Marc Lou: From Failed Products to a One-Time ShipFast Sale

Starting Over with Small Products After the Income Stopped

In September 2023, Marc Lou released ShipFast, a bundle of the base code needed to build a web service. He told his wife he would be lucky to make $100, but the first month brought in $40,000. The product started from the preparation work he repeated every time he built another service.

When he first started a business, his approach was different. After graduating with a computer science degree in 2016, he spent a year on an app for connecting people who like sports, but he could not answer the question of how it would make money. In 2017 he moved to Korea and joined friends in an AI business that predicted flight prices, and he left that one too after nine months without revenue.

His first paying customer came in 2018. While thinking through a marketing tool for escape room businesses, he took the advice to sell it before building it, and a call with one Australian business ended with a $99 monthly subscription. VirallyBot grew into a business that covered his living costs. When COVID-19 shut down his customer businesses in 2020, that revenue disappeared quickly.

In 2021 he stopped building and took a job, then lost it in November. According to his recollection, he was living in Bali with about $20,000 in the bank. That was also when he found developers on Twitter who were building small products for a living. Watching people like Peter Levels and Danny Postma, he started making products he could finish alone and publish right away.

Mood2Movie, released that December, was a free app that recommended movies to match a user's mood. A single Reddit post spread and brought in about 10,000 visitors, and he shared the experience on Twitter. Over the next six months he released seven projects, learning coding, search traffic, writing and promotion along the way. Each release also added a few more readers he could tell about the next product.

Habits Garden: Time Spent on a Topic He Liked

In March 2022 he built Habits Garden, where practicing habits grows a flower. It combined his own interest in games and habit building, and he put a lot of time into it. Even so, monthly revenue was still under $200 in September of that year.

The way he improved things was promotion through free tools. He built tools like VisualizeHabit, which shows what small habits look like when they build up over a long period, and used them to introduce Habits Garden. Revenue and his Twitter audience grew together, and by January 2023 Habits Garden was making about $800 a month. A mobile app that users asked for shipped in two weeks with help from another developer.

Adding features ran into its own ceiling. In March 2023 he decided that spending all day on the product was not increasing his income much, and he stopped building new features. He kept fixing bugs and answering customers, and about $500 a month continued to come in. In October that year he announced he had sold Habits Garden for $10,000.

Around then he also tested a product that used AI. MakeLanding, which generated landing pages, made $12,000 over a few months, but a low purchase conversion rate, customer complaints and a high refund rate weighed on him. He decided that when choosing his next product he would stay closer to problems he had actually experienced and understood. That meant building a tool he needed himself and checking whether other people needed it too.

Turning Repeated Setup Work into ShipFast

The repeated work had become obvious after building several services. To ship a new idea he had to add login and payments, set up email sending, and rebuild the pricing table and landing page. He was spending time on the same preparation before developing the core feature of the service. He organized that work so it could be reused, and gave it the name ShipFast.

ShipFast is a Next.js boilerplate, a base set of code that buyers copy as the starting point for a new project. Buyers add their own service features to the prepared structure and connect the outside service accounts they need. The official documentation covers setting up authentication and payments, a database, email and deployment. The target buyers were developers who could do this work but wanted to stop repeating it from scratch every time.

He set the price as a one-time purchase. A buyer who pays once can use the code across multiple projects and also gets the documentation and updates. For developers testing several ideas, the appeal is that they can reuse the same foundation in their next product. Compared with the time it would take to build the same thing, charging for the code bundle becomes an easy argument.

He said he spent one week getting ShipFast into a sellable state. After publishing it on Product Hunt he made $6,000 in 48 hours, more than he had made in all of 2022. Behind that short build was the development and launch experience from the earlier projects.

Early Customers, Real Demand and Cumulative Revenue

Early customers showed reactions he had not seen with earlier products. One customer apologized first even though a sign-in error appeared after payment, and another asked for bank details so they could wire money because they did not have a credit card. Those experiences made it clear that some customers strongly wanted to use the product. Willingness to push through a rough purchase process shows a level of demand that visitor counts alone cannot reveal.

By launch he already had readers who could spread the word. By his own account, he had about 35,000 Twitter followers in August 2023, and they had watched him build and sell product after product. Some of them were developers planning their own launches. When he started selling the tool he used for fast development, his accumulated experience lined up with what his readers cared about.

The sales copy matched the outcome developers wanted. It led with shipping a service quickly and making the first revenue, and showed testimonials from customers who had actually launched. He shared his own revenue numbers, which led to a newsletter feature and mentions from other creators, and that attention flowed back to the sales page. In a February 2024 retrospective he said the page drew 500 to 1,500 visitors a day without ad spend.

The cumulative ShipFast revenue he published was $168,100 as of December 17, 2023. On February 24, 2024 he said cumulative revenue had reached $250,000 in about five months after launch. The reaction to the launch carried into months of sales that followed.

The Work That Remains After a One-Time Sale

Those numbers have to be read together with the one-time pricing. A strong month did not mean existing buyers would pay the same amount again the next month. Continuing sales required a steady flow of new buyers, which made sharing the build process and the results an important part of selling.

He also set up an affiliate program that pays a commission on referrals. When another creator or developer introduces ShipFast and a sale follows, they receive part of the revenue. The program created an incentive to promote the product outside the accounts he ran himself, and it tied the cost of finding buyers to actual sales.

Work continued after the sale. ShipFast says it includes lifetime updates, and Marc Lou explains that he passes on the improvements and fixes he makes while using it in his own new projects. Because he sells code that connects to real operations like payments and login, usage guidance and bug fixes are part of the product's value. The terms mean a single payment also has to cover later support.

In 2024 YouTube became a new growth channel. Marc Lou recalled that the spread of his videos pushed ShipFast to $133,000 in monthly revenue that April. He also said that as revenue across his businesses swung widely, the pressure to keep the numbers up grew. Even after strong sales he still had to keep producing content and finding new customers.

The lesson he wrote down in early 2024 was about which products deserve continued time. He had launched more than twenty products, he said, but only one had produced both large income and growth, and he advised watching the early response before choosing where to focus. With Habits Garden he stopped new development and kept it running, while with ShipFast he added features based on customer response and kept promoting. Repeating attempts included decisions about how to rebalance his time.

What remained after the failures was concrete. Code from earlier products made the next build faster, and the promotion skills and audience he built while spreading free tools helped sell ShipFast. The criteria he used to choose products changed so he would not repeat the same failure. Even when a first product performs modestly, it can lower the cost of the next attempt and leave a channel to reach buyers, so the products that follow start from better conditions.