$80K/Month in Bali: Marc Lou’s Full Solopreneur Strategy
Hello, I’m David Kim.
I’m planning to create a series of videos discussing renowned indie hackers, their stories, and growth trajectories.
We’ll deconstruct their cases and learn from both their successes and failures.
I’m on my indie hacker journey under an anonymous identity, aiming to share my progress from 0 to $100k MRR.
Feel free to follow me on Twitter and subscribe to my YouTube channel and Podcast “AI Watcher by DK” .
Today, I’ll be talking about Marc Lou, an indie hacker with over 100,000 Twitter followers, making him one of the prominent figures in the indie dev community.
Over the course of three years, Marc Lou has created multiple products, achieving a monthly revenue exceeding $80,000.
Let’s delve into how Marc Lou cleverly connects his products to capture the attention of other indie hackers and examine his innovative marketing strategies.
Build in Public Like a Pro
Clearly Define Your Target Users
The main advantage of building in public is attracting followers.
However, you need to consider those interested in your building in public approach are likely from your industry. If your content is highly specialized within your industry, it will attract attention from professionals in the field.
Therefore, the build in public approach often attracts other developers. Marc Lou is a perfect example of this approach. He has mastered the build in public strategy, creating a well closed loop.
If your product targets downmarket users, there’s a mismatch between your product and the followers you attract. These indie hackers aren’t your target users, so while you gain followers, you might not be able to profit from them.
Marc Lou, however, has a clear vision. He specifically caters to indie hackers. By building in public, he attracts other indie hackers and then creates tools designed to monetize this very group.
A Closed-Loop Product Logic
The Resolve to Monetize Independent Developers
Marc Lou’s MRR is approximately $80k, with the majority coming from the following product:
1. Creating a Needed Development Tool: ShipFast
ShipFast helps indie hackers launch products quickly, offering code packages, tutorials, and more. Marc’s approach is self-consistent; as an indie hacker himself, he turns his own challenges into products.
Is ShipFast useful for experienced indie hackers?
Honestly, not significantly. However, for newcomers to independent development who haven’t encountered many pitfalls and may not understand basic principles, ShipFast could be a good choice.
ShipFast is more than just a website template. With one click, developers can generate a fully functional product website using ShipFast’s official code.
The tech stack includes Google login integration, Stripe payment processing, Mailgun email services, Tailwind CSS design, and MongoDB database management.
Since Marc Lou uses ShipFast in all his projects, ensuring regular updates, a $199 subscription offers lifetime updates.
However, ShipFast may not be ideal for developers needing highly customized or uniquely designed websites from scratch. In such cases, significant template modifications or custom solutions may be necessary.
It’s an ideal choice for Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) or prototypes.
Notably, ShipFast’s recent monthly revenue reached $64.5k, with about 570,000 monthly visits.
2. Creating a Viral Video and Selling the Method: LaunchViral
Marc Lou created a parody video to promote his product ByeDispute.
In this video, he photoshopped himself into a scene with Leonardo DiCaprio, creating a fictional conversation where he explains to DiCaprio how great his product is. This video was highly effective, garnering over 7,000 views on YouTube.
For a typical indie hacker, this might have been the end of the story: creating a promotional video, boosting product sales, and moving on. But Marc Lou took it a step further.
He immediately turned his viral video-making process into a course, teaching others how to replicate his success. The course website is called LaunchViral.
It’s worth noting that viral video success is often not replicable. Even if you create one viral hit, using the same approach for a second attempt doesn’t guarantee success.
However, Marc Lou doesn’t worry about that. As an influencer, he knew that if he dared to teach it, people would be willing to learn. At its peak, the video course generated about $6,000 per month, which is significant.
I purchased the course to see its content firsthand. Overall, it’s quite good. Each instructional video is short but packed with practical information, helping you apply the viral video formats to your own product.
The course doesn’t focus on explaining product principles or usage instructions. Instead, it emphasizes how to resonate with users and spark curiosity about your product. It also provides templates from classic movie scenes and teaches skills like image editing. If you’re interested, it might be worth checking out.
3. The Final Stage: Selling Course Website Code
Marc Lou didn’t stop there. If you thought that was the end, you’d be underestimating him.
After creating a course to sell his viral video-making approach and building a website to host it, he had another idea: What if other indie hackers want to create courses too? Instead of building their own websites from scratch, why not sell them the code for his course website?
Just think about his logic chain: First, he makes a product promo video. Then, he creates a course teaching others how to make similar videos. Finally, he sells the code for the course website to other indie hackers.
I have to applaud this strategy; it’s brilliant. This guy has created a perfectly closed loop, consistently monetizing each step. He’s earned quite a bit from this approach and still maintains a large following.
Reading the User’s Mind
The Independent Hackers Mastermind
ZenVoice, another product by Marc Lou, helps indie hackers manage invoices. It currently earns about $1,000 monthly.
ZenVoice employs a clever psychological tactics by simulating a variety of urgent notifications in the website’s top-right corner, including realistic client demands for invoices or refunds and imitation Stripe alerts warning of potential lost revenue, all designed to create a palpable sense of anxiety and urgency among visiting indie hackers, thereby emphasizing the perceived value and necessity of the product.
On his video-making tutorial website, Marc uses very casual, even crude language like “so fucking good”. While unconventional, this style resonates with its target users.
These strategies show Marc Lou’s deep understanding of his audience’s mindset. He uses bold, attention-grabbing tactics that connect with indie hackers, even if they’re unconventional in traditional business settings.
Conclusion
If you want to learn how to build websites and dramatically improve conversion rates for indie hackers sites, studying Marc Lou’s methods would be valuable. His strategies are highly refined and mature.
Marc Lou consistently makes money from other indie hackers. While his products, like courses and small tools, may have a limitation in terms of growth potential.
In my opinion, his marketing prowess deserves an even more impressive product. However, in the indie hackers field, it’s unrealistic to expect one person to excel at everything. Being excellent in marketing, product development, and having a grand vision would make someone unbeatable, but that’s rare. Excelling in one area is often enough for success.
Marc Lou is undoubtedly an expert in marketing and content creation. He’s doing very well and living a good life now, and that’s the story I wanted to share with you today.
If you enjoyed this article, please clap and comment. For more indie hackers insights, follow along.Until our next deep dive!
