ShipFast
by Marc Lou
Marc Lou built ShipFast in seven days and turned it into the anchor of a portfolio that now earns him $45K and up a month, all posted in public.
What they built
ShipFast is a code starter kit for building software products. It comes with the boring, necessary parts already wired up: payments, login, email, a database and a landing page, so a developer can skip weeks of setup and ship a paid product in days. Marc Lou built it in about seven days to solve his own problem, then sold it to every other builder who was tired of rebuilding the same plumbing on each new idea.
How they did it
Marc builds in public louder than almost anyone. He posts revenue screenshots, launch stories and monthly income reports, and that transparency is the marketing. ShipFast sells to the exact people who follow him, other indie hackers, so the audience and the customer are the same person. He then reused the playbook: CodeFast to teach coding, DataFast for analytics, and a string of small bets, each launched fast and cross-promoted to the same crowd.
“When I launched ShipFast, I told my wife we'd be lucky to make $100. $384,000 and 7 months later, I eat my words. That's the power of showing up.”
View on XThe numbers
Marc posts monthly income reports across his whole portfolio. In July 2025 he reported $48,921 for the month, with ShipFast contributing $18.2K and the rest spread across CodeFast, DataFast and a dozen smaller products (source). Later months have run higher. These are public self-reports, so treat them as claimed, and read the figure as Marc's monthly earnings rather than a single audited product line.
What to take from it: build in public before you have anything to show. By the time ShipFast launched, Marc already had the audience that made it sell, and every product since has ridden the same attention.
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