He doesn’t code. He’s an indie FDE.

On a Tuesday morning in Medellín, Diego Alvarez walks into a ten-table restaurant in Laureles, sits down with the owner, and opens a laptop. By Thursday, that restaurant has an AI agent that checks last week’s sales, predicts the next two weeks of produce demand, drafts the supplier order in WhatsApp, and waits for a thumbs-up from the owner before it sends.

Diego does not write the agent. He configures it. He sells it. And he owns the customer.

He charges the restaurant $280 per month. He has thirty-four restaurants on the platform. Three of those are franchises that count as one logo and eight locations. His monthly recurring revenue at the end of April 2026 was $11,460. Annualized: north of $130K. Net of indie FDE platform fees and his own travel and SIM cards, he keeps about 78% of it.

“I’m not a software person. I’m a restaurant person who learned to sell software. The agent is just the product.”

From restaurants to agents

Diego spent a decade running back of house. He knew exactly which part of a small restaurant’s week ate the owner’s soul: producing the weekly order. Counting inventory on a clipboard. Texting six different suppliers. Forgetting the cilantro. Eating the loss when too much fish came in on a slow Tuesday.

In November 2024 a friend showed him a chat with an AI agent that read receipts and produced an order. Diego didn’t think “cool tech.” He thought, “I can sell this to every owner I know.”

He signed up to indie FDE the same week. The platform gave him a hosted runtime, a cloud computer for the agent to run on, a chat UI he could brand, and a Stripe account that paid out to his Colombian bank in pesos. He spent the first weekend prompting the agent to do what he had done by hand for ten years.

The four-step loop he runs every week

1. Sit with the customer. Diego visits one new restaurant per week. He watches them count inventory and write their orders. He records nothing fancy: a voice memo and a photo of the spreadsheet.
2. Teach the agent the workflow. Back at home, he prompts the agent through indie FDE’s chat UI. He pastes the spreadsheet, gives it a sample order, and lets the agent propose three weeks of orders to compare against the real ones.
3. Deploy in one click. Diego clicks “Deploy” on indie FDE. The agent goes live with a phone-number link the owner can save as a WhatsApp contact. The runtime, the cloud computer, the storage, the email receipts: all handled.
4. Bill the customer. Stripe takes the restaurant’s card on the first day of the next month. indie FDE deducts the platform fee and revenue share. Diego gets the rest in pesos, automatically.

“I sold the first three restaurants by walking in. Then the owners told their friends. Now I get WhatsApps from people I do not know.”

Why one vertical, not ten

Every restaurant in Medellín has the same suppliers, the same ingredients, the same Tuesday lull. Once Diego had built the agent for one restaurant, it took him two hours to configure the next. The hard work, the customer trust, the social proof, the prompts, the supplier list, the WhatsApp templates, all of it compounded inside one vertical.

That is the unfair advantage of an indie FDE. You don’t build a horizontal SaaS that nobody knows how to sell. You build one agent for one industry and you become the operator that industry trusts.

Diego is now expanding to Bogotá and Cali, and a friend in Lima is using his playbook to sell the same agent in Peru.

Why he calls himself an indie FDE

The term Forward Deployed Engineer came out of enterprise AI: a specific kind of engineer who ships product directly to one customer’s reality. Indie FDE is the same idea, run by one person, for one vertical, with no employer.

The indie hacker generation built SaaS for other founders. The indie FDE generation builds agents for the real economy: restaurants, law firms, accounting practices, recruiters, ad agencies. The people who pay for results in cash.

“Indie hackers had a decade. The indie FDE decade started last year and most people have not noticed yet.”

A normal Wednesday

• 9:00. Coffee. Diego opens indie FDE and reads the overnight runs. The dashboard shows each restaurant’s draft order. He skims for anomalies.
• 10:30. He visits one new restaurant for the first sales conversation. He brings nothing but his phone.
• 13:00. Lunch. He answers two WhatsApps from existing customers. One of them wants to add a wine inventory module. He notes it.
• 15:00. He extends the agent prompt to include wine inventory. Cloud computer runs it against the restaurant’s last month of receipts. It works on the second try.
• 18:00. He’s done. He goes to play tejo with friends.

What Diego tells operators who ask

Pick a vertical you’ve already worked in. Visit one real business. Watch them do the work for an hour. Then write the agent that does that hour for them. Sell it. Visit the next one.

The technology is the easy part. The trust, the local relationships, the ability to walk into a back office and not be the IT person: that is the moat.

“If you have a year of experience inside any industry, you already have a head start that no engineer can buy.”

Your turn

You don’t need to live in Medellín. You don’t need to speak Spanish. You need one industry you understand and one workflow you can describe out loud.

The platform does the rest.