Marc Louvion (@marc_louvion) is the Maker of the Year 2023 and the visionary behind the innovative ShipFast. His product development philosophy emphasizes rapid shipping and focusing on feature-specific builds, which has transformed his approach to creating tech products. Utilizing platforms like ProductHunt for launches, Marc highlights the importance of pre-validation and community feedback in fine-tuning his products, illustrating his strategic and responsive methodology to product creation.
In our insightful conversation —that at some point turns into a founder brainstorming session— Marc delves into the emotional nuances of creators who navigate various expressive avenues, from entrepreneurship to writing, and then returning to coding. His journey with ShipFast showcases the blend of strategic foresight and serendipity crucial for digital market success, alongside the continuous process of innovation. The discussion dive into the intricacies of building a community around a product, the challenges of SaaS businesses, and the significance of maintaining a work-life balance that incorporates personal interests, which in turn fosters a lifestyle that integrates personal well-being with technological advancement.
Marc on Twitter: https://twitter.com/marc_louvion
Arvid Kahl 0:00
Today, I’m talking to Marc Louvion who’s Product Hunts maker of the year 2023. Marc is a shipping beast and his most recent project ShipFast allows other founders to launch their products just as fast as Marc does it. ShipFast has seen massive success over the last couple of months. And our conversation actually turns into a founder brainstorming session at some point where we try to figure out where Marc can take his project from here. This episode is sponsored by acquire.com. More on that later. Now let’s get shipping with Marc.
Marc, welcome to the show. I am talking to the maker of the year 2023. I think this is awesome. Congratulations! How does it feel to be awarded such an honor, such a title? Did you expect that?
Marc Louvion 0:46
I had a little glimpse of it. Last 2023 was very, you know, a lot of thing happened, shipped a lot of startups. But backward like two years back when I just got started Product Hunt was kind of like the coaliton of virus. I was seeing it as the thing you know, for makers. And so that two years journey has been pretty impressive. And the title was, it was just so cool.
Arvid Kahl 1:08
Yeah, that’s really nice. I found this, first off, it’s really cool to have this title. And then to get that title as somebody who hasn’t been around like for decades as well. Right? You got started, you really shipped for a couple of years. And now you’re here building all these amazing things. Is Product Hunt still something that you like use in every single of your products and every single of your launches?
Marc Louvion 1:33
Yeah, man, I literally shipped an app yesterday on Product Hunt.
Arvid Kahl 1:36
Yeah. How is that doing? Was it ZenVoice? What’s the name of that thing?
Marc Louvion 1:41
Yeah, it is ZenVoice.io. It is a new tool for Stripe to avoid paying the fee for Stripe invoicing.
Arvid Kahl 1:47
Yeah, that’s awesome!
Marc Louvion 1:49
And it was doing well. I always launch on Twitter as well. I make videos that I think I remember you were one of the first person who made a comment on that Joe Rogan video. It was a year and a half ago. And I’m forever thankful for that. And yeah, doing well.
Arvid Kahl 2:05
Yeah, I want to kind of talk about this like because I was looking at this yesterday when you launched and I was thinking this guy not only is building interesting products, but he’s building them with this focus on the launch on Product Hunt itself. Like, I don’t think you could build a tool that could not be launched. I think you would always gravitate towards something that you can actually put on Product Hunt. How much of a priority is it being launchable for you, if you build something new?
Marc Louvion 2:35
It is 300%. It is my entire focus that’s why I tried to avoid shipping proper startups with more like one feature of what a startup idea have in mind. Because I have packed a bunch of failed startups in the past. And I would drive my mind crazy. I would spend a year building a product that nobody would ever want. And so now my marketing is mostly launching. And I see how people react. And I’ve seen that with some product like ShipFast, I have really good feedback and traction from the launch. And then I go all in on it. And sometimes with other products then, you know, I launch I make a couple of $100 for the launch. It’s nice, but there is no real traction. There’s nothing that people are really excited about. And though I would just keep the product running and I would move on to the other one to avoid making the mistake of spending another six months on something that people will probably never want or use.
Arvid Kahl 3:33
Yeah, do you have a time limit for this? Like if a product that doesn’t? Like how long do you work on a product before you think okay, maybe it’s time to pivot to something else?
Marc Louvion 3:43
So there are different stages in, the last year it would be maximum one month. I never spend more than a month on it. Now I get to see people’s questions. People are giving me feedback, people are sending me emails. So I get some kind of pre validation. I kind of know something that people already want. And so I would this year spend more time building those products because I know there’s some kind of need already somewhere.
Arvid Kahl 4:10
Yeah, so with this pre validation, do you also have kind of a pre validation like before the launch itself? Do you try to build up some kind of, I don’t know on Twitter in your community, some kind of buzz before you even put it up on Product Hunt?
Marc Louvion 4:25
I do. Actually for ZenVoice so the last product I launched I build it live on YouTube. I set up my stream. I have a little microphone and I go live every morning and I would spend two to six or eight hours live building the product. And then I get people’s feedback. So they’re like sometimes they help debug my code, which is really nice.
Arvid Kahl 4:44
Yeah
Marc Louvion 4:45
Sometimes they give me marketing like headlines IDs. And also I get also some potential customers they’re who are like, oh, this is cool. You know, why don’t you add this feature or that feature? This is my pre validation thing.
Arvid Kahl 4:57
Wow, this is awesome. That is really cool. Streaming has always been really interesting. I feel like as a coder, I’m always super scared to stream. And I had RoxCodes on the show and he streamed a lot in the past. I had an interview with him on his podcast, like we were hanging out on his Twitch stream for four hours just chatting. We were diving, like from topic to topic. Streaming is a different world, right? It’s just a more engaging kind of thing. When did you start streaming? And why did you start streaming? This is a pretty big deal, right?
Marc Louvion 5:29
And I think this is the kind of question that I don’t even know how to answer. I don’t know. I felt okay. I think I wanted to have a different approach to building in public. And like you’re doing with a podcast, you know, you’re showcasing some funders who have done well in the past. I tried to have a different approach than just 280 characters on Twitter. And building live is the most, you know, real things you can ever do. Because there’s this thing where you see some people who’ve made it. You don’t know the entire story behind. And even though you see your tweet, it’s hard to relate for some of them. And so I was like, what if I go live, this is 100% me. This is not edited, not scripted. And so, yeah, transparency is something that, you know, it connects people. It sells and I wanted to give it a try. I think I’ve done it three times, once a year ago, maybe another one six months ago and recently, like last week and he’s been doing well, like even YouTube is also pushing those lies. I have a really tiny Youtube channel. At the moment, I think it’s about 5000 subscribers. And each live will get at least 2000 views, which is nice for a video that’s not edited. And that forces me to sit at my desk and actually produce some code.
Arvid Kahl 6:43
Yeah, that’s awesome. And yeah, it is very interesting to watch. I feel like watching somebody act as an entrepreneur, as a founder is wildly different from just seeing those like you said 280 characters of a summary of their work, right? You get this transparency, the authenticity. I do wonder because you are now somewhere at 76-77,000 followers on Twitter as well. Yeah, maybe the question is, do you struggle with staying authentic in front of such a massive audience at all? Or is it easy for you?
Marc Louvion 7:19
Yeah, recently. I don’t think it’s about, at least for me, not about the number of audience of people. It’s about coming back after making a product that was talked about a lot on Twitter. It’s very hard. I feel like some people would have expected or maybe I just have expectations for myself and I feel like I have to make the next heat. I cannot cheap something that will fail. And I sell for sure myself with that. Yeah, that’s pretty much where I am at the moment.
Arvid Kahl 7:49
That’s interesting. I love this because that’s how I felt for the last couple of years. Right? We sold our business in 2019, then I started writing. And I mean, you know, writing is also hard. Coding is hard. Business building is hard. Everything is hard, if you really want to do it well. But writing is easier because you know, people don’t pay you a subscription fee. And you have to keep writing, right? It’s not the same. It’s not the same as building an indie business. So I kind of didn’t build businesses for a while because I felt well I’m just gonna keep writing, gonna build a new set. I gotta build a media business, you know, going to just find sponsors and do advertising, make money a different way. And then I started building again, didn’t work out too well, right? Like the first couple projects that I was doing didn’t go that far or as far as I wanted to, where as far as I did in the past and I felt like, oh, should I even code? Like, it’s nice to hear you feel the same kind of feeling because it’s obviously stupid, right? Like these things, you never know where it’s gonna go. You just have to put in the work. So how do you convince yourself to still go through this to still put your work out there?
Marc Louvion 8:53
I think I built a little identity in my head of who I am. And I tried to turn off the emotion and just be like, okay, I like creating stuff. And this is who I am. Since I’m a kid, I create stuff. I’m just going to keep creating stuff.
Arvid Kahl 9:10
Yeah, it’s an easy answer. Maybe share some things from your past that you have created like free indie hacker, like if you said you started as a kid, what did you create back in the day?
Marc Louvion 9:28
I think like a lot of video acres, Legos of playing in my room. I’d be able to use them all day. Nothing else matters, huts and dams. I’d go into we had a little garden, my parents might. I would have some little logs and I will make a little huts in the garden or the forest. And then, yeah, I mean and then I discovered coding at university at the time where I was not interested in coding, but I kind of started to understand a little bit what is the internet and what is coding. And then after university, I had to do something. I just didn’t want to become an engineer, which was my graduation. And so I tried to, you know, find back what I was doing as a kid. So building stuff for the current world. So the digital world and I found myself coding to be this kind of like self fulfillment of creation of tool creation. Yeah.
Arvid Kahl 10:23
Yeah, that’s really cool. I agree with that, like coding is magic. I don’t know how to say it any better. Right? Coding is just magic. And the fact that you can create magic for other people to use to be wizards all by themselves, that is so powerful. I think I would like to talk about ShipFast. That is the product that I’ve been most impressed by recently. Although we’ll see where ZenVoice goes over the next couple of days. Right? You never know. But ShipFast has been just blew up like crazy. And can you explain to me why you build it? What it is? Maybe that’s important too. Who you build it for? And where this journey has been going over the last? What is it like six months?
Marc Louvion 11:05
Yes, yes. Soon to be six months, yeah. Yeah, so yeah, so this is a code base for programmers who want to create startups. It includes payments, it includes emails and all that. Back then it was just a way for me to ship faster. So it was six months ago, I already at this point built about 15 products. And I was doing the same thing over and over. You set up a landing page, you create a domain name, you add customer support, you process the payments. I was like, oh, I’m going to create my own boilerplate. And I’m going to make it available for people who wants to eventually do the same. And I spent probably a week gathering the code, making a little documentation and I push it live before going on holiday to Hong Kong. And then I just woke up to the launch. And at the time, I was making maybe 3,000 to 4,000 a month and I would wake up to the launch with something like 3k already made within 24 hours. And from that day, yeah, things like it created some kind of I don’t know, loop or whatever. And just things keep going up. And it has been making about $50,000 a month for the past five months. Yeah
Arvid Kahl 12:14
Yeah, it is. I’ve noticed that in your Twitter bio. That number is just amazing. Right? That’s for a product that doesn’t even have like recurring revenue, right? This is just amazing sales. Can you talk to me maybe about a choice that you made here? I think you have two prices, you have one like $169 for like a normal version and you have the $199 version, that includes like lifetime updates and that kind of stuff. I find that pricing choice really interesting. First off, it’s just pay once use forever, that is already pretty cool. But also this very slight difference between prices. Can you talk maybe about the psychology that you put in there, like the reason why you priced it that way?
Marc Louvion 12:59
So the people who are listening to this know that this is pure luck and randomness. I had no idea what I was doing back then. But I think it worked. So the IDE is to have some anchor price, where you have a price that is slightly cheaper than another one with one or two or less three features less, that it creates some kind of anchor people will be like, okay, so that’s 169 is the price for the product. So that 199 makes sense afterward because you’re anchored to that 170 or 169 dollar price point. Whereas if you have just one price, how do you compare that with something else? Like, how many apples is that, you know, it is hard to understand for people what is the value of such a thing and that helps a lot with this. And I decided to go with a one time payment because you know, as you said, that gets much easier to sell. But one time fee for something, then it needs to sell a subscription. If your product doesn’t have a really good recurring value, there is no point of charging your recurring revenue.
Arvid Kahl 14:05
Yeah, I think it’s also just a wonderful idea for this kind of product. Right? This product, you don’t have to pay for hosting. I mean, you have to host somewhere, but you don’t have to pay for ongoing hosting of other people’s stuff. You provide files. I mean, from your marketing copy, you don’t provide files. You provide an experience, right? You provide, like a way for people to ship, which is nice and I like this. I really enjoy your copy. I gotta say. I was reading through the page. And even just because I’m interested in what people built and the way you phrase it, it’s like you don’t buy the code. I mean, obviously you buy the code, but you buy your own time. You buy your own time back. That’s what this product is. I find this really, really cool. You really speak the language of the people that you’re helping and that’s probably because you use this yourself, right? Do you still use it in all your products? Is this still like the boilerplate for everything you do?
Marc Louvion 15:01
Every time and that’s how I avoid building unwanted features. I have tons of feedback about potential features for ShipFast. And what made it successful is because I built it for myself. And if I listened to all those feedbacks, I’m going to build a very complex boilerplates. And I do not do that. Instead, I use it for myself. And every time I see something that is useful, I’ll add it to ShipFast. So I shipped ZenVoice yesterday using ShipFast and out of ZenVoice, there were two UI components that I made for the landing page that were nice. I thought I could reuse later. And so I went back to ShipFast. And I added those two components. And that’s kind of my filter to avoid, you know, focusing on unwanted stuff and build only what matters.
Arvid Kahl 15:46
That’s really cool. Because you also get to use these new components now in your old projects, if you ever wanted to, right? That is awesome. What a genius way of building something that just feeds back into everything else you’re doing. That was really cool. I love what you’ve done on the homepage too where you show just how recently you updated the product. I think this is a lesson like for indie hackers who still want to communicate with their audience, like one to one who really want to show hey, I am building this. This is not some nebulous company somewhere. This is me. I am the person behind it. Here’s the feed of like the GitHub commits that just integrates into your website. Is that something that you, like did you choose that as a marketing tactic? Or are you just a nerd who wants to show that you integrate the GitHub comments into your website there?
Marc Louvion 16:40
I would say it’s the spirit of the community where will build in public. The things you share your transparents we relate very close little community. So we can relate to people that way. So it’s closer to a marketing strategy than me being a nerd. And I yeah, I think like the YouTube lies, building in public, I think it’s great to show everything that you’re doing, the good, the bad, the secrets and all that. And so that’s part of the reason I made this open. Yeah.
Arvid Kahl 17:15
Yeah, I think it’s really cool. I think it really speaks to me as somebody who judges or has to judge like most of your users that come to your website. They look at it and they want to figure out, is this legit? And is this going to stay with me for a while, right? Because for $200, you want to invest that money into something that’s going to stick around, showing the update frequency and just how recent the latest update has come, that is a pretty solid positive signal to the developers that you’re serving. I think that feature in particular stood out to me as genius. I’m gonna steal that idea at some point. And I think if only more of us would do this just to share with their target customer audience, just how much effort they put into this. Right? Then I think that would communicate much more clearly why and how you’re building this. This is really cool. Are you building some kind of a beyond the product, which is code, right? Are you building a community around this too? So that’s not just a code base there, but also people who can help each other? Is that a plan? Are you doing this?
Marc Louvion 18:19
Yes, it was not expected at all because I’m not a community type person. I’m very, actually, I spend all my time in this bedroom here. And I don’t talk to barely anyone. But someone mentioned do you have a Discord community? And I was like, why not? Let’s give it a try and I opened the Discord. And I made it part of the premium plan. And people started to join and like share, like crazy help, like debug each other, vote each others. Me for someone who has never been part of a like closed community like this only Twitter I was like, wow, this is pretty cool. And I kept you know, adding more channels so people can talk about marketing, can talk about debugging, life in general, updates, work in progress. And it’s been doing really well. The ShipFast community now is I think it’s about 1000 something members. And you have every week you see new project being launched on Product Hunt and man, this is pumping. This is a kind of like the end reward for me is like, oh, I see people actually shipping stuff. It’s beautiful.
Arvid Kahl 19:19
Yeah, it’s really cool. I love that this is like a little side result of you building this product. Now all of a sudden, you’ve brought people together. Isn’t that awesome? I think that’s just the most wonderful thing. Do you intend to take this further as a business like the both ShipFast and this community? Not just in terms of monetizing it, but do you intend to build more around this like consolidated?
Marc Louvion 19:45
I don’t. I’m at a point where I don’t really know. Do you have any clue how I could update or upgrade this?
Arvid Kahl 19:54
Well, let’s brainstorm a little bit. I’m thinking a lot about the small bets community by Daniel Vassallo, right? That is a very focused community on this one aspects of, we all want to build different things. And we want to see which one of the makes it and we focus on that one. You kind of are in a very similar niche just in a more technical way. You are where people start their thing and they try to make it grow, right? They try to grow it to a point where this little thing that they quickly build turns into a real business, what Daniel has done and that’s probably the one thing that I would recommend is turning the community into university. Because Daniel has been hiring people to teach, right? I was on his and I’m gonna be at the end of February, gonna be there again, teaching about building a media business. And he has Justin Welsh talking about LinkedIn, right? He’s bringing all these experts in that can help the existing community just with a lecture and then he saves the lecture as a recording and offers it for free to anybody who joins the community, you know. That turns the community into this constantly growing treasure trove of knowledge that new people can tap in. And old people, they get new lectures every now and then. I think turning it into university, that’s a move. And it’s easy, like you’re well connected, you could easily get your indie hacker friends and the people that you know in the marketing world and all of that just give a lecture, then Daniel Vassallo pays them. But you probably don’t even need to do that. There’s a lot of just interest by indie hackers to find other indie hackers to look at their stuff. So you know, I think that’s how it could start for you.
Marc Louvion 21:32
Wow, that’s smart! He is very smart, yeah, this guy is really doing really well.
Arvid Kahl 21:35
Oh, sure. Yeah!
Marc Louvion 21:38
That’s why I think this is probably the part where my developer mindset comes and tells you like, hey, bro, we need to build here. The operational thing, part of it, it’s not for you, mark your developer. But I think this is a really smart way. That’s probably why the community is growing. So it’s so big now. I hear it everywhere.
Arvid Kahl 22:00
Yeah and the thing is, I think Daniel has hired people to help him out. I think Louie besides is on the co founder, like after the fact kind of co founder situation. They’re just sharing the operational workload. But that’s the one thing that may be a bit problematic at this point. If you’re a developer and you want to code than sitting in webinars, like it’s not the same thing, right? Like sitting and listening to people teach in the community, putting effort into maintaining the community, that obviously is time that is not spent in your IDE. So you will have to figure out how much of a developer do I want to be if you want to build this even bigger? Or do you want to find somebody who’s kind of a community manager or community leader? Somebody who does it better than you, but will still listen to you, you know, somebody like that and give them that role and have them built the community while you keep coding. That’s really the balance you need to strike as a solopreneur. Right? Because you still need to be fulfilled in what you do. Daniel has no problem with that, but might be more problematic for you. Have you thought about like giving up the reigns to somebody else?
Marc Louvion 23:11
It has crossed my mind a few times. I think there is a part of me that really wants to stay solo. I think you can only go as far as you want being solo, but at a certain point. And I feel like where I am now, I’m kind of happy to stay solo. And not have the part of me that doesn’t want to work with people. I’m making this but I guess I am somebody who doesn’t ike people. I love people. I just don’t like the operational part of it. And having, you know, like deadlines and stuff, you know? So, yeah, yeah, this is probably like, yeah, I have to probably find if I can find a fit with my personality and expending the businesses. It’s pretty hard.
Arvid Kahl 23:54
Honestly, I think it’s a very common, I wouldn’t even call it problem. It’s a common reality for indie hackers like for people, like the indie is important, right? We want to be independent. We don’t want to be beholden to somebody else. It’s bad enough that we have to listen to our customers, right? It’s bad enough that they’re the ones controlling what we do. Now having other people in the mix, that’s just complicated. I understand it. I feel it. Honestly, that was the reason why I never hired anybody for Feedback Panda, the business that we built, my girlfriend and I built back in the day and then sold a couple years later. And this is a cautionary too because my reluctance to hire, my reluctance to get people on board into the business led to me almost burning out completely. Like I was mid burnout when we sold the business. We sold the business mostly because I couldn’t keep doing it anymore. Right? This might not be where you are right now. And I hope you never get to that point. But I convinced myself that I never wanted to share this with anybody else, right? I convinced myself that only I could do what I’m doing because I am the world’s best developer, for some reason, obviously not true. But that’s what I told myself. Nobody else could do my work. And then it kept growing and growing and got bigger and bigger, which is wonderful. But I was still just me. And I was the only technical person in the business. My girlfriend was doing operations. She was doing, like the design and the marketing and all that. And still, we were both overloaded me a bit more than her. It got pretty horrible. So there is value in thinking of other people and bringing them in to a certain degree. There is also value in doing it yourself. So I don’t want to scare you with this. I just want to give like my perspective on this because that was pretty dangerous at some point. And I hope you’ll never get there.
Marc Louvion 25:44
Yeah no, I think I can imagine. Yeah, I mean, it’s probably because you have, I think you were having like a proper software. So people would use it every day. For me, as you said, it’s like, they get the code. It’s kind of like a course. So once you get the course, you could get a few supports customer support emails here and there. But it’s still quite light. So probably not experiencing any of all the hard work. How what would you say is, did you have mostly customer support? Like, bugs on the site or emails from clients? Or is it something like technical that was hard to manage because you had traffic or something?
Arvid Kahl 26:19
Woah! I guess that’s a good question. Most of customer support was just people who had little issues, right? We were serving kind of a, it was B2B. But it was also B2C, like we were serving freelance online English teachers. They were not very technical. They were just sitting in front of their computers trying to get their webcam going and whatnot. And we help them with some kind of admin stuff on the back end. So we were with the browser extension integrating into their online classroom. There were some technical hiccups. But it was mostly just when our side had a problem or when the connection the browser extension had a problem. A lot of people we had like 5000 customers at any given point. Everybody would write at the same time. That was the stressful part, like dealing with the avalanche of customer service not even the individual problems because most of the time, it was like, yeah, yeah, we’re fixing it. Just check back in five minutes, right? That was the answer we would give. But I would give this answer like 150 times, that was the problem. And it was the flood. And had we hired somebody, just anybody for customer service at that point, just to be like the first line of defense and say, yeah, yeah, I’m gonna go through these 150, you keep fixing that bug. I’m going to tell them they’re going to be better in a couple minutes, that would have saved my sanity much more. And you’re right. It was a SaaS business. We were serving customers constantly 24/7 worldwide. That’s different than an info product, which is why, like I said earlier, I have not built a SaaS in a long time after we sold. I wrote books. I made courses. I did all that stuff. Because precisely, the customer service load is minimal. Like with books, in particular, Amazon KDP, like you put it on Kindle Direct Publishing, Amazon deals with all this stuff, right? They sell it for you, they print it for you, even the ebooks they put on the Kindle. You don’t have to deal with any of these issues, even Gumroad. People download it, they do it all by themselves. It gets very, very low support. But also, I guess, the upside of it is also a bit lower, right? It’s not that you all of a sudden have 1000s of customers paying you hundreds of dollars a month. It’s just people paying you $5, $10 every now and then. So you know, different deal. But that’s kind of why I’m trying to suggest something that is not a SaaS to you at this point as an extension of this, right? If you take ShipFast further, if you start building little SaaS tools, you can do this. But then you get into this whole customer service cycle again, right? Then you need to be present all the time or you need to hire so I guess a community of just lectures, where people like you can still build, you can build a community website. I think Daniel Vassallo did that too. Like he built the platform that houses the small bites community, there is a Discord. I think now he’s using the one thing that the Basecamp people put out like the Campfire, I think is the name, right? Of their chat system but Daniel still has all the videos and all that stuff integrated into small bets.com or whatever. I forget. But it’s his own platform that he built. It’s just he doesn’t sell the platform. He sells memberships on that platform, which is a different kind of business and memberships I think also easier to handle or it’s not a membership. It’s a lifetime membership. It’s a pay once, you know, use forever, just like your product is at that point. It could come with the code. I think I love this idea of you building a community that sits on top of an info product that is actively maintained, that makes the community more active. And that also allows you to just grow the value of the community then people would probably buy the product just to be part of the community. That’s very interesting.
Marc Louvion 29:53
I get that a lot. Yeah, I get that a lot that says I don’t know how to code but I want to be part of the community.
Arvid Kahl 30:00
That’s the point where you’ve tapped into something, right? That’s the point where you know, okay, people value this connection and they would buy something they cannot use just to be part of this. I would think about the ShipFast University, man. I really think you don’t even need, you could sell a membership. You could sell a monthly membership to that community. And people would probably pay it if it’s not too high, right? Particularly if it doesn’t come with the code. But if it comes with the code, then now all of a sudden you have an LTV that is three, four digits, if you, you know, bundle it with the price. That’s kind of nice. I think that’s pretty cool. And you’re a charismatic guy like you could get people to come in. You already know how to launch things and how to drum up some interest. I think that’d be cool. Sorry for turning this podcast episode into a consulting session. But that’s, I think you asked so that’s what you get.
Marc Louvion 30:55
Man, that was nice. Actually I was typing a little new line on my to do list. I appreciate it.
Arvid Kahl 31:02
Yeah, I appreciate it, too. Thanks for asking me. I think it’s nice to think about where things can go. Right? Because that’s what indie hackers do. We build something and we say, well, what can we do? What else can we do? How can we help these people more? I really enjoy this. And you having built so many things, go ahead.
Marc Louvion 31:23
I just want to say that what you were talking about the community for ShipFast, I could see sparks in your eyes, the founder sparks like you have a new business idea in mind and you start to imagine the entire roadmap of yeah, this is going to be like this, like that. This is beautiful, man.
Arvid Kahl 31:38
And it is, you know, yes, it really is. I’ve been experiencing this over the last couple of weeks building my own thing. It’s just you, all of a sudden you see something that doesn’t exist, but you see it. I think that’s one of the most wonderful feelings that you can have. And I find it really cool that your software that you sell, with ShipFast is facilitating that for other people. I think you’re doing the community a great service in having this out there. And I know you have competitors. And I know people could just learn how to code and do it all by themselves. But that is also competition like a job to be done kind of competition, right. But what you’re doing in particularly in building this community around it is just drawing this massive moat around this project. I think that’s a really, really smart choice that you’ve done there, very cool. What else are you working on? Are you fully focused on ZenVoice now? Or are you still like, how do you distribute your time? That’s what I want to know. Because I see like three or four things in your Twitter bio, all of which probably take some maintenance. How do you prioritize these things right now?
Marc Louvion 32:41
So this is new this year. I have five days allocated for building stuff. So from Monday to Friday, where I’m offline most of the day and then I come online at four or 5pm browser limit Twitter, go to bed and start again the next day. And I allocate my weekends, Saturdays and Sunday for content creation. Saturday would be for the, I just started a YouTube channel where I tried to do exactly the same as I used to do and I did on Twitter and I’m still doing it. But with the videos, is taking a lot of time. And I’m not, you know, used to making an entire 10 minute YouTube video in one day, but I’m trying my best. And Sunday would be for writing the newsletter and a couple tweets related to that newsletter.
Arvid Kahl 33:26
Okay, wow, that sounds like you have a full week. How do you balance like, you know, like, work life balance? I don’t think for founders really exists. But I think we call this work life integration at some point, right? Where it all kind of flows into each other. Do you do other things as well other than like coding and writing content and now doing videos? Like how do you balance this in your life?
Marc Louvion 33:49
Yes. I surf every morning. I wake up, drink a coffee and go to the beach, spend two hours spread some energy, get some sun. Then I’ll go home. I have a coffee and read a book for I don’t know, 30 minutes usually and get breakfast after that. Then I start the day and I work and I finish around six, I would say and then with my wife would go out, find a local restaurants, chat there. I recently set up this little guest room on the back where I have a PS4. I just received nice new speaker. So kind of like your office, a bit sketchy version of your office right now.
Arvid Kahl 34:30
I love it. That’s really cool. Yeah, that’s nice, Well, that sounds like you’ve figured out a balance. I love the honestly, I love your discipline. Because when I wake up, I’ve been thinking like while I slept about some weird coding issue or you know, something that I really wanted to talk about to be able to go and serve and have a coffee and read before you work. Congrats, man. That’s discipline right there.
Marc Louvion 34:54
So for you the struggle is in the morning. It’s like you wake up and you have those ideas and you have to put them to work, correct?
Arvid Kahl 35:01
Yeah, yeah
Marc Louvion 35:03
For me, mornings, okay, I wake up. I’m like fine, like the work is gone. But the problem is, if I wake up in the middle of the night, then I’m dead. That’s why I try to not drink water before going to bed like at least three hours before because if I wake up to go to the toilet and my brain starts to think about work, man two hours, like in the bed, I spent two hours debugging some code or imagining features or talking about that small community thing for ShipFast.
Arvid Kahl 35:30
I get that. I understand. Like, I’m trying to keep it out of my evenings for that same reason, right? Like I could work until midnight and then go to bed and then go back to work. Like, I’m at a stage with my thing. Like, I have my first customers. And I have really good feedback cycles and all that. I could work forever and there would always be something to do. But I have learned over the last couple of years, particularly after selling this business because of my burnout and my high anxiety that I don’t need that. Like I literally don’t need that in my life, right? This is something that should stay out of there. So I’m starting, the best thing that we have done is get a puppy. We have a dog and I’m the one that walks her in the morning. So when I get up, I cannot go to work because first of, I’m woken up by the puppy. The puppy comes into the bed and just like yeah, I’m hungry. That’s how that happens. Right? So I have to feed the puppy and then I have to walk the puppy and something magical happened there ever since I started walking her. My brain just it dumps all of the random stuff that it’s like journaling. Some people journal in the morning. I go on a walk with my dog and it’s just empties the trash, you know, the Empty Trash button. That’s the walk for me in the morning. And then I come to the come back home. The puppy is happy because she did everything she wanted to do. She sniffed the whole neighborhood. It’s very fun. And we have this bonding time with each other. So that’s good for my heart. And then I get my coffee and I go downstairs and I started working. I think I’ve been much more productive ever since I’ve done this compared to before where I would wake up go right to work and like you know find my way from sleep mode into work mode in front of my computer. This little interruption, you surfing, me the puppy, I think that makes a big difference. I think that’s really helpful.
Marc Louvion 37:15
Yeah. And you say more productive I think you also produce better quality work because your your brain is fresh is like sticking 100% of that thing. So I think, what time do you usually close your computer?
Arvid Kahl 37:29
We have figured out that somewhere around five or six, we’re both done. Like Danielle works from home. She’s an audio engineer. So she edits and that’s like audio work. And she’s done at five or six most of the time. She closes her computer. I tend to close my computer. I mean I don’t close my computer. I have a MAC studio. I just walk away, right? The studio is my workspace, right next to it is my coding space. This is my talking space. I close this door and I’m done with work. I try not to take it. I’m in the basement. I try not to take it upstairs. That’s the idea. So it really helps. Honestly, that’s one of the things also that I learned, first off get a puppy everybody get a puppy. The second thing is put a door between your work and your non work life like physically locate your work away from where you live, right? Don’t put your work in your bedroom or your living room, don’t take a laptop, don’t do what Pieter Levels probably does. I just work from the couch, no disrespect to Pieter. Obviously, he does a great job at whatever he does. But I have found for me taking the work with me is not a good idea. I need a designated space for it. And that’s what the studio is for me.
Marc Louvion 38:43
Yeah, yeah. 100%, yeah, that’s a new experiment for me this year. Last year I would work until I had to go to bed. And it was doing well because everything was growing. But then as soon as things become steady or worse things start to decline, man that’s your inner brain is like totally fucked up. So I really tried to have as you said, like office. I close the door and I’m good for the day. 6pm is also the time limit for us. So yeah, good. I will also put you in the category of you know, you have a really nice beard. You have a puppy. I will put you in the same category as Danny Postma.
Arvid Kahl 39:18
Yeah! Oh, for sure. Yeah.
Marc Louvion 39:20
Two founders who found the good life, work life balance.
Arvid Kahl 39:24
Yeah, I talked to Danny on this podcast just about the same thing as well. Like we were exchanging information about our dogs because we wanted to know, you know, just dog parents talking about their puppies on a podcast, obviously. But yeah, that’s the thing. I had this conversation with Danielle earlier. We were out walking the dog like an evening walk. And we were talking about well, when do indie hackers stop spending all their time on their businesses? Right? When is that? Is it a phase where you do this where you focus you grind every day, hours, hours, hours from waking up until your sleep. And Danielle was saying, yeah, well, I guess it’s when things start working out, right? When you have revenue coming in, then you have the luxury of not working full time on your thing. You can start surfing and you can you know, get started reading books and stuff because you have a stable financial situation. How was that for you before you were successful with your products? Were you like grinding 24/7?
Marc Louvion 40:25
Yes. I’m still quite healthy. I would always sleep eight to nine hours. I would always go to surf. But I would not have this moment at night where I close the computer at six and I enjoy three hours of free time with my wife going out for dinner. I would just somehow work even though Twitter is not proper work. I would still be on Twitter and be around
Arvid Kahl 40:46
I think it is. Putting a lot of effort to make things nice on Twitter, but yeah, it’s kinda it is not work that feels like work. Right? It’s kind of leisurely, yeah. Oh, wow. I’m glad that’s not the case anymore, man. Because that can quickly this can damage relationships too, right? It can damage your relationship with your partner. If you have kids, you neglect them, even the relationship with yourself. If all you do is work, work, work and you don’t allow yourself to find, you know, recreational joy and other things. Stress, anxiety, these things happen. So I’m glad that you and I, we both speak for taking time off work even if work is interesting, right? That’s a pretty important thing.
Marc Louvion 40:46
And I’m curious if you enjoy anything besides spending time with your girlfriend or walking out with your dog, if there’s anything that you really enjoy in life, like really, really enjoy at a point where it’s like, almost addictive.
Arvid Kahl 41:50
Cooking, I love cooking. Cooking to me as an activity is something that I just love, like I will make a roast. I will make a risotto. I will make like really fancy pasta with pestos, all kinds of things. I just love making things that I enjoy eating. And then other people enjoy eating. Whenever we have people over which we try because we live in a really small town in Canada. I moved here with Danielle to be close to her family. And it’s a pretty sizable family. She has lots of friends. Whenever we have people over, I try to make an amazing meal. We try to make an amazing meal. And I just love that. I bake. I cook. I do all kinds of things. To me, it’s almost like coding because it’s literally an ingredient list and you step by step, right? It’s like its source code, you have your variables and you kind of you loop over that thing. And you know, it functions and you’re transforming gradients from one data type into the other. But it is such a physical thing, where you get immediate feedback from the product that’s quite different from virtual things. So I love this. I also love painting miniatures, that’s my other hobby. I’m a big Warhammer nerd, that’s kind of the world that I come from. Right? If you see what is behind this here. I have like an airbrush and like all kinds of brushes and all kinds of acrylic colors. My studio is The Man Cave of the Nerd. I have their studio here, my computer over there. And there’s my Warhammer painting station right over there behind. So that’s what I love to do.
Marc Louvion 43:17
I really appreciate if you send me a picture after the podcast because I used to do the same thing.
Arvid Kahl 43:22
Will do. Wow, why did you stop? Was it too expensive? Because that tends to be a problem.
Marc Louvion 43:29
It could be. I think since I started to code, I put all my attention to that. Now it’s kind of new. I’m trying to find some hobbies and stuff that I can do outside of work to disconnect. And that could actually be one of them.
Arvid Kahl 43:42
I recommend it like to me I have a 3D printer too. Let me be honest, I have three 3D printers, two resin printers and one FDM printer. And I’ve been like printing miniatures and you know, understanding how all of the chemistry and the physics of that works. And I’ve been painting them. It’s just trying to nerd out on a different level, right? Something that is for me exclusively for me, I don’t do this in public. This is a personal thing. But I needed to connect with my physicality. Because all I do is right about abstract things and talk with people like you. I love talking but you’re just this tiny little thing on my screen, right? Like you’re not physically present here. I need something that allows me to feel the physicality of my life. So that’s what cooking does. And that’s what painting miniatures does too. Do you have any hobbies other than surfing that gives you like a physical thing in your life?
Marc Louvion 44:36
Naturally, I was super excited when I was making of this room to just you know, put the furniture here and add the speaker there. Now I love work like working. I love switching. It’s not that you say like that, but I love working outs.
Arvid Kahl 44:51
Yeah, well that’s also great. I think Pieter always says you got to lift, right? Are you lifting enough? What do you think?
Marc Louvion 44:59
Not at all. I am a outdoor. I’m like a play person. I tried to get to the gym. I just realized I don’t like it. So skate and surf work well for me.
Arvid Kahl 45:13
I have a home gym and I don’t use it. It’s like right over there too, doesn’t work. I mean, that’s just me being lazy. But I’m also not that kind of thing. I’m not that kind of personality. But maybe that’s the thing. If you prioritize it, you make it happen. And if you can’t prioritize it, you need to find something that you will willingly prioritize in your life. And I see you do this with surfing, if that is something you really enjoy, you make time for it. Right? That’s how that happens.
Marc Louvion 45:39
Yeah, sometimes is learning how to just listen and not forcing. It could be a great teacher.
Arvid Kahl 45:44
I think so too. And I think it’s an important priority to choose in your life. Like as a solopreneur, as an indie hacker, like we are so focused on our technical parts of our lives because that’s what everybody talks about, right? Like, in the community, I think until like, the last couple years, the indie hacking community was all about code. It was all about like, you know, JavaScript frameworks and all about like Stripe integrations and that stuff. And I mean, we all laugh about it, like the whole Pieter Levels deadlifting comments and that kind of stuff. It’s all funny in a way. But I’m really glad that he’s bringing this into the conversation, that he’s talking about healthy eating, that he’s talking about, like healthy way of living for this this weird obsession with calculating the carbon dioxide of you know, the chemicals in his rooms and stuff. I think it’s important to take care of your surroundings and of yourself of your body in your life. So I’m glad to see you do it. And I think to talk about it too not just productivity right not just like how to be more effective with your business, but also how to live a fuller life. I think you’re a good example for this as well. So thank you for doing this in public as well. I think it’s really cool.
Marc Louvion 46:57
Appreciate it. Yeah. Yeah, Pieter is doing a great job at leading the indie hackings movement and still after all those years, showing us how to do things. Yeah
Arvid Kahl 47:06
I think you’re doing this too. I think like let’s not forget that you have what is it like probably one quarter of Pieters’ following now on Twitter. Is it like maybe maybe 25, 20% or so that is pretty significant. Think about that. Right? That’s I mean, Pieter has been doing this for a decade now. Right? It’s pretty sizable. So you’re still hanging out in Bali, right? Are you slomad? Is that what you are?
Marc Louvion 47:30
Yes. Six years in Bali and almost five years in this house. So barely moving anyhow. Yeah.
Arvid Kahl 47:37
That’s funny. That’s not nomading and all. Do you ever see yourself like taking up the Nomad life again? Or are you just done? Are you just settling now?
Marc Louvion 47:47
We have a plan to buy a hopefully a cyber truck if it becomes available in Europe and do a Europe tour from Norway to, it’s not Europe anymore but Morocco.
Arvid Kahl 47:58
Yeah, more close. Right? I mean, they’re not gonna like it. But this is very interesting. That’s really cool. Yeah, that’s awesome. That is really fun. That’s so and then after that, you’re gonna go back to Bali? Like I just want to know, do you have like, do you feel like you have a place that is home at this point in Bali or is Bali still like, you know, like the foreign place like the vacation-ey kind of phase of your life kind of place?
Marc Louvion 48:27
It feels like home. And I feel so good. When I’m back from my home country friends to Bali, I feel like I’m actually back home. The only thing is hard to make a big commitment and buy a house here because things move really fast. With what happened with the war in Russia, you have a bunch of people coming and so things so they start to build things everywhere. So that creates some kind of like a random events that I’m not sure I want to deal with. That’s why we struggle for now to commit to Bali for the long term. And we keep renting this villa. Every year, we renew the contracts.
Arvid Kahl 49:02
Yeah, interesting. Yeah, I guess it is a volatile place. So things change pretty quickly like I’m not adverse in it. What I know is that lost change quite often and relationship with foreigners and what they can do and all that is always a bit problematic and unplanned double, I guess. So very interesting. Well, I guess your Cybertruck tour is going to be interesting. Are you going to do that in public too? Are you gonna share that journey if you do it?
Marc Louvion 49:29
I’ll probably still build in the Cybertruck.
Arvid Kahl 49:32
Ah, that’s awesome. You got to put like a Starlink on top and just kind of build from the driving vehicle.
Marc Louvion 49:40
Live stream it, probably the car will drive itself. And I’ll be building live stream while being driven by the car.
Arvid Kahl 49:49
That is so cool. Yeah, I don’t own a vehicle. We only have one in our household but if I ever were to buy one, it would probably be the Cybertruck. I think it’s just such a fun vehicle. Big fan of like 80 Sci fi style and that car or that truck is just the most wonderful example of this. Man, I am looking forward to seeing your drive the cybertruck all through Europe. That’s gonna be awesome. Man, okay, if people want to find you and follow you on your journey, both the journey of you building indie products and building SaaS business, maybe communities hopefully in the future, where do you want them to go?
Marc Louvion 50:25
Would be marclou.com, my website. I have my Twitter where I share everything I do in public, my YouTube channel, which is pretty new and all my startups and revenue there are shared there.
Arvid Kahl 50:38
Yeah, I highly recommend following your journey. I’m a big fan. And in case you haven’t noticed, I’m a huge fan of you and your work. And I really appreciate you talking to me about it and sharing all of these insights both into your life, into your personal approach on how to live and balance your life. That was really interesting to hear and just how awesome you are at building things. That’s always wonderful to see. Thank you so much for being on the show today. I am really, really happy we got to talk.
Marc Louvion 51:05
Thanks for having me, Arvid. I really enjoyed the podcast and enjoyed also following your journey since the beginning and got inspired by everything that you’ve done. Thank you.
Arvid Kahl 51:14
Thanks so much!
And that’s it for today. I will now briefly thank my sponsor acquire.com. Imagine this, you’re a founder who’s built a really solid SaaS product, you acquired all those customers and everything is generating really consistent monthly recurring revenue. That’s the dream of every SaaS founder, right? The problem is, you’re not growing for whatever reason, maybe it’s lack of skill or lack of focus or play in lack of interest, you don’t know. You just feel stuck in your business with your business. What should you do? Well, the story that I would like to hear is that you buckled down, you reignited the fire and you started working on the business, not just in the business and all those things you did, like audience building and marketing and sales and outreach. They really helped you to go down this road, six months down the road, making all that money. You tripled your revenue and you have this hyper successful business. That is the dream. The reality, unfortunately, is not as simple as this. And the situation that you might find yourself in is looking different for every single founder who’s facing this crossroad. This problem is common, but it looks different every time. But what doesn’t look different every time is a story that here just ends up being one of inaction and stagnation. Because the business becomes less and less valuable over time and then eventually completely worthless if you don’t do anything. So if you find yourself here, already at this point or you think your story is likely headed down a similar road, I would consider a third option. And that is selling your business on acquire.com. Because you capitalizing on the value of your time today is a pretty smart move. It’s certainly better than not doing anything. And acquire.com is free to list. They’ve helped hundreds of founders already, just go check it out at try.acquire.com/arvid, it’s me and see for yourself if this is the right option for you, your business at this time. You might just want to wait a bit and see if it works out half a year from now or a year from now. Just check it out. It’s always good to be in the know.
Thank you for listening to the Bootstrapped Founder today. I really appreciate that. You can find me on Twitter @arvidkahl. And you’ll find my books and my Twitter course there too. If you want to support me and the show, please subscribe to my YouTube channel and get the podcast in your podcast player of choice, whatever that might be. Do let me know. It’d be interesting to see and leave a rating and a review by going to (http://ratethispodcast.com/founder). It really makes a big difference if you show up there because then this podcast shows up in other people’s feeds. And that’s, I think where we all would like it to be just helping other people learn and see and understand new things. Any of this will help the show. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful day and bye bye.
