Case Study: ShipFast made $63K in Revenue in 60
Days
Statistics:
- Website: Shipfa.st
- Launched On: 23rd of August, 2023
- Revenue Last Month (September, 2023): $36,400
- Profit Last Month (September, 2023): $31,668
- Monthly Website Traffic: 385,400
Description:
Founded by Marc Louvion in August of 2023, Shipfa.st is a NextJS boilerplate which helps indie hackers launch their own SaaS, AI and other web apps much faster.
It’s essentially a template of codes that saves developers 20+ hours on setting up key functions like user authentication, payments, landing page design etc. Since its launch less than two months, ShipFast has already generated an impressive $63,600 in revenue.
Business Model:
ShipFast runs on a pay once, use forever model. The two packages range between $129 and $149. On the launch month of September, Marc was able to generate $36,400 in revenue, and as of October he already made $27,000 in sales.
Since his solution is essentially a digital product and as there are no other high incurring fixed costs, Marc is able to benefit from very high profit margins.
Growth Strategy:
The rapid success of ShipFast has stemmed from three key marketing strategies, consisting of utilizing: Product Hunt, Twitter and Reddit.
Let’s first dive in into how Marc got his initial users.
Product Hunt:
Marc used Product Hunt as the initial launch strategy in order to validate his idea, and to his surprise he was able to generate generate $1,000 in sales in the first 7 hours of his launch. After 48 hours, Marc mentioned he had already made $6000 in profit. His Product Hunt launch turned out to be a huge success as he got voted “2nd Product of the Day” with 941 upvotes.
The ShipFast launch success on Product Hunt can be attributed to three factors: Product, Promotion and Conversion. Firstly, Marc developed a product that people actually wanted – a solution that solved a large enough problem. Secondly, actively engaging with other projects on Product Hunt, helped him get support for his launch when the time came. This combined with building anticipation and announcing the launch on his personal Twitter further boosted the votes. And thirdly, replying to all of the 100+ comments and creating a funny yet effective advertising video for his product page allowed the algorithm work in his favor.
Twitter:
Since his launch on Product Hunt, more than half of ShipFast’s entire website traffic has come from his personal brand on Twitter which has over 40,000 followers. Marc attributes his Twitter growth and derived traffic to “building in public”, meaning sharing the journey of building his projects openly for everyone to see. This not only built social proof and grew his following from 1,000 followers in July of 2022, but also allowed his announcement post of ShipFast to go viral and get 167,000 impressions.
This very same “build in public” strategy has helped most of Marc’s other posts be boosted by the Twitter algorithm for other users to see. That said, since his Twitter following are mainly indie hackers and as his product ShipFast helps this particular target audience develop their own projects faster, it has allowed Twitter to be especially effective at growing his business.
Reddit:
Lastly, Marc has also been able to drive traffic to his website and get paying users via Reddit. He did this all organically by sharing his start up on relevant subreddits like r/SideProject which has 120,000 members. Here he made a post which simply was a video demo of ShipFast and this post got 100 upvotes as well as 40 comments. On a subreddit of that size, and with that many upvotes, he is bound to have gotten several tens of thousands of users seeing his post and thousands of users checking out his website. That is the power of organic marketing.
He used the same strategy by posting on Hacker News as well.
Key Takeaways:
Focus on building a personal brand for your product. This is what helped Marc jumpstart his success with ShipFast, and is a strategy that allows for exponential growth.
Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed it. In my Newsletter/Database, I write twice per month a case study like this and share on a weekly basis 5 lucrative online businesses with their respective metrics:
- How much profit and revenue they make per month
- How many monthly website visitors they get
- When they launched etc.
Would love to see you in there!
With much love,
He already had 40K+ Followers on twitter before the launch of the product, so no matter what product he releases, or even if he just posts a tipping link, he can easily make so much money.
This is also the part that worries me the most. I know that a successful launch on Product Hunt can bring huge traffic, but if you haven't already accumulated a lot of fans before the launch, it's almost impossible to climb the rankings, even if your product is beautifully designed and attractive. My product has been online for a few weeks now, but I still don't dare to launch it on Product Hunt because I'm afraid of wasting this opportunity for nothing.
I find a open source project "Saasfly" on GitHub, I think it's the alternative to shipfast
I think this is great, but yeah agree with most comments on that he is seasoned. I also think the vast majority of selling anything online today is related to audience size and I could definitely be wrong on this. I feel like it is extremely difficult to put together a great product and sell it to people (even a good product) without some kind of audience first or a strategy to build an audience online quickly.
你的营销策略很成功，产品本身也很有市场需求，帮助了Indie hacker更快的构建自己的软件，这个产品质量很关键，很棒，向你学习！
Wow, so fast! Your story is very inspiring and I think it motivates other aspiring founders. Good luck!
This is refreshing content. As a founder shipping in public and shipping fast -- this was a helpful strategy guide!
You're telling my story better than me 😂
I used to binge Indie Hackers's stories to get inspired and motivated to grind. I'm so happy to be featured and hope it inspires others to start the journey!
Also, ShipFast results from 7 years of failures and 2 years of full-time indie hacking.
I started just like anyone else: No coding or marketing experience, no following, and no budget.
I sat down at my desk, every day for 2 years, and built tons of apps (most failed). But step by step, I built a following, shipped faster, learned about marketing, and ShipFast happened.
Go build your side project! Thanks for sharing Diego.
PS: Total traffic on the site since launch > 90,000 visitors (not 300k)
Very cool, Marc! Congratulations on the success.
I just bought ShipFast today to check it out and whip something up. I'll let you know when I launch something I build with it.
Hey, thanks for sharing. This is really helpful.
Its all about creating and mastering distributions channel. The only reason his launch is successful is because he already have huge experience on how he will and can distribute his product.
He is seasoned entrepreneur after all.
On top of that he have twitter follower and huge reputation on solofounder community, so people will trust his product. He himself is the reason why people will by product from him.
Not to discredit him but just to make sure all of us learn and care more about distribution channel which will make you money.
Here some article to learn how to built a distribution channel. Why solopreneurs should focus on building distribution channel
Exactly this, success comes with the result of combined years of effort and experiences, not just following a specific strategy.
Without reading this I'll tell everyone exactly how he did it.
He built in public over several years and gained a followers of other software engineers that were building SaaS products as well.
He then created a product and sold it to those peers of his to make bank.
Summary: he built a distribution channel and sold to it.
It sounds like I knew what I doing, but I didn't.
I built 17 startups in the last 2 years with no master plan, but building a little portfolio of projects.
I created ShipFast for me to ship my apps faster.
Before launching, I told my wife "If we make 1 sale, I'm happy"
He didn't intend to build a distribution channel, it happened naturally. I just focused on shipping apps every day.
Nice Post Diego. just so you know the images are not being rendered. You might want to update that :)
Cheers for the feedback :) What do you mean by the images not being rendered?
I can only see "alt text" in all the images in the post. My bad, it could be a problem with my network provider as I'm not able to access some specific sites too, like GoDaddy.
On my end it works, curious about the rest.. But thanks for pointing that out, will look into it!
Here is also the full article if you want to see it with the images.
For twitter, is it just putting #buildinpublic to all your tweets? The growth from 1k to 40k followers with specifics would be helpful as most of us are in square one looking to grow. Otherwise I love the review
Hey thanks for the positive feedback. It's a combination of different acts related to #buildinpublic. Like you mentioned, including the hashtag is one strategy. With that also comes sharing your numbers and journey openly i.e. your MRR, what marketing strategy is working best for your, recommendations etc. The more open and helpful you are the more value other people see in you and the more followers you get. Another strategy is to get more eyeballs to your profile is to engage with others users and their tweets. Here you also want to be a valuable source, as this leads to them viewing your twitter handle, then they see your #buildinpublic profile and helpful posts, and from there a fraction of viewers again convert to followers. There definitely is more to the whole strategy. Will look into it a make a whole breakdown in the future of how other's managed to grow their accounts like Marc did.