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:

• $1249 on the first day

• $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:

1. Choose a product idea and find a relevant keyword (Lead Magnet Examples helps with that).

2. Launch on X, Product Hunt, and product directories -> Get featured for free in AI-related newsletters.

3. Get featured for free by TikTok and Instagram influencers. They LOVE talking about free tools!

4. 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.

5. Enjoy SEO traffic thanks to the backlinks.

6. 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).