How to make money as an indiehacker in 2026 and beyond? the opportunities seem to be shrinking fast. I've been thinking about this a lot lately. AI is eating whole categories of the SaaS industry. What would I work on if I was starting from scratch? Here are some random thoughts. 1) Software primitives Some of the basics aren't going away. Humans use them to get a job done, or humans use AI to interact with the tool. The AI needs the tool and can't natively do what the tool does. Newsletter managers/deliverers, form builders, analytics software. If the category has existed for 20 years, it will continue to exist. The question here is can you get traction for a product in an extremely saturated space. Maybe there are opportunities in niches. 2) Automate your specialized service This is probably the best time ever to productize a specialized service. Take a domain / service you're an expert in, which previously would require unscalable 1-to-1 attention with a client, and agentify it with proprietary data/skill.md etc. 3) AI value arbitrage There is a short term opportunity in taking things we see at the cutting edge of the X bubble, and packaging it for the non-AI-pilled. Opus 5.5 motion videos would be a recent example. We all know this is possible with AI now, but maybe there's a vehicle to package this for normies in a way that blows their minds and creates value for them. This relies on there being a knowledge gap though, which will shrink fast. 4) Just Do Hard Things (TM) Do things that are genuinely hard, that you would never be able to build before. Build things that previously only a VC-funded company would be able to do, with hurdles from all angles not just tech, but also go to market, regulatory, etc. Doesn't guarantee success but it at least keeps competition away. 5) make a social media scheduling tool just kidding about that last one.