The case archive operators wished existed.

A daily decoded operator case for indie founders, affiliate marketers, and AI builders. Numbers, stack, moat — distilled.

What this is

Case Distillery is a daily newsletter that picks one indie operator each weekday and writes ~2,000 words on what's actually happening: revenue, traffic source, conversion math, the technical stack they're shipping with, and the moat they probably haven't noticed.

The premise: most "case study" content online is either flattery (founder profile pieces with no numbers) or thin (one-line tweet with a screenshot). Operators making real decisions need the version in between — readable in 8 minutes, dense enough to act on.

Who it's for

• Indie founders running <$50K MRR products who need pattern-matching, not motivation
• Affiliate marketers and SEO operators looking for traffic-source breakdowns that aren't gatekept
• AI builders trying to figure out what's a defensible product vs. a wrapper that gets eaten by GPT-6
• Investors and operators who want a daily input on what's working at the small-but-profitable end of the market

What you get every weekday

• One operator case, dissected — typically a $1K–$50K MRR product
• The number that matters (MRR, traffic, conversion — whatever drives the business)
• The actual stack they shipped with (frameworks, infra, third-party tools, cost)
• The moat the operator probably didn't realize they had — or the one they think they have but don't
• One pull-quote, one bottom-line, one quick poll. ~2,000 words. ~8-minute read.

Who's writing this

Case Distillery is written and edited daily. The editorial bar: every claim either has a public source (linked) or is a clearly-flagged inference. No anonymous "an operator told me" claims passed off as fact.

Sources include public revenue dashboards (Stripe Atlas, Indie Hackers self-reports, Reddit case threads), SEC filings for adjacent public comps, web archive snapshots, and primary interviews where operators agree to be on record.

Why $199/yr

Because the alternative is $20/month newsletters that get $20/month effort. Decoding one operator end-to-end (stack, numbers, moat, traceable claims) is a 4–6 hour research-and-write cycle per issue. That work needs a price floor that lets it stay sharp.

Founding 100 is $99/yr locked for life — first 100 subscribers, never raised, even when the standard rate hits $249.

What this isn't

• Not a job board, not a deals newsletter, not a "5 tools I love this week" list
• Not unicorn coverage. If a company raised >$10M, you can read about them somewhere else
• Not affiliate-funded. No sponsored issues, no "this issue brought to you by." Subscribers pay; that's it

Schedule

Mon–Fri, in your inbox before market open (9 AM ET / 6 AM PT). Weekends quiet. Holidays observed.

Ready to read? Lock your founding rate →