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.
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 😄
Who gets cited when AI recommends products in your category?
treg asks ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity what your buyers would ask, then shows which brands get named and which pages they're pulling from.
About $0.31 a run and no subscription 👀
🤝 Paid partnership
Introducing OpenSource AEO Toolkit
- Find every source AI cites, and the author behind it
- Get your product into the sources AI trusts
- 1¢ per prompt, no subscription
- Access 4000+ data & services
Try it at treg.to/aeo
Partner with @cloroai
Repo link below 👇
Anthropic says Claude now writes about 90% of Claude Code, and low-risk changes ship without a human reading them. Payments still get one or two engineers.
After 10+ iOS apps, here's my split:
- Ships without me reading it: copy, layout, READMEs, icons
- I read every line: paywalls, restoring purchases, anything that shows a price
So I trust it everywhere except where it can cost me money 😄
Claude writes about 90% of Claude Code's code.
From June to September, merged PRs more than doubled while the share reverted fell by more than 40%.
We wrote about how we changed code review to get there, and how to adopt it:
claude.dev/blog/solving-code…
Anthropic is putting 5% of its shares toward the public benefit.
My side projects have been 100% public benefit since day one … mostly by accident but they are 😂
We’re committing a portion of Anthropic’s shares to the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, a new wholly owned entity dedicated entirely to the public benefit.
It will start off with 5% of our shares. For every 50% increase in the company’s value over a set baseline, we can contribute up to an extra 2%, subject to our board’s discretion.
In total, this means that roughly 20% of Anthropic’s shares are committed to the public good. Our co-founders have already pledged to donate 80% of their equity, and around half our employees are donating a portion of their equity as part of a donation matching program we’ve run since our founding.
In the post below, we share more details about our new fund.
anthropic.com/news/public-be…
Sometimes I find myself believing that every flop has a reason. a bad hook, bad timing, wrong topic.
But two posts with the same format and the same hour can hit completely different numbers
The point is: there’s no way of knowing what will work until it does
Really impressed that this post did so well at 11K views
Combining news with personal experience seems be what resonates with me
The iPhone Duo sold out its pre-orders in minutes today. New orders ship in January.
After 10+ iOS apps, here's what I'm checking in mine before Oct 23:
- does the layout survive unfolding from 5.4" to 7.6" mid-session
- do my paywalls look silly stretched across a tablet-sized screen
- do any UI elements assumes one fixed width
The funny part: I don't have one. So I'll be testing a $1,999 phone in the simulator like everyone else 😂