How to make $250k in 5 months out of a code script - ShipFast ($50k MRR)
Today's case is about ShipFast, a project developed by a solopreneur, Marc Louvion, to help other solopreneurs launch their projects faster. Before achieving success with ShipFast, Marc launched several businesses that ultimately failed.
In 2016, he moved to South Korea to build a VC-funded startup that unfortunately failed. After a period of soul searching, he started experimenting with everything from building Web3 apps for Tai Lopez to selling knitted couple gloves in the streets of Korea.
In 2021, Marc hit rock bottom; he was depressed, living in his parents' house, and with no income. One day, while scrolling through Twitter, he got inspired by Pieter Levels (@levelsio), a well-known solopreneur famous for creating startups using only a laptop and no employees. So, he decided to follow Pieter’s example...
Marc relocated to Bali and put in a lot of hard work. Even when he didn't feel like it, he kept pushing himself every day. He shipped lots of products -some of them failed- but he realized that he had to do the same thing over and over: Set up DNS records, listen to Stripe webhooks, design pricing section etc..
And suddenly, the light bulb lit up for him 💡
The start of a beautiful (and successful) journey... 🚀
In just one week, Marc gathered all the code he'd developed over the past two years and created ShipFast—a handy boilerplate tool for web development.
In September 2023, Marc officially launched ShipFast, a NextJS boilerplate designed to make web development faster and easier.
To get the word out about ShipFast, Marc used three main platforms:
- ProductHunt: ShipFast got a big boost here. Since most of his customers are solopreneurs, ProductHunt was the perfect place to share it. Marc got 3,000 new visitors thanks to ProductHunt's newsletter.
- Hacker News: Marc also shared ShipFast on this tech forum associated with Y Combinator. It helped him get some customers and feedback.
- Twitter (X): Marc has a large following on Twitter, so promoting ShipFast there brought in a lot of new customers. Twitter has been his most effective platform for acquiring customers so far.
In the first 48 hours, this project already made $6,000.
By the end of the month, ShipFast had earned $40,000. Sometimes, describing what Product-Market Fit is isn’t easy but when it happens you know it and that was the case with ShipFast.
In the following months, Marc continued to improve ShipFast by adding new features. He also stayed connected with users by sharing updates and interacting with the community on Twitter, which helped build trust and transparency.
