If you haven’t been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard about microsaas, where you build out a tiny piece of software with just one feature and ship it as fast as possible in order to validate it and make some money with it.
So how easy is this and can someone with limited coding background make money with it?
Let’s find out.
The strategy of the Shipfast community is rather simple.
Build out a software that solves just one problem, ship it as fast as humanly possible, even if that means writing rather poorly poor code, and see if there is demand for it in the market. If there isn’t, repeat the process until you find something that works. I am someone with a lot of ideas and perfectly able to write poor code, so I think this is a match made in heaven.
Okay, one of the largest influencers in the Shipfast community is Marc Lou, a solopreneur that had great success selling his boilerplate Shipfast in the last few months. Shipfast is a code template that enables you to speed up the process of building your SaaS as a lot of the basics like user authentication, payment processing and basic SEO are already taken care of. Selling such a template during the microsaas hype is basically like selling shovels during a gold rush.
You sell a dream and the tools to possibly make it happen. But how good is Shipfast actually, and is it worth the money?
A few weeks ago I bought Shipfast to build out my own little piece of software. I’ve been following Marc for a while and wanted to try the things that he’s preaching and as someone coming from a business background, I could use all the help I get.
So fully embracing the entrepreneurial spirit, I started a new venture.
The first thing I noticed is that the documentation is good enough for someone that has never used the terminal on his PC before. I have some experience with building websites, but this was the first time that I actually wrote code in an actual programming language.
Setting the project up I opted for the app router in JavaScript and used MongoDB for my database. Marc documentation leads you through all the steps you need to take in order to get everything up and running, so setting up a project is actually really fast, just as promised. Of course, being able to receive payments and authenticate users isn’t actually enough to make money, you need a product to ship.
This part was a little bit more difficult for me, and obviously the Shipfast template doesn’t help you with programming the actual features that turn your idea into reality. So I asked ChatGPT for help however, he had his problems with the new app router in JavaScript. Maybe GitHub Copilot works better and actually helps you write code specifically for your project.
After some long days, however, I managed to get all the processes done and my project running. Now I have to admit that I cheated a little building the processes for some backend stuff.
I just used make.com
This allowed me to build out automations with tools that would have been a lot harder to integrate into my software, especially with my knowledge. However, I don’t think that this is a huge problem and I think it actually aligns with the Shipfast mentality of shipping as fast as possible and not investing a lot of time into coding a project that might actually flop.
It is all about speed and making the product as easy to build as possible. So in order to, for example, set up a new customer and integrate other tools into my software, I just send this information to a webhook in make and process the data over there. This way I am more flexible in the processes, I can build out the workflows visually and debugging is also a lot easier.
So I actually think that I will stick to this method for my next project as well. Having the technical stuff ready I now needed a landing page to present all of it to potential customers. What is great about Shipfast is that it actually helps you create this landing page for your product as well.
There is a ready to use template with tips and tricks on SEO and copywriting as well as a blog for your website. This is amazing as it was fairly easy to set up and is very useful for marketing. Deploying the project and making it public was the next big challenge here.
I would have loved some better documentation as I have never done this before. If you’re a developer you’re probably laughing at me right now, but it is how it is. Besides that, Shipfast was actually very helpful for me.
Without it I would probably still sit on my computer and try to figure out how to get stripe up and running. So having a framework to start with makes your life a lot easier.
Now to the economics of this project.
Buying Shipfast set me back just $130 as I bought it at a discounted price on Appsumo. Sorry Marc, right now I have one paying customer on a yearly plan that pays me $206 per year. Taking into consideration the cost of the domain, I made about $70 in profit so far.
Hopefully there are a few more customers to come. I created the product as an add on for an already existing software and currently I am talking to their team to get listed on their marketplace. As this is still ongoing I don’t want to disclose too many details about the project right now.
For me, using a boilerplate was integral as I could use the already existing features and analyzed the structure of the code to build out my own features. I think even if you are a more experienced developer you can still benefit from the reduced setup time. However, all of this is true for any boilerplate so you don’t have to buy Shipfast specifically.
You can use any other boilerplate with similar features or build out your own and use that in the future. In the end its just a time saver and if you somewhat value your time then its economical to use a boilerplate like chip fast from Marc Lou, especially considering that you can reuse the boilerplate for future projects.