Samuel Rondot was fitting lenses into frames three years ago. Today he runs three SaaS products from his laptop, pulling in roughly $28,000 a month — and he uses the exact same tech stack for every single one of them.
From Eye Exams to MRR
Before the SaaS life, Rondot worked as an optician in France. He'd been tinkering with websites since college but went the safe route — a steady job, a predictable paycheck. On the side, he built MathPlanner, an Instagram automation service that was mostly manual labor: he'd manage accounts for clients using human operators, not code. When MathPlanner hit $30K/month, he walked out of the optician's office and never looked back.
The problem? MathPlanner was a service business disguised as tech. It didn't scale without more humans. So Rondot taught himself to code properly and started building actual software.
Three Products, One Stack
Here's what his portfolio looks like right now:
StoryShort.ai (~$20K/month) is the star. It turns text into faceless short videos — the kind that flood TikTok and YouTube Shorts. Users type a prompt, the tool generates a video with narration and stock footage. Dead simple value prop, massive market.
Capacity.so (~$3K/month, growing) is an AI website builder he co-founded with a high school friend. Still early, but the growth curve points up. He gets around 400 organic clicks per day from SEO alone — a compounding asset that should keep pushing revenue higher.
UseArtemis.co (~$5K/month, declining) handles LinkedIn automation. It worked well until LinkedIn started cracking down harder on automated outreach tools. Revenue has been sliding, and Rondot seems content letting it run on autopilot rather than fighting the platform.
What's notable isn't any individual product. It's that all three run on the same foundation: Next.js on Vercel for the frontend, Node.js on AWS for the backend, MongoDB for the database. Every time. No exceptions. No agonizing over whether Postgres would be better here or whether this particular project really needs Remix instead of Next.
His reasoning is pragmatic to the point of being boring. When you're a solo founder managing multiple products, every minute spent learning a new framework is a minute not spent shipping features or talking to customers. He knows this combination cold. He can spin up a new project in days instead of weeks. The reduced cognitive switching cost across three codebases is the entire point.
This runs directly counter to the "best tool for the job" philosophy that engineering teams love debating. When you're one person, the best tool for the job is the one you already know.
Distribution Beats Architecture
Rondot doesn't obsess over code quality. He obsesses over distribution.
His playbook runs on two tracks. SEO is the slow burn — he writes content, builds landing pages around long-tail keywords, and waits for Google to compound the results. Capacity.so's 400 daily organic clicks came from months of patient work. No shortcuts, no hacks.
Paid ads are the fast lever. He runs Meta and Google campaigns, but with a hard rule: never compete head-to-head with funded startups on ad spend. If a VC-backed competitor is paying 200 to acquire a customer who pays 30/month, Rondot doesn't try to outbid them. He finds adjacent keywords, targets segments the big players ignore, and builds niche landing pages that convert on tighter margins.
He's also been experimenting with AI engine optimization — making sure his products surface in AI-generated answers and recommendations. The search landscape isn't just Google anymore.
And before writing a single line of code on any new product, he runs the same checklist: What's the search volume? How entrenched are existing competitors? Is there a distribution channel he can exploit without burning $50K on ads? If the answers aren't encouraging, he doesn't build. Period.
The Uncomfortable Portfolio Math
Here's the part that gets glossed over in the "build a portfolio" narrative.
UseArtemis is dying. Slowly, but the trajectory is obvious. LinkedIn's restrictions aren't getting looser, and Rondot isn't pouring resources into fighting it. He's letting it generate whatever cash it can while it can.
That's the dark side of the portfolio approach. Not every product wins. The Indie Hackers dataset reinforces this — out of nearly 3,000 products tracked on the platform, over half generate literally zero MRR. Rondot's story looks clean from the outside ($28K/month! Three products! Freedom!), but the reality includes one declining product, one that's small but growing, and a single breakout hit doing most of the heavy lifting.
Counterintuitively, that's actually the argument for portfolios, not against them. StoryShort might be dominant today, but if AI video generation gets commoditized next year, Capacity might be the one carrying the load. Having multiple bets running simultaneously isn't about all of them winning. It's about surviving when one inevitably loses.
Daniel Vassallo made a similar wager when he left a 500K/year Amazon job back in 2019. Two years and multiple products later: 570K in total revenue. Some products fizzled, one broke out, the rest sat in the middle. The aggregate math works even when individual bets don't.
What Actually Stands Out
Most indie hacker stories revolve around the breakout moment — the viral Product Hunt launch, the hockey stick revenue graph, the tweet that went mega-viral. Rondot's trajectory is quieter. An optician who got restless, stumbled into a manual service business that printed money, taught himself to code when that business hit its ceiling, then systematically applied the same boring stack to three different market problems.
No extraordinary technical talent. No venture capital. No viral moment. Just a guy who figured out that the real constraint on solo SaaS isn't writing code — it's managing attention. And the way you manage attention across multiple products is by making everything else as repetitive and predictable as possible. Same database. Same framework. Same deployment pipeline. Free up the brain for the only things that actually move revenue: finding customers and solving their problems.