5 Essential Tools Every Solo Maker Must Have

As a solo maker, you are overwhelmed with the amount of things you need to do. Everything from coming up with good product ideas, validating them, designing the products, developing the products, marketing them, doing customer service, there's a lot to do. Fortunately, the tools we're sharing today can make you more efficient and effective so you have more time to focus on the things that matter. 

Typing Mind

Typing Mind is ChatGPT on steroids. It lets you use ChatGPT via the API, so you have no rate limits and your data isn't used to train the models. You can use plugins, and if you're a developer, you can even make your own plugins. You can have AI characters to help with marketing, copywriting, and development. You can have the AI models run web searches and visit pages to compile and present information concisely to you, saving you lots of time, and time is money after all. 

You are also not limited to only ChatGPT, but you can also use Claude, Gemini, and many other models. Claude has a token context of 150K words, bigger than many books! You can put in that book you've been meaning to read, and just talk to it instead, or have it summarised! There's also Vision features, so you can snap a picture of a competitors landing page and ask it to deconstruct the design, or you can use the Dall-E and Stable Diffusion plugins to generate illustrations for your blog and social media posts! 

This one is a swiss army knife every solo maker and indie hacker should have in their back pocket for sure! 

Supabase

If you are building a software product, you know the frontend is the easy part, and the backend is a pain to deal with. Databases, authentication, file storage, backups, it's a huge mess and it can become very much a hassle for a single person to deal with. Supabase is here to save your day! This open source Firebase alternative built on Postgres offers both the frontend and backend for auth, DBs (with backups), file storage, and edge functions hosting. The pricing is super reasonable, it's a very developer friendly product with a growing user base and community, and its very popular with solo makers.

If it's a SaaS you are building, Supabase is definitely worth a look!

Canva

Unless you've been living under a rock for the last 5 years, you have surely heard of Canva already. It's a super easy to use design tool for non designers, which lets you build beautiful social media posts, posters, banners, logos, and now even videos! Most of the product is free, and they charge for some illustrations and AI features. Don't waste your time with Figma and Photoshop, Canva is the right tool for you, accessible from your browser and even your phone. The templates also give you a nice headstart! Whenever I have to make social media images or posters for my projects, this is what I turn to! 

Gumroad & Lemon Squeezy

When Stripe had first come out on the scene, it used to be very easy to use, until they started decoupling the products so you need to pay extra for one time vs. subscription payments, extra if you want to prevent fraud, extra for this and that and the other thing (why Stripe?). While Gumroad is the simpler option and I suggest that to start off with, if you need more advanced functionality, Lemon Squeezy is awesome! They are a merchant of record just like Gumroad, which means they handle global taxation for you, rather than having to take care of taxes for each country by yourself. 

If you are charging for your product, and Gumroad meets your needs, go with it, else look at Lemon Squeezy!

Carrd

If you need to make a simple landing page in under an hour, this is pretty much the only one capable of that kind of speed. Obviously you give up a lot of flexibility for that speed, like not having multiple pages, not having too much wiggle room with the design, but there's a vibrant ecosystem of themes and plugins that make up for most of the shortcomings. If I have to make a landing page, Carrd is the first thing I look at. Framer and Unicorn Platform are some other good options, but nothing competes with Carrd on the simplicity and the cost will have your eyes popping (in a good way)!

Want more?

What you have seen here are just 5 of the resources included in Maker Resources, the ultimate toolkit of 230+ resources for solopreneurs and indie hackers. For a limited time, you can get the whole bundle for just $10, and I am sure you will be saving time and money worth thousands with the help of the toolkit, so be sure to check it out and buy it if you find it valuable!