What's New: OpenAI launches the full version of o1

(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)

Here's what you'll find in this issue:

• OpenAI's full version of o1 is much faster than the preview.
• From saving time, to creeping people out, AI interviewers are a wild card.
• $4M in total revenue. Jeremy Redman was fired from every job he ever had. Then, he moved to LA and went from movie studios to startups.

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OpenAI launches the full version of o1 🚀

OpenAI's "12 Days of Shipmas" kicked off with a bang. On day one, the company launched the full version of its o1 model in ChatGPT, and dropped a $200 unlimited Pro plan.

The full o1 is much faster than the preview version launched earlier this year, and can now respond to images.

It's a "reasoning" model, meaning that it works through problems step-by-step. It's given more processing time to "think" things through, resulting in slower, but (hopefully) higher-quality results for scientific, math, and coding queries.

Read the full article →

The Build Board 🪧

Every day, indie hackers post updates about the products they're building. Here's what the community voted to the top yesterday!

1. CodeFast: Learn to code in weeks, not months.
2. MAKE book: The Indie Maker Handbook.
3. HiFive: Helps you form healthy habits and stay fit.
4. Advanced Woo Labels: WordPress (WooCommerce) plugin to create product labels.
5. CarSearch Hub: Car data search tool.

Enjoy building in public? Post an update to your product page on Indie Hackers, and it will automatically be added to the daily leaderboard.

AI is taking over hiring 🤖

AI is shaking up the hiring game, but not without controversy. Enter AI interviewers, the recruitment version of a Black Mirror episode.

Tools that let people apply to thousands of jobs in a day have left HR teams drowning in resumes. The number of job applications is growing 4x faster than actual job openings. Combine that with the fact that hiring takes forever (45 days on average, even longer in tech), and you can see why companies are turning some tasks over to AI.

There are lots of pros for using AI interviewers, but here’s the catch: AI can get weird, and nobody really knows what it’s looking for.

Read the full article →

SaaS Watch 👀

SaaS Watch is a roundup of all the latest micro-SaaS acquisition opportunities. Here are the top three for this week!

1. AI cofounder: $1.5K asking price.

2. Flutter tool for rapid prototyping: $100 per month, 10-100 users, $30K asking price.

3. AI tool for creating interactive data visualizations: $60 per month, 10-100 users, $40K asking price.

$2M ARR in six years, using "beef" as marketing 🥩

Jeremy Redman went from making $15 per hour to launching three six figure no-code tech companies, and one seven figure company, all within six years. His primary focus, TaskMagic, has only been around for two years, but it's already at $4M in total revenue.

TaskMagic started as a browser automation tool. It can automate most things that a human can do: Clicking, typing, copy/pasting, etc. The MVP was just a Typeform on a Webflow site where people would say what they wanted, then the team would manually set up automations in the background.

Jeremy built all four of his companies on the back of Zapier, since he's not technical. But when Zapier labeled TaskMagic a competitor, and unexpectedly kicked the tool out of its App Store, Jeremy had to pivot quickly.

Read the full article →

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Katie Hignett, Michal Kankowski, and James Fleischmann for contributing posts. —Channing