TheAlmanackof

This is an unofficial collection. Every essay in it was written and published by Marc Lou — first on his newsletter, and in one case on 𝕏. Nothing here has been rewritten, paraphrased, or generated. The editing is limited to three things: choosing which issues belong in a book, deciding what order they should be read in, and removing the newsletter furniture that does not survive the trip — reading-time stamps, sponsor slots, build-in-public boxes, and the “here are five ways I can help you” footers.

Every essay carries a link back to the issue it came from. If a line here matters to you, read it at the source, and subscribe there — that is where the next one will be.

Marc earns nothing from this book, and neither do I. It is free, it always will be, and it is not affiliated with or endorsed by Marc, his companies, or his newsletter. It exists for the same reason Eric Jorgenson gave for making The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: good writing scrolls away, and knowledge this useful deserves a more permanent shape.

If Marc would rather this did not exist, it will not. Write to me and it comes down the same day.

Marc Lou changed my life.

An afternoon in 2023, I was doomscrolling Twitter before my usual bath time. I was just about to leave, when a tweet popped up from Marc. "looking for beta testers for a boilerplate I'm about to launch" it said. I replied within the minute. Someone still beat me to it, but I was beta tester #2 regardless. A few hours later, a certain boilerplate called ShipFast was launched. And the rest, as they say, is history.

A paid boilerplate. I don't remember the launch price, but it doesn't matter because I wouldn't have paid for it anyways. The Indian + indie hacker mindset wouldn't have allowed me to. Luck was on my side, I got it for free.

Then he opened a Discord and hundreds of people poured in, most of them wanting to build something, most of them never having shipped anything. I had shipped. Not much, and never alone, but enough to be useful. So I stayed in there and answered questions, for months, at all hours, for nothing. People started to recognise my name. Marc did too.

When he added a paid support channel I joined that as well, and spent my evenings on Google Meet with strangers in other time zones, unsticking their deploys. A few dollars a session. Not much. Dollars, though — and if you have ever earned in rupees you know exactly what that sentence means.

March 2024, he offered me to look after ShipFast and his other projects, so he could spend time on his new one, CodeFast, that would require focused commitment. I said yes immediately. The stipend was good, but the chance to work with your hero was great. I would have done it for free, but that part I kept to myself.

Some months in, my laptop went for repair and Marc bought me a MacBook. I need you to understand what that was. Not a perk. It was the machine I had been dreaming about since college. I doubt he thought about it for more than a minute. I have thought about it ever since.

After CodeFast landed we started DataFast, and that was a different animal — a real SaaS, built from an empty repository. The idea was his, the direction was his, most of the design was his. I took the backend. Watching a product climb to twenty thousand dollars a month from the inside, sitting next to the person making the calls, is an education nobody had ever offered me and none of it was on sale.

Here is what I would have missed if I had only ever read him: the writing is not a highlight reel. Every week he put down exactly what he had done and whether it worked. The launch that flopped. The free plan he killed. The headline he rewrote nine times before anybody clicked it. Most people who get good at something quietly stop explaining how. Marc never stopped, and he will tell you himself, over and over in the pages ahead, that there is nothing underneath it but shipping something most weeks for nine years and writing down what happened.

And then in May 2025, of all the things I did not see coming, there he was in my living room in Mumbai. Next to me in a kurta, flowers in hand, finger hearts pointing at the camera.

This book exists because his best writing keeps getting buried. Newsletters scroll away, posts die within the hour, and I got tired of digging up the same six links every time a friend asked me where to start. So I stopped digging and built this instead.

Read it end to end if you are starting out. Open it at the chapter you need if you are already building. Either way, none of it is mine. I only decided the order.

Wahab Shaikh Mumbai

• 2015 — An exchange semester in Hong Kong. “It transformed me.”

• 2016 — Graduates in computer science and learns to code, convinced he is the next Mark Zuckerberg.

• 2017 — March 10 — quits everything. Spends the year on a startup that makes $0, throws away the code, and moves countries.

• 2018 — January — a bedroom in Seoul, eight square metres, full of unsold stock and an empty bank account.

• 2018 — Summer — makes his first $1 online, in Osaka, on a three-day visa run.

• 2019 — Builds VirallyBot for escape rooms. Never touches it again; it still pays $600 a month.

• 2020 — March — COVID closes every escape room in the world. The revenue goes with them.

• 2020 — Summer — decides to get married.

• 2021 — January — launches The Golden Plumber. June 9 — cries over a morning coffee and quits entrepreneurship.

• 2021 — November — gets fired, opens 𝕏 with zero followers, and finds the build-in-public crowd.

• 2022 — July — 1,000 followers. August — Habits Garden makes ~$200 a month and he goes all in.

• 2023 — January — income $1,500 a month. Habits Garden crosses 10,000 users.

• 2023 — August — ships ShipFast. $6,000 of profit in 48 hours; a quarter of a million dollars in five months.

• 2023 — November — income $65,000 a month. Product Hunt names him Maker of the Year.

• 2024 — February 5 — builds a micro SaaS live on YouTube in 31 hours. July — 100,000 followers.

• 2024 — Tired of stitching Plausible to Stripe, starts building DataFast.

• 2025 — August — 200,000 followers, DataFast at $5,000 MRR, 5.6% body fat.

• 2025 — Earns $1,032,000, visits seven countries, reads ten books, drinks no alcohol.

• 2026 — 300,000 followers. Writes up how DataFast reached $1M, and launches SHIP OR DIE.

Nutella was an accident.

During World War II, there wasn't enough cacao, so Pietro Ferrero tried making chocolate with hazelnuts instead. He ended up creating the world's biggest chocolate spread.

Successful startups are born by accident too.

It starts with the founder either playing with new technology, solving a problem they have, or listening to what their customers want.

Put your work out there.

You don’t need a good idea to start. Write an article about what you learned last year, rebuild your note-taking app, or send a cold email to a business.

The process of creating will help you discover problems.

Real problems that people would pay you to solve. In the end, you might create a successful business you never even imagined.

Less thinking, more doing.

PS: My solopreneur journey was an accident. I was bored so I played with AI and created MakeLanding. MakeLanding created ShipFast. ShipFast created ZenVoice. ZenVoice created PoopUp.

Everything that worked for me came from scratching my own itches.

I once made Naval25 — a tiny site where people voted on their favorite Naval Ravikant quotes. Sounds pointless, but it was something I cared about, so I built it.

And that “pointless” project made noise. It gave me feedback. It opened doors to the next thing, and the next, until eventually I built ShipFast, my boilerplate, born from the itch of rebuilding the same setup again and again. That one made $1.2M.

Solve your own problem → Ship an MVP → Discover new problems → Scratch again

It doesn’t need to be a big problem. My friend Jack wanted to stop doomscrolling TikTok. So he built an app for himself. That itch gave him his first revenue, which taught him how to do marketing, which led to his next SaaS at $15K MRR.

Scratching your own itch works because:

• You care enough to finish it.

• It’s authentic, so people feel it.

• Sometimes your itch is everyone else’s too.

Right now, I’m building BioAge — a health dashboard that connects my food intake, workouts, sleep data, and lab tests. Because everything in health is connected: food affects sleep, sleep affects performance, and performance affects food cravings. I wanted a way to see the whole picture of my body in one place.

It’s not really a business yet. Maybe it will be one day. But that’s not the point. The point is: I had an itch, so I scratched it.

Don’t start with a “business.” Start with yourself.

Curiosity is where startups start.

Hey—it’s Marc,

In 2022, 25% of my startups made money. In 2023, 71% of my startups made money.

The last issue was about finding ideas. This issue is about picking the right one.

1. Is it painful?

I spent a year working full-time on Habits Garden (a gamified habit tracker). 10,000+ accounts and tons of happy users, but it makes less than $400/month.

In comparison, VirallyBot (a marketing tool for escape rooms) generates $600/month and I haven’t touched it since 2019.

The difference?

• Habits Garden is a vitamin: It’s cool to track habits

• VirallyBot is a painkiller: Escape rooms need marketing

People are much more willing to pay for a product that solves their problems.

• Focus on painkillers to reach profitability faster

• Turn vitamins into painkillers by explaining why your product is a must-have: Track your habits → Diet habit you won’t quit

2. Would you (really) use it?

My wife is a Korean teacher. So I typed Korean workbooks in Google and discovered people were searching for this. 3 weeks later, WorkbookPDF was born (AI-generated language workbooks).

I launched and made a few bucks. But the product is stuck because I don’t use it: I have no idea how to write the copy or what features to add.

Validating ideas (i.e. keyword research) is important. But it’s pale in comparison to actually using the product yourself:

• In the worst case, you improved your life

• Chances are someone needs the product too

• You understand the frustration, your copy will be on point

3. How long until launch?

You’re a solopreneur with limited time, primarily if you work 9 to 5. If it takes 6 months to build a startup, it’s not a good idea. It will actually take 12 months (overthinking and bugs) and you could burn out and quit.

Instead, think in weeks, and ditch ideas that take longer than a month. You can also lower your time-to-market:

• Presell a product

• Ditch code testing & dark mode

• Break big ideas into 1-feature-only products

There is no perfect idea. The only way to know is to launch it. This framework helps you increase the odds of success and get profitable faster.

I’ve met hundreds of people with great ideas who never made it.

But I’ve never met anyone who launched 10 startups and failed.

That’s the difference between the people you see crushing it online and the people who don’t: a bias for action.

Thinking feels productive, but it’s not. It’s like reading 100 books on swimming but never getting in the water. You’ll drown the moment you try.

For me, execution didn’t come naturally. I had to force it with routine. For the past 6 years, I’ve lived the same day 2,000 times: Workout, coffee, code. Boring, but it works. I avoid overthinking by holding onto one north star metric: build 100 tiny startups.

Each day starts with a fork: dream it, or ship it.

Success is nothing more than repeating the right choice.

This newsletter is written 30,000 feet in the air—I’m going to Taiwan.

I used to spend days brainstorming for a startup name, to finally come up with something nobody understood…

Let’s talk about making up an unforgettable name. First impression matters.

1. A super easy and short name—like Stripe or Butter. ChatGPT is good at making them.

2. SEO-oriented names—like HeadshotPro.

3. Benefit-oriented names—like NomadList or Tweet Hunter.

Let’s focus on the last one. It’s the easiest way to be memorable as a solopreneur with limited resources. The name is usually made of 2 short words.

One word should be super relatable to your customers. Speak a language they use and understand.

• Tweet Hunter is for professionals on Twitter

• ShipFast is for indie makers

• OurBabyAI is for couples

The other word should signal a change in your customer’s life. It shouldn’t be about your product at all. Why is your product useful? How will it change my life?

• ShipFast: Finally launch that side project

• CleanShotX: Take beautiful screenshots with no skills

• NomadList: Go nomad, change your life

Now you have 2 words, find 5 short synonyms for each. Quick? Fast. Launch? Ship. When you have 2 lists of 5 synonyms, ask ChatGPT to create all combinations. Remove combinations that are over 10 words. Keep it simple.

Pick your 3 favorites and send them to a few friends: “What’s your favorite?” Their answers don’t matter, yet. After 24 hours, remove your messages from the chat and ask “Which one do you remember?” Your new startup name is the most remembered. That’s it!

Don’t spend too much time on this. A name won’t make a startup. Pick one, and start building!

2017: I spent a year building a startup that made $0. 2023: I launched 10 products and made $263,000.

Speed is solopreneurs' best friend. Here is how to get ideas and build them fast.

An idea, quick

The most successful products were built by solopreneurs scratching their itches. Pieter Levels building NomadList while traveling the world is a great example.

There are tons of existing problems gravitating around you. Build a habit of looking around. If you’re working 9/5, it’s the best place to explore. Search for experiences that bother you. Or knowledge you wish you had.

If nothing comes, start something new. Try a new sport, start a new daily routine, or acquire new skills. You can also solve universal problems: Businesses want more revenue, and people want to be more productive. Finally, you can upgrade a product you or your friends are using.

When you get started, ideas don’t matter. Building them does. You’ll discover real problems and get tons of promising ideas.

The 24-hour startup

My 2017 startup failure went like this: I threw away all the code, quit my girlfriend, and moved to a new country.

The more time invested, the higher the expectations. In the tough world of entrepreneurship where expectations are rarely met, spending months on a product is a recipe for burnout.

Every startup has a 24-hour version: Airbnb is a spreadsheet, and Instagram is a Google Drive.

Find yours. Remove all non-critical features. Spend a week or two building. Write a good headline and ship with a buy button.

Building a successful startup is a repetition of tiny failures.

Be comfortable being imperfect. Take action. Now is a good time to write some code.

When I believed I was Mark Zuckerberg in 2017, I spent a year building a startup that got 0 users.

20+ startups later and countless months spent on useless features, I can confidently say this: We overthink startups.

Here’s how to launch in weeks, not months.

The hard truth

Let’s say you’re getting started and just launched your startup on Product Hunt. 1,000 visitors. Pretty cool! 900 will read your headline, 500 will scroll past the first section, 50 will sign up, and 5 will pay to use your app.

That is a 0.5% conversion rate, which is optimistic for a first startup. Spending 3 days on a password recovery form wasn’t probably worth your time…

Most of your efforts have 0 financial outcome—that’s entrepreneurship. Spending months on a startup that will get 5 users and $100 in revenue is a recipe for burnout (I was there in 2021). Shipping minimal MVP in weeks is an alternative for mental well-being and financial success.

Every startup has a 24-hour version

• Airbnb is a spreadsheet

• Instagram is a Google Drive

• McDonald’s is a pop-up store

I’m not saying you should launch a scrappy product in a day (the product-obsessed developer inside of you will resist anyway, I am the same).

But there’s a version of your startup that can be published within 24 hours. What does it look like?

Start from that baseline and only add the bare minimum to get your minimal MVP in days.

What’s enough for a minimal MVP?

A headline, a buy button, and 1 feature.

Your headline is the most important. It’s like the thumbnail of a YouTube video: people will decide to invest their precious time on your site based on that sentence. I wrote about how to make memorable headlines.

You can only validate an idea if people pay for it. A waitlist isn’t enough. Your minimal MVP should have a buy button.

Finally, the feature should solve the most painful customer’s problem. If that feature requires smaller features, it’s OK. But don’t overthink it.

What you should ditch:

• Anything that’s invisible to the customer: Code testing, git branches, new frameworks

• Anything that doesn’t add direct value to the customer: Forgotten password, dark mode, a professional logo

• Any secondary features.

Shipping startups fast isn’t about working 12 hours a day. It’s about removing noise. Ship minimalist. Be comfortable being imperfect.

On February 5th, 2024, I hit "Start Streaming" and built a micro SaaS live on YouTube in 31 hours.

The product has made almost $2,000 in just 5 days. Here's the entire journey from idea to launch.

Getting the startup idea

After I realized I paid Stripe $1,600 to create PDF invoices, I turned off the option. Within days, my inbox was flooded with customers asking for invoices.

A pain with a money incentive is promising. So I searched for alternatives but I couldn’t find any. And just like this, a new startup idea was born: A self-serve invoicing tool for Stripe (now called ZenVoice)

I wrote more about getting ideas (TL;DR; think less, build more).

Building the MVP

1. Pricing is everything

As a customer, that’s what you look at first, especially when you don’t understand the product. As an entrepreneur, that’s how I pay the rent. So I brainstorm pricing first.

I went with one-time payments because it’s almost free to run this startup:

• $49: Unlimited invoices for 1 Stripe account

• $69: Unlimited invoices for unlimited Stripe accounts

If a customer generates more than 49,000 invoices, I’m losing money. But this will never happen for all customers.

There are 2 plans because people have no clue how much a tool like this costs. Confused customers don't buy. The first plan ($49) is the anchor, so the second one makes sense.

2. That ONE feature

I had tons of features in mind. But I also remembered that 90% of startups failed. So I have a rule to avoid wasting time (and eventually burning out):

1 startup = 1 feature

For ZenVoice, customers of my users should be able to generate invoices. That’s it.

There’s no password reset form, invoice preview, or account deletion. But there’s a feedback button so I know what users need instead of making a blind guess.

3. The landing page is as important as the product

On average, only 1 website visitors out of 100 will see your product.

I spent 11 hours on the landing page (37% of the time) to make sure it converts. Here are the key elements I focused on:

• Problem agitation: Annoying notifications to remind potential customers why they’re here.

• Headline: A promise with an emotional outcome “Focus on your startup, not the invoices”

• Demo video: I’m not a cold VC startup, so I demo the product and explain why I built it

• Social proof: I let a few users beta test the product in exchange for a testimonial

• Startup name: ZenVoice is easy to remember because it’s short and related to the pain (in-voice)

I wrote more about making landing pages that sell.

Getting the 1st customer

To get the first visitors (and customers), I launch everywhere:

Product Hunt, Reddit, Hacker News, and Twitter have the most impact.

For each platform, I try to format the post for the user’s language. For instance, I use cold tech words on Hacker News, and friendly vibes with emoji on Product Hunt. I also made a launch skit to kickstart the post on Twitter.

I don’t know what’s next for ZenVoice, yet.

When it reaches 10,000 visitors (currently 7,600), I’ll look at just one metric: $ per visitor. The worst I’ve had is $0.06 per visitor. The best is $0.93 (ShipFast).

If ZenVoice $-per-visitor is above $0.5, I will focus. Otherwise, I’ll let it run by itself, fix bugs, and move on to the next startup.

On October 28, I saw this tweet from Pieter Levels.

He said a lot of people share fake MRR screenshots to get attention.

The next morning, I woke up still thinking about it. Because I share my own revenue publicly, and I care about trust. So I had an idea…

What if there were a place where founders could verify their revenue by connecting a read-only Stripe API key?

I just opened Cursor and said, “build this.”

Within hours, the first version was ready. It had only one headline, two buttons (one for adding a startup, one for searching), and a leaderboard showing real revenue.

I launched it the next day by quoting Pieter’s original tweet. The tweet got 3,000+ likes, 2M+ views.

At the bottom of the page, I added my 𝕏 handle and a link to my boilerplate, the same codebase I used to build this app in 24 hours. I also embedded DataFast’s real-time visitor globe for people to discover my little SaaS.

I also added a few ad slots on the sidebar. At first, they promoted my own product. Then, just for fun, I opened a few empty ones for others to buy.

I priced them at $299/month. Within hours, half were sold.

Within 3 days, every ad slot was gone, and my side project made $20,378.

It became the third fastest-growing project I’ve ever built (I’ve built more than 30).

It took me months to grow some of them. This one took a weekend. Ha, entrepreneurship!

I didn’t know what the perfect product looked like, so I just listened.

Soon, big startups started verifying their revenue. Some were making millions a year.

And then Gumroad joined. It felt unreal.

And that’s it.

No grand plan. No strategy.

Just an idea that solved a tiny problem, built fast, launched fast, and fueled by luck, timing, and curiosity.

Takeaways

• Simplicity wins. The landing page had one headline and two buttons. Nothing else.

• Treat your OG image like a YouTube thumbnail. It’s your first impression.

• Context matters. This only worked because I built it in response to Pieter’s tweet; it gave people a story.

• Show up and build. You can’t control luck, but you can increase your odds by playing (shipping) more often.

I never change my tech stack.

My 21 products get 250,000 page views per month and generate $1,753 a day using this simple, non-fancy tech stack:

Front-end

I use ReactJS, Tailwind CSS, and NextJS.

I also use daisyUI, the awesome Tailwind component library to speed things up.

Design trends give birth to new UI components every day. It’s a distraction for solopreneurs. daisyUI has 20+ themes and all the components, that’s enough.

Back-end

I use serverless functions by NextJS. I don’t have to install packages or maintain an OS. I clone a NextJS project and I have a scalable API for my micro SaaS in seconds.

My database is hosted on MongoDB Atlas. I create a free M0 customer for each new project and use daily backups ($10/month). I use mongoose on top to simplify queries.

To send emails, I use Mailgun ($4/month). It’s easy and free to start.

Payments are processed via Stripe (3.5%). Getting started is a bit daunting. I wrote this tutorial to handle subscriptions with Stripe.

Hosting

I host my 21 apps on Vercel ($20/month). I push changes to a GitHub repo and it automatically deploys them.

Monitoring

Simple metrics like visitors and pageviews are handled by Plausible ($29/month).

If something goes wrong, I check Vercel deployment logs.

I query the database using relevant filters for advanced monitoring, like split testing. But I rarely do that.

Extras

I hired a junior developer for $10/month. His name is GitHub Copilot.

Some of my products use AI models like GPT-4. Pricing varies on usage, currently, I spend ~$20/month.

And if I need specific features, like image hosting or a CDN, I use AWS (1$/month)

When I learned to code, I struggled to decide on the right tech stack with all the noise out there.

Tech stack doesn’t matter. Pick one and stick to it. You’ll get comfortable and ship much faster.

WARNING:

❌ This is NOT for people who want to get a 9-5 as a software engineer. ✅ This is for people who want to learn to code fast, build a business, and quit their 9-5.

What I did wrong:

I learned to code in 2016 to build my dream startup (I believed I was the next Mark Zuckerberg).

So I bought Udemy courses. My cart looked like this:

• React: 64 hours

• JavaScript: 52 hours

• Node.js: 41 hours

150 hours of content and 2 years later, I still couldn’t create an online business (payments, user login, dashboard, emails — nothing fancy).

I felt defeated. I thought coding wasn’t for me. I almost gave up…

In 2018, I met Andrey in South Korea and he told me: Sell your SaaS before you make it. I was broke, so I tried, and after sending 20 cold emails… I got my first customer!

When the money landed on PayPal, I had no other choice: Build the product ASAP.

I spent the next 7 days learning and coding only what was necessary to deliver the MVP. It was scrappy and slow because most of what I had learned previously was useless.

Once I delivered the product, the customer was happy.

They used it for 4 years, spending over $4,000 ($99/month for 48 months).

That’s how my first online business started: VirallyBot — A SaaS that made over $75,000 in revenue, let me move to Bali, and most importantly, made me fall in love with coding (which I hated just 2 years ago)

• Employment is a zero-sum game—If you get the job, someone else won’t. You increase the odds of winning (getting hired) with a degree and advanced skills.

• Entrepreneurship is a different beast—The pie is infinite, and customers don’t care about your JavaScript expertise. They want their problems to be solved.

So here’s exactly what I’d do (in 3 steps) if I were to learn to code in 2025.

3 steps to learn to code like an entrepreneur:

1/ Learn the Fundamentals

AI is making a lot of tools and jobs obsolete at warp speed.

But chances are, in 20 years you’ll still receive HTML files over HTTP to read Twitter or see your friends’ posts on Instagram. Infrastructures evolve much more slowly. The internet is likely to work in the same fashion years from now.

Learn how it works using ChatGPT. Ask about what you do on the internet:

• What happens when you click the like button on YouTube?

• What happens when you type “google.com” in Google Chrome?

What happens when I search “YouTube” in Chrome? — From CodeFast

When you discover a new term, ask the AI to go deeper.You’ll discover the foundations that power the internet. Here are some core concepts I think are crucial:

• HTML/CSS/JS webpage

• Internet browser

• IP address

• HTTP protocol

• DNS and domain name

• “Backend VS. Frontend”

• API endpoint

Don’t spend more than a few days on this. Stop when you have an overview of how the internet works.

What is a URL? — From CodeFast

I have 2 projects for you:

1. Go to your favorite site, open the developer console, and inspect the code.

2. Build your first webpage using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It could be the sales page for your business idea or just a portfolio page. Create the HTML file and send it over to a friend. You’ll be surprised how simple it is.

Important: Don’t skip this step. Coding apps without knowing how the internet works is like buying a Ferrari without knowing how to drive.

2/ Pick a tech stack, and stick to it.

When you run an online business, you need tools. For instance:

• Your server sends HTML files to your users

• Your database saves your user’s information

• Your payment processor charges your customers’ credit cards

The tech stack is a set of tools used to build and run your web application. There are millions of combinations. Here’s mine:

• Frontend:

  • React (components)

  • NextJS (pages)

  • TailwindCSS + daisyUI (styling)

• Backend:

  • NextJS (API)

  • MongoDB (database)

  • Vercel (hosting)

• Additional tools:

  • Stripe (payments)

  • Resend (emails)

  • AWS (image hosting)

• Programming language: JavaScript

The SaaS we build in CodeFa.st uses the same tech stack

I built 30+ websites with this tech stack. Millions of people visited my sites, DataFast has 10M+ database records, and HabitsGarden has 17,000+ users tracking their habits.

Here’s the red pill: Tech stacks don’t matter. You can do everything you need as an entrepreneur with any tech stack.

Pick one. Never change it.

3/ Build, ship, learn (in this order)

A. Build

You’ve got the map and the tools, now we’re entering the fun part: Coding.

Build the smallest version of your idea. Whatever product you have in mind, start building the landing page to “present” your product. Use the tech stack you just picked.

Learn just what you need to build the static page. With my tech stack, you need to know:

• 10% of NextJS

• 10% of React

• 10% of TailwindCSS

Here’s another red pill: You don’t need to know everything. For instance, React has 15 hooks, I use only 2 in all my 30+ projects. You can ditch 85% of the tech stack features because you’ll likely never use them.

Learning gives us a feeling of being productive but it’s an illusion. You want to get users/customers/testers ASAP.

Add a Call-To-Action (CTA) to your static page. For instance, a Stripe payment link (no-code) or a Google Form to collect beta testers’ emails. It will take you a few days or weeks at max.

B. Ship

You might think it’s early but it’s not: Launch your site.

• First, you’ll have to buy a domain name (I use NameCheap or Netim)

• Then, deploy your site on the internet (I use Vercel)

• And put your offer online: Send cold emails, ask friends, make a post on Reddit

How domain names work — From CodeFast

Your goal is to get 1 customer or 1 beta tester—This is key because these are the next steps:

1. You’ll get instant motivation to build the product (I’ll never forget my first customer, the feeling is insane). Coding will suddenly become fun, you will naturally want to spend more time learning/coding.

2. You won’t overthink about what to learn. Pick just what you need to deliver the product.

3. You will get real feedback. The #1 mistake in entrepreneurship is building a product people don’t need. If nobody is interested in your idea, at least you saved yourself 6 months of coding and a nasty burnout.

C. Learn

Once you get a person on board, your goal is to build the smallest version of your product.

You might have to learn about user authentication, API, and databases on the way. Once again, learn just enough to make something and show it to your customers/users. Ask AI when you’re stuck and make sure you understand “why” you do something.

Stripe subscription flow — From CodeFast

Do things that don’t scale. For instance, you don’t have to set up an entire Stripe subscription flow. You can turn on/off subscriptions manually at first, and automate them later.

D. Repeat

You will build a learning flywheel: Build, ship, learn, repeat.

Once you’re comfortable with the tech stack, start using AI to code for you. Now, I barely code anymore (and yet, I ship more code than ever). I write in English and review the AI-generated code.

⚠️ Important: Resist the temptation of using AI too early. V0, Bolt, etc… are great tools, but using them without understanding the code is like buying a Ferrari without knowing… Yep, you got it.

And remember, you don’t need a brilliant idea to start. Mine was a free movie recommendation app (Mood2Movie).

Final thoughts on the future of coding

150,000+ tech employees have been laid off in 2024.

Meanwhile, my Twitter feed is filled with entrepreneurs making a living with their apps.

More people want the freedom to work on their own projects, according to their own terms. Coding enables that. It’s not too late to learn. And it’s easier than ever because:

• You just need to know the minimum to build your idea

• You have a superintelligence at your fingertip

You got this, friend!

Hey, it’s Marc. Last week, my solopreneur journey hit an all-time high:

• 5,000 readers on this newsletter (thank you)

• 50,000 followers on 𝕏

• $100,000 of revenue in 2.5 months for ShipFast

Most of the recent growth can be attributed to removing free plans. I was skeptical at first.

“Grow first, monetize later”

Facebook, Spotify… All the startup success stories we’ve heard started in the same fashion: Get millions of users then make money.

But as solopreneurs who value freedom over unicorns. We won’t raise money and hire a team of growth hackers.

We operate with fewer resources and there’s a major downside.

Why the most successful solopreneurs don’t do free plans

140,000 visitors on my (recently sold) habit tracker made $6,000 in 1.5 years. Here’s the red pill:

3% of users upgrade to paid plans. So If you have a $5/month plan, your average user is worth $0.15.

If you need $3,000/month to sustain your lifestyle, you need 20,000 new users per month or 150,000 monthly visitors.

For a solopreneur who deals with everything from tax to bugs, this is an insane amount of work.

My friend Dan gave me the red pill in 2022. I wish I’d have taken it earlier. It’s not that bad.

Removing free plans is removing pain

As a developer, I struggled to ask for money. But here’s why I removed free plans from all my startups:

1. Better users: Paid users are skin-in-the-game. They give you the right feedback you need to grow your startups.

2. More motivation: There’s a magical thing about making money: it’s exciting and helps you focus on work.

3. Sustainable: Free users won’t pay the rent. I lived with $1,000/month for 5 years and had to say no to dinners because I couldn’t afford them.

If you want to be profitable a solopreneur, consider ditching your free plan and adding a paywall to your startups.

I recently received messages from solopreneurs making their first $1 online after removing free plans.

If you think you need one, here are 3 alternatives to become profitable faster.

A free plan is a bad idea disguised as an opportunity.

Only 3% of free users will convert to paid users.

To make $5,000 with a $20 plan, you’ll need 8,250 users (100K visitors). Let that sink in.

But free users spread the word…

If someone refuses to pay for your product, they won’t tell their friends about it.

Less than 3% of customers of my $50K/month product spread the word. And they spent a few hundred $ on the product, worked with it for hours, and made their $1 online.

Free users testing the water won’t become your marketers. They won’t give you a backlink either.

But people won’t pay if they can’t try my product…

Then the problem is probably your landing page copy. It’s either unclear or not speaking to your customers’ emotions.

Alternative 1: Free credits

If your product requires significant time investment for customers, like API-as-a-service, offer limited free credits to test it out.

The user should understand the core of your product without being able to benefit from it.

For instance, it’s free to create a profile on my startup IndiePage. Users pay to deploy their page to show it to others (the real value).

Alternative 2: Free trial with credit card and auto-subscription

If your product isn’t a painkiller and adds value over time, you can try free trials.

• Maximum 7 days

• The user must add a credit card

• Subscription starts automatically

You want users to commit. An email isn’t a commitment. A credit card is.

Alternative 3: Free tools

If a standalone feature of your startup is sharable but not worth paying for, turn it into a free tool.

Ahref gets tons of traffic from their free SEO keyword research tool. I also added +25% daily traffic to ShipFast thanks to LogoFast.

Free tools help you make some noise by launching on Reddit, Product Hunt, Twitter, etc. For best results, let users try them without signing up.

AI wrappers are trendy and easy free tools to launch. My friend Dan doubled its revenue in 2023 thanks to them. He documented everything in his new course.

Free users slow solopreneurs down.

Avoid freemium and get paid for your work to get profitable faster.

The most popular advice for entrepreneurs is to charge subscriptions. Passive income and predictable revenue, yes sir!

This is terrible advice.

Here’s why recurring payments are killing your business.

The Subscription Fatigue Era

I killed 3 startups because of recurring payments:

1. IndiePage

   • ✅ It makes $4,000/month on autopilot ($45 for lifetime access).

   • ❌ It made $0/month when I priced it at $15/year.

2. MakeLanding

   • ✅ It made $100/day when I launched ($19 per landing page generated).

   • ❌ It made $0 with a $5/month subscription.

3. HabitsGarden

   • ✅ 100% of users chose the $47 lifetime deal.

   • ❌ Nobody buys the $5/month plan.

Netflix, Spotify, wifi... I spend a few thousand dollars a year on these services. When I see $19/month, it’s not just $19. It’s $228 a year, on top of everything else.

Business owners love subscriptions. Customers hate them.

Here’s the invisible cost of charging recurring payments:

• Conversion rate drop: People are reluctant to commit to another subscription, which triggers objections and hesitation.

• Fighting churn: People lose interest soon after signing up. Instead of a steady income, you’re constantly replacing customers who cancel.

$10/month VS. $100

Selling a $10/month monthly subscription is as hard as selling a $100 one-time payment.

Let’s assume you built an excellent SaaS (10% churn = 10% of your customers cancel at the end of the month).

• You’ll earn $7,176 with subscriptions, after 365 days.

• You earn $10,000 with one-time payments, right now.

Subscription doesn’t mean recurring revenue. If you’re working solo, in 99% of cases you’re better off financially with one-time payments.

One-time payments alternative

Sometimes, your business has recurring costs, and you can’t afford one-time payments. I’m not talking about bandwidth (that’s negligible) but things like AI credits or database costs.

Then try credits-based pricing:

• Let your customers pay upfront for what they’ll use. Generate 10 AI photos for $5.

• Then, add a Good-Better-Best package. 100 AI photos for $20 ($.2/photo looks cheap now)

This removes the subscription friction (which boosts your conversion rate) and helps you avoid constantly fighting churn.

When subscriptions make sense

• B2B: If you’re selling to businesses, subscriptions make sense because the end goal of any business is to make money.

• Complex credits: When tracking credits is too complex or it’s hard to quantify what your customers use.

Subscriptions serve a specific purpose. Recurring payment = Recurring value according to my friend Dan.

Just because competitors charge recurring payments doesn’t mean you should. Remember, people are tired of subscriptions, and purchase behavior is changing. Not charging a subscription can be a competitive edge.

Oh, and entrepreneurs flex on each other with MRR charts. It’s a status game, don’t fall for it. In the end, the customer is king.

My little SaaS, DataFast, is now growing 4x faster than a year ago.

In my quest to improve MRR, I noticed something: 95% of people who signed up never became customers, ouch.

So I spent weeks maniacally polishing the onboarding flow.

DataFast's average revenue per visitor grew from $0.04 at launch to $0.30 in the last 30 days. Here are 4 lessons I’ve learned.

1. Show the promise first

The biggest win came from stripping the onboarding down to one goal: Get users to the “aha” moment as fast as possible.

For DataFast, that moment is the little orange revenue bar next to the traffic bar. It shows users exactly where their money is coming from.

So I redesigned everything around getting them to that chart. First, I put all features into 2 buckets:

1. Core Flow: Features that are required to reach the aha moment (install the tracking script, integrate with a payment provider)

2. Side Quests: They can help, but they don’t deliver the core promise upfront (invite team members, track custom goals)

Then I removed every feature that doesn’t fall into the Core Flow bucket. New users who sign up experience the following flow:

1 page = 1 step. Everything else is invisible. Complexity kills momentum. Treat attention like a limited resource.

Some of my users don’t want to integrate with payment providers yet, so I made this onboarding step skippable and added a popup to the main analytics dashboard.

2. Turn questions into documentation

On May 26th, 2025, I added a customer chat plugin and noticed users reach out whenever they’re stuck on the onboarding. This is gold.

Every time someone asked a question, I wrote a guide. Then I linked it inside the product, right where people usually get stuck.

Some of those guides now rank on Google, and AI assistants surface them too.

I polish the documentation as much as I polish the product. I deeply care about the UI/UX and make it very easy for my users to find what they need.

3. Show the finished product early

Some parts of onboarding can’t be sped up. For DataFast, it takes time to collect enough data to show revenue insights.

So I made a video.

As soon as a user finishes the onboarding, they see a 60-second clip of a real DataFast dashboard — with revenue mapped to real traffic. It shows them what’s coming and gives them a reason to come back.

4. Test onboarding like a first-time user

Every time I update the onboarding, I opened an incognito tab and signed up again. I did the whole flow from scratch — no assumptions.

If anything confused me, I rewrote it. If any step felt unnecessary, I cut it.

Eventually, I saw tweets saying “DataFast’s onboarding is smooth.” That’s when I knew it was working.

Your best growth channel might be right under your nose: The people who already signed up — but never made it past step one.

Let them see the juice, fast.

Hey, it’s Marc

Until last year, I believed a $300 MRR startup was worth nothing. I was so wrong….

Your weekend project can change your life. Let’s talk about what it’s worth and how to sell it.

Valuation

Startup valuation can be very complicated. I’m going to assume we’re alike:

• You’re a solopreneur or have a co-founder

• Building software, AI tools, or mobile apps (no info products)

• Shooting for 5/6/7 figures valuation (no unicorn)

• Low operating cost (hosting, OpenAI credits, etc.)

Here’s the over-simplified formula to calculate your project worth:

Valuation = Annualised Revenue x 3

Let’s take a few examples.

• A habits tracker with $300 MRR could be sold for $10,800 (300x12x3)

• A logo maker with AI launched 3 months ago and made $4,000 so far could be sold for $12,000 (4,000x3)

Note that Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) can be extrapolated to a year for the habit tracker but the one-time payments for the logo maker with AI can’t.

You can dive deeper into startup valuation. I don’t. It gets overwhelming and gaining 5% here or there isn’t worth the hustle. I’d rather build more apps.

Imagine you grow a weekend project to $1,000 MRR… You have a 2-year pass to quit your job, move to Bali, and build apps full-time. Congrats!

Is it time to sell?

It’s a tough question. For me, it comes down to 3 criteria:

• Can I 10x the revenue in a year?

• Do I care about the market?

• Do I need money right now?

It’s tempting to enjoy a juicy $500 recurring revenue. But keep in mind that every abandoned business goes to 0 quickly.

When you sell a startup, you get temporary financial freedom (and less stress) along with more time to focus on a new project.

The acquisition process

You made up your mind, listed your startup, and got interested buyers. What’s going to happen if someone decides to buy?

1. Paperwork

First, you’ll do boring paperwork like signing a Letter Of Intent (LOI) and an Asset Purchase Agreement (APA). The latter is a summary of what’s going to be bought, like your Intellectual Property (IP), marketing assets (like a Facebook page), etc. You might also sign a non-compete agreement. Just make sure it’s not too broad and allows you to build apps you care about.

Platforms like Acquire will do the paperwork for you. You don’t have to read 20 pages of boredness, ask ChatGPT to explain like I’m 5 to make sure you know what you’re signing. If you don’t use Acquire, ChatGPT is also really good at making the paperwork for you.

2. Payment

Second, the buyer will secure a payment through a third party like Escrow. Once the money is secured, you have to send the assets to the buyer.

3. Transfer

Lastly, transfer the domain name, database, credentials, etc (more on that below). The buyer will inspect everything and tell Escrow to move forward with payment. Congrats, you got acquired!

How to transfer the assets

Some platforms don’t allow you to transfer assets. For instance, you can’t transfer an AWS S3 bucket, a Mailgun email-sending domain, or a Google Cloud Console project.

Should you give your credentials and move on? I wouldn’t.

Chances are you use these platforms for other projects and sending your credentials isn’t an option. In that case, explain it to the buyer and ask him/her to create his own account/API keys.

Tips to sell faster

• Ditch buyers asking a million questions. If they’re highly skeptical, they won’t buy and you’re losing your time

• It all comes down to trust so build your startups in public: you don’t know it yet but potential buyers are following you and can wire the money to your bank account without asking much (that was the case when I sold Habits Garden). You also save the platforms’ listing fee (4% on Acquire, for instance)

• Don’t be afraid to follow up and tell buyers you need an answer within 3 days.

• If you’re selling on Acquire, ensure your listing is 100% ready before publishing. All buyers on the platform will be notified within 24 hours when most opportunities land.

• If you’re selling on Acquire and no one is interested after a month, lower your price a bit. Acquire tends to lift your listing up when significant edits are made.

Selling your side project can give you the mental clarity to work harder on your solopreneurship journey. Dive in!

I assume you have a product but 0 audience and $0 for marketing.

Here are 4 marketing strategies I use as solopreneur to get customers for all my startups.

1/ Launch

List your product on popular launch platforms like Product Hunt.

It’s the fastest way to get results. And it’s free.

• How to launch a startup on Reddit

• How to launch a startup on Product Hunt

• How to launch a startup on Hacker News

Spend at least 1 hour crafting your headline. It’s 80% of a successful launch.

If you’re building an AI tool and have a few bucks to spare, list on AI directories like TIAAIFT & Futurepedia.

2/ Cold outreach

Developers like myself are scared of this task. But it works.

I made my first $1 online and grew a SaaS to $4,000 MRR using cold emails.

Cold DM on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram works too — If you do it right. I get 30 cold outreachs per day. 99% are generic. 99% end up in the trash. Quantity doesn’t matter. Quality does. Spend hours carefully crafting your message:

• Benefit-oriented

• Ultra personalised

• Short (5 sentences max)

Cold outreach works best if you’re doing high-ticket clients or B2B.

If you can afford it, sponsor niche newsletters (like mine, but I don’t do sponsorships, sorry!). It’s a clever way to do cold outreach at scale without being salesy.

3/ Build an audience

It changed my life.

But unlike the other marketing channels, it takes a lot of time and it’s not for everyone.

This part could be a book, so here’s the 80/20:

1. Pick a platform where you’re comfortable sharing your work: Twitter if you like writing, Instagram if you’re good with photos, YouTube if you prefer videos.

2. Build cool stuff. People need a reason to follow you.

3. Communicate using the platform’s code. Learn from creators who are already successful.

4. Respect people’s time. Too short is better than too long.

5. Find your signature: Start by getting inspired by others, shine by being you.

4/ Code, code, code

This is for you if you’re a developer who can’t close VSCode.

• Build free tools you can launch anywhere and go viral

• Rank hundreds of pages on Google, for free, with pSEO

If you tried all the strategies above but none is working, it’s usually one of these:

1. Your product doesn’t solve a real problem, consider moving on

2. Your landing page copy isn’t converting, improve it

Your first endeavor won’t magically be a success. But if you show up for long enough, luck will find you.

Even after launching 30+ startups, there’s still one feeling I can’t get over:

Launching a new product… and nothing happens. It sucks.

But here’s the good part: You can relaunch the same product 100 times without changing it. Nobody keeps track. Here are 3 ways to relaunch until it takes off:

1. Rebrand

Same product. New name. New domain. New color theme. New hero section.

The last one is the most important. 80% of people don’t scroll past the headline. In most cases, it’s where the bottleneck is. Make sure you radically change your offer.

I rebranded my AI website builder from LandingAI (#1) to MakeLanding (#2). Sold the SaaS in 2023 for $35,000.

Design matters. People judge a book by its cover, and your landing page by its hero section. Here’s how to not screw your headline design and how to choose colors without confusing visitors.

Relaunch everywhere with a different offer, until one clicks.

2. Reposition

Same product. New angle.

Change your landing page copy to speak to a new customer segment. Refine your words until they’re ultra-specific for your ideal customer and nonsense for the others. It works best when you niche down.

Here’s the conversion rate of my startup, DataFast:

• 0.22% when I launched a year ago as an analytics tool

• 1.45% after repositioning to a revenue attribution tool (niche)

Change your landing page copy to speak to customers with a different pain point, different level of expertise, or simply a different culture. Here are 5 copywriting mistakes to avoid.

Then relaunch everywhere. Small changes in words = big changes in conversions.

3. Repurpose

Same product. Same landing page. New vertical.

Turn one feature into a free tool. Extract something useful from your product. Give it away with no signup. Use it as a funnel. I wrote a dedicated issue about free tool marketing (if you like building, you’ll love this).

People love free tools. And they share them. Launch your free tool everywhere and repeat without moderation.

Rebrand + Reposition + Repurpose = a whole new launch.

Mix everything until your product takes off. Each relaunch teaches you more about what people want. You become a better marketer, a better builder, a better founder.

Launch without moderation.

Among the 21 products I launched, 13 got the Top Product badge and one ranked #2 Product of the Month.

I also got the Maker of the Year 2023 award.

Here’s everything I learned about Product Hunt — as a solopreneur competing against VC-backed startups.

Build-in-public update

My new course generated $6,000 in presales in December.

I just finished recording all the videos and… it’s now live!

Introducing LaunchVir.al: Learn how to grow your startup with viral videos. The $70 off launch discount expires on Monday.

But first… Is Product Hunt dying?

This is a recurring question on Twitter, and unfortunately, there’s some truth to it — Product Hunt isn’t as big as it used to be.

But it remains one of the best places to launch a startup:

• 4M monthly high-quality visitors

• One of the biggest tech newsletter

• Massive media coverage

Unlike any other platform, if you work on the launch, you’ll get predictable traffic and grow your customer base.

Let’s get some upvotes.

Inbound upvotes

There are 2 ways to get upvotes.

Inbound upvotes are given by Product Hunt users who casually browse the site. Your listing should be on point:

• Your startup name should be crystal clear. I wrote about making names people remember.

• Your tagline should be short, straight to the point, and possibly trigger an emotional reaction. You can use trendy tech words like GPT-4 but don’t go too deep. Designers, product managers, and marketers must understand your tagline.

• Animate your logo as a GIF, it’s such an easy way to get attention because few are doing it

• Images in the gallery should be extremely concise, like a YouTube thumbnail. One feature per image. Zoom on the feature until you can’t before taking the screenshot.

When your listing is scheduled, write the first comment.

You’re a solopreneur, not a VC startup — this is inspiring, so write about it. Explain why you came up with the idea.

The comment section supports markdown. Add a link to your product name to maximize traffic. I also recommend plugging your Twitter to build an audience and make the next launches easier.

Finally, if you learned anything valuable when building your startup, create a Product Hunt conversation on the day of the launch. Plug your launch link at the end. People are already browsing the site, it’s an easy upvote.

Outbound upvotes

You’ll compete against VC startups, so you need help from outside Product Hunt — outbound upvotes.

1. Twitter

Twitter is the biggest source of outbound upvotes you can get because our community is big and very supportive.

Within the first 4 hours after the beginning of the launch, make a tweet to announce it, and include the link.

There are more makers than ever, so your tweet will need to stand out. I always add a launch video: Each tweet would get 300+ likes and my startup gets a Product Hunt badge — even when I had 1,000 followers. I made LaunchViral to help you replicate this.

Retweet the launch tweet a few hours later.

I also schedule 2 or 3 tweets later in the day — not related to the launch — so that hopefully one goes viral and newcomers discover my profile (don’t forget to pin your launch tweet).

2. Website badge

Add a Product Hunt-branded badge to your landing page which links back to your launch page.

Then launch your product on other sites like Indie Hackers, Reddit, and Hacker News.

If one of your posts goes well, you’ll upvotes from your landing page badge.

When should I launch?

Monday to Friday are busier. More traffic, but more competition.

If you’re chasing for the badge, launch on Sunday. If you want traffic, launch on Monday (VC startups don’t work on Monday 0:01 AM)

Is it time to launch?

Get social proof first. Ask a few customers/users and add their testimonials to your landing page.

Then, launch as soon as possible, especially if you’re getting started,

The first Product Hunt launch is unlikely to be a big hit. And that’s OK. It’s a learning process.

You can re-launch a few months later after adding new features. You can also launch free tools promoting your product to sharpen your skills.

Meanwhile, you build an audience and each launch will be easier.

Hey, it’s Marc

When I started Twitter in November 2021, I experienced the void. 0 likes for months.

After a post on Hacker News, I got my first customers, and I started to get traction on Twitter.

Here’s what I’ve learned after 5 viral posts and 25,000 visitors from Hacker News.

Show HN

There are many categories in Hackers News. Only one matters to us, makers: Show Hacker News.

It’s a dedicated space for users to share their side projects. That’s where you want to launch.

When you submit a post, add Show HN: to the title. The post will automatically appear in the /newest category.

• Posts getting traction in /newest will be moved to /new for more visibility.

• Posts getting traction in /new will be moved to / for maximum visibility.

I made…

People don’t care about a big corporation getting richer. People care about you, side hustler, shipping apps after your 9 to 5.

Make it personal. Start your post with I made or After 6 months coding…

The spirit

Developers and tech enthusiasts use Hacker News. Speak the language: I made an SEO-optimized site entirely with GPT-4

Anything else will be ignored (course, coaching, e-commerce). Unless… you make it techy. For instance, a habit tracker stands no chance—but a gamified habit tracker does.

That’s how I got 11,000 visitors for my first startup (Habit Garden) and the first customers.

Tell the outcome

Look at the list of the best Show HN posts of 2023. They all share one thing: You know what you’ll get by clicking on it.

What makes your product/service special? Why is it worth my time?

Contribute

There’s a lot of spam and people trying to promote themselves without contributing.

Add a comment to your post. Explain briefly who you are and why you built the product. Ask for feedback.

Engage with users who comment. People say Hacker News is full of negativity, but once you show you’re a real person, users are much more friendly.

Don’ts

Don’t ask for upvotes.

At least not directly. I believe there’s a real person who decides which posts get featured. They know when a user arrives from a direct link to your submission.

If you want support from your friends, tell them to find your submission by browsing Hacker News, not by sending a direct link. Keep in mind that multiple upvotes from accounts with 0 karma look suspicious.

Don’t overthink it.

Hacker News is very random. Unlike Product Hunt, there isn’t much you can do to influence the success of a post.

Don’t use emojis.

I never enjoyed marketing.

But I’d never earn $50K/month without doing some kind of marketing.

I found a better alternative by making free tools that fulfill my inner builder.

Build-in-public update

My free logo maker —LogoFast— was nominated for the Product Hunt Golden Kitty Awards 2023 🎉

If you liked it, I’d love your support!

Free tool marketing

I am a developer and I love building apps. But I also need marketing to pay the bills.

Free tool marketing is symbiosis.

It consists of launching free and viral mini-apps to promote your main startup.

Free tool marketing works because:

• It expands your audience to a wider market.

• You rank for new SEO keywords.

• It’s sharable so people spread the word on TikTok, for instance.

• You grow an audience by launching often.

• It creates a good first impression to warm up potential customers.

• Your inner builder is motivated to work.

Some guidelines for the best results:

• The app must be free, that’s how you create a viral loop.

• One feature is enough. It must be super simple.

• The name should tell exactly what the app does. That’s how people remember and search on Google.

• The experience must start on the homepage. Visitors shouldn’t sign up or click links.

• The app can be hosted on your main website, but it’s best to give it a dedicated domain.

LogoFa.st is also hosted on ShipFa.st/tools/logo-fast. The canonical URL points to the latter to boost the main site’s domain authority.

How to find ideas

Take a standalone feature of your main startup and make a free version of it.

This works well if you already have traction because you know people need that feature.

It’s also a good strategy to validate potential features. Instead of cluttering your main product, launch a standalone feature as a free tool.

You’ll get more traffic, and you can still add the feature later if the market validates it.

Another strategy consists of getting into your customer’s journey and thinking about what they’ll need before using your product.

2 key factors to get paying users

#1 — Promote your startup in a seamless way

The simplest way to convert traffic from your free tools is to advertise your startup. A simple ad placement can get up to 10% Click-Through-Rate.

You can pump these numbers up when the free tool seamlessly embeds into your customer’s journey, so the promotion feels like an extension of your free tool.

This is a free tool to show how much can be achieved in a year with tiny habits. It automatically imports the habits when the user signs up for the habit tracker. The conversion rate is 30% (traffic on the free tool to traffic on the habit tracker)

Alternatively, you can collect emails and market through a follow-up sequence.

#2 — Launch, profit, repeat.

With free tools marketing, it’s common to get media coverage and go viral on TikTok thanks to the embedded virality.

Launch everywhere. Hacker News, Reddit, Twitter, Product Hunt. The more noise you make, the higher the revenue.

I launched 7 free tools in a year. Thanks to viral launch videos, each product goes viral on 𝕏, gets a Product Hunt badge, and is reshared on other social media.

Each launch will make more noise, increase your daily traffic, and grow your startup — while keeping your inner builder satisfied.

Imagine making money while you sleep… with 0 followers and $0 in marketing.

Sounds like I’m selling you a get-rich-quick course. Hold on!

This is just a guide about how I get 300 visitors a day from Google, for free, using programmatic SEO.

What’s Programmatic SEO?

Programmatic SEO (pSEO) is a marketing strategy to rank on Google for a group of long-tail keywords related to 1 main keyword.

You use programming to build a skeleton. And you fill it with content, usually generated programmatically too. In other words, SEO for features-addict developers.

That’s how I got

• 15,600 visitors on BooksCalculator

• 9,000 visitors on GamifyList

• 4,500 visitors on WorkbookPDF

I built them once and never touched them again. All free traffic from Google.

1. Find 1 keyword

Let’s use a real example.

Our business is a directory of rage rooms — like TripAdvisor — to help people find the best place to smash away stress.

1. Get traffic on autopilot

2. Show ads and profit

3. Move to Bali

Let’s skip the last part and focus on getting traffic with pSEO.

First, you need 1 keyword with:

• Keyword Difficulty (KD) lower than 20. It requires 10 backlinks or less required to rank on Google

• Search volume superior to 500 per month in 1 country (3x this for worldwide searches)

Ahref's free keyword generator tool shows you exactly that. And guess what? The keyword “rage room” is (almost) perfect.

Second, we need numerous long-tail keywords (at least 20).

There’s a high volume of searches for “rage rooms in [city]” and a low keyword difficulty. Let’s build around these keywords.

2. Build a webpage empire

We want to create 1 webpage per long tail keyword.

There are 333 cities with over 100,000 people in the USA. Let’s assume there are 1000 rage rooms (random guess).

Here’s what our website structure looks like:

• / → main welcome page (1 webpage)

• /[city] / → all rage rooms in [city] (1 skeleton, 333 webpages)

• /rage-room/[rage room name] → a rage room page (1 skeleton, 1000 webpages)

a. Create a skeleton

A skeleton is an HTML mold. Add some data, and you have a unique webpage.

For instance, the skeleton for the /[city] route (the 333 webpages with all rage rooms in [city]) would look like this:

• H1: “The [total] best rage rooms in [city]”

• Description: “Explore [city]’s top rage rooms! Find the perfect spot to smash away stress and have a blast. From [district_1] to [district_2], we've got you covered. Let the fun begin!”

We want to build as many valuable pages as possible. Pretend you’re searching for a rage room in New York. What do you want to see?

• The list of rage rooms, sorted by Google Maps stars

• The price per hour and the type of objects you can break

• A button to book a rage room

The list goes on. Search for patterns while crafting the experience of the end-user. By building 3 HTML skeletons, we can have 1334 web pages ranking on Google.

b. Collect good data

We need rich data to build valuable web pages and rank on Google. For example:

• 333 cities

  • City name

  • City photo

  • Popular districts

• 1000 rages rooms

  • Business name

  • Starting price

  • Reviews

Most of our data could be obtained using Google Maps API.

To get richer data, outsource the data collection for a few hundred dollars and/or use ChatGPT for some parts, like the meta description.

c. Optimize your SEO

Once you have 1334 webpages built with your skeleton and the data, make them SEO-friendly

• The long tail keyword should be in the title and <h1> tags, at least

• The images should have an alt text, good size, and lazy loaded

• Links and buttons should have titles

Optimize for the long tail keywords, and add them at different strategic locations.

Don’t stuff keywords though. Only add them where it matters for users.

3. Rank on Google

We need around 10 backlinks to start ranking on Google.

a. Launch

The easiest way to start is to launch on Product Hunt which gives you a follow link, regardless of the upvotes. Nice!

Platforms like Hacker News, Twitter & Reddit work too. It’s a nofollow link, but people might reshare the website in their newsletter or blog.

b. Buy Backlinks

If you’re serious about the project, investing in backlinks is a great way to kickstart the ranking.

You can either purchase a listing in a popular directory, like TIAAFT, or buy a listing of sites to submit yours, like BACKL.IO

c. Submit to Search Console

Verify your domain name in the Google Search Console.

Then manually request for a few page indexing. It makes Google index your website faster.

Now, wait. Indexing is fast, but ranking for keywords takes 3 to 6 months.

You will get traffic from Google on autopilot, for free. Monetize it with a product or ads and you make money when you sleep.

If you’re a developer who loves coding too much (like me) check out my guide about growing a startup with free tools.

PS: Thanks to Danny who taught me everything about pSEO. My article is a wrapper around his knowledge. Thanks to Elias who kickstarted the SEO for one of my projects—check out his SEO course.

I used to hate marketing.

As a developer, it felt cringe, scammy, or just… unnecessary. So I avoided it. I built stuff quietly. And I made $0 online for two years.

Today, I’ve made over $2 million. Marketing changed everything.

But not through books or courses. I learned by doing something most people skip:

I watched ads.

AI made building easy, marketing is the hard part

Let’s be real. Launching a product in 2021 was hard because you had to code everything.

Today, you can ship with AI and a boilerplate in 24 hours.

So now the hard part is… getting people to care. And if you’re building solo, marketing is not optional. It’s survival.

My favorite hack: YouTube Ads

Most people use YouTube to procrastinate. I do too.

But I don’t use YouTube Premium. Because when I get distracted by an ad, I often watch it instead of the video I came for. I close YouTube and go tweak my landing page.

Why? Those ads are tiny masterpieces in marketing.

And YouTube only shows the top-performing ones — the ones making real money. So instead of skipping them, I study them.

I copied a French Instagram ad and made $10K+

One night, my friend Nico sent me a French Instagram ad for a Chinese restaurant.

It was simple and fun. So I rewrote the exact ad and just plugged my course CodeFast.

It took me 30 minutes. Cost $0.

That ad went on to generate over $10,000, with a 4:1 return on ad spend.

Watch more ads. Steal the structure. Make it yours.

How to templatize an ad (without overthinking it)

Most great ads follow a simple 4-step rhythm:

1. Hook: Say something unexpected in the first 2 seconds to stop the scroll

2. Problem: Call out the pain they feel right now, be specific.

3. Solution: Introduce your product as a fix, keep it simple

4. Proof: Show it works. Use testimonials, a demo, or hard numbers.

5. CTA: Give one clear next step.

It’s not just a blueprint for ads… It works for everything:

• Landing pages

• Tweets

• Cold emails

Different tools. Same structure.

Your move this week:

1. Watch 10 ads — don’t skip, note what made you stop scrolling.

2. Pick your favorite — the simplest one.

3. Break it down — hook, problem, solution, proof, CTA.

4. Remix it — plug in your product and rewrite it. Could be a tweet, a landing page, or a video script.

Don’t skip ads.

They’re trying to sell you something, and that’s exactly what you need to learn.

Until next Saturday, keep shipping.

1. A viral product does not have a free plan

Free users are leeches. They increase support, server costs, and make you build features your paying customers don’t want.

Less than 3% of free users ever convert. Remove your free plan.

2. A viral product has three colors

Every color fights for attention. The more colors you add, the less people notice what matters.

Black text. White background. One color for the Buy button.

3. A viral product uses numbers instead of adjectives

“Fast” is forgettable. “Save 4 hours every week” isn’t.

4. A viral product ends with a footer people want to share

97% of visitors won't buy, but they might share. People remember what they see last.

Finish strong.

5. A viral product treats the OG image as a YouTube thumbnail

“If they don’t click, they don’t watch”. Your OG image is often seen more than your actual website.

Design it like a YouTube thumbnail.

6. A viral product reveals one idea per screen

Don’t try to say everything at once. One screen should communicate one idea and nothing else.

One screen. One message. Just like the Instagram feed.

7. A viral product has a headline a fifth grader can understand

Complexity kills curiosity. Use simple words. Your mum should get it.

8. A viral product has a hard paywall

Signups don’t pay the bills. If nobody is willing to pull out their credit card, you don’t have validation.

Ask for payment before asking for data.

9. A viral product has copy only you could write

If a competitor could copy-paste your landing page onto their website, your copy is too generic.

Write from experience.

10. A viral product shows the product before it explains it

A demo communicates more than paragraphs of text.

Show. Don't tell.

11. A viral product does one thing

The more things you do, the less people remember. People don't remember Swiss Army knives. They remember the tool that solved their problem.

Be known for one thing.

12. A viral product uses Popcorn Pricing

Your visitors came to buy a product, not study a spreadsheet. Every pricing tier you add creates another decision and another reason to leave.

Keep it to three choices: Good. Better. Best.

13. A viral product rides a wave

Build around trends, technologies, and problems people are already discussing.

The wave does half the marketing for you.

14. A viral product steals its best copy from customers

Customers already describe your product better than you do.

Write like your customers talk.

15. A viral product has a founder people can see and hear

People buy from people. A screen recording from the founder beats a corporate promo video or a wall of features.

Show your face.

16. A viral product makes pricing impossible to miss

The pricing section is one of the first places visitors look. They use it to understand the product, not just the price.

Put “Pricing” in the header.

17. A viral product has a headline people remember the next day

Write five headlines. Show them to friends. Wait 24 hours and ask which one they remember.

Keep the one that sticks.

18. A viral product has an emotional headline

People don't remember features. They remember feelings. Your headline should make people laugh, say wow, or think what the fuck is this.

Write for humans.

19. A viral product does something people have never seen before

Nobody shares another clone. Surprise people.

20. A viral product can be sold from the hero section alone

80% of visitors won’t scroll past the hero. If they don’t understand the product and want it within a few seconds, you’ve already lost.

Fix the hero first.

21. A viral product shows empathy before it sells

Before people trust your solution, they need to believe you understand their problem.

Describe the problem better than they can.

22. A viral product has one call to action

Every extra button creates hesitation. When people have multiple paths, many choose none.

Give people one next step. Just one.

23. A viral product has a name people remember

Use words people already know. Avoid wordplay, made-up words, and names that require explanation.

24. A viral product sells a human desire, not a feature

People buy more money, more time, better health, more status, or less pain. Features are just vehicles to get there.

Sell the outcome, not the feature.

25. A viral product lets people try the product before buying it

Don’t hide your best features behind a paywall. Put them on the landing page.

Let people play before they pay.

26. A viral product does not use weak words

“most”, “many”, “rarely” weaken your message because nobody knows what they mean. Strong copy makes clear claims that people can picture, remember, and challenge.

Make statements, not estimates.

27. A viral product does not have a subscription

People already pay for enough subscriptions. Don't add another monthly charge unless you can’t ship without it.

One-time payments are 10x easier to sell.

28. A viral product has a call to action that says what happens next

"Get Started" means nothing. "Analyze My Website" tells people exactly what they're about to do.

Remove uncertainty.

29. A viral product does not launch without testimonials

A landing page without testimonials is asking strangers to trust you blindly. Get a few users, friends, or beta testers first and collect their feedback.

Collect proof before traffic.

30. A viral product can be described in under 10 words

If you can't explain your product in one sentence, your users won't either.

31. A viral product is more expensive than its competitors

Nobody talks about the second cheapest option.

Charge more.

This is what I’ve learned from 5 years of building 35 startups in public, watching hundreds of launches make $0, and a few reach millions of people.

These are not rules. They’re patterns. Use them as a compass, not a checklist.

And if you’ve found a 32nd principle, I’d love to hear it.

Let’s be honest.

Most entrepreneurs obsess over getting more traffic: SEO, social media, product launches. But if your landing page doesn’t convert, none of it matters.

Most fail not because the product is bad, but because the promise is weak or the page is a mess.

After writing over 30 landing pages and watching thousands of startup launches, I noticed a framework that works. I call it: The Clickbait Landing Page.

Step 1: Make a promise that sounds too good to be true

The first job of your landing page is to stop people from closing the tab. That’s your headline (H1). Your hero section. It needs to make people say: “Wait… what?”

This is where most founders play it too safe. They write “clean” or “honest” copy that nobody remembers.

The best headlines sound too good to be true, slightly clickbait, bold enough to spark curiosity. That’s the job of the promise: To open a loop in the reader’s brain. To make them scroll.

Here’s a simple way to brainstorm it: If TechCrunch wrote an article about your product, what would the headline be?

Step 2: Prove it’s not clickbait

If the promise does its job, the next question is always the same:

“Yeah, but… how?”

This is where your landing page earns trust. Each question your promise raises should be answered in its own section: testimonials, pricing, how it works, etc.

• How does it work? → Show steps 1, 2, 3.

• Why this product? Why now? → Agitate the pain

• Can I trust this? → Add testimonials

• Can I afford it? → Show pricing

• Do I need this now? → Show urgency

Think of your landing page as a sales conversation. Anticipate every doubt and answer it in the right order. That’s how you move someone from “This sounds too good to be true” → “Okay, I’m in.”

And cut anything that doesn’t help make the promise feel real. Extra words kill conversions.

Make it sound scammy. Then prove it isn’t.

Why this works

Let’s say your landing page converts 1% of your 1,000 monthly visitors. That’s 10 sales.

Improve that to 2%, and you’ve doubled your revenue without changing the product, the price, or the traffic.

→ To double your traffic would take ads, SEO, influencer deals (and money). → To double your conversion rate takes 3 hours and a blank doc.

This is why landing pages matter. They’re the bridge from attention to money.

Your move this week

1. Rewrite your headline, make it sound too good to be true. (I have a lot more to say about headlines, should I send a full issue on this?)

2. Back it up, answer every question your promise raises (why? what? how?).

3. Cut the fluff, remove anything that doesn’t support the promise.

4. (optional) Send me your before/after: Take a screenshot of your current hero section, then update your headline. Reply with both. I’d love to see. (I’ll feature a few in a future issue)

Don’t expect to nail it first try. Great landing pages are built through iteration and repetition (just like shipping fast).

I created 20+ startups and here's what you need to convert visitors into customers: Create a damn good hero section on your landing page.

Here are 5 mistakes I see solopreneurs make, and how to fix them.

1. Your brand (name + logo) doesn’t matter

I see websites with a massive 56px brand name and enormous logo in the center. Yes, your brand matters. But only to you.

Internet is crowded. People have no time. They aren’t looking for a new brand with a cool name. They want solutions to their problems. And your brand name isn’t one of them (unless you’re Nike or Apple).

Let’s fix it:

• Make your brand name and logo smaller. 18 pixels max. for the font, and 32 pixels max. for the logo.

• Alight them at the top left corner.

• Make your brand name super simple (i.e. Zoom, Stripe, Butter) or objective-oriented (ShipFast, MakeLogo, HeadshotPro).

2. Your headline does 80% of the job

This is the first part of your site that people will read. It’s like the first Tinder profile picture or a YouTube thumbnail. Miss it, and they’ll leave.

Let’s fix it:

• Every site needs a headline (I’ve seen some without).

• The font size should be BIG. 36px to 48px is a good font size

• The headline copy should answer this question: Why should a stranger stay on your site for more than 10 seconds? Write about the pain it's relieving, the problem it's solving, or the pleasure it's giving. This could be a dedicated issue, let me know if you want to read more.

• Align your headline in the center or on the left if you have a product demo on the right.

• Write 5 variations. Send them to 5 friends. After 24 hours, delete the message. Ask which one they remember. Pick that one.

3. People don’t trust you yet

Asking for money, or even just an email is a lot on the internet. There have been too many scams and humans are risk-averse. If there’s no social proof on your site, the conversion rate will plummet.

Let’s fix it:

• Don’t call your users, users. They are students, product managers, or solopreneurs.

• Don’t fake it at all. People are really good at spotting suspicious stuff. If it seems suspicious, people will leave in a second. Confused shoppers don’t buy.

• Get testimonials before you launch. DM the right people on Twitter, post in the right subreddit, or ask relevant friends.

4. Let me try it!

Echoing the previous point: Asking for money, or even just an email is a lot on the internet.

Is it worth my time? People want to see what’s in it for them.

This is how you show them:

• Add a demo of your product on the right side, or in the center, under the headline/supporting headline/CTA block.

• An image is good. A video is better. A demo is best.

• Remove clutter, especially if your product is complex. You just need to show the most important feature.

5. OK—Can I buy it now?

Visitors on your landing page aren’t users. They are just a little bit interested in what you have to offer. Make it very easy for them to start once they’re ready.

Let’s fix the Call-To-Action:

• Your CTA should be a big button of the same color at different locations of your site.

• Don’t add other CTAs. If you have a log-in button, use a neutral color or a link.

• Don’t bury your call-to-action button somewhere on the page. Add one in the hero section, usually under the headline/supporting headline block.

• Avoid Get Started or Sign Up. Remind the benefits to the user. Use this formula: Verb + Benefit. Learn Korean now, Get your headshots, Make my logo.

• Answer objections in a small paragraph under the CTA:

  • I bet it’s expensive → Start for free

  • Another subscription… → One-time payment

Finally, launch your website as soon as possible and find out how people react. If there isn’t much conversion, try tweaking your headline for the most impact.

Nobody cares until you win

But here’s how to actually win

A lot of people ask me how to grow an audience.

They think there’s some secret strategy. Be the reply guy. Post 50 times a day. Share memes. Study the algorithm.

That might get you attention for a few minutes. But it won’t build long-term followers. And it definitely won’t build trust.

Because here’s the truth nobody tells you: You don’t grow an audience by being visible. You grow an audience by being different.

The real reason no one’s paying attention

Every week, I see the same thing:

Someone sees a successful product or post and copies it. They build a clone. AI profile picture generator, social media scheduler, the list goes on.

They show up as the 10th, 20th, 100th version of something that already worked. And then they wonder why nobody cares.

What’s missing is novelty.

If you’re not first, you better be different. Because if it’s not new, the algorithm ignores it — and so does everyone else.

That’s why no content strategy works if you’re not doing interesting things.

In 2021, I had 0 followers. After one full year of posting, I reached just 1,000. Nobody followed me when I just posted thoughts.

It only started to grow when I started winning — even in small ways:

• Weird launch videos with Joe Rogan

• Viral posts on ProductHunt, Reddit, Hacker News

• Screenshots of the first $1 for a new startup

• Stats like “I built 5 startups in 5 months”

Each win gave me stories worth sharing.

And those stories gave people a reason to follow.

Five steps to actually grow

1. Make small bets

Each project you launch is a dice roll.

The more you roll, the more likely you are to hit something.

2. Be different

Don’t clone what worked. Twist it. Weirdify it. Make it yours.

No one cares about the 78th “startup idea generator.”

3. Ship consistently

Each thing you finish gives you a new reason to post.

Finish more. Share more.

4. Post your wins

Got 300 visitors from Reddit? Made $19 this week?

That’s content. That’s how you grow.

5. Don’t quit

I’ve launched over 30 startups. Only 2 made real money.

But luck is math — if you keep playing, you eventually win.

Your move next week:

• Build something, even small (how to find startup ideas)

• Launch it everywhere (how to get your 1st customer)

• Post what happened.

• Do it again next week.

Each small win = a story = a reason to follow you.

That’s how audience growth really works.

I root for you.

Hey, it’s Marc

I started 𝕏 in November 2021 with 0 followers. It took 8 months to get the first 1,000 followers.

Now, it takes 10 days to get 1,000 followers. The game-changer was knowing what to write, and what not. Let’s talk about it!

Why should someone follow you?

It comes down to 2 criteria:

1. Usefulness

There are only two types of content we consume on 𝕏: educational and inspirational.

• Educational tweets make us smarter, like how to use GPT-4 to improve SEO.

• Inspirational tweets motivate us to crush our goals, like an MRR growth chart from a fellow solopreneur.

Usefulness describes the level of education/inspiration of a Tweet.

90% of your content should be useful (it’s OK to post about your cat from time to time).

2. Authority

6,000 tweets per second.

We’re all competing to get attention. What’s the easiest way to know if a creator is worth our time?

Her number of followers. If people trust her, so should I.

But authority is a just byproduct of usefulness. So we start with the latter.

How to be useful?

1. You inspire others

People should read your tweets and think you’re special, unique, and different. At first, you’re inspirational with what you do:

• You build startups from a boat

• You learn how to code in 6 weeks

• You ship an app every month while working 9 to 5

Then you keep inspiring with your results:

• You get acquired

• You reach ramen profitability

• You get a DM from someone famous

There’s no way to manufacture inspiration. You have to live a remarkable life, share it, and be patient.

Avoid the future tense trap: a commitment is far less inspiring than an achievement.

2. Or you educate them

You don’t need to be an expert to teach. You only need to know something people don’t:

• A MacOS shortcut

• A new subreddit to promote an app

• A writing formula to get upvotes on Hacker News

For instance, I follow @wono_strategy because he writes about growing an audience in a genuine way. I binge, like, and retweet everything he says because it resonates with me and I haven’t heard this before.

There are two traps to avoid:

1. Everything Education: If you write about habits, audience building, and finance, your readers will be lost. Focus on your field of expertise.

2. Abstract Education: Topics like motivation, focus, or productivity are too abstract to be taught on 𝕏. Avoid them, or niche down like @heyeaslo (productivity + Notion)

My 𝕏 account started to grow once I realized which category I fell into. People were inspired by the velocity at which I built apps. So I redesigned my profile and focused on shipping more.

In 2022, my tweets would get 1 like (mine) before disappearing into the void.

In 2023, my tweets allow me to speak to 50,000 followers, make a living, and create relationships.

Here’s what I would do if I had to start again.

1. Create your unique profile

Your 𝕏 profile is what people see before clicking “Follow”. It should be crystal clear (or noise-free).

Start by finding your identity. Are you a tech solopreneur? A designer? Then build your profile around it:

• Your bio: Mention your identity explicitly. If you have a relevant track record, add it. Otherwise, keep it simple.

• Your name: It should be your name or a nickname. Not your startup or revenue goal.

• Your profile picture: It should be as close to you as possible (unless you’re in crypto).

• Your banner picture and pinned tweet: Showcase your identity or promote your work.

Ditch everything that doesn’t add value to your identity: dad of 3, part-time student, hobbies… Now, onto the most important part.

2. Engage with creators of your expertise

Most of your new followers will not come from your tweets, but from your replies to established creators’ tweets.

First, follow 100 creators with the same identity as yours. 𝕏 is good at recommending them. Like their tweets so your feed will be filled with their content.

Then reply to their posts as much as you feel comfortable. Make a witty joke, root for them, and add value. Don’t promote your work unless it’s super relevant. Behave like you would in real life to create relationships.

3. Post about your work

You want to tell us a story and build your identity. People will start to see you as the person working on XYZ and root for you. Here’s what I would post about:

• 60% of behind-the-scenes: What course are you learning from? What feature are you adding to the app?

• 30% of learnings: What do you know now, and didn’t a month ago?

• 10% of lifestyle: Sunday plan?

This could be a dedicated issue but here are some tips for crispy tweets:

• Say “I”, not “you”

• Avoid long format

• Don’t use ChatGPT

• Tell a story in each post

• 1 sentence = 1 paragraph

• The first sentence is the most important

• Add visuals to add trust (i.e. traffic analytics, code screenshots)

You don’t need analytics or tools. Engage with people, behave like you would in the real world, and show up daily. That’s how you build relationships and grow your 𝕏 following.

It’s Sunday, 8:01 am in South Korea.

I’m in an empty coffee shop with a latte, waiting for inspiration to strike.

Spoiler: it doesn’t.

So instead, I’ll just write about what I’ve actually been working on.

200K followers

I started sharing my thoughts on Twitter in November 2021.

Growing an audience was never the goal (and never will be), but I thought:

"If I can get a few people watching my work, I won't have to start from 0 when I launch new startups."

It took 8 months to get 1,000 followers. It was very slow, but I didn't care because my north star metric was the number of shipped startups.

I was having fun, and I was committed. I think early followers felt it.

My audience grew faster after shipping 10+ startups. And much faster after the financial success of ShipFast.

In July 2024, my Twitter account crossed 100K followers.

And here we are, August 2025, with 200K followers, a number I never thought possible for a little guy writing JavaScript and surfing.

I'm deeply grateful to every single one of you who has been following the journey. You make me feel less weird and make my life more meaningful.

So thank you 200,000 times ❤️

$5,000 MRR

A year ago, I launched a new SaaS, DataFast.

The growth was very slow at the beginning. I thought I had made a big mistake and wanted to give up.

But I’m stubborn, so I kept improving the product, polishing the onboarding, and building features users requested. This is what the MRR growth looks like:

• $1K MRR → 4 months

• $2K MRR → 3 months

• $3K MRR → 2 months

• $4K MRR → 1 month

• $5K MRR → soon?

5.6% body fat

You didn’t expect this in a tech newsletter, did you?

Well, it’s not about fitness, but about psychology, productivity, and work.

When I started my entrepreneurial journey in 2016, I neglected physical activity because I perceived it as time wasted. This is partially why I burned out in 2020.

Since 2021, I’ve put my health as my #1 priority. These are my non-negotiables:

• 10K daily steps

• 1 hour of workout

• 8 hours of good sleep

• 95% healthy food (my diet)

These habits create a positive reinforcement loop that impacts every aspect of my life positively:

→ Finishing them gives me an instant hit of “I did it,” which boosts my mood and focus → Repeating them compounds into real results (more startups shipped, better shape) → Results reinforce my identity, so sticking to the habits becomes effortless

In fact, I enjoy my routine so much, I repeat it 365 days a year.

New project

My Twitter feed is full of 20-year-old founders crushing it with short-form content marketing on TikTok.

I’m a boomer, but I want to give it a try too.

So I’ve created ClipMarc.com — a content reward program to clip my YouTube channel. Clippers get paid $3 per 1k views (well above market average). It’s limited to 30 people, and it has a first-come, first-served policy.

My latte is cold. And I’m late for my swimming class.

That’s it for today. See you next week!

My 𝕏 account grew by 60,000 followers in 2023.

It’s not earning money, but writing that had the biggest impact.

I’ll share what I learned by rewriting 3 of your tweets.

Build-in-public update

Since last Monday, I’ve been live streaming while building a new SaaS startup.

It’s harder to code, but I’m more productive because I can’t procrastinate 😅

I’ll keep streaming on Monday to finish the product!

Day 1 stream got 5,200 views 🤯

Tweet 1 — First impression matters

What’s missing

1. The screenshot is low quality

2. The text structure is off: I use energy before I start reading

3. The meaning comes late: I have to read 80% of the tweet (202 characters) to grasp it

Rewriting

There’s a lot of noise out there, the first impression matters:

• Use simple structures (listicles, before/after)

• Convey meaning in the first sentence

• Add space between lines

I started following Justin Welsh in 2022 and my writing has drastically improved.

Tweet 2 — Just Give Me a Reason

What’s missing

Kyzo is doing a great job of telling the story intro. The first sentence is a bit long and intense, but it’s OK — I can relate.

But then? There is no incentive to click on the thread to learn more.

Rewriting

People are busy.

Reading a thread, clicking a link, or even liking a tweet is a lot to ask.

Wave a clear outcome to convert the attention you get.

Tweet 3 — To the point

What’s missing

The first line got my attention. And the structure is great.

But then I’m facing 228 words telling 3 different stories. Each should have its own tweet.

Also, the screenshot is too hard to read. I wrote a few words last week to make catchy screenshots.

Rewriting

I would write 3 tweets instead:

1. Inspirational one-liner: “I just got my first customer”

2. The tweet above explains how to get the most out of unsatisfied users

3. Educational tweet about how to scrap Shopify stores (this is interesting, and could even be a product)

The easiest way to grow on 𝕏 is to improve your writing. Look at what’s working in the feed, find patterns, and replicate.

If done right, visuals get you heaps of attention on 𝕏.

And when you’re building in public, there’s much worth sharing.

Let’s review the best practices for attention-grabbing screenshots with the Stripe example below.

Build-in-public update

I just started sharing what I do & learn as a solopreneur on my YouTube channel.

One video a week — until I burn out 😄

1. Zoom, even too much

The width of a tweet is smaller than 500 pixels (13.2 centimeters or the length of a pen).

Compared to your computer screen, the content will be less readable. People won’t click and zoom.

Ditch everything that’s not crucial. Zoom until you can’t.

2. Center the most important information

The further away from the center, the less people will notice.

Information at the edges of the screenshots is usually ignored.

3. Explain when necessary

Screenshots that don’t convey any meaning get lost in the void. Use clear and visual explanations for people to understand your message.

• Use arrows to tell people where to look

• Underline to showcase information

• Write text to explain the meaning

Screenshot tools like CleanShotX or Xnapper have features to help you do this without design skills.

4. Favor square and portrait format

It gets more real estate on the 𝕏 feed.

If you’re working on a laptop, resize your window as a mobile before taking a screenshot. The format will be more suitable for a tweet.

Avoid backgrounds

Colorful/gradient backgrounds in screenshots are a bit overrated.

• They distract from the actual content.

• They reduce readability and make the image cramped.

• Fancy backgrounds aren't meaningful for analytics or bill screenshots.

I only add backgrounds to success screenshots with minimal content, like revenue or followers milestones.

My rule of thumb for anything I create (websites, videos, tweets): Convey meaning within 2 seconds.

I hope the best practices above will help you get more attention. Tag me when you tweet, and I’ll check if it can be improved. Have a great weekend!

I'm a developer, not a designer.

Yet, my landing pages generated nearly $1M in sales by applying design principles.

In the coming weeks, I’ll show you everything I know about design.

Rule #1: Use less colors

Colors are like beers. Things get messy after 3 or 4.

Look at these 2 hero sections. Where do you want to click?

few colors, 1 call-to-action

many colors, many call-to-action

Landing pages that convert have 1 main call-to-action (CTA), the rest is secondary.

Start with a minimal color palette — 4 colors

1. Primary + Primary Content for the main CTA, like buying your product

2. Base + Base Content for everything else

You can design the most important UI components with 4 colors.

Avoid pure black (#000000). Instead, use dark gray, night blue, zinc, etc.

Even an entire landing page.

1. Each Base must contrast well with the Base Content.

2. Each Base should have a similar hue (all base colors below are yellowish)

Now, you can create any component for a beautiful landing page that sells.

• Use Base Content for headlines

• Use Base Content Secondary for paragraphs

• Use Primary for CTAs

Real designers know how to use multiple colors to build gorgeous UI.

But if you’re a coder with unsophisticated taste for design (like me) go easy on colors and stick to the rules.

You don’t want to confuse users, you want them to buy your product.

Last week, we discussed how colors impact your conversion rate and why less is better.

Now, let’s focus on the most important part of your landing page — headlines.

Rule #2: Emphasise your headline

People don’t read text.

At least, not until you get their attention. Your headline must be remarkable if you want people to read your copy. Let’s redesign it.

Make it big

The default font size is 16px. Headlines should be bigger (of course, Marc). But how big?

The sweet spot is somewhere between 36px and 60px. It depends on the typeface you use.

Once you set a system, use the same for the entire landing page. Here’s mine:

• 60px for <h1>

• 48px for <h2>

Make it bold

The default font weight is 400. Headlines’ font weight should be big too.

The sweet spot is between 700 (bold) and 900 (black). It depends on the typeface you use.

Make it tight

Headlines should be compact to be read easily.

1. Reduce the letter spacing by -0.4px

2. Reduce the line height to 1

But make it light

Headlines must be short or your visitors will never read them. Use 70 characters max.

If your headline is larger than 1000px, break the line. Find a semantic breakpoint, not a visual one.

Make it pop

Use the most contrasted color towards your Base (yep, the Base Content one).

Avoid dropping another color. It breaks the reading flow. And conflicts with your main Call-To-Action.

If you need to highlight a word, use visual clues.

Use responsibly

There’s nothing easier to understand than a website section with:

• 1 headline

• 1 paragraph

• 1 image

• 1 button

Write one headline per section of your landing page. Not 0, not 2, just 1.

Make it responsive

All rules above work on mobile devices, except for the font size.

Make your headlines a bit smaller than on desktop — 32px to 40px is the sweet spot.

Bali. 09:23 am. Linkin Park in my ears.

Last week, we talked about designing remarkable headlines. Today, let’s redesign the supporting text below your headlines.

The supporting text below the headline is crucial. It’s how you convert attention to action.

But most people won’t read it. Here are 5 design tips:

Use a secondary color

The supporting text should be written in a color that contrasts less with the background than the headline color.

That’s why we made the Base Content Secondary color previously. It creates a visual hierarchy.

Let the content breathe

Unlike headlines, reading a paragraph in a small font size requires a visual effort.

Make it easy for your visitors by increasing the height of each line.

Align text on the left (or right)

Our eyes are used to read from the left.

At the end of a line, we know where to look: The line below, on the left.

Centered-aligned text is hard to read because the eye has to scramble around looking for the beginning of the next line.

It’s OK for short paragraphs (2-3 lines). But avoid centering longer blocks of text.

Good design = easy understanding for users.

Write blocks, not lines

Finding the beginning of the next line is hard when the line is long.

Add a maximum width to each paragraph. 500 px is a good range. It makes it easy for the eyes to find the start of the next line.

Don’t write a novel

A big block of text is scary. Most visitors won’t read it.

Structure your text block using bullet points.

I listened to the Hybrid Theory album 3 times. It’s time to have lunch with my wife. Have a good weekend!

07:23 am. Bali is windy. The surf session will wait until tomorrow.

We’ve covered headline and paragraph UI design. Let’s combine them with spacing.

Lighter than text, but more powerful than words.

Spacing in UI design refers to the use of empty space between elements to enhance readability, visual hierarchy, and overall user experience.

Place a button too close to the headline and you confuse users. Luckily, you can be a wizard with these 3 rules:

Use the 4 points grid system

Every space (margin or padding) between elements (text, button, image, section) should be divisible by 4.

It helps users understand how components relate to each other. And it’s a shortcut to designing faster

Use limited constraints

Spacing is semantic. The distance between UI elements explains their relationships.

A headline and a paragraph should be close to each other because the latter explains the former. The illustration, however, should sit farther away from the text block.

• Paragraph to headline: 16px

• Button to text block: 32px

• Image to text block: 48px

• Section to section: 256px

Define your rules before coding. 5 to 6 maximum. Use them across all the landing page for clarity.

Let it breathe

When the UI is cramped, users get confused and leave.

If in doubt, add too much empty space.

As a solopreneur, being able to create my own logo in 5 minutes is bliss. No back-and-forth with a designer means more time shipping.

I used to suck at design but after creating 30+ logos, I found a simple blueprint that works all the time. No skills required. Let’s start.

What are you selling?

Before jumping on Figma, we need to talk about why your startup exists. Your product solves a problem. The problem solved upgrades the lives of your customers. Let’s explore a few examples:

• A habit tracker helps people struggle to be consistent to get in shape

• A code boilerplate has templates to avoid writing code from scratch to help developers build faster

• A PDF AI chat app saves time by not having to read long and boring documents

Find how your startup upgrades your customers’ life. It’s hard. But once it’s done, you’re minutes away from having a beautiful logo.

Start with a shape

The shape of your logo shouldn’t be about the product at all. Instead, it should depict the life upgrade you’re offering. Let’s use the previous examples:

• Habits tracker: A seed or a strong biceps represents a life transformation

• Code boilerplate: A lighting bold or a Formula 1 represents speed.

• PDF AI chat app: A clock represents time saved.

If you don’t know which icon could represent the life upgrade, google it: Icon to depict [life upgrade]

For our example, let’s say we’re designing a logo for a habit tracker for people who want to work out consistently. A strong bicep is a perfect fit.

Have you got your shape? The fun part begins. Head over to any free SVG libraries. I always use one of these:

1. Iconbuddy

2. React Lucide

3. Heroicons

Search for your shape, download the SVG, and import it in Figma.

Let’s paint

At this point, you’re almost done. A few colors and you’re ready to ship.

If you’re a designer reading this, you’ll go bananas: ditch color palettes. Solopreneurs don’t have the time and skills for this.

Pick one primary color and stick to it. If you need help picking the color, search for symbolic color meanings—it’s how colors make people feel. Red brings passion or excitement (Tinder), yellow is hope or joy (McDonald), and green is nature or growth (Instacart).

For our habit tracker, we could have used green but we’ll go with red because we’re targeting fitness.

Just add the primary colour in the background, and fill the icon with white. You can also swap the background and filling color. And here’s our logo!

Let’s explore some alternatives. Gradients are trendy for AI products. Just select the SVG and change the stroke color to a beautiful gradient. Keep the colors of the gradient in the same zone, for instance, red with yellow or green with blue. Avoid mixing hot and cold colors.

You can also stick to black and white. That’s what Twitter did when rebranding to 𝕏 and it looks slick/noble. Play around with the SVG fill color and the background color to find out what’s best.

Finally, if you’re shipping a startup that’s mobile-first, you can easily give it an app feeling: Add a large border-radius to the edges and a shadow.

The first logo will take some time. The second one will be faster. The third one will only take 5 minutes. Keep shipping and you’ll be unstoppable.

I made peanuts and tweeted in the void for 18 months.

But I showed up daily — even when I didn’t feel good — until luck found me. Here’s how I stay motivated:

I ship small

Some solopreneurs spend years working on a startup until they get lucky. I did that and burned out.

My monkey brain wants quick results. So I never spend more than a few weeks building a new product.

No unicorn master plan. Just one feature.

I play with friends

I started Twitter at the same time as Dan. Every day, I’d check if my tweets overperformed his (it usually did, sorry buddy).

My monkey brain wants to play. So I compare myself with other solopreneurs at the same stage.

No jealousy. Just healthy competition (we all win in the end).

I quit early

Most of my 28 products made at least $1. I’m tempted to focus and grow each of them.

But I move on to the next startup idea after 10,000 visitors (unless it’s a hit, like ShipFast).

My monkey brain hates losing. But I’d rather quit too early and miss an opportunity than quit too late and burn out.

Entrepreneurship is a marathon. Those who don’t quit are rewarded in the end.

Show up daily — 1 hour is enough to build a habit. Create something small. Compete with friends. Don’t quit. And trust the process. I root for you.

Today is Sunday, 7:21 am in Bali.

I’m writing this newsletter instead of surfing (the waves are excellent). There’s a force pulling me to work. It’s more addictive than my favorite sport.

How to love working so much, that everything else becomes a distraction?

1. The tribe

We are the most social creatures on the planet.

Art, books, startups, and everything we create have a fundamental purpose: To contribute to society and evolution.

We’re hard-wired to care what people say, to be curious, and to compete.

Twitter changed my life. I found people I admire and people I could compete against. It created a powerful and healthy desire to grind.

You don’t have to build an audience (although it helps). Subreddits, Telegram chats, and Discord communities let you connect with like-minded people to leverage our social drive.

2. The system

You can trick the brain into working hard, but we’re still monkeys. We expect our efforts to bring results, quickly.

I have no clue how much I’ll earn next week, or how many followers I’ll get.

But I know exactly what I’ll achieve:

• 1 YouTube video

• 1 newsletter issue

• 1 feature (or startup)

With a short deadline and controllable goals, I always fulfill my expectations, and quitting is not an option.

3. The carrot

I lived like a cockroach with $1,000/month for 5 years. No one cared about my work.

Family, friends, and random people became curious when I started to earn $50,000 per month.

I don’t care what money buys (I didn’t even get a new surfboard). But I care for my work to be recognized.

Money gets attention. And attention drives motivation. Get paid for your work (ditch free plans). It’s a powerful drive to get things done.

Throughout my life, I’ve quit countless times — because one of these 3 drivers was missing.

It took 2 years to understand what pulls me to work. This issue summarizes it.

PS: I won’t ship startups for 3-6 months. I’m working on a project that’s important to me. I’m a bit scared, but it’s the right thing to do, I guess.

Lovable, the AI website builder, just raised $200M. The CEO, Anton, built it in a weekend. On Monday, 500K people saw the demo and 35K starred the repo on GitHub.

That’s how a lot of successful startups begin: a dead-simple MVP that goes viral overnight.

I spent 3 years building in the dark. It ended up with a severe burnout.

I wish I had removed my ego and convictions from the equation and instead treated each startup as a small bet (as I do now). Out of my 26 startups, only two took off. The day I launched them, I knew instantly they would work. Product–market fit feels different.

Focusing too early turned into emotional attachment. I fell in love with the idea, not the data. I kept going, not because it was working, but because I was afraid to let go. It’s like staying in a broken relationship. You already know how it ends.

The market doesn’t care how long you’ve worked on something. It rewards momentum, not effort. In a full year, you could build one perfect app. Or twenty imperfect ones. That’s twenty dice rolls. That’s twenty times more chance to hit.

To get lucky faster, let the market tell you when it’s time to focus.

Until then, roll the dice again.

PS. You can launch your idea 100 times. I’ll show you how next week. Until then, here’s how to get your first customers.

A couple of days ago, I saw a tweet from Adam.

He’s making about ~$1K/month from his projects, but feels empty, unworthy, and unsure if it’s even worth continuing.

It hit me hard. Because that was me for 5+ years. And it’s the story of most entrepreneurs.

Here’s what I’ve realized: Everyone has an idea. But 90% never act on it. Out of the few who do, 90% quit before anything happens.

If you’ve built a little internet business, if you own a domain and it’s live, if it’s making any money, even $100/month, you’re already in the top 0.1%.

And if you’re reading this newsletter on a Saturday morning instead of scrolling cheap dopamine content, you’re way ahead of the crowd.

The trap

Social media only shows the top 0.1% of the top 0.1%.

The 19-year-old founder making $300K/month. The multi-millionaire who bought Bitcoin in 2009. The fitness guy whose abs look like they were carved in 3D.

You almost never see the ones grinding without results, even though they make up the vast majority.

“I’m useless.”

For my first 4 years, I didn’t even know what “startup Twitter” was.

I was surrounded by friends and family who didn’t understand. I felt lonely every day.

It took 2 years to make my first $1 online. 2 years of complete void. No support from anyone, no traction, nothing but the same feeling crippling every day. I’m useless.

Even after my first startup made enough money to pay the bills, I felt behind. I was the one working the hardest, yet my friends with jobs made more money and had more free time.

By the way, here’s something I didn’t know back then: A startup making $1K/month is a $36K asset if you sell it (MRR × 36 months is a common rule of thumb). That’s a year’s salary for many people.

But I didn’t see it that way. I saw failure.

At one point, I fell into depression. I quit entrepreneurship and got a job. 6 months later, I was fired, so I came back to building.

And for two more years… Nothing.

By year five, I was making $500/month, living off my wife’s support, feeling like a complete failure.

Then, out of nowhere, one of my projects took off. And everything flipped.

Looking back

I wouldn’t erase a single failure.

The void is what makes the flip moment feel so good. The pain gave me a story worth telling.

Without it, I’d just be “some guy who got lucky,” and you wouldn’t read my newsletter.

If you’re building, you’re already amazing. If you’re making a little money, it’s just a matter of time. The struggles, the emptiness, the crippling self-doubt, they’re the foundation. They’re part of the process.

Don’t give up. It’s all worth it in the end.

I root for you.

I’ve been a loser most of my life.

As a kid, I fought with my mom because I hated school, and school hated me back. As a teenager, I didn't grow up. I was 155cm and super skinny when all the other guys were 180cm. I became an easy target, and I had to stop playing sports.

As a uni student, I lost the remaining bits of self-confidence. I had no role model, no idea what to do. So I became the guy who drinks the most and plays World of Warcraft the hardest.

As an entrepreneur, the first four years were painful. I spent an entire year thinking I was the next Mark Zuckerberg, I lost my friends who followed the traditional path, and I felt completely misunderstood by everyone.

Nothing ever seemed to work.

And in 2021, I hit what felt like the natural conclusion of that losing streak — broke, 27, living with my wife in my parents’ house in Paris, still trying to prove I wasn’t a failure.

I thought I’d build something clever: The Golden Plumber. A $2 PDF to help men stop dribbling after peeing. Yes, really.

I even printed stickers with QR codes and stuck them in public toilets in Paris, hoping strangers would buy it. Nobody did. Another failure.

Every day felt like a parody of entrepreneurship. I was broke, embarrassed, living in my childhood room, and my parents still didn’t understand what I did for a living. One morning, I punched four holes in the wall. Then I cried in my wife’s arms.

That was rock bottom. But looking back, that’s where everything started to flip.

Failure strips away your ego. Once there’s nothing left to lose, all that’s left is the work.

I read books. I worked out. I learned Korean. I started coding again. And slowly, I realized something simple:

Success isn’t luck. It’s a law of physics. If you keep showing up, something will move.

In the past 4 years, I lived the same day 1,460 times. Workout. Code. Repeat. I built 30 startups. Most failed. But each one made me a little sharper. A little faster. A little closer.

Until one day, one of them hit. And that was enough to change everything.

If you’re in your loser era right now, the universe is testing how much you actually want it. Keep showing up. Keep losing forward. If you put in enough reps, something will move.

And one day, you’ll realize you were never really losing.

I was lucky in 2023 — my income jumped from $1,500 in January, to $65,000 in November.

But the real outcome was the knowledge I acquired.

Here are 7 lessons I wish I knew when I started the solopreneur journey.

1. Don’t marry your idea

Out of the 20+ startups I launched, only 1 made good money and grew.

It’s the same pattern for most solopreneurs who made life-changing money.

When it’s time to focus on your startup, you’ll know.

2. Ditch free plans

Only 3% of users upgrade to paid plans.

You need 10,000 users to make $3,000 ($10/mo subscription). That’s an insane amount of work for a solopreneur.

“Grow first, monetize later” is for VC-backed startups.

3. Subscriptions headache is real

I killed a startup by swapping one-time payments for recurring ones.

Monthly passive income is good for business owners only. Users are much more reluctant to subscriptions.

Start with one-time payments. Add subscriptions if there’s a demand.

4. Swap vitamins for painkillers

100,000 visitors on my nice-to-have product website made $6,000. 100,000 visitors on my must-have product website made $100,000.

Unless you have an audience, avoid note-taking apps or habit trackers. People buy solutions to painful problems.

5. Emotions sell

Few care about a NextJS boilerplate. But many care about a shortcut to ship startups faster and reach financial independence.

Rephrase your copy to trigger an emotional reaction.

6. First impressions matter

In our digital world, it’s the headline of your website, the thumbnail of your YouTube video, or the first sentence of your tweet.

That one sentence has more impact on your conversion rate than anything else.

7. Food + Sleep + Workout = Psychiatrist

As a solopreneur, you’re wearing 10 hats (developer + copywriter + accountant…). Burnout is around the corner.

• Eat healthy, avoid carbs, quit sugar and alcohol

• Exercise daily, even if it’s an easy 15-minute workout

• Make sleep your #1 priority. Sleep at the same time every day in a dark room at 18°. Don’t drink coffee 10 hours before bed, don’t drink water 3 hours before bed, dim lights 1 hour before bed.

Although I earn $55,000/month as a solopreneur, I’ll never forget how much I struggled to make $1.

It took 2 years of chaos and mistakes. Here’s what I would tell myself if I had to start again.

Background

I graduated from Computer Science in 2016. My friends applied for a job in Paris but it didn’t feel right to me. My exchange semester in Hong Kong in 2015 transformed me. I didn’t know what I wanted—I just didn’t want that.

On a regular hangover Sunday morning (2 pm) I watched The Social Network movie and had an epiphany: I will be the next Mark Zuckerberg.

My secret unicorn idea? Tinder for sports lovers. I spent an entire year:

• Learning to code because I was partying instead of studying at the university

• Asking people to sign an NDA to listen to my idea

• Designing a logo and business cards

To pay the bills, I was a waiter in a restaurant in Paris. During my shift, a customer mentioned a new school to learn entrepreneurship.

I was lonely so I registered. The teacher asked how my startup would make money. I froze. How come I didn’t think about it after a year of work?

My app was a disaster. Users couldn’t even sign up. And I was the only user. My relationship with my girlfriend wasn’t working either.

On March 10th, 2017, I quit everything. The next week, my parents drove me to the airport. I cried in the car.

My friend, Sacha, was waiting for me in Seoul, South Korea. We raised $100,000 from angel investors and built an AI startup with 2 employees.

We were trying to reverse engineer flight ticket pricing to predict their future prices. 9 months later, we had a bad product, no income, and I was wearing a shirt every day. So I quit, again.

In December 2017, I was broke, in a foreign country, and had zero self-confidence. I started to smoke again (I smoked for 7 years in university and stopped when I arrived in Korea).

After reflection, a pattern started to emerge: Big goals, big failures.

I saw an ad on Facebook selling gloves for couples (1 big mitten to hold hands together). I decided to copy and sell them on Facebook for Koreans.

As a product-obsessed engineer, I didn’t think about dropshipping. I had to build the product. A lovely Korean grandma knitted 50 Glovers: Gloves for Lovers (I was quite proud of the name).

My new Korean girlfriend helped with the translation. I burned all of my savings on Facebook Ads (a few hundred dollars) with this video. I made 0 sales.

In January 2018, my 8-square-meter bedroom was filled with Glovers, but my bank account was empty. At $20 per piece, I had to sell them to pay the rent. My girlfriend and I went down the street every night to sell them.

To brave the minus 15 degrees Korean winter, we had to drink 1 liter of beer before standing in the street for 2 hours. We would sell 2 gloves per day. I would wake up sick and coughing.

What the fuck I am doing with my life?

She said “Yes”

In April 2018, I was more broke than ever, out of shape and unhealthy. I needed a big change.

I applied for a second role acting to pay the bills. I would get a call once or twice a week and get paid $200 per gig. Then I started to work out every 2 days for clarity of mind—20 minutes of intense jumping rope. I got shredded in 1 month.

Finally, I set a simple goal: Make $1 online with code.

To avoid another failure, I focused on problems, not products. Every business wants to grow. So I decided to build a gamified marketing tool for escape rooms.

At a startup event, I met Andrey, a talented marketer who became my friend. He said: Why don’t you sell it before you make it?

I’m an engineer, I love building. Marketing? Not at all. But I failed for 2 years so I decided to listen. He taught me the foundation of marketing. After a few cold emails, Daniela from Time's Up Escape Rooms in Australia wanted to learn more about the product over a quick call.

On Friday 13th, 2018, I was in Osaka, Japan for a 3-day visa run. I just had a bad night of sleep in the cheapest guest house I could afford. 9 am. I was in the common area, it was hot, and the wifi was bad. The call started.

There are no words to describe how cringe I was. So here’s the intro of the sales pitch. After 42 minutes, she said “yes”. By the of the day, she subscribed to the $99 monthly plan. YES!

I went back to Korea and built the product. That call started a SaaS business called VirallyBot. It made $70,000 and it’s still paying the bills ($600/month in 2023).

What I would tell myself if I had to restart again

1. Forget big startups, try making $1 online first. Movies and media make unicorn founders famous. But making a living with your craft is the deepest source of happiness.

2. Listen to relevant persons. I didn’t question my friend Andrey about marketing. I applied everything he taught me.

3. Hard times build strong relationships. My Korean girlfriend with the gloves project is now my wife and my best friend.

4. Success happens much more quickly than expected. Make a radical U-turn, throw away the past, and restart.

5. Eat healthy, work out, and sleep well. It impacts all your decisions.

6. Don’t fall in love with your product. Ship fast and launch fast. One feature with a buy button is enough. Your customers will shape the rest of your product.

Wherever you are right now, I root for you.

Hey, it’s Marc.

The last 3 days were wild.

• I’m writing this issue locked in my 8-square-meter bedroom—the strongest typhoon in the last 80 years is hitting Hong Kong

• I launched ShipFast and earned more money in 48 hours than I did in 2022

Here are 4 lessons that’ll change my journey forever.

Backstory

I made 2 decisions in April 2023:

1. Always have a buy button on every project

2. Build painkillers, not vitamins

At that time, AI FOMO was at its peak. I took the plunge and built MakeLanding and WorkbookPDF. Both made money. MakeLanding generated $12,000 in a few months. But something was off… Low conversion, angry customers, high refund rate.

In August, I took 2 weeks off to Korea, remarried my wife, and came back with a new goal: Make something people want.

But I don’t know what people want — me too.

So I built something I wanted—a code boilerplate to ship faster—and hoped people would need it too. I built it in a week, with no expectations, and launched it.

Here’s what I learned:

1. Don’t build AI products

What can AI improve or fix? A million ideas come to mind, but none fix the problems I have.

If there’s an easy way to find startups, VCs and people who experience the problem are already on it.

FOMO is real. Twitter success stories keep reminding us. Don’t fall into the trap. If you want to build with AI, build something else and see how AI could improve your workflow.

2. Focus is overrated

• 365 days on my first startup: $0

• 365 days on a habit tracker: $5,000

• 7 days on ShipFast: $6,000

Startups and relationships are the same. You wouldn’t marry someone you met last week. Don’t try to make a startup work if there is no initial traction. Create a bunch of startups, see what sticks, and then focus.

I was dating for 6 years. Now my focus is IndiePage and ShipFast.

But there is a guy on Twitter who focused on a startup and it took off after 2 years… This guy knows what he’s doing. He’s probably been working in the industry for years and knows something people don’t. Unless you’re that guy, don’t marry startups without product-market fit.

3. Design is underrated

Landing page is hot — One of the most common feedbacks I heard for ShipFast.

Your design is the YouTube thumbnail. Your copy is the video title. Visitors are caught by the design and stay for the copy.

I’m not saying you should spend weeks adding SVG doodles. A good design is just 3 things:

1. Padding: The right space between copy, buttons, and sections. RefactoringUI by TailwindCSS is a masterpiece.

2. Layout: Big headlines, smaller paragraphs.

3. Typeface: I found Bricolage Grotesque for ShipFast and I love it so much, that my wife is jealous.

4. Product Market Fit, or no

• A customer of ShipFast apologized because there was a bug and he couldn’t access what he paid for

• Another one asked for my bank details because he didn’t have a credit card—he wired the money

For 7 years, I tried to convince users my apps were worth trying—pushy. But with ShipFast, users were pulled into the product.

Build something that makes users want to pull their credit cards like a no-brainer. Don’t waste time on the rest.

We live 4,680 weeks, you have 4,680 shots.

When I launched ShipFast, I told my wife we’d be lucky to make $100.

5 months later, the product made a quarter million dollars at 90% profit.

Here’s why (I think) my code boilerplate worked.

Background

In November 2021, I joined the community of programmers building small startups in public on Twitter.

In August 2023, I shipped almost 20 side-projects and grew an audience of 35,000 people. 10 of my products made money. I sold 3 of them for $50,000. The others were making me $4,000/month. Reasonable salary when you live in Bali.

To ship faster, I spent a week building a code boilerplate with landing page components, Stripe payments, user login, etc. I launched on Product Hunt and made $6,000 in 48 hours.

Part of the success is luck, but keep in mind that I was in the game for 2 years — with an audience and proof of work.

Elements of success

The ShipFast growth launched hundreds of boilerplates. (It became a joke on Twitter so I made a video). But none came close to ShipFast’s revenue. Here’s my take:

1. First move advantage

Being first in entrepreneurship is a competitive advantage. First, people like new stuff. Second, every other product will be compared to yours — it’s free marketing.

In August 2023, there was no go-to boilerplate for NextJS — the most popular React framework.

People talked about ShipFast on Twitter, blogs, and newsletters because it was new. The website was getting 500 to 1,500 daily visitors without spending a dime on ads.

The next trendy boilerplate will be for another platform than the web. visionOS maybe?

2. Emotional outcome

I can’t stress enough how important emotions are in marketing, especially if you’re a product-obsessed developer like me.

People don’t care about features. People want money, status, and respect.

3. Real social proof

Thanks to the emotional outcome, customers of ShipFast are pumped to get started. Their motivation drives results: they actually launch startups and make money.

The testimonials on the site reflect that perfectly — Videos of coders in their bedrooms who just experienced a life transformation.

It’s reinforced by my story. In 1.5 years, I went from 0 to $4,000/month with an audience by shipping apps fast.

4. Unfair advantage

You get attention when you make $55,000/month as a solo founder.

Newsletters, retweets from bigger accounts, YouTubers. People spread the word. It brings traffic to my site, which increases revenue and makes more people spread the word.

In hindsight, it’s easy to understand why it worked. But 5 months ago, I had no clue what I was doing.

Your best bet to become profitable is to show up daily and produce something: a tweet, an app, a video. You’ll be surprised by what can happen in a few months.

Everything changed after making my first $1 online in the summer of 2018.

I started to believe in a world where I could work solo, pay the bills, get happy customers, and have no constraints whatsoever. Total freedom.

But I didn’t know the price to pay... Here’s my solopreneur rollercoaster.

Growing a SaaS

After making my first $1 online in 2018, my Korean girlfriend and I had no reason to stay in Seoul anymore. We’d rather be somewhere hot and cheap. So we moved to Bali in September.

I was working on VirallyBot: a gamified marketing tool for escape room businesses, priced at $199/month. A typical day would be:

• Marketing in the morning: Collecting leads and sending cold emails. I tried cold calls but it was not working for me.

• Product in the afternoon: Adding games and features while learning how to code.

Life was good. I was not living in a bugs-infested room anymore, I learned how to surf and the SaaS was making $1,500/month.

But churn was high. To earn money with my software, escape rooms had to use it. Most didn’t.

I felt like on a treadmill: New customer, new churn. So I offered a yearly plan for $1,999 and got some sales. My revenue hit $3,000 in early 2020. But I was just running faster on the treadmill.

So I built a new product called GameWidget: An embedded mini-game on websites to entertain visitors and offer discount coupons.

Same market (escape rooms) and same strategy (gamification marketing) but different fulfillment. Instead of using the software, my customers just had to add a script to their sites and let the magic happen.

I beta-tested the product for 2 months and the results were impressive: +0.6% conversion rate (3% is considered great in the industry). I was excited.

Failing life

When COVID hit in March 2020, all escape rooms closed. My revenue went to $0 in a week.

I was fortunate to be in Bali because I met Hugues who became my best friend. We spent 6 months surfing empty waves and talking about life.

Just like my girlfriend, he never judged me—I could show him every weird side of my personality. Thanks to them, I stopped caring about what others think of me.

In the summer of 2020, my girlfriend and I decided to get married. We flew back to France. My Korean parents too. The wedding was wonderful. Unfortunately, we couldn’t go back to Bali due to COVID restrictions. We lived in Paris with my parents and sisters for 1 year.

I worked on my previous SaaS and got it back to $1,000 MRR, but something was off. I didn’t like it anymore, so I quit.

After a few months of nothingness, I had to start something new. Anything. So I launched The Golden Plumber in January 2021. Males often dribble after going to the toilet, due to the nature of our engine—as my sister explained (she’s a doctor).

I created an info-product (2-page PDF) and ran ads on adult websites. I made $8 in 2 months. I quit, again.

My parents gave me $100,000 as an early legacy. I invested everything in Tesla in March 2021, when the stock hit an all-time high. I refused to use the money for at least 10 years. I still believe it’s not mine.

2 weeks later, my portfolio went down by -$36,000.

I was 27 years old, broke, and living with my parents. A recurring thought started to echo:

I am a failure…

On Wednesday 9th, June 2021, while drinking a morning coffee in my bedroom, I started to cry. Sadness turned to anger and dug 4 holes in the wall.

Overcoming depression

It’s not common to see a 27-year-old boy crying in his mum’s arms on the sofa. But life isn’t like movies. I needed a change, a big one:

Quit entrepreneurship and get a job.

Within 2 weeks of applying as a software engineer, I got an interview. At the end, the HR asked: Do you want to say anything to Tai Lopez? It wasn’t written on the application, but it was a $9,000/month job offer to work for Tai Lopez. I accepted.

I started reading. I thought I hated books because it was boring in high school. It turned out to be my favorite activity. My first book was “Why We Sleep” by Matthew Walker. It changed my life. I realized I was tired without knowing it. Fixing my sleep unlocked more motivation, happiness, and less anxiety.

While I worked for Tai, I also learned Korean. 1 hour a day, 6 days a week. 3 months later, I could have a conversation with my wife.

My mood improved every day. I was growing, and I finally had a sense of purpose.

In October, we went back home to Bali. I got fired in November 2021.

But it didn’t matter. I was so inspired by Pieter Levels building startups in public that I went back to entrepreneurship. I had a new dream.

It took 2 years to turn that dream into a real world of freedom with no constraints, happy customers, and $65,000/month.

What I would tell myself if I had to restart again

• Money can’t buy product-market fit: When I worked for Tai Lopez, we launched 3 apps and spent thousands of dollars on marketing. None made money.

• Don’t link your revenue to your customer success: My friend Dan was right—you can’t control how people use your product. They often get busy.

• Small actions today will compound tomorrow: When I quit working on GameWidget, it was making $80 MRR. I sold it for $4,300 in 2023.

• Make sleep your #1 priority.

• Get married: It creates a strong sense of commitment. We’re in the same boat

• Call your friends: My best friend Hugues passed away in 2022. I wish we spent more time together.

• Be whoever the fuck you want: Don’t let anyone make you feel weird or wrong.

After being fired by Tai Lopez in November 2021, I discovered the build-in-public community on Twitter.

It changed my life. In 2 years:

• I launched 17 products

• I grew this newsletter to 7,000 readers

• I grew a Twitter account to 55K followers

• I reached $65,000/month at 91% margin and 0 employee

• And made new inspiring friends

This is my solopreneur story.

4 years of failure

My entrepreneurship journey started in 2016 when I believed I was Mark Zuckerberg.

It took 2 years to make my first $1 online. Later, I grew a SaaS to $3,000 MRR, but I started to see my journey as a failure after 4 years of grind. I got depressed in 2021 and quit entrepreneurship.

I worked for Tai Lopez as a product manager to overcome my depression. It worked because I finally had a sense of purpose.

When I got fired in November 2021, it didn’t matter. I had a dream. I discovered my role models on Twitter: Pieter Levels, Danny Postma, and other cool kids working solo on their projects from anywhere in the world, making much more money than needed to live comfortably.

I wanted freedom. I was living in Bali with my Korean wife, $20,000 in the bank, no audience, and bad coding skills.

Just for fun

When there isn’t much happening in your life, it’s hard to find a startup idea. I was so frustrated about my previous years of go-big-or-go-home mindset, that I needed a simple project everyone could understand.

In December 2021, Mood2Movie was born: A movie recommendation app based on your mood. It sounds fancy but it’s just a simple if [mood] then [movie_genre].

This project kickstarted my build-in-public journey. The app is free so I could launch it everywhere on Reddit. One post went viral and got 10K visitors. So I had somewhat valuable content to share on Twitter.

In 6 months, I launched 7 projects without thinking about business, just for fun. I learned much about coding, SEO, writing, launching, and marketing. My Twitter account reached 1,000 followers in July 2022.

Meantime, I ate healthy food, prioritized sleep, and worked out every day (surfing or skating). I also raised a chick.

Even though I was making just a few hundred $ a month, it was too much fun to give up.

I fell in love

In August 2022, my gamified habit tracker, Habits Garden, was making ~$200/month so I went all-in. But I’m a product-obsessed developer. I don’t like marketing.

Side-project marketing saved me: Ship free tools to promote a paid one.

For instance, I launched VisualizeHabit—a free tool to visualize the compound effect of tiny habits. I plugged Habits Garden and it brought 30,000 visitors in 2 months.

For a side project to work, I had to be good at launching. I started to make fun launch videos. People enjoyed and shared them, creating a viral loop. Each side-project grew my Twitter following and brought decent traffic.

Thanks to side-project marketing and launch videos, Habits Garden reached 10,000 users in January 2023.

Users requested a mobile app. I had no idea how to code them, but I tried. After 14 days with the help of my friend Martin, Habits Garden was live on the App Store and the Play Store.

It was making $700/month. Not bad, but not worth 6 months of my life. I fell in love with the wrong product.

Back on the grind

Early 2023, I sold a micro-startup I built in 2021. It was making $80/month and was acquired for $4,300. I had stories to tell. My Twitter account grew by ~50 followers a day.

But I was still not making enough to cover my cheap lifestyle.

So I did the 2021 strategy again: Ship startups like a madman. But this time, I applied some rules:

• No free plan

• Only painkiller product

• Move on if no product market fit

I built 8 startups in 8 months. 6 made money. 2 paid the bills. Ship fast, launch viral, repeat. In July 2023 I was making ~$3,000/month.

60% of my revenue was generated by MakeLanding, an AI landing page generator. I tried to grow it but failed. I didn’t use the product and I didn’t care about the market. I just built the startup out of AI FOMO.

In August 2023, my whole family flew to South Korea where my wife and I re-married. It was wonderful.

Product market fit

Holidays are magic. When I left for Korea, my head was full of questions. When I came back, it was obvious: I must build a business for customers I care about. So I quit all my faceless AI projects and focused on products I’d use.

I sold my AI landing page generator for $35,000 and my habit tracker for $10,000. It gave me time and clarity. I wrote about the process and the outcome.

On September 1st, I launched ShipFast, a NextJS boilerplate to ship startups fast. I packed 2 years of shipping knowledge in a GitHub repo.

I told my wife we’d be lucky if we made $100 with it. By the end of the month, ShipFast made $40,000. I was blown away. It’s hard to describe product market fit, but when it hits, it’s clear.

I kept adding features while tweeting about it. I received tons of testimonials from customers who made their first $1 online thanks to the boilerplate. I was happy.

I also launched ByeDispute: A no-code tool to prevent Stripe chargebacks.

In November, my revenue hit $65,400/month at a 91% margin and 0 employees. As of today, December 17th, ShipFast alone made $168,100 in total revenue.

What money buys

I don’t stress about paying the bills anymore.

I can also speak to a bigger audience because everyone understands money. It’s hard to explain to a doctor what a NextJS boilerplate is. But a $60,000/month salary buys you attention.

Besides that, my life hasn’t changed.

I surf, write, and code every day.

Living for 6 years with $1,000/month taught me a lesson: My happiness comes from creating, not consuming.

What I’d tell myself if I started again:

• Find your models: To grind in the void for months, you need a dream.

• Don’t fall in love with your code: Most startups fail. Keep shipping until one startup hits product market fit. Your customers will tell you which features to build.

• Focus on painkillers, not vitamins

• Add a buy button to all your startups, and ditch free plans

• Start, then think: Even if it’s a stupid idea, build it. You will get more and better ideas, sharpen your skills, and stay motivated.

30,000 feet in the air. Brad Strut in my ears.

Hey, it’s Marc.

I’ve completed about 50% of that big bet. The weekly newsletter will be back soon. Until then, I’ll send a short solopreneur update sometime.

I’m traveling back to my homeland. 20 hours in airplanes should be enough for a few words.

In June, Noah Kagan WhatsApp’ed me. We did a podcast.

I also reached 100,000 Twitter followers and did an interview with Starter Story.

UPDATE: The video is live!

Seriously it’s crazy. Nobody cared about my work for 5 years (apart from my wife). Sometimes, I think I don’t deserve all this exposure.

With the recent growth came a few haters.

I’m negativy-averse. I don’t know how to react, so I am spending less time on Twitter right now. My friend Dan says I’m a Labrador.

Instead, I surf more often and broke 2 boards. I also added 2km of barefoot running to my daily routine.

I love working out. It quiets the mind.

Business videos aren’t fun — I want to change that. I’ll add a lifestyle dimension to all my new videos. This one was my first experiment.

I hope you’re shipping. Take care.

Being rich was never the goal.

Freedom and fulfillment are. But $1M as a solopreneur? Hell yeah!

85% is profit. 19% went to taxes. It took 7 years, 2 burnouts, and 1 depression.

I could talk about what I learned, but my blog is for that. And Starter Story made a video about the journey.

Instead, I want to write about what it means for us — Solopreneurs — who organize our lives around work, not the other way around.

The solopreneur niche

When I started in 2017, there were three alternatives to employment:

• Wear suits and please VC for a 0.00001% chance to build a unicorn

• Open a restaurant with your parent’s legacy

• Dropshipping

Unless you were a Hacker News reader, you would have missed the startup counterculture movement.

Guys like Patrick McKenzie and Pieter Levels building tiny startups in public while traveling the world.

It’s a dead-end

I live where I want. I don’t have to ask for permission to take time off. And I can prioritize other parts of my life like sleeping, surfing, and spending time with my wife.

Solopreneurship is addictive. Once you crack the money code, there’s no turning back.

It’s not surprising this new startup wave is spreading fast. COVID was a catalyst.

“The bubble is about to burst”

Some are skeptics and think we’ve reached the peak. I believe the opposite.

OK, let’s be honest: You won’t get a TechCrunch article for building startups from Bali. That period is over.

But solopreneurship is just getting started.

1. AI makes everything easier: It writes my code, improves my broken English, and brainstorms video ideas for my YouTube channel.

2. Niche businesses are exploding: AI apps, one-person design agencies, newsletters… Just look at the IndiePage Leaderboard.

3. The wave is reaching the masses: Solopreneurs’ stories are popping up everywhere on YouTube now. The move is about to go mainstream.

Out of 7 years of entrepreneurship, I was crippled with self-doubt for 6 years.

But there is a bright future ahead for those who don’t quit. Ignore the skeptics, we are just getting started.

I root for you — Marc

P.S. When in doubt, refer to Naval “Learn to sell, learn to build, if you can do both, you will be unstoppable”.

P.S.S. I built this Twitter Revenue Bot last week and it has 502 followers.

A year ago, I started DataFast.

The first months were rough. Churn was 33%. It took me 124 days to reach the first $1K MRR.

Today it’s a different story:

• $5,338 MRR growing 22% month-over-month

• 405 paying customers

• Churn at 8.99%

1. Pick one problem, and ignore the rest

Analytics is a crowded space. Big, VC-funded startups dominate it. And most people just use free tools like Google Analytics.

Instead of competing with everyone, I narrowed down.

I built DataFast only for entrepreneurs (because that’s who I care about).

And the #1 problem entrepreneurs face with analytics? Revenue attribution. Most tools are either painful to set up or only show vanity metrics like pageviews — which mean nothing without context.

That simple focus made it easier to stand out, because I was speaking the language of entrepreneurs and solving their problems.

By the way, positioning feels natural when you’re scratching your own itch — which is exactly why I started DataFast.

2. Using info products is a cheat code

Selling SaaS is hard. Most people aren’t ready to commit to a monthly charge right away.

My first batch of DataFast customers came from my course CodeFast and my boilerplate ShipFast — where I upsold my analytics tool.

One-time products are low-commitment, so they convert better. And once someone has already paid you and liked what they got, it’s much easier to upsell them to SaaS. Trust is already built.

3. Build viral features

I designed features to be shareable.

Because people only share what feels valuable and beautiful to them.

It’s a heuristic that forces me to aim for the best. If it isn’t good enough to screenshot, it isn’t good enough.

That’s how I built things like the real-time globe with avatars, customer journeys, and funnels.

4. Let customers decide the roadmap

In May 2025, I added a customer chat box on every page

Instantly, users started sharing what they wanted. Patterns emerged. I turned those into a feedback board where people could vote.

The roadmap became obvious. Instead of building features based on my assumptions, I built what users actually cared about.

5. Cut onboarding down to the AHA moment

Because I let customers decide the roadmap, I ended up building a feature I never thought I needed: Funnels

That’s how I discovered the biggest bottleneck in my SaaS: Onboarding. Only 6% of users who signed up ever started a free trial.

So I went back and stripped the onboarding flow down to the essentials. I removed everything that wasn’t directly helping users reach the “aha” moment (the #1 reason they signed up): Revenue attribution.

This shift had a huge influence on growth. I documented the full breakdown here.

6. Share your progress until people trust you

For a year, I shared daily progress on Twitter.

Most tweets went completely ignored. But every now and then, one post would click and bring in dozens of signups.

I've been traveling a lot this year, so I built myself this little feature.

— Marc Lou (@marc_louvion) 12:41 PM • Aug 9, 2025

The real lesson wasn’t about writing the perfect tweet — it was that consistency beats quality. By showing up every day, I built trust. Even skeptics eventually came back when they saw me making progress.

It doesn’t matter which platform you use. The same approach works on YouTube, where one video turned into my biggest lead magnet. Just be genuine, concise, and consistent.

Final thought

If I had to sum it up:

• Focus on who you’re building for

• Make it easy for them to trust you

• Ship things worth sharing

• Keep talking to your users

• Show up every day

DataFast isn’t big yet. But at $5K MRR, it finally feels like the hard work compounds.

See you at $10K,

512 days ago, I set myself a very specific goal.

I wanted to build a software business worth $1 million. $20,000 in MRR. With a conservative 4× multiple, that’s a $1M business.

A few days ago, I crossed that number. Here are 3 lessons I wish I knew earlier.

In 2024, I was using Plausible for analytics and Stripe for payments. Which meant that every day I was opening two dashboards.

One to see how many visitors I had. One to see how much money I made.

But the one thing I actually cared about didn’t exist anywhere: Which visitors made money.

I didn’t want to know that I had 3,000 visitors. I wanted to know that Google brought $2,400, or that 𝕏 brought $700.

So the idea for DataFast was simple.

1. Take the traffic analytics

2. Connect it to the revenue

3. And make revenue attribution the main metric

I spent a few weeks building a very rough MVP. It started as a very simple analytics dashboard, similar to Plausible, but with Stripe revenue added on top.

Me. And three friends.

The public launch on 𝕏 brought the first few dozen users and around $500 in MRR.

And progress felt painfully slow. It took four months to reach $1K MRR. I remember thinking many times that it probably wouldn’t go anywhere.

You work all day, ship features, answer users, improve things… and at the end of the month, the revenue barely moves.

Every month, MRR grew about 10%. Each month was slightly better than the previous one. And over time, that compounding started to add up.

Little by little, the product crossed $10K MRR, and not long after that, it reached $20K MRR.

The biggest lesson for me was that the beginning is by far the hardest part.

Getting to the first few thousand dollars in recurring revenue is brutal. That’s where most people quit. But once a product crosses that point, things start compounding.

A few things really moved the needle along the way.

#1 Positioning

The analytics market is crowded. There are dozens of tools. If DataFast had just been “another analytics tool”, nobody would have cared.

Things started to click when I positioned it as a revenue attribution tool.

Instead of focusing on traffic metrics, the product focused on the one metric founders actually care about: where the money comes from.

That positioning came naturally because it was exactly the problem I had myself.

#2 Onboarding

I can’t stress this enough: get users to the aha moment as fast as possible.

For DataFast, it’s the moment when they suddenly see something like: “Google → $1,240 revenue”. When that appears on the dashboard, the product makes sense instantly.

I wrote about onboarding and positioning in detail when growing DataFast from 0 to $5K MRR

#3 Anti-marketing

I don’t enjoy traditional marketing. I don’t like ads, cold outreach, or spending my days trying to “do marketing.” So my strategy became very simple: build features people want to show.

I built a real-time visitor map that shows traffic around the world. It looks cool. So users take screenshots and share them. People ask what tool it is. They reply with DataFast.

More recently I opened a full DataFast API, which lets users access all their analytics data programmatically.

Then I spent four days building four apps on top of that API.

One turns real-time analytics into a Severance episode. Every page on your site is a department. /pricing is a department. /blog is a department.

Your visitors are innies now. They arrive through the elevator. When they navigate to another page, they walk through the corridor to the next department. When they bounce, they walk out.

I think this direction will matter more and more.

We’re entering a world where AI agents will use software directly. And AI doesn’t click buttons. It talks to APIs.

My guess is that in the future, many products will simply expose powerful APIs, and users will interact with them through whatever interface they prefer. Generative UI.

DataFast now sits at a little over $20K MRR. Which means the original goal is technically achieved. But reaching a goal has an interesting side effect: you immediately set another one.

The new target is $1 million in ARR. That’s about $83K in monthly recurring revenue. At $20K MRR, DataFast is roughly 25% of the way there.

So the journey continues.

DataMarket is part of the 4 apps in 4 days challenge, and my new favorite way to check web analytics in public (I pretend I’m a smart stock market guy)

If there’s one thing I’d leave you with, it’s this: The beginning always feels slower than it should.

You work every day and the numbers barely move. But once something finally starts working, growth compounds faster than expected.

Most people quit during the flat part of the curve. If you survive that part long enough, the curve eventually bends. And when it does, things start moving very quickly.

I root for you.

Hey, it’s Marc, and I wish you a Happy New Year!

I’m writing this newsletter from Crete, Greece. My wife and I are looking for a new place to live — more on that later.

Here’s a recap of 2025.

My 15 income streams

I earned 20% less in 2025 than in 2024, but I wouldn’t change anything. This year was more peaceful (better work/life balance), and my revenue is more diversified now.

Here’s a breakdown of my entire portfolio’s revenue:

ShipFast and CodeFast are still my primary income sources. They currently make around $20K/month each.

DataFast

My biggest achievement this year is DataFast. I spent about 200 days building features, and it paid off. The SaaS is now at $15.8K MRR, which makes it worth roughly $800K as an asset (4× multiple on ARR). DataFast is about to cross 1,000 paying customers, with around 7% churn.

It’s growing organically at 14% MoM. Users do the marketing by sharing screenshots of their analytics. All I have to do is build features they need and love — basically my dream product.

To be honest, I have no idea what’s next for DataFast. I listen to power users, build what they ask for, and trust the process. That’s how I broke through the valley of despair (it took 4 months to reach the first $1K MRR).

TrustMRR

The most unexpected income of the year is TrustMRR. I built this side project in 24 hours, and a few days later it was at $25K MRR.

After the launch craze died down, I tried 10 different verticals to keep the project alive. Nine failed. But when I launched the buy/sell startup marketplace in December, it took off. Within the first two weeks, a dozen startups were acquired.

Investing

I also started investing $15,000 per week in January 2025. It has returned $147K so far. Cash sitting in the bank gets eaten by inflation, so I had to make it active.

I don’t really like investing (I prefer building startups), so I picked the simplest option: the S&P 500. I also recently started investing $5,000/week in ICHN, because I believe China will keep growing. And I made my first AI investment ($20K).

Misc

I launched 3 other startups:

• BioAge (failed)

• ClipMarc (failed)

• A secret project (didn’t have time to launch yet)

A good reminder that having an audience doesn’t guarantee a successful startup!

Meanwhile, I kept sharing everything on 𝕏. I gained 100K new followers and earned $14,339. Thanks, Elon!

Getting younger?

According to my WHOOP wearable, my body age is under 18 (I’m 32).

It might sound cliché, but it’s actually hard to reach this number. WHOOP looks at sleep data, VO₂ max, daily step count, zone 2 and zone 5 workouts, strength training, and more.

The biggest change this year is that I started lifting at the gym (it’s never too late!) As a result, I gained 4 kg of mostly muscle.

I trained for over 340 days this year (mostly surfing, gym, running).

I tested my VO₂ max for the first time and scored 57.4 ml/kg/min (top 5% of men my age). VO₂ max is one of the best longevity markers.

Like in 2024, I drank 0 liters of alcohol and walked at least 10K steps every day (4.2M steps total).

Unlike 2024, I was less strict with my diet: I reintroduced carbs and allowed myself around 10% cheat meals.

7 countries, 10 books

My wife and I want to leave Bali, our home for the past 7 years.

The wake-up call came when we realized how polluted the food chain and air have become. It’s also hard to hit 10K daily steps there, and it’s far from our families (South Korea and France). So we started touring the world looking for a new nest.

In 2025, we visited 7 countries: New Zealand, India, South Africa, Spain, France, South Korea, and Greece.

Despite security issues, South Africa surprised us: organic local food, kind people, awesome nature. But our favorite so far is Hossegor, France. And now we’re in Crete, Greece, which we also love.

One reason we traveled so much was to meet you! We organized meetups from Paris to Wanaka, and it was so nice!

Along with my daily morning coffee, I read 10 books in 2025. My top three:

• The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli

• The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly

• Elon Musk (biography)

That’s it for 2025!

I hope 2026 unfolds in the same way. I like my current work/life balance, and I like working every day. I hope I’ll ship even more startups, that’s what I enjoy the most.

I wish you a Happy New Year and all the best for 2026.

Marc has been posting to @marc-lou since 2024 — build-alongs, revenue teardowns, and a long-running series counting the days it took to grow a SaaS to $1M. The most recent uploads at the time this edition was compiled:

• I made a game where you have to ship an app in 30 days or... 2026

• I made my SaaS ready for AI agents (in San Francisco) 2026

• I documented my SaaS journey to $20K MRR 2026

• Day 287 growing my SaaS startup to $1M 2026

• Day 512 growing my SaaS startup to $1M 🎉 2026

• Build Your App With Me (Deep Work) 2026

• I made an app to fix my terrible posture 2026

• Day 494 growing my SaaS startup to $1M 2026

• Day 474 growing my SaaS startup to $1M 2026

• so... I built my own web analytics SaaS 2026

• I made $1M in 2025 (WRAPPED) 2026

• Day 412 growing my SaaS startup to $1M 2025

Read

• Just Ship It — the newsletter every essay here came from.

• @marclou — the daily version, several times a day.

• marclou.com — every startup he has shipped, with the revenue attached.

Watch

• @marc-lou — one video a week, until he burns out.

Build

• ShipFast — the boilerplate that started all of this.

• DataFast — the analytics he built because nothing else told him what to fix.

• CodeFast — how he teaches people to code.