From $0 to $10k MRR: My Indie Hacker Journey – Part 1

Before August 15th of this year, I had never done full-stack development, nor had I worked as a software engineer or developed any product from scratch. My background? I’m an NLP master’s student whose only reasonably proficient programming language is Python. My coding experience was limited to implementing machine learning algorithms for assignments and writing scripts for research papers—far from what you'd call independent software development.

Then came August 15th, the day I joined a community of indie hackers and SEO enthusiasts. That’s when my journey began. I had no prior experience with JavaScript, so I started with the basics: classic JavaScript syntax, HTML, and CSS. Eventually, I discovered the Nuxt framework. It seemed promising for full-stack development—intuitive and beginner-friendly. Around the same time, I stumbled upon Cursor, a renowned AI programming assistant, which turned out to be an absolute game-changer for my development process.

Using Nuxt, I launched my very first website: https://headshotgenerator.net/. The journey wasn’t without its hurdles—I spent countless hours on rudimentary tasks like domain registration and DNS configuration, having no prior experience in these areas. I deployed the site on Vercel, a platform that offers seamless GitHub integration and free hosting for low-traffic projects while supporting various full-stack frameworks.

The website was... rough, to say the least. It had a very amateurish look, but I managed to implement core features like user login, payments (later removed), and multilingual support—basic must-haves for AI-powered tools. That said, I had zero knowledge of SEO at the time. In hindsight, targeting a highly competitive niche like “headshot generator” with an old keyword was a rookie mistake. The site saw almost no organic traffic and, unsurprisingly, generated no revenue. But I chalked it up as a valuable learning experience—it was my first full-stack project, after all, and it gave me a solid grasp of the basics.

After this, I became interested in content-driven websites. Inspired by a McDonald’s menu website, I had the idea to create something similar, but for KFC menus. That led to my second Nuxt-based project: https://kfcmenu.net/. Today, the site gets tens of thousands of monthly visits, generating a trickle of ad revenue.

The process wasn’t as straightforward as I’d hoped. I had to gather nutritional information, images, and other details for various food items to make the site genuinely useful for users looking to plan their orders. Since the site contains numerous standalone pages, even minor tweaks often required repetitive updates across multiple pages—a huge time sink. This inefficiency stemmed from my inexperience with Nuxt and full-stack development in general. Everything was trial and error. To better meet customer needs, I also added an AI-powered chatbot to recommend KFC items, enhancing user engagement and providing personalized suggestions for their orders.

Thanks to Cursor, I was able to push through, spending over a hundred hours building this site. The high content volume, combined with the need for multilingual translation, made the task daunting. Without AI assistance, completing the site would’ve been near impossible. The translation work alone would’ve been a dealbreaker.

Throughout these two projects, I started noticing the limitations of the Nuxt framework. Its community is relatively small, which makes troubleshooting challenging. Additionally, the scarcity of UI resources and the less extensive training data available for AI coding assistants when working with Nuxt posed additional hurdles. These realizations eventually led me to switch to Next.js for future projects.

In Part 2, I’ll dive into the website that currently earns me $10k MRR, sharing the lessons I’ve learned along the way. Stay tuned!