Sergi Ruiz

March 2026 | My digital adventures, fully exposed 💰 🟢 Total income: +€5K 👉 AdSense: €4K 👉 YouTube AdSense (faceless channel): €41 👉 Amazon affiliates: €26 👉 Booking affiliates: €103 👉 Other affiliates: €170 👉 Mapness.io (e-commerce): €533 👉 Ads, PRO plans: €112 🔴 Total expenses: -€900 👉 Hosting: €25 👉 Domains: €38 👉 Content writing & VA: €142 👉 Mapness.io: €106 👉 Claude Code: €90 👉 Other expenses: €500 (a bug that triggered extra requests to a paid API) 🟢 March 2026 balance: +€4K ⸻ A humble reminder that not everything is as shiny as it looks: 👉 Ranktracking.co: €0 👉 CtrlAltShip.com: €0 👉 FiniteGrid.com: €0

February 2026 | My digital adventures, fully transparent 💰 🟢 Total income: +€5K 👉 AdSense (niche sites): €4.1K 👉 YouTube AdSense (faceless channel): €35 👉 Amazon affiliates: €46 👉 Booking affiliates: €273 👉 Other affiliates: €70 👉 Mapness.io (e-commerce): €470 🔴 Total expenses: -€920 👉 Hosting: €120 👉 Domains: €170 👉 Copywriting & virtual assistant: €230 👉 Mapness.io: €210 👉 Apple Developer Program signup: €100 👉 Claude Code: €90 🟢 February 2026 net profit: +€4.1K

I’ve spent the last 3 weeks building an iOS app. Full-on vibe coding. Since the initial idea: - 21 days - 40 hours of development - 375 prompts in Gemini - and a few hundred more prompts in Claude Code I recorded a video walking through the whole process (idea, decisions, execution…): youtube.com/watch?v=lOiAa0… (It’s in Spanish, but YT auto-subs do a pretty good job)

Buckle up. This is just getting started. open.substack.com/pub/theindiepa…

@eliana_jordan That’s me. Last week I got approved my 1st app on my 1st try 🤪 Probably I’m lucky, so I’ll go to the casino these days.

Once upon a time, a developer got their App Store app approved on the first try. This story has been classified as fiction

Talent, sacrifice, and luck: The 3 legs of making money online (and probably in life). 👇👇👇 open.substack.com/pub/theindiepa…

About 20 days later and ~40 hours in, the app is basically done. Time to wait for the Apple review process🤞🤞

Super interesting article by @mattshumer_ about where we are and where this is all heading. And you don’t need to be operating at his level to feel it firsthand. I know I’m not squeezing AI anywhere near its full potential like they are. But even so, these past few weeks using Claude Code have blown my mind. This isn’t just a “productivity boost”. It’s a shift in how we work and in what it even means to be a developer. A simple example: A year ago, I had to build a PHP feature to create and update database records through the OpenAI API. Without AI helping me, it took me almost a full day to get everything working the way I wanted. Yesterday I asked Claude to do something very similar. It was done in 20 minutes: - 5 min writing the prompt. - 5 min making coffee while Claude worked. - 5 min reviewing the code. - 5 min testing. I didn’t write a single line of code. Now, to be fair, when it handles frontend stuff, UX can be a bit rough. Sometimes it builds things that don’t make much sense and you have to iterate with more precise instructions. I’m sure that improves with better prompts, sub-agents, custom skills, etc. But without any of that, you can see some rough edges. But on backend logic though or pure development logic, it barely misses. And this is me using AI in a very basic way, probably not even 30% of its real potential. I don’t even want to imagine what’s coming next. Fasten your seatbelts, ladies and gentlemen.

Don’t let them sell you AI development as magic. I’ve spent 20 hours building a simple app and it’s still not finished. Would it take 100 hours without AI? Probably. But that doesn’t mean you can ship anything worth using in just 1 hour. You can’t even define the basic features properly in 1 hour, let alone prompt Claude. Unless everyone else is actually doing SaaS wizardry in an hour and I’m just the idiot who hasn’t figured out how to use AI properly. Let’s not rule that out.

January 2026 | My digital adventures, fully naked 💰 🟢 Total income: €6K 👉 AdSense: €5.1K 👉 YouTube AdSense (faceless channel): €55 👉 Amazon affiliates: €16 👉 Booking affiliates: €342 👉 Mapness(.io): €557 🔴 Total expenses: €924 👉 Hosting: €127 👉 Domains: €31 👉 Mapness expenses: €400 👉 Content writing & virtual assistant: €250 👉 Other niche site costs: €116 🟢 January 2026 balance: +€5K

2025 recap: €124,000 revenue. (my 7th year in a row above €100K). And while checking old data I realized I’ve crossed €1M+ billed since mid-2019. 🤘 I shared the full breakdown of income + expenses (freelance + AdSense + affiliates + e-commerce + faceless YT + experiments). If you want the full financial striptease 👇 open.substack.com/pub/theindiepa…

Me to myself: “Sergi, don’t open more fronts. You can’t even keep up with the ones you already have.” Also me at 4am rocking the baby: “Holy shit, this is such a good app idea. Top priority for this thing.” I’ve never built an app before, so I’ll document the whole process on YouTube. Let's go!

Stories from when I tried to summon Cthulhu with AI. We built a shop selling Lovecraft merch with Midjourney designs. It flopped. Learned a lot anyway. Here’s the story: open.substack.com/pub/theindiepa…

I’m giving this account a second chance. I paused it months ago for a very simple reason: life happened. Client work was heavy, I had projects going on, and family stuff too (two kids = chaos, in the best way). And when your time is limited, you start cutting anything that feels “extra”. The truth is: posting in English took real effort and gave me almost no feedback. This account was new, reach was low, and every post felt like shouting into the void. At some point I thought:“Why am I doing this? I could spend this hour building something.” So I stopped. Not because I lost interest. Just priorities. But I miss it. So here we go again. No promises about frequency, but I’ll try to be consistent. Same with the newsletter. I have several projects in progress right now, and I’m starting a new one in the next few days: an app I want to ship soon. I’ve never built an app before, so it’ll be a challenge. That’s it. I’m back.

Had two quick project ideas this week and I’m building both. One’s a digital-only e-commerce using AI to generate a specific product. The other, a low-cost micro-SaaS with 2–3 focused features. Last night, I kicked off the ecom one: - Registered domain - Made a quick logo - Set up the base code (reused a custom CMS I built for other shops) I know it sounds great in my head, we’ll see what reality says 😅 Should take ~15–20 hours to build. Might document the whole thing on YouTube for my spanish channel, from idea to execution to launch. Not sure how yet. Just thinking out loud.

@davidantunespt Upvoted! Looks really cool and I can tell you’ve put in the work 👏 Just sent you an email invite to also publish it on CtrlAltShip. Would love to have projects like yours in the directory.

Today I'm launching Flowceipt on Product Hunt 🚀 I started building this as a side project to learn more about AI and solve a personal pain point. Check it out here: bit.ly/47LN7mQ Always happy to hear your thoughts and feedback 🙌 #ProductHunt #SaaS #AI

New post in the Mindset series (6/9): Why I don’t set goals (and what I do instead) I’ve never had business goals. Just a direction. Read it here 👇 open.substack.com/pub/theindiepa…

Post 6/9 of the Mindset series drops tomorrow. We’ll talk about goals. Why I don’t set them, what I do instead, and the one life goal that truly mattered to me. Not all goals are created equal. open.substack.com/pub/theindiepa…

Post 5/9 of My Indie Mindset series: Obsession isn’t a strategy, but it helps. A quick dive into how getting a little too obsessed with my projects has actually helped me move forward (and finish things). Now live👇 open.substack.com/pub/theindiepa…

I don’t know, maybe those trash launches still get 100+ upvotes because the PH system rewards hype, not quality. Who knows. I don’t have stats on this, I just talk from what I’ve seen. Maybe my perception is off. Maybe the bar I expect for a micro SaaS product is simply higher than it “should” be. What I was considering is exactly what I said: automating invites to every founder who launches on PH, asking them to also list on CtrlAltShip.com But after testing, I realized I’d end up with the same garbage inside my own project, which defeats the whole point. So now I’m keeping the automation for collection, but adding manual curation before sending invites. Less scale, but more aligned with the “quality over quantity” vibe I want.

@TheIndiePath Great point btw but 73% of PH launches still hit 100+ upvotes despite being trash. Maybe the real issue is voters not being picky enough? What black hat tactic were you considering?

You can’t imagine the amount of trash that gets posted on Product Hunt every single day. The same “low quality” threshold we used to see in niche websites has now infected the micro SaaS space. “Thanks” to AI and vibe coding, I guess. I was considering a slightly black-hat-ish strategy to give CtrlAltShip.com some traction, because with zero audience among solopreneurs and this English Twitter account with zero reach, sometimes you need to shake the tree hard. The initial plan was to automate invites to every founder launching on PH. But after some tests, nope. Way too much junk. Products with no About page, no contact info, nothing. Less than an MVP. A joke. I don’t know how these people expect anyone to trust them enough to type in a credit card. One thing is shipping fast with AI. Another is publishing straight-up garbage. So here’s the new plan: I’ll still collect PH launches daily, but instead of inviting everyone, I’ll manually curate the ones worth it. I set up a system that sends me a daily email with a shortlist, and with one click I can decide who gets an invite to list on CtrlAltShip. Not 100% automated, but cleaner and way more aligned with what I want this project to be. It’s still cold outreach and the conversion rate will probably suck. But I can’t think of a better way to spread the word at this early stage.