The Wall.

For his first Hyrox race, Marc auctioned 10 tattoo spots on his own body as ad space. Bidding started at $1,000 and doubled per round.

He Sold His Own Ass

Literally. Stanley paid $20,000 specifically for that real estate. Higgsfield bought multiple other spots. Total raised: $112,062. We tried to buy him for free and got nothing.

He auctioned tattoo space on his own body and Stanley paid $20k for his ass specifically. Genius marketing or has the man completely lost it?

Both, Obviously

$112k for six brands to put logos on his skin for one race. Every marketer reading this is furious they didn't think of it first. That's the tell.

I've been building an AI CRM for dentists for 3 weeks. $0 MRR. Should I keep going?

Don'T Build

Don't write another schema. Sell a Google Sheet and a weekly call. If dentists won't pay for that, they won't pay for your agents.

Screenshot → landing page. 12 users. 0 paying. I was going to charge $19/month.

Charge More

$19 is how you tell the market you don't believe it. Put $99 on the ugly version and ask 15 people.

Marc spent ~a year building a startup and got 0 users. He put that on shipfa.st himself.

That'S The Origin Story

Then he shipped 36 startups and sold ad space on his own skin. The lesson isn't 'become Marc.' It's stop treating one idea like a religion.

Just raised $500k pre-seed for an AI note-taking app. No users yet. Should I hire first or build first?

Neither

Hire nothing. Build nothing new. Go find 20 people who'll use it this week, paid or not. Money in the bank isn't a customer — it's a longer runway to discover nobody wants this.

11 weeks. $0 MRR. 2 landing pages. 0 customer calls. I keep rewriting onboarding.

Kill

That's not a startup. That's a private art project with a custom domain.

ShipFast is just Stripe webhooks and a Tailwind theme behind a paywall. Am I wrong?

You'Re Not Wrong

That's the whole pitch. He sold you the week you'd otherwise lose to Stripe docs. The 'boring stuff' is the product.

indiepa.ge currently shows Marc Lou at $311k/month, 36 startups, Bali.

$0 → That

We're at $0 looking at that number like idiots. This site is the cope. Also the product.

My cofounder wants to pivot for the third time in 2 months. I think we should stick with v1. How do we decide?

Talk To Humans

Stop deciding it in the group chat. Go get 10 people to pay for v1 this week. If nobody bites, your cofounder's right and you're just attached to your own code.

I'm launching Friday. Analytics for indie hackers. 40 followers. No waitlist.

Ship

One sentence. One CTA. Then go bother humans. Adding a feature tonight is fear.

36 startups and I've heard of maybe 4. Is that quantity beating quality, or survivorship bias with a newsletter?

Both, Honestly

Most of them made $0. The 4 you've heard of are the ones that mattered. That ratio is the actual lesson, not the count.

Saw a tweet about fake MRR screenshots. Built TrustMRR in about 24 hours. One headline. Two buttons. A leaderboard.

Ship The Ugly Thing

No monetization plan on day one. That's not mysticism. That's on his newsletter.

It's a GPT wrapper for writing LinkedIn posts. There are 40 of these already. Worth building?

Distribution

The wrapper was never the product. Whoever gets in front of the most LinkedIn addicts first wins. No audience means you're 41st in line for a market that's already bored.

Bali. Of course it's Bali.

Correct

Low cost of living, fast wifi, a timezone that overlaps nobody's. It's not a vibe, it's a spreadsheet decision.

ShipFast made ~$6k in 48 hours. He said that was more than all of 2022.

The Boilerplate Won

He spent years building SaaS for users. The product that printed was the one that helped other founders ship. Funny. Also documented.

6 months building a waitlist page for a tool that doesn't exist yet. 200 signups. $0 built.

Test First

A waitlist isn't a product, it's a maybe. Email the 200 a Stripe link for a manual version this week and see who's actually real.