Pre ShipFast: First Dollar Online
Cold email
Marc cold-emailed physical businesses (escape rooms) offering a customer acquisition tool, validated with a 42-minute sales call before building anything. Closed first paying customer — an Australian business — on that call and sent an invoice.
→ First dollar online; grew to $1,000/month MRR serving physical businesses
MRR $1.0k
Pre ShipFast: Scaling physical business tool
Cold email
Continued the same cold-email + phone-call loop each morning in Bali to acquire more physical business customers for the escape room / local business tool.
→ Grew to $4,000/month MRR before COVID wiped it to $0
MRR $4.0k
Post COVID restart: Building in public
Build in public — Twitter
After getting fired from his software engineering job, Marc committed to shipping small apps fast and sharing everything publicly on Twitter so each project built his audience. Explicit goal: accumulate followers so future launches don't start from zero.
→ Built audience across 6 app launches in 7 months; ~10,000 users on Habits Garden alone
MRR $1.0k Users 10k users
Mid 2023: Viral skit content
Twitter viral video skits
Created short comedic video skits — e.g. fake podcast appearances with Joe Rogan or fake movie scenes with Leonardo DiCaprio — to promote his apps in a fun, shareable way. Focused heavily on the 'launch moment' virality rather than ongoing SEO or ads.
→ MRR grew from ~$1,000/month to ~$4,000/month
MRR $4.0k
ShipFast Launch
Build in public — Twitter
Extracted his internal reusable Next.js boilerplate (built in <1 week) and launched it as a paid product to his existing Twitter/indie hacker audience with zero hype — told his wife they might make $100. Announced publicly and went skating. Returned 2 hours later to $500 in sales.
→ $3,000–$4,000 on day 1; ~$40,000 in month 1
MRR $40k
ShipFast Growth: Black Friday
Email and promotions
Ran a Black Friday promotion in November (month 2 of ShipFast), resulting in a single-day revenue spike.
→ $8,000 in a single day; $65,000 that month vs. steady ~$50,000/month baseline
MRR $65k
ShipFast Growth: Free tools marketing
Free tools seo and referral
Built free micro-tools (e.g. a logo generator) with a persistent banner ad for ShipFast on the right side of the tool. Users of the free tool were shown ShipFast as the natural next step for founders building startups.
→ Contributed to MRR lift; exact increment not stated
ShipFast Growth: YouTube feature
Youtube press feature
A YouTube episode (likely Starter Story or similar) featured Marc's story, driving a significant new wave of buyers to ShipFast.
→ MRR jumped from ~$50,000/month to ~$85,000 (month 1 post-video), then $135,000/month for two months, settling back to ~$80,000/month
MRR $80k