3. Following the Money: An Indie Hacker's Guide to Idea Hunting

We're going on a search for profitable side hustles, using founder MRR posts

In the last article, we outlined our criteria for idea generation, inspired by Samuel Rondot:

• Proven Demand. Don’t waste time on a completely new concept. Take an existing idea, fix something that frustrates users, and deliver immediate value.

• Low Maintenance. The goal is a side hustle, not another full-time job.

• Low Marketing Spend. You’re willing to invest time and some money, but not enough to compete with VC-backed giants.

• Solves Your Own Problem. Building a product you would personally pay for is a powerful motivator.

With that framework in mind, let’s go hunting for ideas that fit the bill.

Social Media Idea Hunting

A great place to start is social media. Here, we can find founders sharing their Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) milestones to build hype and demonstrate traction. While these figures should be taken with a grain of salt, they are a strong signal of market demand for a product or service.

We’ll look for tags like “MRR” to find founders sharing their progress. This exercise is meant to inspire us and reveal potential markets we can tap into while working limited hours—it’s a side hustle, after all.

Let’s check X, Substack, and LinkedIn. Here’s a collection of what we found:

X

• As an example, successful solopreneur Marc Lou posts about big growth in DataFast, with 8k mrr and growing.

• Dropmagic.ai, 35k MRR

• vibe3d ai, 3k MRR

• Klap AI , 4k MRR

• replymer, with no marketing, 1k MRR

• N8n contractor , 25k MRR

• minea, 75k MRR

Substack

• Writestack, 2k MRR

• Screenshotone, 10k MRR

LinkedIn

• taap, 2k MRR with a spike at 10k

Starter story

A treasure trove of material to inspire you.

• arvow, 70k MRR

• habitkit, 15k MRR

• reelfarm, 10k MRR

• hyperping, 15k MRR

• web.vidon.ai, 6k MRR

• pdfshift, 10k MRR

• others… there’s absolutely loads.

Notes and Takeaways

Keep two things in mind as you do this research.

First, high MRR doesn’t always equal high profit. Revenue can be inflated by high spending on paid marketing. The goal is to find businesses that are profitable and sustainable, not just large.

Second, you can learn a tremendous amount by reading the posts from these founders. While diving down this rabbit hole, I found convincing success stories from people doing n8n automation contracts and others having major marketing success using YouTube.

Making this a regular exercise—soaking up the content and analyzing these journeys—will provide invaluable insights for the later stages of building your own product.

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