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Thanks for signing up for my founder newsletter. I've got the usual bootstrapper news stories, plus an exclusive newsletter interview with the founder of viral site outbid.lol
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News
Ferryman makes $2.2k MRR
There really seems to be a bottomless pit of money when it comes to social media scheduling software. There's a new one out called Ferryman. Personally, I have to say I love the branding and the idea of "ferrying" content from your favourite social media platform to others.
Don't make an Outbid.lol clone
Since Jonathan Wilke made $200k in a few days with his outbid.lol website lots of copycats have sprung out of the shadows, looking to jump on the trend. One has made $18k but the others seem to have flopped.
Thomas from Uneed wrote a good article about why you shouldn't try to clone Outbid (or perhaps any other viral website): https://thomas-sanlis.com/p/should-you-build-an-outbid-lol-clone
I don't have anything against these copycats really but it does seem misguided - they are never going to get more attention than the original and that is what companies are paying for after all.
AWS acquires DuckLabs
Interesting news that AWS has bought DuckLabs the makers of DuckDB. The good news is that the DuckDB is remaining free, open-source and the team will maintain a presence in The Netherlands.
Mark Raasveldt and Hannes MĂĽhleisen
I interviewed the Outbid.lol guy
Most of you will have seen the outbid.lol leaderboard website go viral last week. The maker, Jonathan Wilke, has made $220k in the past 5 days.
One thing I love about this story is that Jonathan had his back against a wall last week. His boilerplate business SupaStarter (affiliate) was seeing declining sales. But he didn't panic. He just got creative and shipped something new. And it's clearly paid off!
He joined High Signal for an exclusive newsletter interview. You can read it here as well (shares are appreciated!) https://www.highsignal.io/220k-in-5-days-the-outbid-lol-interview/
Can you briefly explain what Outbid is and how much you’ve made?
It’s a stupidly simple site where all you can do is to pay to get on to the leaderboard. The higher the bid, the higher your rank. You pay to get seen on the board.
How did you get the idea for Outbid.lol ?
I knew about TrustMRR where people are sharing their revenue, but I didn’t want anyone to share API keys for their payment provider. So I just chose the simplest way to rank. Pay and you are on the leaderboard.
What were your expectations when you made it?
I didn’t really have any expectations. This was a fun side project I built on a Wednesday night while cooking dinner (the coding agent was doing most of the work). I thought if this thing makes a few hundred bucks in total, that would be nice.
Why do you think it went viral?
I think it was a combination of my existing audience of 11K followers on X and just pure luck to have something that was different enough to be worth sharing. I think one pivotal moment was the first 10K bid by trycomp.ai where people thought “why would someone pay this much money to be on a site that does nothing” and this started the FOMO loop.
How long did it take to build it?
The initial version was built in 3 hours with Cursor. After that I have been working 12-14 hours every day to keep the site running, make sure everything works smoothly and add a few new features.
How are you planning to spend the money?
Just going to save it for now. Probably invest in an ETF.
Do you have any tips on making a viral website?
I think the idea needs to feel “like something new” (I didn’t even know about the million dollar homepage before I built this). And there needs to be some WTF moment for visitors.
Is outbid going to be a long-term website or do you think interest will naturally fade?
Honestly, I don’t know. I have added the outbid.lol/today view to have a ranking that resets regularly and create some kind of “recurring urge” to rank, but I ultimately think that if the hype around it dies and the traffic decreases, people won’t see the ROI of the ranking anymore.
What do you think of all the copycats?
I think it’s fun that I can say I started this hype, but most of them will probably not make real money. I have to say that all the copycats did probably contribute to the success of outbid.lol.
Have you told your friends/parents/family about how much money you’ve made?
Yes. Also that information is publicly available on the about page of outbid.lol.
Has outbid.lol helped you sell more Supastarter boilerplates? (affiliate)
Yes, a few more licenses were sold than regularly.
Do you have any tips to make a viral site with less stress?
Set spending limits for the services that can theoretically scale infinitely. But I would always choose services like Vercel so that I don’t have to care about DDoS attacks, etc.
End notes
I hope you enjoyed the newsletter! Let me know with a reply or you can get me on pete@highsignal.io
I'll be back with more news on Friday.
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Cheers,
Pete
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