The $1M marketing secret of ShipFast

Hey!

Let’s steal this $123k/mo business’s marketing strategy today.

ShipFast is a NextJS boilerplate made by Marc Lou.

In May 2024 alone, they got:

• May 2024 revenue: $123k 🤩 

• ~600 customers per month (assumed $199 LTV), which means ~0.5% website conversion

Insane product.

Now let’s break down their marketing game.

TL;DR

1. Personal brand. Personal brand. Personal brand to build trust. People buy boilerplate only from a trusted source.

2. Run ads.

3. Ship more.

1. Personal brand is the best channel for boilerplates.

When you buy a boilerplate, you’re buying a dream to build the next big thing.

So who’re you buying to matters a lot. If that person is credible and trustworthy, you’re more likely to buy from them.

And the best way to become credible and trustworthy?

Make content and share your journey on X (Twitter).

Marc has been active in the Indie hacking/Build in public Twitter community since 2022. All these time he had accumulated a huge following.

And all these paid off eventually as he launched the ShipFast project, which rapidly monetised his built brand as a profitable solopreneur chasing his dream.

His content are mainly about sharing progress of his SaaS and lifestyle posts, which suit perfectly to his brand.

He also leveraged his Twitter personal brand to promote ShipFast Leaderboard, which is also a genius move that bring more awareness to ShipFast.

2. Run Facebook ads to target developers.

The target audience for ShipFast is clear: developers who have a dream.

If you got to Meta Ad Library, you can see there active ads, which consist both image and video, even meme.

And it’s pretty profitable as well. 5.19x average ROAS.

3. Indie hacking Youtube is the next big thing.

Indie hacking is going mainstream.

Youtube will be the next #buildinpublic content center.

Marc is one of the first indie hackers to make Youtube videos, which gave him a big first mover advantage.

He grew his channel to 66k subscribers in less than 6 months.

So are the Youtube videos that useful in marketing?

The answer is: it’s very useful.

These 3 videos below combined have ~1M view, assuming 1% CTR to landing page and 0.2% conversion with $199 LTV, they made Marc at least $50k.

4. Shipping-as-a-marketing.

The ShipFast ecosystem is very interesting.

Marc would build new tools with his own boilerplate, which create compound effect when that tools went viral.

This create a tremendous flywheel.

I call it shipping-as-a-marketing (only applies to boilerplate business).

5. Affiliate program.

This is pretty straight forward: run an affiliate program.

When a customer bought ShipFast, they are also incentivised to become an affiliate. Hence a growth loop.

Note: all the above information and data are retrieved from data providers like Semrush and Meta, there could be error and are mostly assumptions.

Thanks for finishing this issue! 😄 

If you like this one, comment what you think to let me know. Share to your friends if you think it’s useful.

If you want to learn more about their marketing game, check out this video where I break down more detail on ShipFast’s marketing channels and 4 new idea for them to do marketing:

I’ll see you in the next issue!

Desmond