After spending hours in his YouTube channel, Twitter account, business websites, newsletter and interviews, everything I've seen from how he gets killer ideas, how he builds startups and days, how he gets free visitors, how he actually makes his money, and the truth he’s not telling us. Massive admiration for this guy. So let’s get into it.
In This Article:
How He Gets Killers Ideas
Okay, so this guy is awesome.
He’s built like 21 startups in two years.
His first ideas were not that great, but his last ideas have made him a ton of money.
I like how he refers to ideas as vitamins or painkillers.
In the end, business is about finding solutions to pains, so he stopped building vitamin solutions like habit trackers, gamifications, and he started building painkiller solutions.
He finds killer ideas by scratching his own itches.
An example is how he suffered paying stripe $1500 every month to generate invoices, so he built an invoice creator to solve this, and he’s selling the solution for $49.
So you can imagine how this is a no brainer for anyone suffering this pain. Anyway, the golden goose of his ideas is ShipFast, making him $120K a month purely profit, which represents more than 90% of his revenue.
This solution is like stacking together all the tools he uses to launch new startups.
Try ShipFast: shipfa.st
I do understand the huge problem he’s solving, which is starting businesses in days instead of months. Again, one of the pains he suffered himself, he used to take months to ship products. He learned how to build super fast, and he packed this for others to benefit from his methods.
This guy’s just building solutions for himself.
How He Builds Products In Days
Once he has a clear pain, he starts putting together the solution.
He mentions many times to launch as fast as possible. If it’s a win, great. If it’s a flop, well then better to know early so you can move on.
He also mentions sticking to one core feature. This is a big issue for many founders. I’ve been there when you procrastinate the launch because there’s something missing.
He focused on one feature for Zenvoice, but who knows, maybe this product can become the next accounting platform.
Anyway, he builds super fast with this specific method, putting together the frontend with react, the backend with NextJS, a database with MongoDB, payments with Stripe, and email service with Mailgun.
This is just for tech founders who know how to code.
Our party is saving developers tons of hours in building and that’s great.
Marc has managed to get his startups running in days and that is great because the fast we get to our customers, the faster we’ll get our first sales.
How He Gets Free Visitors
He seems to be like a normal developer, but he’s actually a marketing beast.
He mentions to get traffic from Product Hunt when he launches new products, and he’s been featured many times as product of the day, which gives him a ton of exposure and an initial peak of traffic.
And this is pretty good, but I believe it’s just for the start and doesn’t guarantee ongoing visitors to your business.
I believe he’s killing it because he’s built a great community around tech founders.
He’s been documenting his journey on Twitter, where he’s been building in public, super transparent with his results. This is where many founders are heading to.
People want to connect with people, not brands.
So in this case, with the founder behind the brand, he doesn’t have any social accounts for any of his businesses.
He’s promoting everything on behalf of his personal brand, which I believe is genius.
He’s been delivering a ton of value and building trust.
Every time he launches a new product, he’ll craft a pretty funny video like faking scenes of Wolf of Wall street.
He pushes these tweets and they go viral because of the problem in solving, the way he communicates the solution and the push from his community.Pretty strong cocktail here.
He also mentions to invest $1k a month on paid ads, probably more now, and $700 a month into its affiliate program where he’s paying his customers a 30% to 50% commission on every sale they bring in.
And lastly, he’s been working pretty hard on his YouTube channel, again with his personal brand, which is super good.
I recommend you guys follow him. I’m sure this YouTube channel is doing great for him.
How He Makes His Money
He has this pretty cool website where he showcases all his products transparently with how much they’re making, literally from stripe.
Again, another example of a great product he’s built for himself now sells for other people to use. Alright, so this is not an overnight success.
He says to have been making $1K - $3K a month for the last 2 years and now finally he’s find product market feed and he’s killing it.
The truth is is 94% of his money is coming from ShipFast but his other software businesses are making around $5K a month, which is still great because you know he’s solo and this is purely profit. Another thing I was impressed with is his pricing strategy.
We’ve all heard tons of times why SaaS is great because of the subscription model behind it.
Well he’s breaking with subscriptions which at first is like Bro, you’re breaking the model. But then on a double thought it makes so much sense because people hate subscriptions. We all do.
So he believes in one off payments or in pay per use. Conventional software businesses rely heavily on subscription models because building software was super expensive and someone has to pay for the party of the engineers.
But if now a solo guy can build a robust software with code or even with no code, then there’s a big opportunity in the pricing strategy.
Like Bezos would say in your margin is my opportunity. I’d love to see how this works for him in the long run because he might be burning his market. But he mentions a case where he tried jumping back to subscription model and he was a complete disaster.
He was selling one of his products, MakeLanding for $39. Pay once, access forever. And then he tried $5 per month subscription and his sales just plumped.
Get MakeLanding: https://makelanding.ai
I think we’re all just getting fed up with subscriptions. So here we can see how competition is actually great for the consumer, bringing us better products and better prices.
I’m paying like $50 a month for holder to manage my accounting.
I would love to pay one shot pricing. Maybe I have to copy this strategy from my friend Marc.
The Truth He’s Not Telling
Nothing against Marc, he’s become one of my top inspirations.
I just want to share what I’m reading between the lines, but it’s just my personal opinion. So everything he’s doing is centered around software.
But the reality is his product making most money shipped fast is not exactly software.
It’s more like he’s selling his way of building software.
Conceptually, it’s similar to a course he’s teaching us how to do something to ship your startup in days and not weeks, which again is a huge problem that’s not fully solved.
So what’s really making him money? It’s not software, it’s content around the software space, what other people refer to as info products.
And I’m guessing that probably the money that he’ll start making from his YouTube channel as a pure content creator will soon surpass the $5K a month he’s doing from his software products.
In his last update, he was already around $1K a month from YouTube and had a third of the subscribers he has now. So I don’t think he’ll shut down his software businesses.
He loves this and it’s the core of his content strategy. But my guess is he will continue pivoting towards content businesses, putting more efforts into YouTube and launching more online courses like this one. He’s taken the courage to jump into YouTube, which is probably not the comfort zone for many software engineers, and I think it’s just unlocked a new market.
Conclusion
So massive admiration for this guy.
Hope he keeps on killing it and bringing tons of value to us.
Let me know in the comments if you have any questions.
Try ShipFast: shipfa.st
Try MakeLanding: makelanding.ai