Danny Postma: How a Solo Hacker Built an AI Empire from Bali
Aug 3, 2025
Danny Postma’s journey isn’t just about making cool tools; it’s a how-to guide for riding the fast currents of new tech, smart audience building, and savvy SEO to stack a bunch of profitable, viral applications. He went from a Dutch freelance conversion pro to running a bunch of AI ventures from Bali—all while turning ideas into products that catch the cultural wave just right, then selling them off.
Here’s a year-by-year look at how he pulled it off, what clicked, and where he tripped up.
🚀 2015: Landingfolio Takes Flight
Danny booted up Landingfolio in 2015 as a curated showcase for the best landing pages he could find. It started as a small, self-built WordPress site to scratch a personal itch: his freelance clients kept asking for examples of landing pages that really converted. Within a few months, 1,000 visitors were showing up every day—but the site pocketed zero dollars for the first four years. It was a hobby that secretly taught him the ropes of SEO. As Google’s algorithms grew to love handpicked content, Landingfolio started climbing the search results. Danny kicked off a programmatic SEO game, letting code harvest and tag new pages while scaling visitors by the thousands. These days, it quietly brings in about $1,000 a month, while Danny sleeps.
🌎 2016–2019: Bali, Digital Nomads, and Big Mindset Moves
When Danny landed in Bali in 2016, he plugged straight into the indie hacker vibe through Tropical Nomads and Hackagu groups. Those years flipped the script on him—not just for apps and code, but for his whole self. Without the grind of 9-to-5, hanging around doers and dreamers, he waved goodbye to self-doubt and got comfortable showing his projects to the world.
No blockbuster apps hit the store during that stretch, but he hit bigger milestones. He soaked in how priceless community is, how cool it is to build in public, and most important, how to think like a founder instead of just a hired hand.
✨ 2020: Headlime and the First Big Win
June 2020, smack in the middle of lockdowns, Danny dropped Headlime. It kicked off as a simple PDF of 200 headline formulas. When he got early access to GPT-3, he flipped it into an AI copywriting app that spins out ad copy, blog hooks, and landing page lines.
He tweeted a sneak peek, cranked up the buzz, and rolled out a limited-time lifetime deal. Week one? Headlime pulled in $60,000. By the end of that 8-month stretch, it was cruising at $20,000 a month.
Then came the buyout. In March 2021, Jarvis.ai—now called Jasper—acquired Headlime for something like a million bucks. The whole thing wrapped in about a week.
Marketing steps:
Shared open goals on X
Dug through Ahrefs and SEMrush for the best keyword gold
Dropped a killer Product Hunt launch on December 8, 2020
Landed a TechCrunch write-up that halved churn and doubled monthly revenue
😵 2021: Burnout and Bounce Back
Selling Headlime took a toll. Danny had pushed hard for too long, and the closing check didn’t ease the fade. He vanished for three months to sleep in, walk in, and think.
That downtime crystalized a promise: keep it lean, dodge big payrolls, and craft products he could run from a laptop.
🖊️ 2022: ProfilePictureAI and AI Art Explodes
When AI-generated art exploded from labs to everyone, Danny stepped in. In October 2022, he shipped ProfilePictureAI, a tool that turned your selfie into a work of art using DreamBooth and Stable Diffusion. Over 350 styles, from comic book to almost-too-real.
The first post went haywire; in seven days, the app pulled in a six-figure revenue waterfall.
But that early excitement faded. More companies piled into the space, and the wow factor faded away. By 2025, sales dropped sharply. Yet the algorithms and user feedback from ProfilePictureAI turned out to be the building blocks of what we’d create next.
📷 2023: HeadshotPro Steals the Show in AI Photography
On March 16, 2023, Danny flipped the switch on HeadshotPro. The big idea? Let AI spit out pro-grade headshots while sidestepping cameras, studios, and the usual stiff-smile torture.
This wasn’t Danny’s first rodeo. The road to HeadshotPro was paved with AI tattoo layers, stock photo wizards, and the short-lived ProfilePictureAI. He dusted off the old tech, sharpened the learning curve, and zeroed in on something people wanted.
The launch was like lighting a fuse:
Sales broke six figures in two weeks
40,000 global users by mid-2024
$300,000 a month by the one-year mark
More than 7 million headshots spit out
Google crowned it the No. 1 result for “AI headshots”
But the ride wasn’t all smooth.
In 2024, the initial growth boom demanded more than Danny’s one-man army could deliver. Refund rates climbed with the spikes in traffic, and rival Lensa decided to splash the news all over TikTok, chipping away at the market.
Danny also faced his biggest personal hurdle. He’d always believed in a lean team, yet the inbox was bursting and systems were creaking. So, reluctantly, he started stacking a small crew to keep the momentum without losing the spark.
Marketing Moves:
Churned out 200+ city pages to crush local SEO
Set a 20% affiliate cut to keep referrers hungry
Grabbed Hesti AI to steer traffic straight to HeadshotPro
Snatched the exact-match domain (headshotpro.com) for a quick SEO lift
🚀 2024: Scale Spurs Growing Pains
As HeadshotPro blasted upward, Danny finally faced the one task he’d dodged: building a crew. Refunds jumped, which meant tighter QA and faster user support—auto-tickets alone couldn’t cut it.
Dipped a toe into smaller apps—Tattoos AI is $4K a month, easy. StockAI got blasted into the ether after a cease from Getty.
Deep Agency, born with HeadshotPro, scored press but lagged at a 0.3% close rate—not a keeper.
The lesson: not every buzz drives sales, and real growth means handing a few reigns to the herd.
✨ 2025: Shelf Dust to Gold Dust
July 2025, Danny pulled the trigger on Dreamchanted, a sleepy AI tool no one wanted. Grab it, dust it off, gift the SEO, then let traffic funnel back to HeadshotPro. Straight 3-step-sharpen.
These days, Danny’s little studio Postcrafts is juggling nearly 20 live projects, among them:
HairstyleAI
Deep Agency
StockAI (now dust in the wind)
Tattoos AI
🏆 Wins in the Book
Headlime: Racked up $60K in the first week, hit a $20K monthly recurrence, then sold for just shy of $1M inside twelve months
HeadshotPro: $300K a month now, sits at the top of search results, 40K+ loyal users
Twitter/X: Followers zoomed from 400 to 95,000+, tweets regularly explode with open-book revenue charts and SEO slices
Clever buys: Hesti AI, Dreamchanted—bought and paid off in under a year
🤦 Fumbles and Takeaways
StockAI: Legal roadblocks and shaky output spelled “game over”
ProfilePictureAI: Fast first-day buzz, then a long, slow dropout—proof viral dust doesn’t stick
Deep Agency: Headlines don’t pay payroll
Burnout: Hit hard, forced Danny to hit “pause, then rethink”
🔍 Danny’s Game Plan
Step One: SEO first—fire up Ahrefs, SEMrush, and hunt for hungry, empty search boxes
Grab the exact-match dot-com—call it headshotpro.com because why pick a fight with fate?
Spin up programmatic SEO—crank out hundreds of long-tail pages, short-form salesmen
Live out loud: tweet the wins, the losses, the penny-counting month
Lifetime deals: a revenue and feedback rocket
Buy it, fix it, and redirect: building’s cool, but fixing someone else’s half-baked project is too
🌟 Parting Shot
Danny Postma proved a solo studio can outpace VC-backed leviathans—just use smarts, let SEO point the way, and never stop chatting with users.
Whether he’s flipping a sleepy PDF into a seven-figure sell-off or dressing up plain headshots using Stable Diffusion, Danny’s story shows indie hacking is buzzing, profitable, and very much in business.
And he’s only warming up.
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