How I'm selling the ideal AI WebApp boilerplate, which doesn't exist

Disclaimer: This is a live story. It is happening right now, and I'm not sure there will be a happy ending.

First, I found myself so f***ing tired of doing the same things again and again!

As a seasoned freelance developer, I sent over 300 proposals, spoke with 100+ clients, and had 30+ contracts only on Upwork. And you know what? Around 90% of the new projects have 80% common elements!

When you start a new project, you must usually add register/auth, one-time payments or subscriptions, different plans for free/paid/pro users, and so on.

So yeah, you guessed right, I came up with an idea to create a boilerplate. An ideal boilerplate.

But... there are a lot of other boilerplates, right?
I found shipfa.st, makerkit.dev, Divjoy, and ten more with similar tech stacks. They are really good, especially ShipFast! But it's not ideal, probably.

And then, I went into analytical paralysis for a couple of months

I didn't start the development, but I asked myself a lot of times:

Why should someone buy a new young product when there are a lot of others?

The answer could be "it's cheaper" — but I don't want to do something cheap and poor. Actually, the opposite — I want to create something pricy and extra-good!

I registered a domain RunApp.Today and did nothing. Time went by, I still freelanced and started slipping into a depressive state. To be honest, over the last three years of full-time freelancing, I'm sick of it.

But the product that I did for a year and invested about $10k failed (I will write an article about it, I guess — I was so stupid and blind doing it...).

What helped me to do just something? FOMO because of the Black Friday.

I used to work in sales and know that the highest season in the year is November and December, and the lowest season is January. Right now, on Twitter/ProductHunt, so many people are launching and selling all the cool things...

I didn't want to miss out on the hype either and delay validating my idea for another year. So, I decided to launch on Black Friday with no excuses.

But... I didn't have a product at all!

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are coming, but I'm totally not prepared! I only have an empty GitHub repo with .gitignore and readme.md files.

Yeah, I built so many projects for clients, but I can't reuse my code in another project — it's against the Upwork rules. I really don't want to have legal troubles later.

And what rescued me here? The IndieHackers community!

Well, not literally. It's just that I've been reading this site a lot in the last few months and chatting on Twitter with cool guys (btw, my X profile, feel free to subscribe).

And what I heard all the time could be summarized like this: "Don't build your project silently for years! Don't sit in shadow, talk with people! Build in public! First sell, then do! Launch fast!". (well, at least that's how I understood it.)

So I just started selling a non-existent product

Yeah, literally, I just created a Gumroad product and described the future tech stack, of course, clarifying that it will be delivered later.

I was very doubtful and even wanted to cancel the launch, but then I thought like:

If I have even one customer, I will be responsive to finally create the product and make the customer happy. Clients paid me $ 60k on Upwork, why not make something useful for $100 or $1000 and then resell it?

But for me, it was still not enough. I am responsible and don't want to disappoint customers. So I decided to make a really sweet deal for the first customers.

My sweet deal

First: a unique proposal — custom feature request

Each of the first X users can request one custom feature! Yeah, I’ll customize the boilerplate just for a customer, like it would be a freelance task. Let’s think about it, like pushing features to the roadmap.

Rules - the feature should not be large and should be discussed and approved by me first. Order of the features will be primarily first buy - first done, with some reasonable exceptions.

Second: An extremely low price.

Only 69 USD during Black Friday. I truly consider it as extra-low because of comparing it with the other boilerplates (ShipFast: $150, MakerKit: $300, Gravity: $500+).
And because I will put the price at a minimum of $300 upon full release. Why that much? Read above. I want to create an extremely high value for a pretty high price. But initial versions will be high quality, but very small, so only $69 for now (and this is an interesting number also 😜).

And third: permissive refund

This is a code boilerplate, and usually, there are no refunds. But this is a pre-order, and I have no community trust yet. So, for the start, I decided to remove user hesitations and offer a full refund with no questions.

If I fail? No sales - No problems

Possible outcome options:

1. If I fail, this will not be a problem. I will mark the boilerplate idea as validated, close the Gumroad product sale, and go further.
2. If there are a few customers, then they and I will receive a good boilerplate (and I'll finally be able to reuse it for my other projects legally)
3. If there are a lot of customers and a lot of custom feature requests, I will raise the price and cancel the feature request proposition. Then, I'll deliver all the features, and it will probably be a much more valuable product than if I had built the roadmap myself.

Final thoughts

To increase trust, I decided to show my Upwork profile ( I'm in the top 3% of all Upwork freelancers, $60k+ earned, 50-60 USD per hour of work) and GitHub Profile with a long streak of commits.

I don't know if it will work, but what I have is what I have.

The product: https://runapp.gumroad.com/l/ai

What do you think? This is my first article here, so please share your thoughts! And if you find this story interesting, please consider sharing it somewhere - I'd be really grateful!