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Marc's content is addicting but don't take it too seriously. The overwhelming amount of his income success has come from selling devs the template and dream of shipping fast, and not all the little saas apps he has made with it.
Very true. After all, RU-vid is just a sales funnel for him at the end of the day. I don't doubt that the majority of his customers are his viewers. Good business model though - also, he lives in Bali where expenses are like...zero...
It's technically true to say that the overwhelming amount of the overall income success has come from ShipFast (aka selling the dream of shipping fast), it blew up in the past months in combination with his social media/yt success. However spinning it like that makes it sound like he made no money from his previous years of unrelated saas sites, even without ShipFast, the "income success" was more than considerable from the pov of devs looking for passive income streams. He goes over them transparently, some made little to no money, some he sold for 30k, some make a few hundred a month etc.
@@hmthatsniceiguess2828 I'm not spinning anything. You literally proved my point. He makes very little money off saas. He makes it all from youtube ad revenue and selling a product (not a service). There is a difference between running software as a service and selling a product. ShipFast is literally a product he could have sold on shopify, it's not a saas.
This is a classic: I sell you a course about how to sell courses and I'm earning my money with that". In this case, I sell you how to ship fast indirectly who do that is to earn money, so I earn money with motivating you to do that, but I'm not earning money from my ship fast products, I'm earning money motivating you to do that. So, now devs are creating tools like shipfast to show other how ship fast too...
His tech stack is such that even if you save 3 hours initially, it is gonna cost you many 10s of extra hours later for debugging, poor code and other problems.
I definitely noticed that he made a majority of his money from the shipfast kit he sells to his users. I chuckled a bit when I saw this video. Finally someone mentioned something about it lol
Sad truth is your projects that you wanna make money with don't have to challenge you as an engineer. They challenge you as an entrepreneur, a marketer, and MAYBE an engineer
I dont get why everyone is going for aws or gcp. Just rent a virtual server for like 6$ a month (same specs would cost you 80$ a month on aws) and deploy there to see if the mvp succeeds.
@@florianlutze9068 Exactly. Shows that a lot of people have never actually run a startup or saas, because if they had then they would have quickly moved away from aws/gcp. They're overcomplicated and expensive in order to offer you things you don't need yet and likely never will.
@@florianlutze9068 I'm not a software engineer but I'm a deep learning engineer, AWS is great because it offers many options scaling, transfer large amount of data, could watch to monitor anomalies in the performance of models and data features also tools for monitoring bias shifting. Probably is it just good for people that do a lot of data engineering and modeling stuff, rather than simple JS apps.
I'm not sure to understand your point. You said you "failed" but you didn't do anything in terms of marketing (at least it's not mentioned in the video). If the product is something that takes a while to release, you can do pre-orders if you want to be 100% sure to validate before shipping. Talk with potential users, check if they actually have the problem you're trying to solve, and see if they're willing to pay for a pre-order of the app In my opinion, you didn't fail, you gave up before giving the project a chance
It wouldn’t and I found this out after I built a much more maintainable implementation of boilerplates. It’s a highly configurable template but with no audience it had all of 1 sale.
@@viktor_zhurbin Agreed. I guess I should say depending on the product and the saturation of the market, having an audience makes it easier to sale. SEO and cold out reach get you in the door but an audience builds trust in the brand and brander.
Can someone explain her idea? What is the business angle in scraping together affiliate product links? Why would I want 10 links to the same product that pays out one of the 10 people?
@@viktor_zhurbin because it is promising something it does not deliver. This boilerplate with honestly quite poor tech stack will not save you that much time, which is what she is saying in the video.
@@ZelenoJabko The tech stack and all the details are right there on the landing page. I'm pretty sure you can find more details if needed. People buy stuff without reading the labels?
Templates are meant to speed up repetitive boring stuff (payment, login, etc). It doesn't promise a successful product. It should also fit your technical requirements. It doesn't really sound like you followed this "shipfast approach". They say you need to validate the idea and confirm if there's a market for it before writing a single line of code. Reach out to people, interview them, engage in conversations on fb/discord/wherever the target audience is. Based on the research, put together a landing page and either presale a nonexistent product, or a very raw MVP just to be sure people are actually ready to pay for it. Then improve incrementally based on user feedback. And keep doing the marketing part continuously. And they drop the idea fast if it doesn't work, no hard feelings.
Spot on! Its like the new era of of those books about '20 steps to becoming wealthy'. Except the trick is that the book made the author wealthy and no one else :D I appreciate you taking the time to share your views on the subject. I really resonate with your concerns about "what if this was a more fleshed out idea, maybe people would have actually found it useful?". I think fail fast, i mean, ship fast, is a useful strategy when you have billions in VC money and can burn your money/time, but for those of us plebeians, we have to be more methodical about how we approach. I dont think its completely impossible, there are always outlier, but im not convinced that this is a sustainable approach to business. look forward to hearing your updates on this topic as you experiment more!
Right? It’s just saves you a lot of time and that’s value where people(I’m one of them) are paying for. She also had just the most basic landing page. Tweak it more and make it more of your own.
Thank you for sharing your experience! I have been on the fence about Shipfast; been just using my own boilerplate for now. I can totally relate about the attention to the craft.. It's so hard to find the fine line between sloppy and fast.
You can do all the script running in your heroku backend, and have a reason to charge people more $. Queue incoming payments in FIFO, and email them when done. Because of the delay, perhaps offer them multiple search queries, but limit the current querey search to 1/10th of it to save compute while increasing number of queries compromising for excesive leads. Offer Excesive lead for single query options.
Some red flags here 🚩 "People might like your product more if you put more effort" - Products should be a pain killer, not a vitamin. You don't want customers who "like" your product, you want customers who "need" your product so badly they don't mind a scrappy MVP. "I would need some way to keep track of state management" - Your MVP can literally be, a form and you running your script manually.
nah it all comes down to morals and ethics man, you might enjoy scamming people but most of us don't. we'd rather spend a year building something that'll have a 100 users and make 10k/y with it, than have a trendy product that runs for two months and makes the same amount of money or even more. not everything is about the money, and i'd rather sell good stuff to 100 users than sell scrappy stuff to 10k. I'm an engineer, not a scavenger.
@@MateoC-f4n That's the problem. Engineers just want to spend all day building stuff and never ship anything. Look up how Airbnb, Zappos and Dropbox started out. Did they build their full product before launching? It's not about scamming anyone. It's about delivering value using as little engineering resource as possible before you are sure your business will work.
It all depends on the idea. Some are suited for fast shipping and others not. It goes along with what you can charge. He in a way does all his marketing through his videos. He has an audience. Boilerplate codes need to be viewed as a starting point, no the destination. To ship a successful product requires more than just a good idea and a boilerplate’s code base.
Great video. I like that you mentioned some of those nitty gritty details which can derail a quick project or “small” project. There’s definitely a difference between a one feature web app and a business. Marc has great content and strategies to learn from. Way to keep this positive learning too! Looking forward to your startup
I think a small lovable and complete (SLC) product suits your mentality better by Jasen Cohen founder of WPEngine. That is also what I am building myself. Get embedded with an audience, find their most important and urgent problem, create a SLC to validate the idea.
He is not selling you a blue print business, he is just giving you the platform for a head start. It’s not fair to put all your failure or success on a boilerplate.
I feel like shipfast only works with api wrappers or super simple products tbh. Maybe im just a bad developer, but i don't see how you could design a resilient well-architected system, then ship it in a week. (Im also using AWS for my SaaS. I have like 800 lines of terraform for some relatively simple architecture) Micro saas is kind of like drop shipping for developers.
Hottest thing rn, is reselling openAI... their own "SEO Blog generator etc.) Aand... then I've even seen people building and selling their own API access to other devs.. like literal wrappers :D
You are missing the point. What is the purpose of resilient well-architected system if nobody is using your product? By shipping fast and solving small, specific problem, you are testing if there is a need for your product. That is the idea. You can't ship something great in the week, you might need months maybe even years.
@@MarkoMarkovic-qd6ci You are mistaken. The whole ship fast paradigm is a symptom of not understanding customer needs i. The first place. Iterating towards a solution in code is always orders of magnitude more expensive than calling and meeting with people. He said ship fast exists because he spent months building something and got no customers, he solved it with building micro saas products that no ones uses that you can launch in a day rather than talk to people lmao
Tech is not important if you want to ship an MVP, just choose whatever you want. In that early stage is good to simplify, build fast and ship! Selling is other story. But if you don't build, ship and market it ,no one is gonna know about your project's existence.
It feels more and more like a MLM scheme but for SaaS developers. All of the successful products are targeted at developers making these micro products. All of the reviews on the products using Marc's boilerplate seem to be unvalidated too, so it's a circle of Indiedevs rating each other's product.
Most developers don't realize that their app is just... an asset. Like a building. Do you think a building will magically generate you income? No, it's what you do with the building, right? Ok, so now you turn it into a warehouse to store goods. One step closer, but it's still... just an asset. (This is the time where you give up and sell the asset -- oh shoot, you realize your code base is worthless, unlike a building! (Or you realize you haven't even started running a business yet, and you continue...) So now you go out and find stores, shipping companies etc. to store their products at your warehouse because... your service is really good and really fast or whatever. And then you start carrying boxes, loading trucks... Now your asset is generating money. Now you've got a business! ... Marc is just selling you the bricks dude. Be ready to spend half your time running a business. And otherwise just stick to billing your hourly rate for building assets for OTHER businesses, that's great too.
It makes no sense though. If you're a developer that is doing repeatable tasks from scratch with every new project, surely you just copy and pasta the relevant stuff from old projects over? And then hopefully you realise there is a standard format to your apps, which will then incentivise you to create your own template to use for future projects. That's what's happened with me. Didn't sell it to others though - I thought most devs would do this.
so many (inexcusable) issues end up revealing themselves to me whenever i tried hopping on this "shipfast" trend. boilerplates can be a decent stopgap, but idk if i'd ever pay for one. were there out-of-the-box copywriting that came along with the design templates? looking forward to the next one!
When I started my small startup I shipped fast by using my old laptop as the server. Ran up to 1k paying customers before upgrading as it was getting a bit laggy. You own it all vs being restricted to whatever platform forces you to do. Many of these indie hacker types get their money by hustling other indie hackers with more landing pages and templates. Building good software you understand and own will not only be more fun from a development pov but also give you the ability to change it up more rapidly.
Boilerplates can be beneficial when you know your desired outcome, as they can save you valuable time during the initial setup process. For instance, if you value your time at $50 per hour and it would take you 10 hours to implement the entire initial tech stack, the "cost" would be $50 x 10 = $500. which is higher than just buying a boilerplate.
This is a really good vid idea :)) hope you can make back the $170 with your next project haha Im currently making a mac app thats taking longer than expected to deliver, all this ship fast stuff does make me think should I stop working on it, but at the same time its challenging and i'm learning a lot so, think I'll stick with it :))
Some tips for you: Serverless approach is way better than EC2 in your case Instead of using Google API for searching abuse the puppeteer and scrape the Google page itself Also I do not know if you did but I'd do caching. Finally, the mentality should be: If not very good developers are making money you should make money. - Choose a project with passion - MVP does not mean 1 week. Disregard the lunatic that propose that. - Shipfast it is not for developers but amateurs/lazy devs. - Work on your idea and validate with 7 people. Good luck. I always love to see honest content
The biggest problem with the shipfast approach is that as a solo dev its hard to create a fully fledged product in such a short time. It's good to ship fast, but if 4 devs were working on it in a startup environment the amount of work that gets done in the same time is so much greater, so you can ship in one week or even two weeks. For a solo dev its just not possible to ship that fast for a saas that would actually be useful!
Hi nice video! I am a data scientist and I am starting to get into Web and Software development. Can you tell me what I need to learn to use ship fast effectively? For example - I am very proficient in Python - can i build the backend / API in Python and still use ship fast?
Most of the youtube videos I end up seeing that are successful tech ideas happen to be ideas for entry level developers whether it be teaching course (feels like every youtuber programmer person has one), interview prep of some kind or now this templating. Its definitely makes software development feel like a pyramid scheme. Once you are in and "successful" you have to sell to others so they can get in and then they eventually sell a course or something.
I thought about buying ShipFast but decided on building my own apps with a similar stack and learning and launching things myself instead of going for a shortcut. If it’s TGTBT then it prob is. He’s a great salesman no doubt, that’s half the battle when becoming a successful entrepreneur.
Hey, I gotta say, I really dug the honesty and passion you poured into this video. I mean, I've been grinding in the software world for a solid decade now, so I totally get the thrill of tackling those mind-bending problems. Honestly, you've just gotta do what feels right for you, you know? Sure, Marc's template is a solid starting point for newbies, but don't forget about all the mad reach, audience, and networking skills he's been hustling to build over the years. It's not like you're gonna go viral or start raking in $10k MRR overnight just 'cause you snagged his boilerplate. Nah, it takes time and dedication to make it in this game. Just keep being true to yourself and putting in that work, and you'll be on your way to crushing it in no time!
I love coming in the comments and seeing haters be like "he's selling shovels don't buy that trash", hey if I could make 800k+ selling shovels like that I wouldn't mind, I'll take that 800k+. People love to hate but, I wanna see what the haters have actually accomplished.
lol you used it for only a week and you call it failure, maybe you should rethink your videos before putting it out. I don't think you understand when someone says "I'm a bad programmer". lol you didn't actually follow the shipfast approach. maybe if you take your time and energy into actually understanding how it works you'd have made a better conclusion from this. it feels like you are hating. nobody is forcing anyone to use it. others have used it and they found it helpful your opinion was not really well thought. you're making shipfast look like a get rich quick scheme. The same way a hammer can’t make you millions in construction, ShipFast can’t make you millions in software. shipfast didn't work for you, doesn't mean it doesn't work for others, don't make it seem like it doesn't work everywhere cos it doesn't work for you. building a SaaS takes time and effort. you make it seem in this video like this was something that was made to make SaaS product successful quick. no hard feelings
Sounds like most of your technical limitations could've been easily solved by you renting a cheap VPS and running a Rails app (which comes with long-running tasks and anything you might need for a complex app tbh).
You felt launching without state management was too sloppy, even for a mvp. That. That right there. Thats a hypothesis you did not check with your target customers right?
yeah i don't like the philosophy seems to be a Venture capitalist approach... FInance 100 company for a million and spend 100 million then one makes 1 billion you've ten-xed.
Marc Lou could have made about the same money selling a book. His boilerplate has no moat. His money is made thanks to having a fan base acquired online.
The thing that is so crazy, has no one heard of t3 stack? It's everything that marc is offering without stripe and mailgun, and some chat gpt homepages.
Ecs and possibly inngest to spin up one off long running tasks is what I would expect to use to schedule and run jobs. Have also found shipfast to be a bit too minimal
To be honest, you are concluding your project a bit early (IMOHO), I feel like you did only half of the work, solopreneurship is both marketing and coding and you are presenting only the coding part of it ^^ You are comparing your success to people that are already kind of extreme but are generally allocating at least a month for a project, or I mean they generally did the 12 month 12 projects challenge before being able to move faster 😊 Maybe keep at it :)
I will break the code for scrapping and use cron to trigger each part. When the scrapping is done I will send a notification to the user, so they don't have to wait.
Yeh idk a good product is worth more than money. And it’s easier to copy code or ideas than ever. Marc is encouraging some shortsighted practices. You need IP and so many other facets. It may be good experience, but it still has cloud bills. The processing & ETL for SaaS integrations can be pricey.
RU-vid videos like this make me so angry. Trashing some other developer's work just to make a few views. 20 hours is not anywhere near a serious try. Render will host long running jobs easily, you don't need AWS. Maybe I'd take it a bit more seriously if you didn't have an affiliate link to the same product you are dumping on.
Well the Onus is on the people buying this product, this product is 'free' and anyone could make this in their spare time. The differnece between your version and Marc's - is his brand. If you want to build a competitive product, then the goal should be to provide more value than what his asking take his especially if you're already a SWE. Dont hate the player, hate the game.
Building a community is what makes you the money, the ideas of little SaaS's allover the place will help you to build a resume for the next Job BUT the community is what will make you independent developer and you can do a lot of things to make money from the community, It's pretty hard to make a small diff business make money consistently, because most SaaS get a good bomb in the money in the first few weeks after that the SaaS just die's if there is no consistently work on it. so build a community just like how Marc's did
So you gave up on an amazing idea because you couldnt ship it in a week ? In my opinion some people are misunderstanding what « shipfast » could really mean. I think its not about shipping anything as fast as possible, its just about finding the best solution that you could ship as fast as possible. It just depends on your idea. Some will inevitably take months while other will take weeks. But the idea behind it stay the same : not waisting your time thinking about tons of features to add in a product while you could just focus on the essential things so that you could gather insights from your customers as fast as possible and see if its a viable solution to build for you?
You could do the MVP of this by doing the searches manually. Just have it on the website that each search takes 3-4 hours, and that would give you time to process it. As long as you're clear about the time it'll take from the beginning, this is a GREAT product that would be more than just a vitamin. Then you can figure out automation later (or just get a hetzner server so you aren't dealing with serverless limitations)
An inspiration/idea is good to motivate yourself to make a product, but if you don't know how to pick the attention or you are not close to the potentional clients will not work. Is so important to understand the reality of why is not working. Keep it up! 💪
It’s an interesting movement. I tend to overthink my projects and mostly do work for other people, so personally it’s helped me to try and focus a little more on what I can develop for myself and how to get it out the door.
Idk for me all of these products “built this saas in 2 days” are sh1tty unfortunately. For me there’s no difference between this and a scammer. It’s more like a marketing game than the product itself. You know, make a lot of people pay once for your product and maybe in one year you fully drop it. I know that the goal of indie hackers is to make money, but for me it looks like a Scammer…
yeah I definitely get this perspective. it's hard to produce good quality in such a short time and seems like it could be hard to be fair to the customer
Marc Lou makes most of his profit teaching his own audience... *rolls eyes*. Honestly, whenever someone is saying they are making millions doing X but seem much more active telling people about it you can suspect their real income is you.
Please don’t buy into these fake gurus BS. I’ve successfully built a profitable startup and the best MVP is to sell the service before you build anything. I created a landing page through a free service, started some google ads then pivoted until I was able to get purchase agreements with a deposit. I don’t care what anyone has to say unless they are willing to pay - now. 😊
