If you follow me on Twitter/X or Threads you know that I’m a strong believer in the build in public philosophy.
It’s a way of building products in public, which means sharing the ups and downs, the experiments done, the struggles and wins, and also being open about the revenues. Recently, Shipped.club hit a new revenue milestone, $15k total revenues, and 126 customers since the 4th of December 2023 (the original launch date).
And I want to share with you what I did to get here.
Who I am and my background.
I am Luca, senior software engineer by profession. I started building products on the side of my 9-5 job in 2019.
I’ve followed the usual (wrong) path of engineers when approaching product building.
I spent two years working on it, launched it on Product Hunt in 2021, and got no interest.
That’s when I realized that a good product is not enough to get attention and customers, you need marketing.
I started being active on Twitter and never abandoned that habit.
In 2022 I launched my second SaaS product, a tool for Twitter. I spotted some interesting usages of the platform, especially related to Direct Messages.
The product was a real success. Fast forward to June 2023: $3k MRR in 1.5 years.
In 2022 I also decided to start doing build in public on Twitter. Over time I created relationships with people with a similar mindset, and people active on Twitter as well (other entrepreneurs, aspiring ones, developers searching for more freedom, and so on).
Again, fast forward to today, I have built a community of 21k people on Twitter.
Why did I launch a SaaS Boilerplate?
After shipping 6 other SaaS products, I have solved all the issues of building and launching a SaaS.
Landing pages that sell, waitlist, pre-sales, sign up, collect payments, affiliate programs, integrate email services, UI kits for fast development, blog, and more.
So creating a boilerplate was a no-brainer decision for me.
I already copied and pasted the code of my previous SaaS products to create a new one, so why not make it available to others as well?
The boilerplate is a huge time saver, you don’t need to spend time on figuring things out, and you already get components well-designed for you, in short, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, it’s already sorted out for you.
Why is this product working for me?
I think the are some reasons why this product is working quite well for me.
First of all, I love coding and building products. What I provide is of great quality.
I always loved helping people, that’s my characteristic. Building a new feature or solving a bug to unlock the job of others, is so rewarding.
That’s also why I provide a private Discord community to all the customers, I want to help them even after the purchase and create a community of like-minded people. They also help each other. It’s simply amazing.
Lastly, I know the developer’s world (most of the customers are software engineers) and I know their mindset and needs, so it’s easier for me to come up with blog posts and tool ideas to serve them even better.
So far I’ve created blog posts on how to use Schema.org, how to track errors with Sentry, the best VS Code themes and fonts, but also how to become a Micro SaaS founder on the side of a 9-5 job, and 10 lessons learned to earn $137k+ revenues.
Which are my distribution channels?
As you can imagine, Twitter plays a big role. Most of the traffic and customers are coming from there.
But I also get interested people from other sources. I do build in public, and I share my milestones. It means that I have some exposure and I was included in some newsletters, which brought customers. Shipped was also mentioned in a video by a YouTube influencer, which led to additional purchases.
I've also tried paid ads in December, but they didn't work well. There are no quick wins in marketing. I suppose you need to spend more time (and money) to fine-tune your ad messaging, even if you have product Market Fit.
Provide value for free
A great way to generate interest in your product is to provide value for free. You may ask, how? Here’s an example.
I’ve written a free guide on How to build and launch a Micro SaaS in 7 days using Notion, and I launched it on Twitter with a giveaway. The interest was so intense, that I decided to convert it into a free email course, that I added to the website of Shipped. Actually, I’m using a trick. I show a pop-up whenever the user is going to leave the website (exit intent). The free course is so appealing that they enter their email and use the course (one email per day, for 7 days).
I hope this was useful to you all. See you at the next update for the 200 customers milestone (I hope soon!).