Growing a side hustle into a $10,000/month SaaS boilerplate business

Jonathan Wilke, 27, thought he’d be lucky if his SaaS boilerplate supastarter made $1,000.

Three years later, and his side hustle is bringing in $10,000 a month for just a few hours' work a week. Right now, it's paying for his Tesla.

Here's how he did it 👇.

Launching a side hustle

I’ve been coding since I was maybe 10. I think the very first thing I built was a website for my band.

I went on to study computational visualistics and design at university. That’s basically a mix of graphic design and computer science, and it’s what I do in my day job today.

A friend and I also run a small web development company. That’s where the idea for supastarter came from.

We found ourselves building this basic functionality for clients again and again. We thought a template could be useful for new projects and quickly realized other developers might want the same.

So, I started making a SaaS boilerplate. I put the first version online in August of 2021. I said to myself at the time, if this ever makes $1,000, that’s a huge success for me.

Three months later and I’d made that $1,000. That was a big milestone for me.

A total rewrite

The software itself began as Next.js with Supabase as the core. We offered authentication and internationalization.

Since then, we've constantly optimized the boilerplate in response to customer feedback.

People wanted to use other databases like Postgres or MongoDB, so we refactored the whole thing and made it more modular. More flexible.

We did a complete rewrite about a year after the first version.

We went to Prisma as the ORM, tRPC as the API layer. We use Radix UI with Tailwind for our front-end styling framework and we’re compatible with shadcn UI.

Two months later, we released a Nuxt version, which is now probably just as popular as the Next.js version.

One of the biggest things I did for sales was build a Tailwind CSS version of supastarter after customers asked for it. That had a massive impact. It basically doubled numbers.

Right now, we're working on a new version for Sveltekit. We hope to launch that next month around supastarter’s third birthday.

The marketing challenge

The biggest challenge for me was marketing. I had never sold a product that I owned before.

The first real attempt I made was creating an X account. I used that and my personal account to post about supastarter, share the website link and share some features.

Then I put the link on Reddit and it led to the first sale after maybe three or four days. That’s still probably the most rewarding moment I’ve had so far.

But I never really did a big campaign. I sponsored some newsletters and a page that offers free HTML templates.

The business grew very slowly through word of mouth. It made maybe 20–25 sales in the first three months, which was huge for my expectations.

From there, we've basically been adding new features to make the product attractive to as many developers as possible.

We’re at a pretty steady sales amount now, so I’m trying to work out new ways to grow.

Beyond one-time purchases

The business is based on one-time purchases, so it could stop at any moment.

But in truth, I have no idea how you could charge recurring fees for a SaaS boilerplate.

Our customers say they wouldn’t be interested in a support service long-term. After the first few weeks, they’ll probably have reached a point where their code base is too far from the core of the boilerplate for our support to help.

At that point, they’d need a developer.

That’s something we’ve thought about offering somehow. A service for people who aren’t experienced developers themselves.

Beyond that, something like paid modules could help grow the ecosystem. A new integration for XYZ.

Paying for my Tesla

Every time someone launches an application that's built with supastarter, it feels incredibly good. It’s cool to see or even use a product with your boilerplate underneath.

An even better feeling is when a developer recommends your product to other developers.

Ultimately I’d like to live off my indie hacking work. But not necessarily this particular product. That wouldn’t feel quite right as it’s not 100% sustainable. 

And there’s a lot to be said for keeping supastarter as a side hustle.

Right now, I only do about 4 to 6 hours work on it a week. I could probably grow faster if I developed more features or if I put more effort into marketing.

I also really like the full-time job that I have right now. The team is very small and very young. We use a similar tech to supastarter. We're launching a new product in September and it's really cool. I don't want to leave.

But I’ve just bought a Tesla and supastarter is basically paying for that. That’s fine by me.

You're the one in charge

I work a lot better if I don't have the pressure of a project having to succeed within three months or whatever. If it does, that's great. But I’d prefer to grow a product in a way that fits my lifestyle, rather go into it full time before it feels ready.

That’s a great thing about indie hacking in general. You’re the one in charge, not venture capital firms that want as much revenue as possible. You can focus on building the best product for the customer.

That being said, don’t price your product too low.

I originally priced supastarter at like $49, and then incrementally increased it. Now it costs $299.

The higher I priced the product, the better it sold, and the more people recognized its value.

I think it would take around two hours’ work for a developer to set up all the features supastarter has manually. You could never pay someone to build the same amount of features for that money.

You can follow me on X or check out the supastarter website to learn more about the product. Readers get 20% off with the code INDIEHACKERS.