How My Side Project Made $600+ in 5 Days Without Social Presence

So This is the story of how my side project, a Next.Js SaaS Boilerplate Indiespace, went from $0 to $600+ in 5 days without any social media presence.

The Idea:

I have been working on this project for the last 1 and a half months. The initial plan was to create something I could use because I love to start new projects but often get overwhelmed by the feeling of setting up everything from scratch. So, I started building this boilerplate which includes 2 landing pages, 2 waitlist pages, and a SAAS kit with a landing page and all the cool features like dark & light themes, subscriptions, one-time payments, transactional emails, authentication, SEO, etc.

The Expectation:

I had zero expectations of whether anyone would buy it or not, or how I was going to market it. With every other developer launching boilerplate solutions with heavy features, and considering I didn't have an established audience, I built it at my own pace and kept adding features.

The Launch:

My launch plan was to post about this on 3 platforms:

• X (formerly, Twitter)

• Product Hunt

• SideProject

  
  

So, on Friday 17th November, I scheduled the launch on Product Hunt for Saturday 18th November, posted on Sideprojects, and went to sleep. I woke up on Saturday around 2 pm and saw Product Hunt notifications on my phone, So I opened my laptop and went into my Gmail and then I saw an email from Stripe, I opened it and:

At this point, I'm so confused about what the hell I'm looking at, and questioning whether this is from someone who purchased my boilerplate. I opened Product Hunt and noticed that it had been an hour since the launch. To my surprise, I found myself in the 6th position with 30+ votes, all without any marketing or asking people to upvote. What's more, I had already made a sale. I was smiling like a freaking child whaaaaaaaaaat?

Then, I posted on X (formerly Twitter) and asked some friends to upvote, and after the launch, I got the 7th position, 150+ upvotes, 1.7k page views, and around 10+ followers on X (formerly Twitter).

The Lesson:

I know it's not a lot of money and I know it's nothing compared to what I earn from my full-time job but to be very honest, creating your own digital product, marketing it, and earning even a single penny from it will give you so much happiness. If you are a developer like me or someone who wants to build something and is confused about how everything is gonna work out, don't worry put your project out there in public let the people decide, do your effort, and keep moving forward.

At this point, I know my Indiespace is not perfect and there is just so much to do right now I have to add the freaking documentation as well and I already hate setting up the content layer docs ugghhhh, But yeah I will keep adding features which gonna improve my productivity as a developer.

Last but not the least:

I would recommend giving Indiespace.store a try, if you are someone who wants to build a SaaS app. If you’re just starting out and can’t afford it, shoot me a dm on Twitter and I’ll be happy to help you.