Marc Lou crosses $133K/mo with a simple NextJS BoilerPlate

Topic of the Week

What are Boilerplates?

Boilerplate originally referred to the rolled steel used to make boilers for steam engines in the 19th century.

Over time, the term evolved to describe any standardized piece of text or code that can be reused without significant changes.

Interest in SaaS has been on the rise, and many more people now want to build products. However, building products from scratch takes a lot of time, and it can be extremely frustrating.

Enter SaaS Boilerplates

With the standardization of stacks and basic systems that govern SaaS tools, it has become evident that there was a need, and the time was ripe for SaaS Boilerplates.

SaaS Boilerplates come with landing pages, website components, authentication modules, payment modules, and various other standard features that can save developers a significant amount of time and cost.

The market is flooded with Boilerplates for various tech stacks, such as NextJS, Laravel, Swift, NuxtJS, and so forth.

Pros and Cons of Boilerplates

Pros

• Save a significant amount of time and money

• Reduce frustration for developers as the redundant tasks are taken care of

• Boilerplates often follow best practices

• For anywhere between $49 and $299, they provide terrific value for those looking to build something very quickly

Most importantly, Boilerplates also enable aspiring founders and builders with limited technical resources or abilities to ship their products faster and more cheaply.

They are beacons of hope for non-technical founders looking to build a product quickly.

Cons

• Limited flexibility

• May become outdated fairly quickly

• Setting them up still requires time

• Similar landing pages and design themes can make the product look like a clone

Marc Lou’s Shipfast

For most of us, Marc Lou popularized the idea of SaaS Boilerplate.

Marc Lou launched Shipfast in August 2023. He had built 27 projects prior to this and Shipfast was nothing but all his basic code organised properly.

At that time, there were no solid NextJS boilerplates, and Shipfast just took off. He got traction via Product Hunt, Twitter and Hacker News and soon Shipfast went viral.

Shipfast now generates $130K/mo, just 9 months after its launch.

Marc has been building Shipfast in public, which has led to a lot of interest in SaaS Boilerplates. The market is now flooded with boilerplates for every major tech stack.

Marc reaped the benefits of the first mover's advantage as well as the social proof via his Shipfast community.

I don't think any other boilerplates are as successful as Shipfast, but there are quite a few good ones out there.

• Shipixen has grossed over $20K in the 5 months

• Makerkit does ~$3500/mo

Moreover, there are many open-source boilerplates available for popular stacks such as NextJS.

The Evolution of Boilerplates

Boilerplates are quickly turning into no-code/low-code code generation tools.

For instance, Shipixen allows you to generate custom code for landing pages, waitlist pages and blogs using a simple User Interface.

Boilerplates are perfectly posied to sit between code and no-code. Allow the flexibility of code with the interface of a no-code tool - that will be the core value proposition of SaaS boilerplates.

Should you build a Boilerplate?

Well, the market is flooded, but I believe there's still an opportunity to leverage boilerplates.

• You can build boilerplates for certain types of apps or tools, such as Chrome extensions

• Boilerplates can act as a great lead funnel for building out a great productized services business

• No-code/low-code code generation boilerplates can become a big thing if you can help build complex tools

• Niche tech stack boilerplates may still be lucrative

Known strategies for successfully building a boilerplate 👇🏻

• Shipfast thrives because of social proof and community

• SaaSRock generates most of its traffic from its Gumroad listings and blogs

• Usenextbase and Shipixen are being built in public

• Many boilerplates start with waitlists

• They have a very clear value proposition around saving time and cost

Design & No-Code Boilerplates

Here is the corrected version with improved grammar and clarity:

While SaaS (code) boilerplates have become fairly popular, other types of boilerplates are emerging in the market, such as design boilerplates and no-code boilerplates.

To be honest, design boilerplates have been around for a while. You will find numerous landing page packs, component libraries, and so forth.

Makers are now building kits that leverage standard libraries and technologies such as Tailwind CSS, Daisy UI, and more.

Nick Buzz from the famous baked.design has this 50 Landing Page Design Kit in Tailwind CSS & Figma which is wildly popular.

Lastly, there is a trend of no-code boilerplates as well. Mohit is building a Bubble Boilerplate for the popular no-code platform - Bubble.

All in all, I think that people want to build products and build them fast. Boilerplates help them save a significant amount of time and cost. More importantly, boilerplates are impulse purchases for people who have not shipped but who want to ship.

Introducing BuilderKit.ai

We have been building AI SaaS tools for quite a while now. 10+ products across text, image, speech, RAG - we have built em all.

We figured that it seems easy but actually building these so called AI Wrappers can be time consuming and frustrating - there is a lot of nuance to it.

So we built BuidlerKit.ai - a NextJS SaaS Boilerpalte

It takes care of everything from landing pages, authentication, dashboarding, emails, SEO to payments - everything that you need to build your tool.

It also comes with 8+ production-ready apps.

Moreover, the BuilderKit community is an exclusive community of AI SaaS builders (Pro Only Access)

The Pre Orders are now live at https://www.builderkit.ai

(First 100 Customers get $100 Off - I think we have already done ~20 odd orders since the announcement yesterday, Grab your seat asap!)

Starter Plan @49, Pro Plan @ $99

Builder of the Week

Marc Lou

Nationality - French
Age - 32
Top Product(s) - ShipFa.st
Current MRR - ~$141K

Today, I want to share with you the inspiring story of Marc Lou, a 32-year-old French entrepreneur who is one of the highest grossing Indie Hackers with a super smart product.

Marc's journey began when he graduated from Université de Technologie de Troyes. He began his career as a full-stack developer and started a couple of ventures. After facing a series of failures and setbacks, including being fired by Tai Lopez in November 2021, Marc discovered the build-in-public community on Twitter, which changed his life.

In just under three years, Marc launched an impressive 21 products, grew his newsletter to 20,000+ readers, amassed a Twitter following of 95,000, and reached an astounding $141,000 per month in revenue with a 91% margin.

Marc's entrepreneurial journey was not without its challenges. It took him two years to make his first dollar online, and he even grew a SaaS to $3,000 MRR before feeling like a failure after four years of hard work. Depression set in, causing him to quit entrepreneurship temporarily.

However, after being fired by Tai Lopez, Marc found inspiration in his role models on Twitter, such as Pieter Levels and Danny Postma. These solopreneurs were working on their projects from anywhere in the world, enjoying the freedom and financial success that Marc craved.

Living in Bali with his Korean wife and $20,000 in the bank, Marc set out to build his own path to freedom. He started with a simple project called Mood2Movie, a movie recommendation app based on the user's mood. This project kickstarted his build-in-public journey, and he continued to launch projects for fun, learning valuable skills along the way.

In August 2022, Marc went all-in on his gamified habit tracker, Habits Garden, which was making ~$200/month. He utilized side-project marketing, launching free tools to promote his paid product, and created engaging launch videos that went viral. By January 2023, Habits Garden had reached 10,000 users.

Marc continued to ship startups like a madman, applying new rules: no free plans, only painkiller products, and moving on quickly if there was no product-market fit. In July 2023, he was making ~$3,000/month.

A turning point came when Marc realized he needed to build a business for customers he truly cared about. He sold his AI landing page generator for $35,000 and his habit tracker for $10,000, giving him the time and clarity to focus on products he would use himself.

On September 1st 2023, Marc launched ShipFast, a NextJS boilerplate to help others ship startups quickly. To his surprise, ShipFast made $40,000 by the end of the month, and as of April 2024, it is at an impressive run rate of $133K.

Marc's success has bought him peace of mind and the ability to speak to a broader audience. However, his life hasn't changed dramatically. He still surfs, writes, and codes every day, finding happiness in creating rather than consuming..

I hope Marc's journey inspires you as much as it has inspired me. Remember, your path to success may be unique, but consistency and perseverance are the key!

Community Learnings for the Week

• Dobroslav shares a counter-take on building boilerplates, you should read and think about it

• Natia shares 10 growth hacks to grow your startup and mind map for SEO

• Alex (SEO consultant with 8 years of experience) shares how will he learn SEO without spending money on courses if he starts again today

• David park shares all the marketing strategies that helps JenniAI reach $5m ARR, a must read

Story of the Week

Simple college essay writing tool —> $50k MRR

From 0 to 100 million+ impressions, 800k+ users, and $50k MRR, in a span of 6 months.

Declan and Derrick were undergrads at UC Berkeley and loved building side projects - Avo Alaram, YouUp, and Steady Soles to name a few.

One of their friends suggested they to focus on a single project and they chose JotBot - an AI essay generator that used writing samples to write like you which they built in a week.

Due to the nature and target Audience of the project, the most obvious marketing channel to go with is Titkok and they did the same. Committed to posting 6-10 short-form videos, every single day, on 3 platforms (Reels, TikTok, Shorts), advertising our product, but nothing worked.

After a lot of failed short-form content, they had a fun idea to get a super long and specific URL like ‘idontwanttodomyessay .com‘ and redirect it to their site, and it worked like a charm.

Here are some of their Tiktok templates (3.2m, 10m, 8.9m) which worked for them, they remade it, it worked again and even other products copied it and it worked for them too (you can use them too).

This pushed them to $25k MRR, but they didn’t want to look like a cheating app that students used and forgot about. Recently they pivoted again to a Research copilot and again with the same set of template with some changes pushing the MRR to $50k.

TikTok is a great marketing channel for B2C products, Trendy and Shareable Products. In the Umax story that we shared last week ($6m ARR), Tiktok was one of their main marketing channel too.

Parting Notes

Did you like today's edition of The Builder OS? Is there something that we can do better? Please share your feedback with us ♥️

Don’t Forget to Check out the Builder OS

Don't forget to check out The Builder OS - a repository of all our learnings, playbooks, frameworks, and resources around building, growing, scaling, and selling products on the Internet. Backed by our experience in building 10+ products, selling 4, and generating over $150K in 12 months.

The BuilderKit

Want to build your AI SaaS Fast? Use our AI SaaS NextJS boilerplate and build your product within days, instead of weeks.

One last thing - If you are building something, drop us a note and we will feature your work with The Builder OS Newsletter Community - Just reply to us and we will get in touch 🙂 

Stay tuned for the next edition, we discuss and dissect productised services - the modern way of doing the IT services business.