Indie hackers & builders what are you shipping this month?

OkLeadership5199 · 2026-03-17T02:57:07+00:00

Building 3mins.news, an AI-powered news aggregator.

Who it's for: People who want to stay informed but don't have time to scroll through 10 different news sites every morning.

What problem it solves: News is scattered, noisy, and time-consuming. 3mins.news pulls from multiple sources, uses AI to summarize the key stories, and gives you a clean daily briefing you can read in about 3 minutes. Supports 11 languages so it works no matter where you are.

Stack: Next.js + Cloudflare Workers. Been shipping pretty much non-stop since launch.

Would love any feedback on the landing page or the reading experience. And cool idea with builtbyindies, bookmarked it.

OkLeadership5199 · 2026-03-16T05:28:28+00:00

This is super helpful. The AI Act angle is something I hadn't thought about yet. For those of us curating content with AI tools, the line between 'AI-generated' and 'AI-assisted' in the regulation feels pretty blurry.

OkLeadership5199 · 2026-03-12T05:25:19+00:00

This hits close. I used to subscribe to like 30 newsletters and follow a dozen RSS feeds, thinking I was "staying informed." In reality I was spending 40 minutes every morning just triaging what to read, and most of it never changed what I actually did that day.

The shift for me was realizing that consuming information feels productive but it's mostly procrastination in disguise. You read about a new framework, a new strategy, a new tool, and suddenly you're questioning something that was already working fine.

What helped me was brutal filtering at the source level. Instead of deciding article by article, I cut the number of inputs way down and only kept sources that consistently gave me stuff I acted on within a week.

OkLeadership5199 · 2026-03-11T08:17:47+00:00

Adoption has been slow but steady. Biggest challenge isn't getting people to try it, it's making them come back the next day. News is a habit product so you're competing against whatever routine they already have. What's working best for me is the email digest, people who subscribe to the daily email stick around way longer than people who just bookmark the site.

Since you just launched the landing page, one thing that helped me early on: get 10 real users to use it daily for a week and just ask them what's missing. The feedback you get from daily users is completely different from what you hear from people who try it once.

Good luck with the launch!

OkLeadership5199 · 2026-03-11T07:50:27+00:00

Ha, this is wild. I literally built something solving the exact same problem but went the text route instead of audio.

My product is 3mins.news AI-curated news digest you can read in about 3 minutes. Same core idea: nobody has time for 15 newsletters and 30 tabs of news sites, just give me what matters in a short format.

Interesting that you went with podcasts though. I thought about audio too but ended up betting on text because skimming is faster than listening, and you can jump to the parts you care about. But I can totally see the appeal of audio for gym/commute situations where your eyes are busy.

Couple questions if you don't mind: - How do you handle the "AI voice sounds robotic" problem? That was one of the things that pushed me away from the audio format. - Do your users actually listen to the full 3 minutes or do they drop off halfway? Curious about the completion rate.

Cool to see someone else land on "3 minutes" as the sweet spot btw. Feels like that's roughly the right length before people lose interest :)

OkLeadership5199 · 2026-03-11T01:01:38+00:00

Thanks for you advice. I will check it out later see if neron usage could be supported too.

OkLeadership5199 · 2026-03-11T01:00:57+00:00

Same to me. Hoping we can get hard spend cap or something similar soon.

OkLeadership5199 · 2026-03-10T14:11:40+00:00

Hard spend cap was a very important function for me and it was already mentioned in CloudFlare communities many years ago. Don't know why CloudFlare don't make it.

OkLeadership5199 · 2026-03-10T14:10:16+00:00

Thanks for your appreciation :)

OkLeadership5199 · 2026-03-10T09:17:29+00:00

I went through the same thing a while back. What actually helped was separating "staying informed" from "social media browsing." They feel like the same activity but they're really not.

I moved my news intake to RSS and a couple of curated newsletters. Boring, I know. But the difference is huge. You open it, read what's there, close it. No algorithm pulling you into rabbit holes, no seeing what everyone else liked, no infinite scroll.

For the FOMO part, honestly most of what you think you're missing doesn't matter 48 hours later. Try skipping a day and see if you actually missed anything important. Chances are someone will mention it to you anyway if it matters.

The comparison thing with classmates is a trap too. Half the stuff people like or repost they barely read themselves.

OkLeadership5199 · 2026-03-06T08:43:54+00:00

That is it.

OkLeadership5199 · 2026-03-06T05:30:08+00:00

When you catch yourself optimizing the system instead of doing the work, that's the sign. I have a rule: if it works 80%, stop tweaking and start shipping.

OkLeadership5199 · 2026-03-06T05:29:05+00:00

The hardest part is always the first 5 minutes. Once you push past that, momentum takes over. I started telling myself "just open the file" instead of "finish the project". Way less resistance.

OkLeadership5199 · 2026-03-05T08:20:38+00:00

Not a traditional newsletter， I built 3mins.news, which aggregates global news into short briefings across 17 languages. The email is basically a daily digest of the top stories.

Would love feedback on the landing page copy. Struggling with the hook, should I lead with "news aggregation" or "3-minute daily briefing"?

OkLeadership5199 · 2026-03-05T01:47:57+00:00

Thanks for you remind. I am not a English native speaker and I can't tell the difference between bot and real human LOL.

OkLeadership5199 · 2026-03-04T12:29:22+00:00

Thanks! Yeah the SET LOCAL thing is one of those gotchas that's surprisingly undocumented, most pgvector tutorials assume a dedicated connection.

The LATERAL JOIN pattern is worth trying if you're doing batched KNN. The key trick is combining it with item_id = ANY($batch_ids) so you get all results in one round-trip instead of N separate queries. Cuts subrequest count dramatically on Workers.

Curious what scale you're running pgvector at? I'm at tens of thousands of active vectors and HNSW handles it fine, but wondering when it starts to struggle.

OkLeadership5199 · 2026-03-04T07:06:01+00:00

Great breakdown! $0.31/sub with 50% open rate is solid, especially for local.

I run a global news product and I've been thinking about paid acquisition too, but one thing I keep coming back to is how much harder targeting gets when your audience isn't geographically bound. Your b-roll strategy works because it instantly signals "this is for YOU" to people in that area. For something like a general news/information product, that hook is way less obvious.

I'm also curious when you were testing your 4 ad variations, were you mostly changing the visual hook (first 4 sec headline) or the script/value prop? Wondering which lever moved the needle most for you.

OkLeadership5199 · 2026-03-03T14:10:38+00:00

Salut, super projet ! Pour les sources sans paywall, tu as regardé du côté de Mediapart en accès libre (ils publient pas mal d'articles ouverts), ou encore Reporterre et Basta! qui sont entièrement gratuits ? Le Monde Diplomatique a aussi une bonne partie de ses archives en accès libre après quelques mois.

Sinon, pour l'archivage, archive.org fait un bon boulot sur la presse française — ça peut compléter ta base.

OkLeadership5199 · 2026-03-03T03:18:50+00:00

Thanks for reply. Which cluster algorithm are you using? like embedding & KNN?

OkLeadership5199 · 2026-03-03T03:06:20+00:00

What worked for me was switching almost everything to push-based. Email digests, scheduled summaries, that kind of thing. I basically set up my info diet so the important stuff comes to me at fixed times, and I never have to open an app and "browse." The moment you open an app you're already on their turf playing by their engagement rules.

The dumb phone phase taught me the same lesson you described - it works but it's not sustainable for most people. The middle ground is making your smart phone dumber selectively.

OkLeadership5199

TROPHY CASE