Marc Lou sold a Next.js boilerplate and published two different revenue clocks

The story

On 24 February 2024, Marc Lou opened a public newsletter with a line he had already used on his wife: when he launched ShipFast, they would be lucky to make $100. Five months later, he wrote, the product made a quarter million dollars at 90 percent profit. That is his five-month window, in his words. ShipFast is a Next.js boilerplate: landing-page parts, Stripe, and login in a GitHub repo. The catalog slug that says $250,000 in five months is echoing this letter, not inventing a third total. The figure is founder-reported cumulative revenue over those five months, not audited annual recurring revenue, and not a later thirty-day snapshot.

He had not started as a boilerplate merchant. After Tai Lopez fired him in November 2021, he wrote, he found the build-in-public crowd on Twitter. He was living in Bali with his Korean wife, $20,000 in the bank, no audience, and coding skills he called bad. Four earlier years of grind had already ended in depression and a quit. The models he named were solo makers working from anywhere, including Pieter Levels, who appeared to earn more than a comfortable life required. Freedom, not a product category, was the pitch he made to himself.

The first public project of that reset was Mood2Movie, a mood-to-genre movie picker he launched in December 2021 because he needed something simple everyone could understand. It was free, so he could post it on Reddit. One post went viral and sent 10,000 visitors, which gave him something to tweet. In six months he launched seven projects for fun and learned coding, search, writing, launching, and marketing. His Twitter account reached 1,000 followers in July 2022. He was making a few hundred dollars a month and did not want to stop.

Habits Garden, a gamified habit tracker, made about $200 a month by August 2022, enough that he went all-in, then learned he was a product-obsessed developer who disliked marketing. Side-project marketing saved him: ship a free tool to promote a paid one. VisualizeHabit, a free compound-effect visualizer, plugged into Habits Garden and brought 30,000 visitors in two months. Users asked for mobile apps. With a friend named Martin he shipped App Store and Play Store versions in fourteen days. It made $700 a month. Not bad, he wrote, and not worth six months of his life. He had fallen in love with the wrong product.

Early 2023 he sold a 2021 micro-startup that made $80 a month for $4,300. He still could not cover a cheap lifestyle, so he shipped again under rules: no free plan, only painkiller products, move on without product-market fit. Eight startups in eight months. Six made money. Two paid the bills. In July 2023 he was making about $3,000 a month, 60 percent from MakeLanding, an AI landing-page generator he did not use and did not care about. In August the family flew to South Korea for a re-wedding. Holidays, he wrote, made the next decision obvious: quit faceless AI and build for customers he would use himself. He sold the landing-page generator for $35,000 and the habit tracker for $10,000.

On 1 September 2023 he launched ShipFast. He packed two years of shipping knowledge into the repo. By the end of that month, he wrote on 23 December 2023, ShipFast made $40,000. He kept adding features and tweeting. Customers sent testimonials about first dollars online. He also launched ByeDispute, a chargeback tool. In November, his revenue hit $65,400 a month at a 91 percent margin and zero employees. That November line is a blended monthly claim for his stack, not a ShipFast-only figure. As of 17 December 2023, ShipFast alone had made $168,100 in total revenue. Those are three different clocks: first month, November blend, year-to-date boilerplate. None of them is the April thirty-day post.

The February 2024 letter tried to explain why copycat boilerplates did not match his numbers. In August 2023, he said, there was no go-to Next.js boilerplate. The site got 500 to 1,500 daily visitors without ads. He argued people buy an emotional outcome, not a feature list: launch, get profitable, quit the nine-to-five. Social proof was videos of bedroom launches. He also wrote that attention arrives when you make $55,000 a month as a solo founder, which feeds newsletters and retweets, which feeds traffic. He launched on Product Hunt and made $6,000 in 48 hours, with an audience of about 35,000 and almost twenty side projects behind him. Luck, he said, sat on two years of proof of work. By then he had sold three products for $50,000 and was making $4,000 a month from the rest, a salary he called reasonable in Bali.

A LinkedIn post dated 8 April 2024 in public copies of the thread is a different window and must stay a different window. The line is $100,000 in revenue in the last thirty days, plus a claim that it was making $4,000 per day, and a count of twenty-three projects before one took off. That is a thirty-day snapshot, not the five-month quarter-million from February, and not the $168,100 year-to-date from December. Catalog copy that collapses $250,000 in five months into $100,000 in the last N days is mixing clocks he published separately. LinkedIn is often a login wall; this record treats that post as founder-reported only and uses the newsletters as the readable five-month source.

He is blunt that showing up daily is the method he would bet on, and equally blunt that five months earlier he had no idea what he was doing. The product is a one-time boilerplate sale. Other interviews have called the cash flow surprisingly recurring; this record does not convert GitHub access into annual recurring revenue. Developer-tools labels in directories are categories, not audits. The 90 percent profit and 91 percent margin lines are his cost claims, not a tax filing.

Read together, Lou's own letters describe a stack of intervals, not one hockey stick. Keep the five-month quarter-million, the first-month $40,000, the December $168,100 ShipFast total, the November $65,400 blended month, and the April thirty-day $100,000 in separate columns. Do not invent a second $250,000. Do not treat LinkedIn's last thirty days as the same interval as the newsletter's five months. He shipped almost twenty misses, sold the AI work he did not use, and sold a repo of the stack he actually used.