Alex Zee

Indie founder → $1k MRR
🤌 AI photo tools
🚗 car history and mileage check by plate
Real numbers, ship/kill notes

[Alex Zee @nocultbro]

What I'm building:
🤌 PerfectifyAI: AI photo cleanup for online sellers, car dealers and real estate listings
🚗 CheckCarNow: car history and mileage check by plate. Relaunching soon

Shut down Petfaces, my webshop for pet owners. Every product gets 90 days to show a paid signal or it's out.

Posting the real numbers on the way to $1k MRR.

[Alex Zee @nocultbro]

@petergyang Did you know Polsia spelled backwards is "aislop"? Maybe that's why there are no case studies

[Alex Zee @nocultbro]

@sksuvorovas Ah, that makes sense. Then taking it down was the right call, not worth the legal risk

[Alex Zee @nocultbro]

@aksenHQ There's real demand for it. People pay for car history checks, I just didn't push it hard enough the first time

[Alex Zee @nocultbro]

a while ago:
> shut down petfaces
> started over

now:
> perfectifyai shipping tool after tool
> checkcarnow coming back
> first users finding me through google, not hype

still far from $1k MRR. still building.

if your first product died, that's not the end. that's tuition.

[Alex Zee @nocultbro]

@Joshua_WD Thanks Joshua, really appreciate it 🙏

[Alex Zee @nocultbro]

Build note: expanded the "make image transparent" guide on the PerfectifyAI blog.

That phrase gets about 18.1k US searches a month, and "transparent background maker" about 22.2k. So the guide now covers Canva, Photoshop, GIMP and the free options too, not just my tool.

People searching how-to want the answer first, the product second.

[Alex Zee @nocultbro]

@LearnWhyWeTrust Mine was my own from day one, I never started from a template. The test was more a check that it still sounds like me and not like every other AI tool

[Alex Zee @nocultbro]

The drama is here if you are interested

[Nevo David @wickedguro]

Honestly, this guy lost his App Store apps and dropped to $0. He looked cool, so I hired him.
But this is beyond anything I can comprehend.
See you in court.

[Alex Zee @nocultbro]

This week's live example: a fake firing, a "leaked" repo that was already open source, and "see you in court". It got everyone talking and made everyone trust them a little less.

You can rent attention for a day. Trust takes much longer to earn back.

[Minh Pham @mq_p]

People will find out one day that indie hackers:

- Fake MRR screenshots
- Pump each other up in engagement pods
- Manufacture drama to farm engagement
- Pretend to have paying customers when they only have free users
- Count lifetime deals as recurring revenue
- Hide churn while flexing new signups
- Launch products nobody actually uses
- Fake testimonials and customer success stories
- Build in public but hide the numbers that matter
- Copy successful SaaS ideas and pretend they invented them
- Sell courses about building startups instead of building successful startups
- Celebrate $10K MRR while quietly spending $15K a month
- Announce fake waitlists to create hype
- Buy upvotes on Product Hunt
- Cross-promote each other’s launches to manufacture traction
- Call every side project a startup
- Spend more time posting about building than actually building
- Sell the dream of passive income while working around the clock to maintain it

Did I miss something ?

[Alex Zee @nocultbro]

@mq_p Missing one: picking the metric that looks best that week. Signups when revenue is flat, revenue when churn is ugly. A Stripe-verified number fixes most of this list.

[Alex Zee @nocultbro]

Had a chat this week about AI product photos. For me a messy product photo doesn't look authentic. It looks like a seller who skips details.

Starting to think this is a generational split. Which side are you on?

[Alex Zee @nocultbro]

@floriandarroman @pbteja1998 Congrats on the 100K 🎉 Where can I watch it? Couldn't spot a link in the post

[Alex Zee @nocultbro]

@aleeshyR @omgsidewalks Interesting, I'm the opposite. A messy photo makes me wonder how careful the seller is with the rest of the business. Might be a generational split, worth digging into more

[Alex Zee @nocultbro]

@aleeshyR @omgsidewalks Where's the line for you? A fully generated product shot feels fake, but what about a real photo of the real product where AI only removes the background or cleans up a wrinkle or dust? That still turns you off?

[Alex Zee @nocultbro]

How I'm doing SEO for PerfectifyAI right now:

Every tool gets its own page, plus a blog post aimed at the exact thing people search for.

Today that was Background Changer, with an 8.1k/mo US search term. No traffic numbers yet since it went live a few hours ago. I'll share them when they're in.

[Alex Zee @nocultbro]

Background Changer is live on PerfectifyAI.

Remove the background, then pick black, white or any custom color behind the photo. Marketplaces want clean backgrounds, not checkerboards 🤌

[Alex Zee @nocultbro]

@ModestMitkus Copying gets you the product but not the distribution, the taste or the stubbornness to keep shipping. That's why the copycats stall out after one tweet.

[Alex Zee @nocultbro]

Everyone's posting revenue screenshots today. Mine's still a work in progress

[Alex Zee @nocultbro]

@elion_shahini Not yet, haven't looked into it. Good luck getting through review

[Alex Zee @nocultbro]

SEO articles brought PerfectifyAI its first users.
X brought me builder friends.
Both count, just in very different ways 😅