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- Shipfa.st made $63K in Revenue in 60 Days
Statistics:
Website: Shipfa.st
Launched On: 23rd of August, 2023
Revenue Last Month (September, 2023): $36,400
Profit Last Month (September, 2023): $31,668
Monthly Website Traffic: 385,400
Description:
Founded by Marc Louvion in August of 2023, Shipfa.st is a NextJS boilerplate which helps indiehackers launch their own SaaS, AI and other web apps much faster.
It’s essentially a template of codes that saves developers 20+ hours on setting up key functions like user authentication, payments, landing page design etc. Since its launch less than two months, Ship Fast has already generated an impressive $63,600 in revenue.
Business Model:
Ship Fast runs on a pay once, use forever model. The two packages range between $129 and $149. On the launch month of September, Marc was able to generate $36,400 in revenue, and as of October he already made $27,000 in sales. Since his solution is essentially a digital product and as there are no other high incurring fixed costs, Marc is able to benefit from very high profit margins.
Growth Strategy:
The rapid success of Ship Fast has stemmed from three key marketing strategies, consisting of utilizing: Product Hunt, Twitter and Reddit. Let’s first dive in into how Marc got his initial users.
Product Hunt
Marc used Product Hunt as the initial launch strategy in order to validate his idea, and to his surprise he was able to generate generate $1,000 in sales in the first 7 hours of his launch. After 48 hours, Marc mentioned he had already made $6000 in profit. His Product Hunt launch turned out to be a huge success as he got voted “2nd Product of the Day” with 941 upvotes.
The Ship Fast launch success on Product Hunt can be attributed to three factors: Product, Promotion and Conversion. Firstly, Marc developed a product that people actually wanted – a solution that solved a large enough problem. Secondly, actively engaging with other projects on Product Hunt, helped him get support for his launch when the time came. This combined with building anticipation and announcing the launch on his personal Twitter further boosted the votes. And thirdly, replying to all of the 100+ comments and creating a funny yet effective advertising video for his product page allowed the algorithm work in his favor.
Since his launch on Product Hunt, more than half of Ship Fast’s entire website traffic has come from his personal brand on Twitter which has over 40,000 followers. Marc attributes his Twitter growth and derived traffic to “building in public”, meaning sharing the journey of building his projects openly for everyone to see. This not only built social proof and grew his following from 1,000 followers in July of 2022, but also allowed his announcement post of Ship Fast to go viral and get 167,000 impressions.
This very same “build in public” strategy has helped most of Marc’s other posts be boosted by the Twitter algorithm for other users to see. That said, since his Twitter following are mainly indiehackers and as his product Ship Fast helps this particular target audience develop their own projects faster, it has allowed Twitter to be especially effective at growing his business.
Lastly, Marc has also been able to drive traffic to his website and get paying users via Reddit. He did this all organically by sharing his start up on relevant subreddits like r/SideProject which has 120,000 members. Here he made a post which simply was a video demo of Ship Fast and this post got 100 upvotes as well as 40 comments. On a subreddit of that size, and with that many upvotes, he is bound to have gotten several tens of thousands of users seeing his post and thousands of users checking out his website. That is the power of organic marketing. He used the same strategy by posting on Hacker News as well.
Key Takeaway:
Sell a product that actually solves an important enough problem, and your marketing efforts will fall in place much quicker and easier.