Whois

Hey, I'm Dan 👋

I'm Dan Mindru: designer, developer, indie maker and occasional collector of domains that seemed like a very good idea at 11:47 PM.

I design and build software, mostly for the web, mostly with an unreasonable amount of enthusiasm. I care about the part users see, the part developers maintain and the mysterious part in between that only breaks on Safari. I also like pizza, which has so far required considerably less maintenance than software.

For as long as I can remember, I've helped people turn ideas into projects and projects into things that actual humans can click. These days, I'm also getting more of my own ideas off the ground. Some fly. Some perform a very educational controlled descent into the analytics dashboard.

If I didn't have to work, I'd still build things. This is either a passion or a failure to discover relaxing hobbies. Over the years I've contributed to products in AI, fintech, telecom, architecture, medicine, digital signage, real estate, pharma and hydrology. That last one taught me there is always another highly specific industry with highly specific software and at least one spreadsheet holding civilization together.

Away from the keyboard, I run, poke at hardware and occasionally fly drones. “Fly” is generous: the drone flies, while I provide loosely worded suggestions from the ground.

I'm currently based in Denmark 🇩🇰, where the winters are long, the design is good and dark mode feels less like a preference and more like infrastructure.

Background

I've been designing and developing software for over 10 years, mostly as a freelance consultant. That means I've spent a decade switching between Figma, code, client calls and politely explaining that “just a small change” is one of the most powerful phrases in software engineering.

I've worked with startups and established companies across Europe, often joining when an idea was still rough around the edges and helping turn it into a usable product. My favorite work lives where product thinking, interface design and engineering overlap. I like understanding why something should exist, deciding how it should behave and then building it without requiring a 34-slide handoff ceremony.

In 2023, I decided to go all-in on building my own things — and I haven't looked back since. I've shipped over 11 products to production so far, and I'm not slowing down.

Building products taught me a different set of lessons from consulting. The code is only one part. You also need positioning, copy, support, distribution, pricing and the emotional resilience to watch somebody use the obvious button in a completely unprecedented way. It is humbling, occasionally profitable and never boring.

Skills & Tech I Work With

Frontend — React, Next.js, TypeScript, TailwindCSS, Shadcn UI
Design — UI/UX, Figma, prototyping, landing page design
Backend & Infra — Node.js, Vercel, Supabase, Stripe, REST & GraphQL APIs
AI-assisted dev — Claude Code, Cursor, v0, Lovable, MCP servers
Testing & DevOps — Vitest, Playwright, Sentry, load testing

The short version is that I can take a product from a blank canvas to a deployed application without throwing it over too many metaphorical walls. I enjoy polished interfaces, sensible component systems and tools that make the next feature easier rather than merely making today's feature possible.

I'm big on shipping fast, but not on shipping mystery meat. Fast should mean short feedback loops, good defaults and fewer ceremonial meetings—not skipping every test and hoping production has a forgiving personality.

I also use AI heavily in my work. It is excellent at removing repetitive effort, exploring options and occasionally generating a bug with the confidence of a senior engineer. If a new tool promises to help me build better, I've probably tried it, benchmarked it and opened a half-finished side project to test it properly.

What I'm Building

The list below is what happened when I stopped keeping ideas in a notes app and started giving all of them databases. Some are businesses, some are open source projects and some are elaborate ways to create more work for myself:

🚀 shipixen.com — customized Next.js boilerplates, deploy to Vercel in a click
🤖 pageai.pro — AI-powered website builder that plans, designs and codes
🏛️ cadscene.com — photoreal architecture renders in seconds
📄 pageui.dev — free, open source landing page components for React & Next.js
🎙️ morningmakershow.com — podcast about building in public
🏏 clobbr.app — API load testing tool
⌚️ crontap.com — cron job scheduling & monitoring
🐈 hunted.space — Product Hunt launch analytics
👾 mrrartpro.com — creative tools
💍 Saventify — digital wedding invitations & RSVP management
🔁 RalphLoop.sh — long-running AI agent loop that codes for days

There is a common thread here, even if the browser tabs suggest otherwise: I like tools that shorten the distance between an idea and a useful result. That might mean generating a website, testing an API, scheduling a job or helping somebody launch without first spending two weeks choosing a button radius.

Other Things I'm Playing With

Not every experiment needs a pitch deck and a five-year roadmap. These are smaller projects where I explore an idea, learn something and occasionally discover that I've built yet another landing page:

🫎 Spamoose — email spam checker tool
🖼️ IMGX AI — minimalist GPT image editor
🥊 llm-boss — frontier LLM benchmarks compared

Open Source

I publish a fair amount of my work as open source. Partly because useful tools should be inspectable and adaptable, partly because the fastest way to improve code is to let the internet develop opinions about it.

Page UI Landing Page Components
Clobbr CLI Load Testing Tool
Ralph Loop
Vibe Coding Starter
Responsive iFrame viewer
HTML signature generator

The projects range from UI components to developer tools and tiny utilities that solve one annoyingly specific problem. Those are often my favorite kind: no platform strategy, just fewer people swearing at their terminal.

Podcast & Videos

I co-host the Morning Maker Show with Sandra Djajic — a podcast (and YouTube channel with 10K+ subscribers) about building products, shipping fast and making your first dollar. We've done 60+ episodes and it's sponsored by Sentry.

The show is where we talk honestly about the part between “I have an idea” and “look, a revenue screenshot.” That includes product decisions, launches, tools, failures and the surprisingly large number of emotional events caused by Stripe notifications.

Some of the more popular technical videos I've made:

Vibe coding beautiful UIs in 3 simple steps — 144K views
TaskMaster AI and Cursor setup guide for vibe coding entire apps — 73K views
Cursor Rules guide for lazy devs — 31K views
Claude Code beginner guide — 18K views
Claude Code secret workflow with TaskMaster AI MCP — 13K views
The Ralph Wiggum Loop — AI long-running agents made easy — 6.4K views
Comparing all AI Pull Request Review tools — 2.9K views

I've also interviewed indie makers like Marc Lou, James Hawkins (PostHog), Yasser (Chatbase) and Daniel Vassallo about building businesses from scratch.

I enjoy interviews because a good conversation gets past the polished launch thread. The useful details are usually hiding in the awkward first version, the distribution channel that almost didn't get tried or the decision that looked irrational until it worked.

Writing

I write about building products, developer tools, AI-assisted development and whatever technical rabbit hole has most recently stolen an afternoon. Writing forces me to turn “I somehow fixed it” into a sequence another person can reproduce, which is inconvenient but healthy.

I also write for the Sentry blog about practical debugging and performance work, including how I ended up cutting 22.3 seconds off an API call using Trace View. Nothing builds character like discovering your API has enough spare latency to make coffee.

Also see: blog and indie page 👀

A Few Fun Wins

I don't keep a trophy cabinet—mostly because it would become a shelf for cables—but a few moments made me stop refreshing the dashboard for several seconds:

Product of the Day on Product Hunt for Page UI
$3K in pre-sales in a few days for Shipixen after a video went semi-viral (75K views)
Featured on Starter Story for Shipixen's growth
Guest author on the Sentry blog
Contributing to Stripe Climate through Parse and Saventify

Find Me Online

Apparently one internet profile was not enough. You can find me in all the places below, although GitHub, LinkedIn and X are the least archaeological options. The rest form a small museum dedicated to the many eras of personal-link websites.

Cal.com
CadScene
GitHub
LinkedIn
𝕏/Twitter
See my Cursor profile
Threads
Project list
Linktree
Bento
Bio.site
Scrapbox
Telegraph

More Tools, Resources & Side Projects

If you've reached this point, congratulations: you now know more about my project portfolio than some of my browser windows do. Here are a few collections and resources that deserve more context than “another link Dan made.”

Apihustle — Developer Tool Suite

Apihustle is the umbrella brand for tools that help developers test, improve and understand their APIs. It includes Clobbr for load testing, Crontap for scheduling recurring API calls, and CronTool for debugging cron expressions visually.

They grew out of problems I repeatedly ran into while building other products. Eventually, creating a reusable tool becomes easier than searching shell history for the command you were absolutely certain you'd remember.

Shipixen Tools & Generators

Shipixen started as a way to get a polished Next.js site running quickly. Around it, I've built smaller generators and explorers for the decisions that somehow consume half a launch: pricing layouts, component choices and landing page sections.

Shipixen Pricing Page Generator — generate production-ready React, Next.js or Vue pricing pages built with Shadcn UI and Tailwind CSS. Customize tiers, frequencies and styling, then copy the code. Try the live generator →
Shadcn Component Explorer — browse and preview the full Shadcn UI component library in one place
Landing Page Component Examples — copy-paste-ready React and Next.js landing page sections and templates

Rare Big Deal — Software Deals Directory

Rare Big Deal is a curated directory of limited-time deals on premium apps, AI tools and SaaS products — covering Black Friday, Cyber Monday and seasonal discounts. It's open source and anyone can submit a deal on GitHub.

I built it because seasonal software deals are useful but usually scattered across social posts, newsletters and browser tabs you swear you'll revisit. This puts them somewhere searchable and lets the community help keep the list honest.

Figma Community Resources

Sometimes the useful output of a project is not another SaaS. These are design resources I've made available for people who need the asset now and do not want to spend an evening nudging pixels:

Open Graph Image Templates — ready-to-use OG image templates for social sharing
App Store Buttons Collection — download buttons for iOS, Android and more
Glass Icons — frosted glass-style icon set for modern UIs

Affiliate Programs & Partnerships

Some products have referral programs. If you already planned to recommend them, you can get paid for doing so—a rare case where telling your friends about software has a business model.

Earn commissions by referring customers to PageAI, Saventify or CAD Scene.
Book a call with Saventify, Apihustle or CadScene.

Other Github Things

And finally, the discussion boards: places for questions, ideas and bug reports that are ideally more descriptive than “it doesn't work.” I've written those too, so this is a judgement-free zone.