UPDATE: This article was first posted Dec 26, 2023. BoilerCode has now been acquired.

Recently I caught up with Manoj Ahirwar one of the founding members of Hacker Cabin to learn how he got his first sales and why he thinks you shouldn't price your product too low.

What is the name of your project?

BoilerCode.

Tell us more about the project

BoilerCode is my most successful project in terms of revenue growth. It reached revenue of $2400 in less than 2 months. BoilerCode is a SaaS boilerplate catalog focused on SaaS and AI elements of the products which are repetitive tasks. The idea is the result of all my previous products learning and I tried to add as much as I could to reduce the effort when building a new SaaS product.

How long did it take you to get your first sales?

I feel lucky to get my first sale just hours after I launched it on Twitter. I got around 3-4 sales in the first 2 days. I kept iterative over based on the feedbacks and then launched on Product Hunt.

What did you do to advertise the product?

I launched BoilerCode on Twitter on 12th September 2023.
This was the tweet: https://twitter.com/manoj_ahi/status/1701659107613106196

Did not get much of the engagement on the tweet but I kept pushing all the progress I was making with BoilerCode and kept improving.

Going all-in on the Product Hunt launch

For BoilerCode, I launched a basic version of NextJs Boilerplate but did not get much traction in sales. Then I decided to add more features to my primary Boilerplate and add a basic version free of cost. Around 10 people took the free version. There was clearly a market for boilerplates.

Later I decided to add some AI component to my primary boilerplate and decided to remove the Free version and kept pushing. For me, I try to record demo videos of the product to show how it can help others to build fast, and it started to work. Before the ProductHunt launch, I got around $200 in revenue and then decided to launch on ProductHunt.

I was all in for the product hunt launch and I market BoilerCode product hunt launch like crazy. I kept posting about the launch progress, google analytics stats, and sales stats. I also thank so many people on twitter who came to support me on ProductHunt and finally, we made it to #1 on product hunt. It was a crazy competition for me that Sunday.

What things did you try that didn’t really work out?

I priced the Boilerplates at $49 but did not get much sales, I think when the price is low, people tend to think that product might not be good. I learned that late and later decided to price it at $99 and then later increase it to $119.

What resources/tools/websites have been most helpful to you?

For me, Twitter is my main distribution. Screen Studio was my friend in recording awesome videos throughout the launch and beyond.

How much revenue has this project generated?

Since announcing the product on Twitter on 12th September 2023 to December 2023 the project has generated $4,476.

Advice for other solo founders who want to get started or are just starting out?

Audience is very important. If your product is great but you don’t get eyes on your product then you might not get anything in the initial time. Getting positive feedback initially is very important and that is why I completely believe in Building in Public. Keep building and you will start getting your audience.

Visit website: https://www.boilercode.co
Personal website: https://manojahi.com
X: https://twitter.com/manoj_ahi

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