He makes $123,000 per month with a SaaS Boilerplate

Meet Marc Lou, a software developer shipping startups like a madman. He has built over 20 startups in the last 3 years. 7 made money. 1 pay much more than the bills.

Today, I want to focus on his most successful Startup: ShipFast

Shipfast makes $123,000 per month and the best part is: you can copy a similar strategy to use in a different industry.

Here is how he came up with the idea, how he monetizes it, and how he gets users:

HOW HE CAME UP WITH THE IDEA

Let me be the first to admit, I hate starting a project from complete scratch, most of the time you have to do the same things for each project.

Set up authentication, payments, emails, DNS records, landing pages, SEO tags, blog section, etc. This can take a lot of development time, nearly every SaaS developer feels this pain.

Marc not only felt the pain, he took a step to solve this problem. The solution was Shipfast, a Next.js Boilerplate that helps SaaS developers to ship their startups in days not weeks.

Shipfast saves you hours of setting up emails, designing a landing page, handling Stripe or Lemon Squeezy webhooks, SEO tags, applying for Google OAuth, DNS records, protected API routes, and more.

This makes it very easy for developers to focus on the core features of their product and to get to market quickly. It’s a game-changer.

If you have a template that you keep using every time you start a new project, you may consider monetizing it, there are likely many other developers like you who would benefit from your template.

CHOOSING MONETIZATION

Marc Lou makes $123,000 per month from Shipfast, (as of June 2024). Mind-blowing 🤯 right? This is what happens when you solve a painful problem.

Shipfast pricing is simple and straightforward: one-time purchase of $169 or one-time purchase with lifetime updates and other extra features for $199.

While many SaaS developers try to enforce subscriptions on every product to get that sweet recurring revenue, it is important to acknowledge that subscriptions is not the only monetization model.

Half of the success of the product is the pricing and having your customers in mind when setting the price and monetization strategy will help you win every time.

GETTING USERS: MARKETING AND DISTRIBUTION

Marketing and distribution are the most important processes to make money with your product. No matter how great your product is, if people don’t know about it, your product is doomed.

Marc is very good at marketing and distribution and there is a lot to learn from him and his strategies.

Here is how Marc markets Shipfast:

PRODUCT HUNT: Marc launches all of his products on Product Hunt and other platforms. When Shipfast was launched on Product Hunt, it got the number 2 product of the day badge.

Marc has been hugely successful on Product Hunt that in 2023 he won Product Hunt’s “Maker of the Year Award”

His launches get a lot of traffic to his products and Shipfast was no exception.

TWITTER: Marc is very popular on Twitter in the Solo Developer space; he pioneered the build-in-public trend and has won the hearts of many developers.

He markets Shipfast on Twitter actively and passively by sharing the features he has added, the revenue it has made, etc. Twitter is one of his primary and major traffic source.

YOUTUBE: Marc has a YouTube channel with 78,400 subscribers (June 2024) where he shares his solopreneurship journey.

He also shares live streams of building startups from start to launch, Shipfast is used in these live streams which gives more awareness to the product.

HACKER NEWS: For every startup launch on Product Hunt and Twitter, Marc also launches on Hacker News and he has made a video on how to get users for your SaaS by launching on Hacker News.

FREE APPS: Another clever way that Marc markets Shipfast is by making free apps with Shipfast and showing the “Made with Shipfast” badge on the website.

For example, he recently launched Insighto on Product Hunt and got the product of the day badge, Insighto is free for any user and it has a floating badge “Made with Shipfast” on the homepage.

AFFILIATE MARKETING: Marc also has a Shipfast affiliate program where affiliates can earn upto 50% for referring qualified customers to the product.

A combination of these marketing and distribution channels has made Shipfast a huge success.

Relentless distribution is a great lesson to take home from Marc’s marketing efforts.

If you want to learn more about how solo software developers make money, join The Snippets newsletter, where I share 3 developers each week and how they are making money from their projects.