancing: Variable (up to $2k)

• MoAIJobs: $1094

• Chat My Brain: $0

• Wandpen: $0

• Real Work From Anywhere: $200

• Job Board Boilerplate: $58 since launching this week

• Founder pay: ~$350

• Bank account balance: $3k

Self doubt kills earning potential

Nithursan is making decent money now, and he wants more of it. Luckily, he's of the mind that earning money is easy — you don't have to be the brightest or most privileged person in the room.

Any fool can earn money unless they doubt themselves.

The problem is that too many people doubt themselves, and that makes it orders or magnitude harder to make money. According to Nithursan, people who make a lot of money "just don’t have time to doubt themselves.”

Investing as an early-stage founder is foolish

Of course, one way to earn more is to invest. But Nithursan isn't doing that.

I’m still trying to realize my goals with this business, so investing in other people's businesses would be foolish.

Until his income becomes stable — and ample — he's only going to invest in his business. Well, that, and fixed deposits.

Fixed deposits provide a higher interest rate than savings in return for a lack of liquidity for a given term. It's like a CD, but with a wider range of terms.

He likes them because he knows what he’s going to get. There’s very little risk. And it’s easy, so it allows him to put his time and energy into his business.

So far, he has $7.5k tied up in fixed deposits.

What the future holds

From here, Nithusan’s goal is to take MoAIJobs to $30k/mo in revenue.

To do that, he'll keep costs down and focus his efforts on what got him here: cold outreach with careful sourcing and personalized emails.

And he's also testing free tools in order to gain more backlinks and traffic. So far, it's having an impact. Product Hunt even tweeted about a free product called Will AI Replace Me?

What he won't do is seek capital. And why would he with costs that low?

If I provide value, my customers will pay. And I’d rather provide value to my customers than to VCs.

You can watch his journey to $30k/mo on X. Or check out MoAIJobs, Chat My Brain, Wandpen, Real Work From Anywhere, and his job board boilerplate.

Please note that the above are opinions. This is meant for informational purposes only. It is not intended to be financial advice.

And if you'd like to be featured as a guest in a future interview for this series, let me know in the comments!