What you can learn from Marc Lou
Marc Lou makes $100k per month selling a boilerplate. He was also Product Hunt 2023 Maker of the Year.
There's a lot to learn from any successful entrepreneur.
People often learn the wrong thing from Marc. They think it's his tech stack. Or that you should never spend more than a few days on a product. But they're learning the wrong things.
This is what you should actually learn from Marc:
1. How to build an audience.
He followed @levelsio’s 12 apps in 12 months. The apps themselves failed. But the real product he was building was his personal brand. And here he massively succeeded.
2. How to launch a YouTube channel.
He has 43k subs and will be at 100k in no time.
I'm proud to have a channel with 3k subs so can appreciate what goes into this. This man is on another level. It's not easy.
3. How to create viral product videos.
I'm not surprised he was able to grow so quickly. He's created some incredible marketing videos for his products.
This was the viral video for ByeDispute:
That product only makes $193 per month. But the real value was in building his brand.
You can create leverage via code, capital, labour, or media. Marc is the latter.
If you want to learn how to build an audience. Marc's journey is a masterclass.
I think Marc is great - he's both really funny and highly informative.
But I think his success is due to more than just "build an audience."
To be more precise, he built an audience of indiehackers, and then created products to sell to indiehackers.
And his largest revenue source by far has a high ($170-$200) price point.
So the keys are:
Well put.
I wonder if his audience goes beyond indiehackers right now. I might be wrong, but seems like a boilerplate product, and the number of sales he's made - it would be hard to do all that from just selling to indie devs.
Shipfa.st is a Next.js SaaS boilerplate, so I guess it depends on how you define "indie dev" but I think the typical customer is going to be someone or some group who is trying to build a SaaS. Maybe some traditional startups too? I'm not sure.
It will be interesting to see how long revenue can be sustained since it's a one-time purchase. That means that he will have to continue to reach more and more customers just to keep revenue up. At some point, it's likely that he will tap out his audience (unless it keeps growing).
But then he can probably just launch another product and sell it to that audience.
I know he's talked about the benefits of one-time purchases, but it wouldn't surprise me if he creates a subscription product for sustainable MRR in the future.
He's def a marketing genius
great
New rockstar Marc Lou :)
Marc definitely does a great job marketing. Especially for indie devs, his content is a perfect mix of marketing and down to earth inspirational.
if you have a personal audience you can divert them anywhere. that's always works.
Thank you for sharing the insights!
Insightful!
If he'd delegate he'd 10x his revenue
Awesome insights. He's definitely redefining startups and indie hacking.
Loving the meme and marketing combo! He cracks it
Some fantastic insights here for sure
Marc is great; I follow him. However, he seems to have descended into building an audience of Indi Hackers and then selling shovels.
There seems to be a formula of build in public to gain an audience and then pivoting from building to selling boiler plates/info products/coaching to this audience.
He is very good at combining memes with good marketing
My favourite idea is "do that works for you", sounds like a great plan to find somethink workable.
ofc, in isolation this thought alone sounds like a dream, but if you think about it, it’s an interesting starting point.
Btw "kill the developer" the best
I started my journey after reading all the posts Marc posted on Twitter and Indiehackers.
He is out of my mind and following his footpath too. Hope I can do that same one day!😇
I have a key takeaway here, after following Marc for quite some time:
"Be the model. Sell the solution to people who are a few steps behind."
Marc can build an audience because what he does relates to what other indie hackers/solopreneurs do.
He is a solopreneur/indie hacker himself. So he understands the challenges they are facing.
Building a product for people having similar problems is the best strategy.
Try - Fail - Learn - Solve - Build - Ship - Try a new one.
If everyone is building products for people building products, then who will build products for other people?
I really want to follow a similar path, as I want to create multiple products in the future. The problem is that the targeted groups differ, so it might be difficult to reach out and build a general audience. My main project right now is Journr, a B2C product that can reach any target group really, but for now I'm focusing on Self-Improvement.
Nevertheless, I'm trying to push content on a weekly basis, building in public.
@NicoBuildsPublic if you wanna follow the journey :)