After losing his job, this founder grew a portfolio of indie hacking tools to
$10k/mo
When the startup that Dan Kulkov worked for ran out of money, he decided to become an indie hacker. He started with low-hanging fruit and gradually built a portfolio of five products.
One failed. One got acquired. And the remaining three — MakerBox, FounderPal, and Lead Magnet Examples— are bringing in $10k/mo.
Here's Dan on how he did it. 👇
Building a portfolio of products
It's been 3 years since I started indie hacking. The startup that I worked for ran out of VC money, so I needed to find something new to work on. At that time, indie hacking and solopreneurship were getting popular on Twitter, so I decided to try a very simple idea: a directory of tools with great free plans that can help founders launch and grow their businesses.
I needed it for myself, so I imagined others might too. My goal was to make my first $1 online to prove to myself that it was possible. And it worked.
Since then, I've launched five products and experimented with different types of businesses, including content products, directories, services, and SaaS.
Some products were a success, and some of them never took off. Here's the list:
MakerBox: Content products and services around marketing. Generated ~ $130k in 3 years.
FounderPal: AI-powered marketing platform. Generated ~ $215k in 2 years.
Lead Magnet Examples: Collection of lead magnet keywords. Generated ~ $1k in 1 month (new product).
Sponsor This Newsletter: a directory of newsletters open to sponsorships. Generated ~$20K before getting acquired.
Smooz: Post-purchase platform. Generated $0.
I'm currently generating roughly $10k/mo from my three remaining businesses.
Start with an audience
Both FounderPal and MakerBox solve one problem — lack of knowledge and time to do marketing. After a couple of interviews with my target audience, I realized this was the biggest pain for most founders and indie hackers, so I decided to productize my marketing knowledge.
I started by building my personal brand on X (@DanKulkov) and writing a newsletter to build authority and trust. At the same time, I launched content products: a collection of marketing tasks and marketing frameworks, directories of free tools and newsletters to sponsor, and marketing courses and consultations.
A year later, OpenAI launched ChatGPT and AI wrappers became the new trend in the indie hacking community. That's when FounderPal was born. It started as a static marketing report that customers got after describing their products. Since then, we transformed FounderPal into a holistic marketing platform where users did everything from defining their marketing strategies to writing SEO articles.
It's built with no-code: Bubble for frontend, Xano for backend.
For my new product, Lead Magnet Examples, I use NextJS, Supabase, and Vercel.
Find out what grows your business
The FounderPal launch was pretty standard: We launched on X and Product Hunt. This is usually enough to validate the idea and get initial traction.
But don’t be obsessed with it.
FounderPal made:
$18,709 in the first 2 months
$60,000+ in the first 6 months
What worked
The real fun starts after the launch. Here are some channels that worked well for FounderPal:
Building free tools to win in SEO — find free tool ideas here
Building audiences outside of X (YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn) — Use my free Content Ideas Generator to get started
Buying Facebook Ads — especially to retarget people who visited your website)
Sponsoring product directories — like Futurepedia or There Is An AI For That
Launching a free newsletter that nurtures our audience weekly
Doing programmatic SEO — not with generic spam AI articles, but data-driven pages
Affiliate marketing — once you get stable conversion and a significant number of customers
What didn't work
And here are some channels that didn't perform well:
Newsletter sponsorships (too expensive and most of the clicks are bots)
Referral programs for users (very hard to make it work)
Google ads (more expensive than Facebook Ads and more irrelevant clicks)
Twitter ads (the worst targeting you will see in your life)
Audience building on Reddit (you will get banned 8 out of 10 times. On a side note, answering long-tail questions on Reddit can work)
Beta list and other half-dead product directories from 2016
There is no silver-bullet marketing channel. Some people get 0 results with cold emails. Some people have a $50,000/mo business that thrives on emails. You need to find out what works for your business.
Build free products
SEO is a long-term and boring channel, but it provides stable, free traffic on autopilot. But blog articles didn't get us any good results, so we decided to try building free AI-powered tools. Here's how it works:
Choose a product idea and find a relevant keyword (Lead Magnet Examples helps with that).
Launch on X, Product Hunt, and product directories -> Get featured for free in AI-related newsletters.
Get featured for free by TikTok and Instagram influencers. They LOVE talking about free tools!
Create PSEO pages. For example, if your free tool is a "business plan generator," then you can create SEO pages for many types of businesses: business plan for a store, business plan for a travel agency, business plan for a hospital, etc.
Enjoy SEO traffic thanks to the backlinks.
Collect emails or soft-promote your premium offer.
You can check how we do it for FounderPal here: https://founderpal.ai/free-tools
Make sure there's actually a market
My biggest challenge is always not to fall into the trap of building a tool nobody needs.
I had this experience while building Smooz. I needed this platform for myself to improve the post-purchase experience of my content products — delivering files easily, collecting data about customers, and upselling products and services. But it turned out that this problem was only relevant to a very small number of users. My ideal customers needed to sell with LemonSqueezy and have consistent revenue. And I also had to persuade them that their current post-purchase flow could be improved.
It required outreach, calls, and onboarding, which is a bad fit with a $9/mo platform. Eventually, I had to accept that the product had flopped and stop wasting time on it.
If I could start over on Smooz, I would run 10-15 user interviews to understand the market and the problem better before building anything. This simple step would have saved me a month of development.
Try different things
My advice is to try more things! Solopreneurship is not easy. Nothing will work on the first try. Marketing channels will stop working. Your audience will ignore you.
I can’t stress this enough — just try different things.
Product Hunt launch failed? Okay, do some cold emails.
No response? Conduct some interviews.
Found a pain point? Build a free tool for it. Iterate-iterate-iterate.
Please, don’t expect your micro-SaaS to earn $5000/mo after 2 weeks of publishing blog posts. It’s a long run. Some months will be a plateau. Until you find out what’s working.
Sometimes you might even need to start again. Maybe the product you’ve launched is good enough to earn $500/mo. But not $5000/mo. This is part of the journey.
Do boring stuff
Ask for feedback
Ship good things
Iterate
Be consistent
What's next?
I have no big goals for now — just to enjoy life.
You can follow along on X. And check out my free marketing guide (15 mins reading time).
Leave a Comment
This was a great read. The “no silver bullet” part really stuck, it’s easy to think you’re just missing the right channel, but it’s really about constant testing.
Free tools for SEO is such a clever angle too. Never considered that as a long-term strategy before.
Really liked this take. The reminder that there’s no perfect growth lever is so important — it’s all about experimenting and adjusting instead of chasing the next shiny tactic.
The point about using free SEO tools as part of a long-term strategy was also eye-opening. It’s easy to overlook how much consistent small actions compound over time. Thanks for sharing this!
Cool to see experimentation with so many different channels
FaceSeek is also a good Ai face recognition App
Really inspiring story! I like how Dan focused on validation and solving his own problems before building. It’s a great reminder that starting small, listening to users, and iterating quickly can lead to sustainable growth. The way he leveraged free tools and SEO to drive traffic is super smart , definitely a strategy worth from for anyone building digital products.
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This is packed with hard-earned wisdom 👏
As a developer who’s been experimenting with side projects, your “portfolio approach” really resonates. Love how you turned small experiments into sustainable revenue instead of chasing a single “unicorn” idea.
The bit about building free AI tools for SEO was super insightful — that’s such a clever way to earn backlinks and validate ideas at the same time.
Also appreciate how honest you were about Smooz not working out. Hearing the real stories behind both wins and flops helps other makers stay grounded.
This is the key message. Be aggressively consistent if you see success, but end early if it’s not going anywhere.
thanks! good article !
Great article, thank you!
It's really helpful that I came across this since I just started my platform as well
I will add podcast partnerships at what works.
Thanks.
In the article some links seem to go through google, instead of directly to your product.
In a few other places it's just the direct link.
Any particular reason for that?
Loved reading this. Dan’s story feels real and down to earth. Trying different things, keeping what works, and being open about the rest is the kind of mindset that actually builds momentum.
Through this article, I see more and more the importance of building a portfolio for myself. Many companies now prioritize candidates with portfolio.
Loved this arc; turning a layoff into a calm portfolio that adds up to $10k/mo is peak indie hacking. The through-line I see: small, opinionated bets; shared components so each new tool is faster to ship; and distribution that compounds (community, SEO, and lightweight showcases) instead of chasing virality.
Curious on two fronts:
What single activation best predicts a paying user across your tools; first successful result, a second session within a week, or an integration connected?
Which channel stayed durable vs. spiky; SEO, niche communities, or marketplace listings?
P.S. I’m with Buzz; we build conversion-focused Webflow sites and pragmatic SEO for product launches. Happy to share a tight 10-point GTM checklist if useful.
Hello everyone 👋
My name is Alaa, and I’m currently working on a personal project — an AI voice chatbot using Unreal Engine and Inworld AI.
I already have the basic concept and some assets, but I’m looking for a kind developer who could help me with the coding part or guide me step-by-step with the integration (especially the voice and animation parts).
It’s a personal, non-commercial project. I’m not looking to pay anyone — just hoping to find someone who loves AI and wants to collaborate or share their knowledge.
Thank you so much for reading this 🙏
Any help or advice would mean a lot to me ❤️
— Alaa
Cool post, thanks for the free value. For me what's striking is your "audience first, product second" mentality. It's so easy to build products nowadays, building an audience not so much.
What I struggle the most with when it comes to building an audience is figuring out what I want to talk about, whether I should show my face or not, which platform to use, etc, and being consistent, obviously. I feel like a complete idiot when it comes to this, like some people are natural influencers, others like me are super bad at it.
Thank you for sharing such a powerful and authentic journey. It’s stories like this that inspire others to push forward in their careers.
Really inspiring story, Dan. Thank you for sharing such a transparent breakdown of your journey from job loss to building a $10K/month indie portfolio.
What stood out to me most:
Your “product-portfolio” approach — launching multiple small experiments rather than betting everything on one big idea — feels like a much more sustainable path.
Using free tools and SEO early on to validate ideas and build signal before investing heavily. That’s smart and low risk.
Being honest about what didn’t work (like Smooz) is just as important as sharing successes — helps others avoid the same pitfalls.
If I may ask: how do you balance time and resources across multiple products so none get neglected, especially when one starts scaling? And how do you decide when to sunset something vs keep iterating?
Again — powerful story. Thanks for the hard lessons and the proof that consistency + experimentation can really win.
Very insightful story. I love how you turned layoffs into a portfolio of tools that each pull their weight. The bit about using free AI tools to seed SEO + validation really jumped out. Such a sneaky-smart way to build both value and signal early.
I am also working on my first project and will soon share my journey. It makes me realize that nothing is impossible.
That's awesome, gonna get there someday!
This is a super inspiring story, it's amazing how he bounced back and built something incredible. Thanks for sharing
Love this breakdown — super inspiring to see how you diversified across products and learned from each stage. The balance between audience-building and product iteration really stands out. Thanks for sharing this!
really inspiring story!
It seems like your micro-SaaS products really took off because they tackled real problems for founders. How do you usually identify which problems are worth building for, especially when starting a new micro-SaaS?
This is so relatable. As someone who got laid off by AI and spent 15 months learning to code from scratch, I built TrendingBizIdeas.com to solve exactly this pain point: founders spinning their wheels on unvalidated ideas.
Really inspiring breakdown. What stood out to me is how you treated every product as a learning step not just a success or failure.
I liked the “build free tools for SEO” idea. That’s such a smart approach to combine value + traffic instead of chasing ads or random backlinks.
Also agree with the point about trying different things most people quit after one failed launch, but consistency really compounds over time. Great read, Dan!
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Great article, keep them coming!
Making $10,000 a month, I think he is doing pretty well.
Super inspiring , turning a job loss into a $10K/mo journey shows real grit. Love your focus on small, useful tools; it’s a great reminder that indie building can create real stability.
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This is such a powerful story! Losing a job and then turning that setback into a $10K/mo indie journey is pure inspiration. I really like how you focused on creating small but useful tools — that’s exactly what real problem-solving looks like. As someone working on creative apps myself, your consistency and mindset are super motivating. Thanks for sharing your experience, it’s a reminder that building independently can actually create stability.
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huh Great James
if anyone want to get an app plz contact me I have no traffic yet I made it today and it is a SAAS idea for only 1000 dollar to 2000 dollar
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