JJulian PscheidFounder & CEO, Hedy AI
Julian Pscheid spent two decades running EMERGE, a digital product agency, helping other SaaS companies and startups build and ship their products. In 2024, he sold his stake in the agency to build Hedy AI — a real-time AI conversation coach that listens during meetings, interviews, and lectures and surfaces the right question or insight while it still matters, not after the fact.
Pscheid has built and scaled Hedy largely as a solo founder, competing directly with venture-backed rivals many times its size. Based in Portland, Oregon, he's focused on making real-time AI support useful across both professional and educational settings — and on proving that a small, fast-moving team can out-build companies with far more capital.
MMarlon Joel PittersMarlon Joel Pitters is a solo iOS developer building Costify, an expense-tracking and bill-splitting app, largely out in the open. He describes himself simply as a "design-obsessed iOS dev, trying to build the best expense tracker ever" — and has run Costify's entire public journey on Threads, from its September 2025 TestFlight beta through its App Store launch in January 2026 and past its first 6,000 users in March 2026.
What stands out about Pitters' approach isn't scale — Costify is still a small, early app — it's transparency. He posts development updates as they happen, replies personally to App Store reviews (including critical ones about performance bugs), and engages directly with prospective users on pricing and feature requests. In one exchange with a user in Pakistan concerned about app pricing relative to local income, he responded directly that he was considering regional pricing adjustments — the kind of pricing conversation that usually happens behind closed doors at larger companies.
He's a single builder handling design, development, support, and community entirely on his own — the classic shape of an indie iOS developer betting that a tightly scoped, well-designed tool can find its audience without a team or outside funding behind it.
ZZainan Victor Zhou# Zainan Victor Zhou
Zainan Victor Zhou is a builder working at the intersection of web standards, blockchain, and everyday utility apps. He is the founder and CEO of Namefi (by D3Serve Labs), a startup tokenizing DNS domain names on Ethereum as NFTs and bringing them into DeFi. Before that, he was the Tech Lead for smart contract architecture at Google Labs' blockchain team, and his earlier background spans Microsoft Research, Johns Hopkins University, and Tsinghua University.
Beyond founding, he is a long-time contributor to the Ethereum ecosystem as an EIP Editor and author, with authored proposals including EIP-5453 (Endorsement), EIP-5679 (Mint/Burn), and EIP-5750 (Extensibility), plus reviews across voting interfaces, jurisdiction and enforcement standards, and anti-poisoning address formats.
What makes him interesting as an indie builder is the range of his side projects, each solving a concrete problem: **3-Line Calendar**, a minimal app that shows your next three events across Apple Watch, iPhone, iPad, and Mac; **Pretty Safe**, which prevents address-poisoning attacks on crypto wallets; **WikiLoop DoubleCheck**, an AI-assisted tool for fighting vandalism on Wikipedia; and **Haoshiyou**, a housing community platform for Chinese-speaking renters.
His personal site ([zzn.im](https://zzn.im)) is itself a small lesson in builder craft — the footer displays the site's version number, live git commit hash, and deploy timestamp, with the whole site open-sourced on GitHub. His broader mission, laid out in his "Manifesto of Digital Trust," is that digitizing trust will unlock a new era of productivity the way digitizing information did before it.
Based in Sunnyvale, CA.