The Almanack of Marc Louvion

On October 28, I saw this tweet from Pieter Levels.

He said a lot of people share fake MRR screenshots to get attention.

The next morning, I woke up still thinking about it. Because I share my own revenue publicly, and I care about trust. So I had an idea…

What if there were a place where founders could verify their revenue by connecting a read-only Stripe API key?

I just opened Cursor and said, “build this.”

Within hours, the first version was ready. It had only one headline, two buttons (one for adding a startup, one for searching), and a leaderboard showing real revenue.

The leaderboard just featured my 8 profitable startups on launch day

I launched it the next day by quoting Pieter’s original tweet. The tweet got 3,000+ likes, 2M+ views.

When I launched TrustMRR, I had no monetization plan.

At the bottom of the page, I added my 𝕏 handle and a link to my boilerplate, the same codebase I used to build this app in 24 hours. I also embedded DataFast’s real-time visitor globe for people to discover my little SaaS.

If you visit TrustMRR, you should see yourself in there!

I also added a few ad slots on the sidebar. At first, they promoted my own product. Then, just for fun, I opened a few empty ones for others to buy.

I priced them at $299/month. Within hours, half were sold.

As the tweet gained traction, I kept increasing the price — $699, $999, $1,499.

Within 3 days, every ad slot was gone, and my side project made $20,378.

It became the third fastest-growing project I’ve ever built (I’ve built more than 30).

It took me months to grow some of them. This one took a weekend. Ha, entrepreneurship!

After launch, I kept building whatever users asked for.

I didn’t know what the perfect product looked like, so I just listened.

For fun, I even made a mini-game called $1 vs $1M Startup, where players guess which verified startup makes more.

Soon, big startups started verifying their revenue. Some were making millions a year.

And then Gumroad joined. It felt unreal.

Gumroad’s page on TrustMRR

And that’s it.

No grand plan. No strategy.

Just an idea that solved a tiny problem, built fast, launched fast, and fueled by luck, timing, and curiosity.

Takeaways

• Simplicity wins. The landing page had one headline and two buttons. Nothing else.

• Treat your OG image like a YouTube thumbnail. It’s your first impression.

• Context matters. This only worked because I built it in response to Pieter’s tweet; it gave people a story.

• Show up and build. You can’t control luck, but you can increase your odds by playing (shipping) more often.

— Marc Lou

Build in public update 🧑‍💻

DataFast prices double on October 31.

Over the last year, I’ve added tons of features and made it one of the most affordable analytics tools compared to similar products, with plenty more on the way.

But DataFast only exists because of its early users. So if you subscribe before October 31, you will be grandfathered into today’s price, for as long as you keep your subscription active.

Thank you to the 600+ customers who believed in this product early and shared feedback; it wouldn’t exist without you ❤️

I’ve been a loser most of my life.

As a kid, I fought with my mom because I hated school, and school hated me back.

As a teenager, I didn't grow up. I was 155cm and super skinny when all the other guys were 180cm. I became an easy target, and I had to stop playing sports.

As a uni student, I lost the remaining bits of self-confidence. I had no role model, no idea what to do. So I became the guy who drinks the most and plays World of Warcraft the hardest.

As an entrepreneur, the first four years were painful. I spent an entire year thinking I was the next Mark Zuckerberg, I lost my friends who followed the traditional path, and I felt completely misunderstood by everyone.

Nothing ever seemed to work.

And in 2021, I hit what felt like the natural conclusion of that losing streak — broke, 27, living with my wife in my parents’ house in Paris, still trying to prove I wasn’t a failure.

I thought I’d build something clever: The Golden Plumber. A $2 PDF to help men stop dribbling after peeing. Yes, really.

I even printed stickers with QR codes and stuck them in public toilets in Paris, hoping strangers would buy it. Nobody did. Another failure.

Every day felt like a parody of entrepreneurship. I was broke, embarrassed, living in my childhood room, and my parents still didn’t understand what I did for a living. One morning, I punched four holes in the wall. Then I cried in my wife’s arms.

That was rock bottom. But looking back, that’s where everything started to flip.

Failure strips away your ego. Once there’s nothing left to lose, all that’s left is the work.

I read books. I worked out. I learned Korean. I started coding again. And slowly, I realized something simple:

Success isn’t luck. It’s a law of physics. If you keep showing up, something will move.

In the past 4 years, I lived the same day 1,460 times. Workout. Code. Repeat. I built 30 startups. Most failed. But each one made me a little sharper. A little faster. A little closer.

Until one day, one of them hit. And that was enough to change everything.

If you’re in your loser era right now, the universe is testing how much you actually want it. Keep showing up. Keep losing forward. If you put in enough reps, something will move.

And one day, you’ll realize you were never really losing.

— Marc Lou

A year ago, I started DataFast.

The first months were rough. Churn was 33%. It took me 124 days to reach the first $1K MRR.

Today it’s a different story:

• $5,338 MRR growing 22% month-over-month

• 405 paying customers

• Churn at 8.99%

Here are 6 lessons I wish I knew earlier:

1. Pick one problem, and ignore the rest

Analytics is a crowded space. Big, VC-funded startups dominate it. And most people just use free tools like Google Analytics.

Instead of competing with everyone, I narrowed down.

I built DataFast only for entrepreneurs (because that’s who I care about).

And the #1 problem entrepreneurs face with analytics? Revenue attribution. Most tools are either painful to set up or only show vanity metrics like pageviews — which mean nothing without context.

So I positioned DataFast as the revenue-first analytics tool for entrepreneurs.

That simple focus made it easier to stand out, because I was speaking the language of entrepreneurs and solving their problems.

By the way, positioning feels natural when you’re scratching your own itch — which is exactly why I started DataFast.

2. Using info products is a cheat code

Selling SaaS is hard. Most people aren’t ready to commit to a monthly charge right away.

My first batch of DataFast customers came from my course CodeFast and my boilerplate ShipFast — where I upsold my analytics tool.

When people deploy a site built with ShipFast, I nudge them to try DataFast

One-time products are low-commitment, so they convert better. And once someone has already paid you and liked what they got, it’s much easier to upsell them to SaaS. Trust is already built.

3. Build viral features

I designed features to be shareable.

Because people only share what feels valuable and beautiful to them.

It’s a heuristic that forces me to aim for the best. If it isn’t good enough to screenshot, it isn’t good enough.

That’s how I built things like the real-time globe with avatars, customer journeys, and funnels.

By focusing on features worth sharing, it’s win-win: My customers have content to share, and I get free distribution.

4. Let customers decide the roadmap

In May 2025, I added a customer chat box on every page

Instantly, users started sharing what they wanted. Patterns emerged. I turned those into a feedback board where people could vote.

The roadmap became obvious. Instead of building features based on my assumptions, I built what users actually cared about.

5. Cut onboarding down to the AHA moment

Because I let customers decide the roadmap, I ended up building a feature I never thought I needed: Funnels

That’s how I discovered the biggest bottleneck in my SaaS: Onboarding. Only 6% of users who signed up ever started a free trial.

So I went back and stripped the onboarding flow down to the essentials. I removed everything that wasn’t directly helping users reach the “aha” moment (the #1 reason they signed up): Revenue attribution.

This shift had a huge influence on growth. I documented the full breakdown here.

6. Share your progress until people trust you

For a year, I shared daily progress on Twitter.

Most tweets went completely ignored. But every now and then, one post would click and bring in dozens of signups.

Twitter tweet

The real lesson wasn’t about writing the perfect tweet — it was that consistency beats quality. By showing up every day, I built trust. Even skeptics eventually came back when they saw me making progress.

It doesn’t matter which platform you use. The same approach works on YouTube, where one video turned into my biggest lead magnet. Just be genuine, concise, and consistent.

Final thought

If I had to sum it up:

• Focus on who you’re building for

• Make it easy for them to trust you

• Ship things worth sharing

• Keep talking to your users

• Show up every day

DataFast isn’t big yet. But at $5K MRR, it finally feels like the hard work compounds.

See you at $10K,

— Marc Lou

Everything that worked for me came from scratching my own itches.

I once made Naval25 — a tiny site where people voted on their favorite Naval Ravikant quotes. Sounds pointless, but it was something I cared about, so I built it.

And that “pointless” project made noise. It gave me feedback. It opened doors to the next thing, and the next, until eventually I built ShipFast, my boilerplate, born from the itch of rebuilding the same setup again and again. That one made $1.2M.

Solve your own problem → Ship an MVP → Discover new problems → Scratch again

It doesn’t need to be a big problem. My friend Jack wanted to stop doomscrolling TikTok. So he built an app for himself. That itch gave him his first revenue, which taught him how to do marketing, which led to his next SaaS at $15K MRR.

Scratching your own itch works because:

• You care enough to finish it.

• It’s authentic, so people feel it.

• Sometimes your itch is everyone else’s too.

Right now, I’m building BioAge — a health dashboard that connects my food intake, workouts, sleep data, and lab tests. Because everything in health is connected: food affects sleep, sleep affects performance, and performance affects food cravings. I wanted a way to see the whole picture of my body in one place.

It’s not really a business yet. Maybe it will be one day. But that’s not the point. The point is: I had an itch, so I scratched it.

Don’t start with a “business.” Start with yourself.

Curiosity is where startups start.

— Marc Lou

It’s Sunday, 8:01 am in South Korea.

I’m in an empty coffee shop with a latte, waiting for inspiration to strike.

Spoiler: it doesn’t.

So instead, I’ll just write about what I’ve actually been working on.

200K followers

I started sharing my thoughts on Twitter in November 2021.

Growing an audience was never the goal (and never will be), but I thought:

"If I can get a few people watching my work, I won't have to start from 0 when I launch new startups."

Launch like nobody’s watching, because nobody’s watching yet

It took 8 months to get 1,000 followers. It was very slow, but I didn't care because my north star metric was the number of shipped startups.

I was having fun, and I was committed. I think early followers felt it.

My audience grew faster after shipping 10+ startups. And much faster after the financial success of ShipFast.

In July 2024, my Twitter account crossed 100K followers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKR8_4rqJ3I

And here we are, August 2025, with 200K followers, a number I never thought possible for a little guy writing JavaScript and surfing.

I'm deeply grateful to every single one of you who has been following the journey. You make me feel less weird and make my life more meaningful.

So thank you 200,000 times ❤️

$5,000 MRR

A year ago, I launched a new SaaS, DataFast.

The growth was very slow at the beginning. I thought I had made a big mistake and wanted to give up.

But I’m stubborn, so I kept improving the product, polishing the onboarding, and building features users requested. This is what the MRR growth looks like:

• $1K MRR → 4 months

• $2K MRR → 3 months

• $3K MRR → 2 months

• $4K MRR → 1 month

• $5K MRR → soon?

I wrote about how I increased the revenue trajectory with better onboarding.

5.6% body fat

You didn’t expect this in a tech newsletter, did you?

Well, it’s not about fitness, but about psychology, productivity, and work.

When I started my entrepreneurial journey in 2016, I neglected physical activity because I perceived it as time wasted. This is partially why I burned out in 2020.

Since 2021, I’ve put my health as my #1 priority. These are my non-negotiables:

• 10K daily steps

• 1 hour of workout

• 8 hours of good sleep

• 95% healthy food (my diet)

2021 | 2025

These habits create a positive reinforcement loop that impacts every aspect of my life positively:

→ Finishing them gives me an instant hit of “I did it,” which boosts my mood and focus
→ Repeating them compounds into real results (more startups shipped, better shape)
→ Results reinforce my identity, so sticking to the habits becomes effortless

In fact, I enjoy my routine so much, I repeat it 365 days a year.

New project

My Twitter feed is full of 20-year-old founders crushing it with short-form content marketing on TikTok.

I’m a boomer, but I want to give it a try too.

So I’ve created ClipMarc.com — a content reward program to clip my YouTube channel. Clippers get paid $3 per 1k views (well above market average). It’s limited to 30 people, and it has a first-come, first-served policy.

My latte is cold. And I’m late for my swimming class.

That’s it for today. See you next week!

— Marc Lou

Build in public update 🧑‍💻

I just shipped Funnels inside DataFa.st to find bottlenecks in my startups.

First thing I learned: around 50% of visitors don’t even scroll. They look at the headline and leave.

That hurts, but it’s also the best reminder that most of marketing isn’t adding more features or getting more traffic, but writing a kickass headline 😎

This is ShipFast's scroll depth funnel, and it’s not pretty

I’ve met hundreds of people with great ideas who never made it.

But I’ve never met anyone who launched 10 startups and failed.

That’s the difference between the people you see crushing it online and the people who don’t: a bias for action.

Thinking feels productive, but it’s not. It’s like reading 100 books on swimming but never getting in the water. You’ll drown the moment you try.

For me, execution didn’t come naturally. I had to force it with routine. For the past 6 years, I’ve lived the same day 2,000 times: Workout, coffee, code. Boring, but it works. I avoid overthinking by holding onto one north star metric: build 100 tiny startups.

Each day starts with a fork: dream it, or ship it.

Success is nothing more than repeating the right choice.

— Marc Lou

P.S. If you’re launching soon, this could help.

A couple of days ago, I saw a tweet from Adam.

He’s making about ~$1K/month from his projects, but feels empty, unworthy, and unsure if it’s even worth continuing.

It hit me hard.
Because that was me for 5+ years.
And it’s the story of most entrepreneurs.

Here’s what I’ve realized:
Everyone has an idea.
But 90% never act on it.
Out of the few who do, 90% quit before anything happens.

If you’ve built a little internet business, if you own a domain and it’s live, if it’s making any money, even $100/month, you’re already in the top 0.1%.

And if you’re reading this newsletter on a Saturday morning instead of scrolling cheap dopamine content, you’re way ahead of the crowd.

The trap

Social media only shows the top 0.1% of the top 0.1%.

The 19-year-old founder making $300K/month.
The multi-millionaire who bought Bitcoin in 2009.
The fitness guy whose abs look like they were carved in 3D.

You almost never see the ones grinding without results, even though they make up the vast majority.

“I’m useless.”

For my first 4 years, I didn’t even know what “startup Twitter” was.

I was surrounded by friends and family who didn’t understand.
I felt lonely every day.

It took 2 years to make my first $1 online.
2 years of complete void.
No support from anyone, no traction, nothing but the same feeling crippling every day.
I’m useless.

Even after my first startup made enough money to pay the bills, I felt behind.
I was the one working the hardest, yet my friends with jobs made more money and had more free time.

By the way, here’s something I didn’t know back then:
A startup making $1K/month is a $36K asset if you sell it (MRR × 36 months is a common rule of thumb).
That’s a year’s salary for many people.

But I didn’t see it that way.
I saw failure.

At one point, I fell into depression.
I quit entrepreneurship and got a job.
6 months later, I was fired, so I came back to building.

And for two more years…
Nothing.

By year five, I was making $500/month, living off my wife’s support, feeling like a complete failure.

Then, out of nowhere, one of my projects took off.
And everything flipped.

Looking back

I wouldn’t erase a single failure.

The void is what makes the flip moment feel so good.
The pain gave me a story worth telling.

Without it, I’d just be “some guy who got lucky,” and you wouldn’t read my newsletter.

If you’re building, you’re already amazing.
If you’re making a little money, it’s just a matter of time.
The struggles, the emptiness, the crippling self-doubt, they’re the foundation.
They’re part of the process.

Don’t give up.
It’s all worth it in the end.

I root for you.

— Marc lou

My little SaaS, DataFast, is now growing 4x faster than a year ago.

In my quest to improve MRR, I noticed something: 95% of people who signed up never became customers, ouch.

So I spent weeks maniacally polishing the onboarding flow.

DataFast's average revenue per visitor grew from $0.04 at launch to $0.30 in the last 30 days. Here are 4 lessons I’ve learned.

1. Show the promise first

The biggest win came from stripping the onboarding down to one goal: Get users to the “aha” moment as fast as possible.

For DataFast, that moment is the little orange revenue bar next to the traffic bar. It shows users exactly where their money is coming from.

So I redesigned everything around getting them to that chart. First, I put all features into 2 buckets:

1. Core Flow: Features that are required to reach the aha moment (install the tracking script, integrate with a payment provider)

2. Side Quests: They can help, but they don’t deliver the core promise upfront (invite team members, track custom goals)

Then I removed every feature that doesn’t fall into the Core Flow bucket. New users who sign up experience the following flow:

1 page = 1 step. Everything else is invisible. Complexity kills momentum. Treat attention like a limited resource.

Some of my users don’t want to integrate with payment providers yet, so I made this onboarding step skippable and added a popup to the main analytics dashboard.

All paths should lead to the aha moment.

2. Turn questions into documentation

On May 26th, 2025, I added a customer chat plugin and noticed users reach out whenever they’re stuck on the onboarding. This is gold.

Every time someone asked a question, I wrote a guide. Then I linked it inside the product, right where people usually get stuck.

Some of those guides now rank on Google, and AI assistants surface them too.

Users can self-debug themselves, and onboarding-related requests have dropped dramatically.

I polish the documentation as much as I polish the product. I deeply care about the UI/UX and make it very easy for my users to find what they need.

Your support inbox is the best roadmap for your docs.

3. Show the finished product early

Some parts of onboarding can’t be sped up. For DataFast, it takes time to collect enough data to show revenue insights.

So I made a video.

As soon as a user finishes the onboarding, they see a 60-second clip of a real DataFast dashboard — with revenue mapped to real traffic. It shows them what’s coming and gives them a reason to come back.

4. Test onboarding like a first-time user

Every time I update the onboarding, I opened an incognito tab and signed up again. I did the whole flow from scratch — no assumptions.

If anything confused me, I rewrote it. If any step felt unnecessary, I cut it.

Eventually, I saw tweets saying “DataFast’s onboarding is smooth.” That’s when I knew it was working.

You’re not done until even your grandma could do it.

Your best growth channel might be right under your nose: The people who already signed up — but never made it past step one.

Let them see the juice, fast.

— Marc Lou

PS #1. I used to polish onboarding too early. Don’t optimize for retention until you have signs of demand (your guts will tell you).

PS #2. If you signed up for DataFast, but didn’t subscribe—why?

Even after launching 30+ startups, there’s still one feeling I can’t get over:

Launching a new product… and nothing happens. It sucks.

But here’s the good part: You can relaunch the same product 100 times without changing it. Nobody keeps track. Here are 3 ways to relaunch until it takes off:

Solopreneur update

I moved to South Korea for a month 🇰🇷

My SaaS DataFast reached $4,000 MRR after almost 1 year of focus, and I’m working on a little secret project (coming soon).

Gym, healthy food, JavaScript. That’s the plan for the next 30 days!

1. Rebrand

Same product. New name. New domain. New color theme. New hero section.

The last one is the most important. 80% of people don’t scroll past the headline. In most cases, it’s where the bottleneck is. Make sure you radically change your offer.

I rebranded my AI website builder from LandingAI (#1) to MakeLanding (#2).
Sold the SaaS in 2023 for $35,000.

Design matters. People judge a book by its cover, and your landing page by its hero section. Here’s how to not screw your headline design and how to choose colors without confusing visitors.

Relaunch everywhere with a different offer, until one clicks.

2. Reposition

Same product. New angle.

Change your landing page copy to speak to a new customer segment. Refine your words until they’re ultra-specific for your ideal customer and nonsense for the others. It works best when you niche down.

Here’s the conversion rate of my startup, DataFast:

• 0.22% when I launched a year ago as an analytics tool

• 1.45% after repositioning to a revenue attribution tool (niche)

Change your landing page copy to speak to customers with a different pain point, different level of expertise, or simply a different culture. Here are 5 copywriting mistakes to avoid.

Then relaunch everywhere. Small changes in words = big changes in conversions.

3. Repurpose

Same product. Same landing page. New vertical.

Turn one feature into a free tool. Extract something useful from your product. Give it away with no signup. Use it as a funnel. I wrote a dedicated issue about free tool marketing (if you like building, you’ll love this).

This free logo maker brought $20,000 in revenue (and counting)

People love free tools. And they share them. Launch your free tool everywhere and repeat without moderation.

Rebrand + Reposition + Repurpose = a whole new launch.

Mix everything until your product takes off. Each relaunch teaches you more about what people want. You become a better marketer, a better builder, a better founder.

Launch without moderation.

— Marc Lou

Lovable, the AI website builder, just raised $200M. The CEO, Anton, built it in a weekend. On Monday, 500K people saw the demo and 35K starred the repo on GitHub.

That’s how a lot of successful startups begin: a dead-simple MVP that goes viral overnight.

I spent 3 years building in the dark. It ended up with a severe burnout.

I wish I had removed my ego and convictions from the equation and instead treated each startup as a small bet (as I do now). Out of my 26 startups, only two took off. The day I launched them, I knew instantly they would work. Product–market fit feels different.

Focusing too early turned into emotional attachment. I fell in love with the idea, not the data. I kept going, not because it was working, but because I was afraid to let go. It’s like staying in a broken relationship. You already know how it ends.

The market doesn’t care how long you’ve worked on something. It rewards momentum, not effort. In a full year, you could build one perfect app. Or twenty imperfect ones. That’s twenty dice rolls. That’s twenty times more chance to hit.

To get lucky faster, let the market tell you when it’s time to focus.

Until then, roll the dice again.

— Marc Lou

PS. You can launch your idea 100 times. I’ll show you how next week. Until then, here’s how to get your first customers.

Let’s be honest.

Most entrepreneurs obsess over getting more traffic: SEO, social media, product launches. But if your landing page doesn’t convert, none of it matters.

Most fail not because the product is bad, but because the promise is weak or the page is a mess.

After writing over 30 landing pages and watching thousands of startup launches, I noticed a framework that works. I call it: The Clickbait Landing Page.

Step 1: Make a promise that sounds too good to be true

The first job of your landing page is to stop people from closing the tab. That’s your headline (H1). Your hero section. It needs to make people say: “Wait… what?”

This is where most founders play it too safe. They write “clean” or “honest” copy that nobody remembers.

The best headlines sound too good to be true, slightly clickbait, bold enough to spark curiosity. That’s the job of the promise: To open a loop in the reader’s brain. To make them scroll.

Here’s a simple way to brainstorm it: If TechCrunch wrote an article about your product, what would the headline be?

Step 2: Prove it’s not clickbait

If the promise does its job, the next question is always the same:

“Yeah, but… how?”

This is where your landing page earns trust. Each question your promise raises should be answered in its own section: testimonials, pricing, how it works, etc.

• How does it work? → Show steps 1, 2, 3.

• Why this product? Why now? → Agitate the pain

• Can I trust this? → Add testimonials

• Can I afford it? → Show pricing

• Do I need this now? → Show urgency

The promise was more appealing in 2023 before AI code editors.

Think of your landing page as a sales conversation. Anticipate every doubt and answer it in the right order. That’s how you move someone from “This sounds too good to be true” → “Okay, I’m in.”

And cut anything that doesn’t help make the promise feel real. Extra words kill conversions.

Make it sound scammy. Then prove it isn’t.

Why this works

Let’s say your landing page converts 1% of your 1,000 monthly visitors. That’s 10 sales.

Improve that to 2%, and you’ve doubled your revenue without changing the product, the price, or the traffic.

→ To double your traffic would take ads, SEO, influencer deals (and money).
→ To double your conversion rate takes 3 hours and a blank doc.

($100 product)

This is why landing pages matter. They’re the bridge from attention to money.

Your move this week

1. Rewrite your headline, make it sound too good to be true. (I have a lot more to say about headlines, should I send a full issue on this?)

2. Back it up, answer every question your promise raises (why? what? how?).

3. Cut the fluff, remove anything that doesn’t support the promise.

4. (optional) Send me your before/after: Take a screenshot of your current hero section, then update your headline. Reply with both. I’d love to see. (I’ll feature a few in a future issue)

Don’t expect to nail it first try. Great landing pages are built through iteration and repetition (just like shipping fast).

— Marc Lou

I used to hate marketing.

As a developer, it felt cringe, scammy, or just… unnecessary. So I avoided it. I built stuff quietly. And I made $0 online for two years.

Today, I’ve made over $2 million. Marketing changed everything.

But not through books or courses. I learned by doing something most people skip:

I watched ads.

Solopreneur update

I’ve tried a bunch of marketing experiments for DataFast.

Most failed. But I found 2 that are now driving +20% MoM growth. I’ll break them down in an upcoming issue.

AI made building easy, marketing is the hard part

Let’s be real. Launching a product in 2021 was hard because you had to code everything.

Today, you can ship with AI and a boilerplate in 24 hours.

So now the hard part is… getting people to care. And if you’re building solo, marketing is not optional. It’s survival.

My favorite hack: YouTube Ads

Most people use YouTube to procrastinate. I do too.

But I don’t use YouTube Premium. Because when I get distracted by an ad, I often watch it instead of the video I came for. I close YouTube and go tweak my landing page.

Why? Those ads are tiny masterpieces in marketing.

And YouTube only shows the top-performing ones — the ones making real money. So instead of skipping them, I study them.

I copied a French Instagram ad and made $10K+

One night, my friend Nico sent me a French Instagram ad for a Chinese restaurant.

It was simple and fun. So I rewrote the exact ad and just plugged my course CodeFast.

View on Instagram

It took me 30 minutes. Cost $0.

That ad went on to generate over $10,000, with a 4:1 return on ad spend.

Watch more ads. Steal the structure. Make it yours.

How to templatize an ad (without overthinking it)

Most great ads follow a simple 4-step rhythm:

1. Hook: Say something unexpected in the first 2 seconds to stop the scroll

2. Problem: Call out the pain they feel right now, be specific.

3. Solution: Introduce your product as a fix, keep it simple

4. Proof: Show it works. Use testimonials, a demo, or hard numbers.

5. CTA: Give one clear next step.

It’s not just a blueprint for ads… It works for everything:

• Landing pages

• Tweets

• Cold emails

Different tools. Same structure.

Your move this week:

1. Watch 10 ads — don’t skip, note what made you stop scrolling.

2. Pick your favorite — the simplest one.

3. Break it down — hook, problem, solution, proof, CTA.

4. Remix it — plug in your product and rewrite it. Could be a tweet, a landing page, or a video script.

Don’t skip ads.

They’re trying to sell you something, and that’s exactly what you need to learn.

Until next Saturday, keep shipping.

— Marc Lou

Nobody cares until you win

But here’s how to actually win

A lot of people ask me how to grow an audience.

They think there’s some secret strategy. Be the reply guy. Post 50 times a day. Share memes. Study the algorithm.

That might get you attention for a few minutes. But it won’t build long-term followers. And it definitely won’t build trust.

Because here’s the truth nobody tells you: You don’t grow an audience by being visible. You grow an audience by being different.

The real reason no one’s paying attention

Every week, I see the same thing:

Someone sees a successful product or post and copies it. They build a clone. AI profile picture generator, social media scheduler, the list goes on.

They show up as the 10th, 20th, 100th version of something that already worked. And then they wonder why nobody cares.

What’s missing is novelty.

If you’re not first, you better be different. Because if it’s not new, the algorithm ignores it — and so does everyone else.

That’s why no content strategy works if you’re not doing interesting things.

In 2021, I had 0 followers. After one full year of posting, I reached just 1,000. Nobody followed me when I just posted thoughts.

Boring, I know.

It only started to grow when I started winning — even in small ways:

• Weird launch videos with Joe Rogan

• Viral posts on ProductHunt, Reddit, Hacker News

• Screenshots of the first $1 for a new startup

• Stats like “I built 5 startups in 5 months”

Each win gave me stories worth sharing.

And those stories gave people a reason to follow.

Five steps to actually grow

1. Make small bets

Each project you launch is a dice roll.

The more you roll, the more likely you are to hit something.

2. Be different

Don’t clone what worked. Twist it. Weirdify it. Make it yours.

No one cares about the 78th “startup idea generator.”

3. Ship consistently

Each thing you finish gives you a new reason to post.

Finish more. Share more.

4. Post your wins

Got 300 visitors from Reddit? Made $19 this week?

That’s content. That’s how you grow.

5. Don’t quit

I’ve launched over 30 startups. Only 2 made real money.

But luck is math — if you keep playing, you eventually win.

Your move next week:

• Build something, even small (how to find startup ideas)

• Launch it everywhere (how to get your 1st customer)

• Post what happened.

• Do it again next week.

Each small win = a story = a reason to follow you.

That’s how audience growth really works.

I root for you.

— Marc Lou

WARNING:

❌ This is NOT for people who want to get a 9-5 as a software engineer.
✅ This is for people who want to learn to code fast, build a business, and quit their 9-5.

What I did wrong:

I learned to code in 2016 to build my dream startup (I believed I was the next Mark Zuckerberg).

So I bought Udemy courses. My cart looked like this:

• React: 64 hours

• JavaScript: 52 hours

• Node.js: 41 hours

Locked in for 7 hours of JavaScript Basics

150 hours of content and 2 years later, I still couldn’t create an online business (payments, user login, dashboard, emails — nothing fancy).

I felt defeated. I thought coding wasn’t for me. I almost gave up…

In 2018, I met Andrey in South Korea and he told me: Sell your SaaS before you make it. I was broke, so I tried, and after sending 20 cold emails… I got my first customer!

When the money landed on PayPal, I had no other choice: Build the product ASAP. 

I spent the next 7 days learning and coding only what was necessary to deliver the MVP. It was scrappy and slow because most of what I had learned previously was useless.

The MVP was a Facebook Messenger Bot (no UI, no dashboard, just an API)

Once I delivered the product, the customer was happy.

They used it for 4 years, spending over $4,000 ($99/month for 48 months).

That’s how my first online business started: VirallyBot — A SaaS that made over $75,000 in revenue, let me move to Bali, and most importantly, made me fall in love with coding (which I hated just 2 years ago)

Here’s the red pill: Coding courses are made for people who want a 9-5.

• Employment is a zero-sum game—If you get the job, someone else won’t. You increase the odds of winning (getting hired) with a degree and advanced skills.

• Entrepreneurship is a different beast—The pie is infinite, and customers don’t care about your JavaScript expertise. They want their problems to be solved.

So here’s exactly what I’d do (in 3 steps) if I were to learn to code in 2025.

Solopreneur update

I just launched CodeFast — Learn to code in weeks, not months 🧑‍💻

It’s the course I wish I had when I started. It follows the 3-step blueprint we’ll talk about below.

653 students joined already, some already launched their businesses! There’s a Cyber Monday deal right now (50% off).

Launch tweet got 1,300+ likes, thanks Neo! 🤩

3 steps to learn to code like an entrepreneur:

1/ Learn the Fundamentals 

AI is making a lot of tools and jobs obsolete at warp speed.

But chances are, in 20 years you’ll still receive HTML files over HTTP to read Twitter or see your friends’ posts on Instagram. Infrastructures evolve much more slowly. The internet is likely to work in the same fashion years from now.

Learn how it works using ChatGPT. Ask about what you do on the internet:

• What happens when you click the like button on YouTube?

• What happens when you type “google.com” in Google Chrome?

What happens when I search “YouTube” in Chrome? — From CodeFast 

When you discover a new term, ask the AI to go deeper. You’ll discover the foundations that power the internet. Here are some core concepts I think are crucial:

• HTML/CSS/JS webpage

• Internet browser 

• IP address

• HTTP protocol

• DNS and domain name

• “Backend VS. Frontend”

• API endpoint

Don’t spend more than a few days on this. Stop when you have an overview of how the internet works.

What is a URL? — From CodeFast 

I have 2 projects for you:

1. Go to your favorite site, open the developer console, and inspect the code.

2. Build your first webpage using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It could be the sales page for your business idea or just a portfolio page. Create the HTML file and send it over to a friend. You’ll be surprised how simple it is.

Important: Don’t skip this step. Coding apps without knowing how the internet works is like buying a Ferrari without knowing how to drive.

2/ Pick a tech stack, and stick to it.

When you run an online business, you need tools. For instance:

• Your server sends HTML files to your users

• Your database saves your user’s information 

• Your payment processor charges your customers’ credit cards 

The tech stack is a set of tools used to build and run your web application. There are millions of combinations. Here’s mine:

• Frontend:

  • React (components)

  • NextJS (pages)

  • TailwindCSS + daisyUI (styling)

• Backend:

  • NextJS (API)

  • MongoDB (database)

  • Vercel (hosting)

• Additional tools:

  • Stripe (payments)

  • Resend (emails)

  • AWS (image hosting)

• Programming language: JavaScript

The SaaS we build in CodeFa.st uses the same tech stack

I built 30+ websites with this tech stack. Millions of people visited my sites, DataFast has 10M+ database records, and HabitsGarden has 17,000+ users tracking their habits. 

Here’s the red pill: Tech stacks don’t matter. You can do everything you need as an entrepreneur with any tech stack. 

Pick one. Never change it.

3/ Build, ship, learn (in this order)

A. Build

You’ve got the map and the tools, now we’re entering the fun part: Coding.

Build the smallest version of your idea. Whatever product you have in mind, start building the landing page to “present” your product. Use the tech stack you just picked.

Learn just what you need to build the static page. With my tech stack, you need to know:

• 10% of NextJS

• 10% of React 

• 10% of TailwindCSS

Here’s another red pill: You don’t need to know everything. For instance, React has 15 hooks, I use only 2 in all my 30+ projects. You can ditch 85% of the tech stack features because you’ll likely never use them.

Learning gives us a feeling of being productive but it’s an illusion. You want to get users/customers/testers ASAP.

Add a Call-To-Action (CTA) to your static page. For instance, a Stripe payment link (no-code) or a Google Form to collect beta testers’ emails. It will take you a few days or weeks at max.

B. Ship

You might think it’s early but it’s not: Launch your site.

• First, you’ll have to buy a domain name (I use NameCheap or Netim)

• Then, deploy your site on the internet (I use Vercel)

• And put your offer online: Send cold emails, ask friends, make a post on Reddit

How domain names work — From CodeFast

Your goal is to get 1 customer or 1 beta tester—This is key because these are the next steps:

1. You’ll get instant motivation to build the product (I’ll never forget my first customer, the feeling is insane). Coding will suddenly become fun, you will naturally want to spend more time learning/coding.

2. You won’t overthink about what to learn. Pick just what you need to deliver the product.

3. You will get real feedback. The #1 mistake in entrepreneurship is building a product people don’t need. If nobody is interested in your idea, at least you saved yourself 6 months of coding and a nasty burnout.

C. Learn

Once you get a person on board, your goal is to build the smallest version of your product.

You might have to learn about user authentication, API, and databases on the way. Once again, learn just enough to make something and show it to your customers/users. Ask AI when you’re stuck and make sure you understand “why” you do something.

Stripe subscription flow — From CodeFast

Do things that don’t scale. For instance, you don’t have to set up an entire Stripe subscription flow. You can turn on/off subscriptions manually at first, and automate them later.

D. Repeat

You will build a learning flywheel: Build, ship, learn, repeat.

Once you’re comfortable with the tech stack, start using AI to code for you. Now, I barely code anymore (and yet, I ship more code than ever). I write in English and review the AI-generated code. 

⚠️ Important: Resist the temptation of using AI too early. V0, Bolt, etc… are great tools, but using them without understanding the code is like buying a Ferrari without knowing… Yep, you got it.

And remember, you don’t need a brilliant idea to start. Mine was a free movie recommendation app (Mood2Movie).

Final thoughts on the future of coding

150,000+ tech employees have been laid off in 2024.

Meanwhile, my Twitter feed is filled with entrepreneurs making a living with their apps.

More people want the freedom to work on their own projects, according to their own terms. Coding enables that. It’s not too late to learn. And it’s easier than ever because:

• You just need to know the minimum to build your idea

• You have a superintelligence at your fingertip

You got this, friend!

The most popular advice for entrepreneurs is to charge subscriptions. Passive income and predictable revenue, yes sir!

This is terrible advice.

Here’s why recurring payments are killing your business.

Solopreneur update

I spent the last 3 months building a new SaaS… 🥁

Introducing DataFast — the actionable analytics tool for founders who want to grow their startups with data.

If you try it, I’d love your feedback!

The Subscription Fatigue Era

I killed 3 startups because of recurring payments:

1. IndiePage

   • ✅ It makes $4,000/month on autopilot ($45 for lifetime access).

   • ❌ It made $0/month when I priced it at $15/year.

2. MakeLanding

   • ✅ It made $100/day when I launched ($19 per landing page generated).

   • ❌ It made $0 with a $5/month subscription.

3. HabitsGarden

   • ✅ 100% of users chose the $47 lifetime deal.

   • ❌ Nobody buys the $5/month plan.

10x the monthly price, but 100% of the sales

Netflix, Spotify, wifi... I spend a few thousand dollars a year on these services. When I see $19/month, it’s not just $19. It’s $228 a year, on top of everything else.

Business owners love subscriptions. Customers hate them.

Here’s the invisible cost of charging recurring payments:

• Conversion rate drop: People are reluctant to commit to another subscription, which triggers objections and hesitation.

• Fighting churn: People lose interest soon after signing up. Instead of a steady income, you’re constantly replacing customers who cancel.

$10/month VS. $100

Selling a $10/month monthly subscription is as hard as selling a $100 one-time payment.

Let’s assume you built an excellent SaaS (10% churn = 10% of your customers cancel at the end of the month).

Imagine you get 100 customers today:

• You’ll earn $7,176 with subscriptions, after 365 days.

• You earn $10,000 with one-time payments, right now.

Subscription doesn’t mean recurring revenue. If you’re working solo, in 99% of cases you’re better off financially with one-time payments.

One-time payments alternative

Sometimes, your business has recurring costs, and you can’t afford one-time payments. I’m not talking about bandwidth (that’s negligible) but things like AI credits or database costs.

Then try credits-based pricing:

• Let your customers pay upfront for what they’ll use. Generate 10 AI photos for $5.

• Then, add a Good-Better-Best package. 100 AI photos for $20 ($.2/photo looks cheap now)

This removes the subscription friction (which boosts your conversion rate) and helps you avoid constantly fighting churn.

When subscriptions make sense

• B2B: If you’re selling to businesses, subscriptions make sense because the end goal of any business is to make money.

• Complex credits: When tracking credits is too complex or it’s hard to quantify what your customers use.

Subscriptions serve a specific purpose. Recurring payment = Recurring value according to my friend Dan.

Just because competitors charge recurring payments doesn’t mean you should. Remember, people are tired of subscriptions, and purchase behavior is changing. Not charging a subscription can be a competitive edge.

Oh, and entrepreneurs flex on each other with MRR charts. It’s a status game, don’t fall for it. In the end, the customer is king.

Being rich was never the goal.

Freedom and fulfillment are. But $1M as a solopreneur? Hell yeah! 

85% is profit. 19% went to taxes. It took 7 years, 2 burnouts, and 1 depression.

I could talk about what I learned, but my blog is for that. And Starter Story made a video about the journey.

Instead, I want to write about what it means for us — Solopreneurs — who organize our lives around work, not the other way around.

The solopreneur niche

When I started in 2017, there were three alternatives to employment: 

• Wear suits and please VC for a 0.00001% chance to build a unicorn

• Open a restaurant with your parent’s legacy 

• Dropshipping

Unless you were a Hacker News reader, you would have missed the startup counterculture movement.

Guys like Patrick McKenzie and Pieter Levels building tiny startups in public while traveling the world.

It’s a dead-end

I live where I want. I don’t have to ask for permission to take time off. And I can prioritize other parts of my life like sleeping, surfing, and spending time with my wife.

Solopreneurship is addictive. Once you crack the money code, there’s no turning back. 

It’s not surprising this new startup wave is spreading fast. COVID was a catalyst.

“The bubble is about to burst”

Some are skeptics and think we’ve reached the peak. I believe the opposite.

OK, let’s be honest: You won’t get a TechCrunch article for building startups from Bali. That period is over.

But solopreneurship is just getting started.

1. AI makes everything easier: It writes my code, improves my broken English, and brainstorms video ideas for my YouTube channel.

2. Niche businesses are exploding: AI apps, one-person design agencies, newsletters… Just look at the IndiePage Leaderboard.

3. The wave is reaching the masses: Solopreneurs’ stories are popping up everywhere on YouTube now. The move is about to go mainstream.

Out of 7 years of entrepreneurship, I was crippled with self-doubt for 6 years.

But there is a bright future ahead for those who don’t quit. Ignore the skeptics, we are just getting started.

I root for you
— Marc

P.S. When in doubt, refer to Naval “Learn to sell, learn to build, if you can do both, you will be unstoppable”.

P.S.S. I built this Twitter Revenue Bot last week and it has 502 followers.

30,000 feet in the air. Brad Strut in my ears.

Hey, it’s Marc.

I’ve completed about 50% of that big bet. The weekly newsletter will be back soon. Until then, I’ll send a short solopreneur update sometime.

I’m traveling back to my homeland. 20 hours in airplanes should be enough for a few words.

In June, Noah Kagan WhatsApp’ed me. We did a podcast.

I also reached 100,000 Twitter followers and did an interview with Starter Story.

UPDATE: The video is live!

The video should be out in 6 weeks!

Seriously it’s crazy. Nobody cared about my work for 5 years (apart from my wife). Sometimes, I think I don’t deserve all this exposure.

With the recent growth came a few haters.

I’m negativy-averse. I don’t know how to react, so I am spending less time on Twitter right now. My friend Dan says I’m a Labrador.

Instead, I surf more often and broke 2 boards. I also added 2km of barefoot running to my daily routine.

I love working out. It quiets the mind.

Morning surf before spending 10 hours behind the computer

Business videos aren’t fun — I want to change that. I’ll add a lifestyle dimension to all my new videos. This one was my first experiment.

I hope you’re shipping. Take care.

— Marc

07:23 am. Bali is windy. The surf session will wait until tomorrow.

We’ve covered headline and paragraph UI design. Let’s combine them with spacing.

Solopreneur update

I launched IndiePage Leaderboards to gamify startups.

The number of solopreneurs crushing it blows me away 🤯

Last 30 days of revenue — verified with Stripe and updated every 12 hours

Lighter than text, but more powerful than words.

Spacing in UI design refers to the use of empty space between elements to enhance readability, visual hierarchy, and overall user experience.

Place a button too close to the headline and you confuse users. Luckily, you can be a wizard with these 3 rules:

Use the 4 points grid system

Every space (margin or padding) between elements (text, button, image, section) should be divisible by 4.

4px, 16px, 48px

It helps users understand how components relate to each other. And it’s a shortcut to designing faster

Use limited constraints

Spacing is semantic. The distance between UI elements explains their relationships.

A headline and a paragraph should be close to each other because the latter explains the former. The illustration, however, should sit farther away from the text block.

To help users create relationships between elements, we need rules:

• Paragraph to headline: 16px

• Button to text block: 32px

• Image to  text block: 48px

• Section to section: 256px

Define your rules before coding. 5 to 6 maximum. Use them across all the landing page for clarity.

Let it breathe

When the UI is cramped, users get confused and leave.

If in doubt, add too much empty space.

Bali. 09:23 am. Linkin Park in my ears.

Last week, we talked about designing remarkable headlines. Today, let’s redesign the supporting text below your headlines.

Solopreneur update

I launched Insighto on Product Hunt last week and… It got the #1 Product of the Day 🤩

I also bought my first premium domain name — shipfast.com — for…

🥁

…$5,000. That’s 3x my revenue in April 2023. It feels unreal.

The supporting text below the headline is crucial. It’s how you convert attention to action. 

But most people won’t read it. Here are 5 design tips:

Use a secondary color

The supporting text should be written in a color that contrasts less with the background than the headline color.

That’s why we made the Base Content Secondary color previously. It creates a visual hierarchy.

Use the default font weight (400) and font size (16px) for paragraphs.

Let the content breathe

Unlike headlines, reading a paragraph in a small font size requires a visual effort.

Make it easy for your visitors by increasing the height of each line.

Align text on the left (or right)

Our eyes are used to read from the left.

At the end of a line, we know where to look: The line below, on the left.

Centered-aligned text is hard to read because the eye has to scramble around looking for the beginning of the next line.

It’s OK for short paragraphs (2-3 lines). But avoid centering longer blocks of text.

Good design = easy understanding for users.

Write blocks, not lines

Finding the beginning of the next line is hard when the line is long.

Add a maximum width to each paragraph. 500 px is a good range. It makes it easy for the eyes to find the start of the next line.

Don’t write a novel

A big block of text is scary. Most visitors won’t read it.

Structure your text block using bullet points.

You can also use multiple paragraphs and emphasize some words to create rhythm.

Use your Base Content color and medium/semibold font weight (500/600) to emphasize words

I listened to the Hybrid Theory album 3 times. It’s time to have lunch with my wife. Have a good weekend!

Last week, we discussed how colors impact your conversion rate and why less is better.

Now, let’s focus on the most important part of your landing page — headlines.

Rule #2: Emphasise your headline

People don’t read text.

At least, not until you get their attention. Your headline must be remarkable if you want people to read your copy. Let’s redesign it.

Make it big

The default font size is 16px. Headlines should be bigger (of course, Marc). But how big?

The sweet spot is somewhere between 36px and 60px. It depends on the typeface you use.

Your first headline (<h1> in the hero section) is usually bigger than the secondary ones (<h2>). 

Once you set a system, use the same for the entire landing page. Here’s mine:

• 60px for <h1>

• 48px for <h2>

Make it bold

The default font weight is 400. Headlines’ font weight should be big too.

The sweet spot is between 700 (bold) and 900 (black). It depends on the typeface you use.

Pick a font weight and keep it all across your website.

Make it tight 

Headlines should be compact to be read easily.

1. Reduce the letter spacing by -0.4px

2. Reduce the line height to 1

But make it light

Headlines must be short or your visitors will never read them. Use 70 characters max.

If your headline is larger than 1000px, break the line. Find a semantic breakpoint, not a visual one.

Avoid using more than 2 lines.

Make it pop

Use the most contrasted color towards your Base (yep, the Base Content one).

Avoid dropping another color. It breaks the reading flow. And conflicts with your main Call-To-Action.

If you need to highlight a word, use visual clues.

You can use the primary color to highlight numbers though

Use responsibly

There’s nothing easier to understand than a website section with:

• 1 headline 

• 1 paragraph 

• 1 image

• 1 button

Write one headline per section of your landing page. Not 0, not 2, just 1.

Make it responsive

All rules above work on mobile devices, except for the font size.

Make your headlines a bit smaller than on desktop — 32px to 40px is the sweet spot.