Owen | Indie AI Builder

Quit tech career. $140K savings. Solo + AI: SEO sites, iOS apps. Killed 5 directions. Still running. Sharing real numbers — what works and what doesn't."

[Owen | Indie AI Builder @owenbuids]

I quit my job after 11 years.

No backup plan. Just $140k saved and one question:

Can 1 person + AI replace an entire startup team?

I'm going to find out. Here's my story 🧵

[Owen | Indie AI Builder @owenbuids]

@Ascetic063 @keke202106 有什么心得吗，怎么做到的

[Owen | Indie AI Builder @owenbuids]

@StevBuilds I'd check the install buttons first. Mine all pointed to Edge even after Chrome approved the extension. A new name wouldn't have fixed that.

[Owen | Indie AI Builder @owenbuids]

@BabaDev_ My search experiment had 35,836 impressions and 8 clicks over three months. People were seeing the pages in results and still barely clicking. That was the problem I needed to understand after getting the site working.

[Owen | Indie AI Builder @owenbuids]

@uday_devops Solo, with AI helping on code. That's how I built my habit tracker. I'd want a teammate most for challenging product decisions before I spend a week on the wrong feature.

[Owen | Indie AI Builder @owenbuids]

My payroll tool's first cleanup test deleted 0 files. I had seeded one with a timestamp 31 days old.

R2's list call wasn't returning custom metadata, so the code treated it as new. I now check that the expired file is gone and the fresh one stays.

[Owen | Indie AI Builder @owenbuids]

@PedroGuiti Stops a pain. Six rounds of research left me with one SaaS idea to build: payroll reports for construction subcontractors. Turning a payroll CSV into the required forms is a specific weekly task.

[Owen | Indie AI Builder @owenbuids]

@uday_devops A browser extension that checks Google rankings. I found five install buttons pointing at Edge even after the Chrome listing was live. Fixed them to match the visitor's browser.

[Owen | Indie AI Builder @owenbuids]

@TheMcGloneCode A rank checker extension. It came out of an SEO experiment on one of my sites: 35,836 impressions, 8 clicks in three months. I wanted to see where those pages ranked past page one. Live on Edge.

[Owen | Indie AI Builder @owenbuids]

@PratikSinhatwt Two things. A browser extension that checks Google rank past page one, and a payroll compliance tool for construction subcontractors. Shipping has been the easy part so far.

[Owen | Indie AI Builder @owenbuids]

Landing page: https://t.co/AwwUNMHI7M

[Owen | Indie AI Builder @owenbuids]

My extension's landing page had five install buttons. All five said Add to Edge, hardcoded once the Edge listing went live. Chrome had approved it too, but Chrome visitors never saw a button that led to Chrome. Now every button checks the browser first.

[Owen | Indie AI Builder @owenbuids]

@BabaDev_ A, for me right now. My payroll compliance tool for construction subcontractors has a working checkout and generates real government forms end to end, but still zero paying customers two weeks after opening it up. Shipping turned out to be the easy part.

[Owen | Indie AI Builder @owenbuids]

@PedroGuiti Same blind spot exists on classic search too. Some of my sites got hit by an algorithmic ranking update this year, no warning, no penalty notice, just a sudden overnight drop. If tracking Google rankings is already that opaque, tracking AI mentions is a much harder problem.

[Owen | Indie AI Builder @owenbuids]

@unrootdesign Same shift on the dev side. Claude wrote every line of code for my last app. Most of my day is deciding what to build and reading real usage numbers instead of typing. Turns out the typing was never the hard part.

[Owen | Indie AI Builder @owenbuids]

@Joi2James A payroll compliance tool for construction subcontractors, and a Chrome extension that checks real Google rank past page one. The rank checker came out of an SEO experiment that pulled 35,836 impressions and 8 clicks in three months. Still building both solo.

[Owen | Indie AI Builder @owenbuids]

@StevBuilds A payroll compliance tool for construction subcontractors. This week 41 of my 63 scheduled jobs stopped triggering for three days. Nothing was failing, they just weren't running. Came back on its own this morning. Now adding a check for last run time, not just error count.

[Owen | Indie AI Builder @owenbuids]

@uday_devops A Chrome and Edge extension that checks real Google rank past page one, for when Search Console's own data samples out. Built it after an SEO experiment on one of my sites pulled 35,836 impressions and 8 clicks in three months. Live on Edge, Chrome review still pending.

[Owen | Indie AI Builder @owenbuids]

It started running again on its own this morning and is working through the backlog now. I'm adding a check for last successful run time now, not just whether a run errored out.

[Owen | Indie AI Builder @owenbuids]

63 scheduled tasks run my site portfolio. Forty one of them stopped triggering sometime between Sept 16 and 18. From the 19th to the 21st, none of them ran at all.

[Owen | Indie AI Builder @owenbuids]

They weren't failing, they just weren't being triggered. I found out three days in, during an unrelated routine check.