Thomas built 32 products before one of them made real money.
Thirty-two failures over six years. Tiny projects, dead launches, things almost nobody used.
Number 33 was Uneed, a launch platform for indie hackers. Today it does more than $20,000 a month. And here's the irony: his winner is a tool that helps other people launch the products they're failing at.
He runs it alone. No team. Just freelancers when the review queue gets too long.
I sat down with Thomas on the Profitable Founder Podcast. Here's the full playbook.
It started as a directory he never planned to monetize
Uneed wasn't a launch platform on day one. It was a niche directory of tools for front-end developers.
Thomas built it for fun. He wanted to try Next.js, which had just come out. That's it. No business plan.
Then he added a form so people could submit their own tools. A year or two later the form SaaS emailed him: "You've hit your free limit, upgrade to keep receiving submissions."
That email was the signal. He was getting real submissions. So he started adding products manually, then capped it at one product per day with a waiting line.
The line got two or three months long. So he did the obvious thing.
→ He put a price on skipping it: pay $30, get published immediately.
That $30 button is where the whole business began.
The pivot that cut his revenue in half
Two years ago Thomas saw a tweet from Nikita Korzhen complaining that Product Hunt was broken. Too many products, no idea if you'd get featured, the audience going stale.
He thought: I have a directory full of tech startups already. Why not pivot it into a real launch platform, a Product Hunt alternative built for indie hackers and bootstrappers?
So he did. And his revenue collapsed.
→ Before the pivot: around $2K/month.
→ Right after: $400 to $500/month.
Building a launch platform means building a marketplace from zero. You need people submitting products AND people who show up to discover them. That balance takes forever to find.
What kept him alive during the slump was boring: he'd automated everything. Launch days, the queue, the rankings. So he could step away, freelance part-time, and not panic when the numbers dipped.
That freelance income mattered. It killed the pressure and let him play the long game while the platform clawed its way back.
How a directory became a Google brand
Three things turned Uneed around, and Thomas is blunt about the first one: luck. He was an early Product Hunt alternative before serious competitors existed. Right place, right time.
The other two he actually controlled.
SEO was the engine. Every product that launches on Uneed wins a badge, and that badge is a backlink pointing back to his domain. More launches → more badges → more backlinks → stronger domain.
Then he mined the data. Years of submitted tools became pages.
→ Alternative pages ("best alternatives to Screen Studio") rank well today.
→ Detailed product pages with internal links pull steady traffic.
He learned all of it himself, by following people on X and making a pile of mistakes along the way. No SEO background at all.
But the wild part is the traffic mix now. Direct traffic is the number one source, roughly half. SEO is about 30%. The rest is X and other channels. A year ago X alone was 70-80%.
The main keyword bringing him traffic is literally "uneed." He built a brand on Google. That's what every SEO actually wants, and most never get there. If you're trying to copy a model like this, the mechanics are worth studying in how to build a micro-SaaS.
The gamification trick most platforms miss
When Thomas studied his most active users, he noticed they treated Uneed like a game. Show up daily, click three or four products, read, leave a comment, vote.
So he built for that. He added a system called Karma.
→ Log in and vote each day, you earn one Karma.
→ More Karma unlocks rewards.
→ The big one: an upvote multiplier.
That multiplier is the part Product Hunt doesn't have. The more active you are, the more your vote weighs. Today the top three products of the day usually win because engaged community members pushed them up, not because a stranger dropped a single vote.
I felt this myself. When I launched my second product on Uneed, one community member's vote counted for two and shot me near the top. I haven't seen that anywhere else.
The goal, in his words, was simple: make people feel at home.
The newsletter doing most of the quiet work
Thomas almost forgot to mention the newsletter, and it's one of the biggest reasons Uneed works.
→ Around 12,000 subscribers.
→ A 40% open rate (he cleans the list every week to hold it).
→ Ad spots at $90 per issue, four issues a month, so about $300/month.
The money is small. The distribution is huge. Readers open it, click the top three products of the week, visit the sites. Get on the podium of the week and you're mentioned in one issue. Podium of the month? Two issues.
As he put it: you probably get more traffic from a newsletter mention than from your actual launch day.
He layers in affiliate links on some pages too (Gumroad alternatives and the like), but it's only a few hundred bucks a month. His recurring users come direct, so they never hit those SEO pages anyway.
I interview founders like this every week → Watch the Podcast
The mistake he'd never repeat, and what he'd build instead
I asked Thomas the question every founder dodges: if you started over, what would you avoid?
His answer surprised me. He wouldn't build a launch platform again.
Not because Uneed failed. Because he got lucky on timing, and the odds for a launch platform are worse than a normal SaaS. It takes years and brutal energy to bootstrap both sides of a marketplace. You can see it in his competitors, most of whom never make money.
What he'd do instead: surf a trend with built-in demand.
He pointed at content schedulers. Post Bridge, Superx, Postiz, and a dozen others, all talking to the same X audience, all making money at different levels. The difference is they deliver value on day one. A scheduler works immediately. A launch platform has zero traffic at the start, so it has nothing to offer.
His real edge there is personal brand. Indie hackers are early adopters. If you build in public, find your voice, and earn a tiny audience that trusts you, those are the first users who get a product off the ground. The market, he insists, is far bigger than it looks on your timeline.
Why he's now betting on personal blogs
Thomas's newer project is Write Easy, a dead-simple blogging platform he's building with his co-founder Hugo, who also co-founded Malt, the biggest freelancing platform in Europe.
The bet: personal blogs are about to come back. As AI floods YouTube and X with generated content, people will crave authenticity. A blog lets you build a real relationship with readers in a way a tweet never can.
He tested the theory at the Akur residency, a month locked in a villa in Da Nang with other founders. He wrote one personal blog post a day, just journaling his days.
→ Started with about 15 daily readers.
→ Ended the month near 400 a day.
When he went quiet for four days over a personal issue, more than 60 people DM'd him asking if he was okay. He'd never gotten that from posting on social media.
His biggest takeaway from that villa wasn't a tactic. It was this: surround yourself with people as ambitious as you are. The motivation it gives you is hard to manufacture alone. If you want that kind of room, that's exactly the idea behind the Profitable Founder Club.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who founded Uneed and how much does it make?
Uneed was founded by Thomas, a French indie hacker and former developer. It started as a niche directory of front-end developer tools and pivoted into a Product Hunt alternative for indie hackers and bootstrappers. Today it makes more than $20,000 a month, and Thomas runs it solo with occasional freelancers.
How many times did Thomas fail before Uneed worked?
Thomas built and launched 32 products over six years before Uneed became his winner. Most were tiny, barely-used projects. He'd never counted them until shortly before our conversation. His point: persistence matters more than talent. You never fail until you stop trying.
How did Uneed grow its traffic?
Three drivers: lucky timing as an early Product Hunt alternative, an SEO engine fueled by launch-badge backlinks and data-driven comparison pages, and gamification through its Karma system. Today direct traffic is the biggest source at roughly 50%, SEO about 30%, with a 12,000-subscriber newsletter pushing major distribution.
The lesson Thomas leaves you with: you never fail until you stop trying, and 32 dead projects can still add up to one that pays the rent.
