Most indie hacker success stories are told from the finish line.
You get the revenue number, the clean narrative, the lessons that only make sense in hindsight. What gets left out is the four years of failed products, the full-time job running in parallel, and the slow, grinding process of figuring out what actually works.
200+ Proven Ways to Make Money With AI in 2026
AI is still in its early money phase- but the window is closing faster than most people realize.
Get 200+ tested AI income strategies, real use cases, and practical paths to start earning this year - curated for people who actually want to act, not just learn.
Nic Polotnianko started coding at 16 in Ukraine. He came to indie hacking in 2022 with one skill - software engineering - and quickly learned it was not enough. He spent a year and a half shipping products that went nowhere before one finally caught.
That product, BlogToPin, is now at $15k MRR. His second product, Sequenzy, an email marketing tool for SaaS companies, hit $1k MRR six months after launch.
Here is how he got there, and what he is doing differently the second time around.
The Product That Finally Worked
Before BlogToPin, there were a string of products that did not go anywhere. Nic does not dwell on the specifics - the pattern is familiar enough: build something, find no traction, move on.
The shift came from an unexpected place. He had been running a blog that grew to around $500 in monthly ad revenue. While working on it, he noticed that Pinterest was an underused but effective
channel for driving traffic to content sites. He built a tool to automate the process of creating and scheduling pins from blog posts.
That became BlogToPin.
Three weeks after launching, he quit his job. He had no revenue at that point - just about a year of savings and a product he believed in. Today, that product is generating $15k in monthly recurring revenue, up from $10k the previous year.
How It Was Built
The initial version took one to two months to build. But it took considerably longer to get it working reliably. BlogToPin handles some technically complex tasks: website processing, pin creation and design, scheduling, and uploading. Nic spent roughly another six months improving it before it was genuinely solid.
The tech stack is straightforward: Next.js, Drizzle ORM, tRPC, shadcn, Express for handling long-running background tasks, BullMQ for job queuing, and MySQL on PlanetScale for data. He designed most of the interface by vibe coding and pulling from Tailwind UI components.
His view on the stack: keep it simple. AI tools are well-suited to working with standard, well-documented frameworks. Exotic choices make iteration slower.
The Churn Problem
BlogToPin offers three pricing tiers - $39, $79, and $179 per month - with annual plans available. Most customers are on the lowest tier. Around 30% opt for annual billing.
The biggest operational challenge right now is churn. BlogToPin runs at roughly 10 to 15% monthly churn, which means Nic needs to bring in around $2k in new MRR every month just to stay flat. He is growing past that, but it creates a constant ceiling on how fast the business can compound.
That constraint directly shaped how he thought about his second product. When he built Sequenzy - an email sequence tool aimed at SaaS companies - he chose the infrastructure category deliberately. Infrastructure products tend to become deeply embedded in workflows, which means customers cancel far less often.
"People don't consider churn when starting out. But churn limits your ceiling. I need to acquire an extra $2k in MRR each month just to stay even."
Five Growth Channels, One That Does Most of the Work
Nic spreads across multiple channels, but is honest about which ones actually move the needle.
SEO - Roughly 50% of BlogToPin's growth comes from organic search. He targets keywords like "Pinterest marketing tool" and builds supporting content: listicles, tutorials, and backlink outreach. It is slow to build but works on its own once established.
Referral program - A 30% lifetime commission for affiliates. It is a generous structure, and because users tend to be happy with the product, a portion of them actively promote it.
YouTube - SEO-optimized tutorials targeting specific search terms within the Pinterest niche. The view counts are modest, but the compounding effect is real over time.
Reddit - Manual, slow, and getting harder. Nic posts genuinely helpful answers rather than promotional content. Moderators are cracking down more, which limits how effective this channel can be.
Influencer outreach - He contacted everyone in his niche. Two responded. One drove a meaningful number of customers. He treats it as a numbers game and focuses on making the product genuinely useful for the person, not just the promotion.
The takeaway: one channel doing 50% of the work is a significant concentration. He is not trying to fix that in the short term - it works. But it is worth noting for anyone building a similar product.
What He Would Tell Someone Starting Out
Nic is direct about this. He describes his path as one mistake after another, with very little elegant strategy involved. The thing that separated him from people who quit was simpler than most frameworks suggest.
He works 16 hours a day. He frames this not as a virtue but as a practical edge: more hours means more experiments, more customer conversations, and faster iteration. Over time, that compounds into a better product and a better understanding of the market.
His advice strips down to four things:
Expect the journey to be longer than you think. Most people underestimate this significantly.
Ship fast. A slow build cycle means fewer learning cycles.
Iterate constantly. What you launch is rarely what works.
When you do not know what to do next, do something. Improve the product, do marketing, talk to a customer. Movement matters.
The last point is the one he emphasizes most. Inaction is what actually kills most products - not the competition, not the market, not the timing.
What Comes Next
Nic's near-term targets: grow BlogToPin to $20k to $30k MRR, and scale Sequenzy to $100k MRR over time.
He is not planning a reinvention to get there. The plan is the same as it has always been: focus on what is working, keep improving the products, keep marketing, and keep iterating.
You can follow his progress on X, where he shares updates on both products and the mechanics of running an indie SaaS business.
200+ Proven Ways to Make Money With AI in 2026
The next wave of millionaires will be people who figured out how to make AI work for them.
The window to get ahead is still open. But not for long.
Here are 200+ proven ways to make money with AI in 2026.
Sign up for Superhuman AI, the free daily newsletter read by 1M+ professionals, and get instant access to all 200+ ways to profit from AI this year.
