marclou

I hate marketing.

But I need to grow my startups.

So I built a Twitter bot that extracts some data from my SaaS and posts it on Twitter.

9 days after the launch, it has 707 followers and grew revenue by 56%

Background:

I built a link-in-bio tool for developers/solopreneurs — it's called IndiePage. Customers can verify their revenue with Stripe and display it on their profiles.

It's been making anywhere from $1K to $4K/month since I launched it 1.5 years ago.

The Twitter Bot posts every time a customer of IndiePage makes money. The bot tags the maker of the startup and links to her/his website.

It gives them a little extra exposure. It gives IndiePage a little extra exposure too.

I love coding too much. So I find ways to do marketing in symbiosis with my coding drive.

— Marc

Hey HN,

I use Canny to collect customer feedback and build the right features, but…

1. It’s way too complicated for a solo dev 2. $99/month… really?

So I built a free alternative called Insighto:

- Collect feedback from your customers - Prioritize features - Build a product users love.

I built other stuff. Here are my 20+ products — marclou.com

— Marc

I thought I found the perfect name but you proved me wrong ah!

Because 1 customer would have to generate 49,000 invoices before I start losing money.

Too many businesses are greedy with subscriptions. I won't join the trend.

Are you Pieter Levels from NomadList? :)

Affiliates are getting great results, good luck!

Hard to quantify. But clearly a lot, that's for sure.

I played with ads (cold audience) and it worked well too (~$15K rev for $5K spent) so the Twitter audience isn't 100%

Noted. Do you share your learnings/stories anywhere?

Correct. Although my definition of success is: 1. no partner/employee — total freedom 2. building apps all day 3. that have a purpose/use case Somehow, I'm already there and have no intent to do much more

Good point.

Either I'll build an audience on YouTube

And/Or I'll build new startups

Also, my Twitter is really small so there's much more work to do there.

Any thoughts?

Note: I've been building an audience there for 2 years (the first 4 years was me building in the dark)

100% with you.

It's so hard to find real problems if you spend 90% of your time finding problems.

Having a job is a great fix.

Building side projects with no purpose works too.

For instance, you can sell a boilerplate to make it faster, or get feedback from users and build for them.

Although it's much harder to start, and hard to navigate life without $ for months (years in my case)

OP here. I call my products startups because I need to believe each will make $ at some point, otherwise, I wouldn't have been able to grind for 6 years.

Some are actual startups with decent userbase and recurring revenue, and some are just free logo makers.

This is exactly the summary of my last 6 years. So happy you could see through. Do you have any social? Would love to connect.

I agree, but that would take much more than a 7-minute read. I wrote about everything I know about marketing in other posts in my newsletter. You'll see dozens of articles about writing good copy, launching on social media, growing an audience, etc.

Weather is sh*t here but too but here are my 2 cents:

I got depressed after trying go-big-or-go-home entrepreneurship for 4 years.

In 2021, when I discovered cool kids like Pieter Levels building apps out of curiosity and making $ with them, my life changed.

I took the plunge and built apps while sharing everything (learning, code, salary).

As my following grows, I receive tons of messages from people mentioning it's inspirational, so I keep sharing most transparently.

I'm not teaching people to get rich to buy a Lambo. I'm giving them the tools I use to build stuff that makes me happy. Most of these tools won't change the world.

Internet is cold. But if you were to meet me, you'd see an average Joe walking barefoot and who is obsessed with building apps.

(1L of water does wonder to hangover)

Yep I did and it worked well.. Which icon did you try? Might trying another one?

I added a link to Lucide at the bottom right of the editor, did I miss something?

What was your input? will check

Hey HN,

I'm Marc and I ship like a madman. 17 products in the last 2 years.

So I made LogoFast: A simple & free logo maker, with a touch of AI.

1. Pick an icon 2. Add a background color 3. Adjust padding, shadow, roundness. 4. Export, and voila!

If you need inspiration, the AI helps you pick the right icon & colors.

I share all my work on : https://twitter.com/marc_louvion

I also built ShipFast: The NextJS boilerplate to ship startups in days, not weeks: https://ShipFa.st

I knew it was you by seeing the design. Would love a demo video before signing up. Congrats on the launch!

Been using JS for 6+ years and never felt the need to upgrade, so I tried to keep the boilerplate minimal

I'm 100% open and public about my work and revenue on Twitter https://twitter.com/marc_louvion

& this is what i built: https://marclou.com

if the weekend project has a buy button and a product, yes

I've been using Mailgun for 6 years and never had any issue, so it pass my reliability filter.

Same for MongoDB. It's also free, scalable. For now I don't see a reason to migrate. Open to hear your thoughts :)

another openai wrapper

cool, another GPT wrapper

How would you let people see, without giving full access?

Love this

Congrats for being featured on the main page Maxime. Best of luck!

Hey HN,

I've been working from home for 7+ years and found a million ways to procrastinate. Along the way, I found a few hacks to get disciplined. I think everybody does, at some point.

So I created 50 Hacks to collectively get the best tips out there:

- Browse and upvote your favorite hacks - Write your own to help others

The site is new, I launched it a few days ago. I'll consider every feedback posted here to improve it.

Marc Lou

PS: There were 30,000 visitors overnight so you could experience a few bugs.