Indie developer in Portugal • Dad • Building small iOS + web products and sharing the numbers, mistakes and weird things users do • Available for work
Porto, Portugal
Joined May 2009
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I made $200.73 in September 2026
📱 iOS Apps - $43.75
🐦 X - $80
💻 Web Apps - $76.98
Probably my best month ever!?
I'm not sure I'll be able to repeat it but I will for sure try!!!
I made $217,071 in September 2026.
💪 HYROX — $112K
⭐️ TrustMRR — $53K
📈 DataFast — $31K
🧑💻 CodeFast — $7K
🐥 Twitter — $7K
🏴☠️ Ship or Die — $3K
⚡️ ShipFast — $2K
🍜 Indie Page — $685
🕵️♂️ Stalkr — $319
🎞️ YouTube — $263
🦐 SuperShrimp — $221
🌱 HabitsGarden — $143
🧾 Zenvoice — $138
🚀 LaunchViral — $129
🛡️ ByeDispute — $97
📚 WorkbookPDF — $67
💩 PoopUp — $9
✂️ Margin: 90%
The HYROX experiment hyrox.marclou.com inflates this month's revenue, but it's the best month ever for my marketplace TrustMRR.com ($53K) and my SaaS DataFa.st ($31K).
I do everything solo, and I'm not going to lie, I'm fucking proud of myself.
Since I was a kid, I've been told to focus on one thing. I find that boring. I want to play and try a bunch of things.
I never felt confident because nothing really worked out for 7 years. I ended up being average at everything: coding, marketing, design...
But building 37 startups (marclou.com) taught me something far more important: resilience, discipline, and optimism.
Over the past decade, those skills have compounded. I now run a tiny portfolio of startups making $1M+/year, sleep 8 hours a night, work out 2 hours a day, and spend plenty of time with my wife.
Anything is possible if you're hungry.
Believe in yourself.
As someone who has been getting interviews:
You can let agents build all your code but you need to know what the fuck is going on
No matter how impressive your process is, at some point they'll ask why you did it that way. "The agent wrote it" won't get you through that"
Some interesting data about my posts:
Food used to be one of my highest reach topics, but indie business and tech took over (1.4x and 1.3x my usual reach)
Makes sense, I've been posting a lot more about them so I'm getting better at saying what I actually think
Anyone else had a topic flip like this?
Four days ago, my X analytics tool showed “indie business” as my 3rd best-performing topic
Now it’s #1 😄
One outlier did most of the work, while “food” is somehow still one of my strongest topics for reach 💀
My reflection posts also seem to be doing much better since I changed how I write them
Wondering if the "Formats" table is worth keeping
BTW, this data is from x-tra.app 👀 You can find your best topics and plan around them as well
I never make launch videos for my stuff, it always feels like more work than the thing itself 😅
Trying this for X-tra this weekend 👀
uxpilot.ai/motion
🤝 Paid partnership
Today we’re launching UX Pilot Motion ⚡️
Start with your website or an idea.
Create launch videos, product demos, logo animations, video ads and more.
Refine through chat or edit on the timeline.
Try it with your product:
uxpilot.ai/motion
Is a CMS still a thing for personal sites?
My whole reading page runs off a books.csv in the repo and a Goodreads feed that syncs on a schedule. I don't see a reason to add a database for it.
Am I missing something?
One thing I got wrong building this year: Apple Ads.
I put €42 in so far expecting a few paying users. Got 3 trials, all cancelled.
I’ve now learned that I need to manage expectations and that your ad budget needs to be a lot larger!
What did you get wrong this year?
People keep saying an app should be easy to sell at "less than a coffee".
I live in Porto. A coffee here is about a euro. X-Tra is €4.99 a month, so that line doesn't work for me at all 😄
How do you pitch the price when the coffee comparison works against you?
No sales on my apps this month, so far
4 people started a trial and none of them paid. Ads aren't working, content isn't working
Honestly, it's moments like this that make me doubt myself
Why am I even doing this?
Just submitted my first short story to a contest 😄
Feels weird to put myself out there but exciting at the same time. Best luck, "Three Nights"! 🫡
Today @bot made all 282 book spines for this and only needed like 3 tries to get the style right
After the first batches it just kept going, and even set up a schedule to check for new books and make their spines too
Now with actual covers 😄
Might be the best usage of tokens I ever had 😂
See it live on itzami.com
Renamed my new app twice on Saturday.
Little Steps until 3pm. Nido at 3:05. Nopi at 3:17.
I even shipped a TestFlight build as Nido. It lasted 12 minutes 😄
Late GM 🤘
Not gonna lie, these last 1.5 weeks have been feeling chaotic and I’m losing track of all I want to achieve
The mood is not up there but I guess we keep on pushing
If you want to learn how people are actually getting AI agents to sell, this is the list.
The 100 best GTM engineers in SF, all in one place, and you can follow every one of them at once.
gtmstack.fyi
🤝 Paid partnership
Apple Ads round 3: the searches are there. I'm just losing the bids.
€42.33 spent, 26 taps, 14 installs, 2 trials that didn't convert
I show up in about 1% of searches for my main term. 69 impressions at 1% means several thousand searches a week.
So the question isn't whether people want this. It's how much I'm willing to pay to find out 😄
