Marc Lou says ShipFast fell from $126k a month to $2k
Four years of a boilerplate business in four lines, posted by the founder himself.
Marc Lou published ShipFast's revenue year by year and the shape of it is a cliff. Zero a month in 2023. $126,000 a month in 2024. $25,000 a month in 2025. $2,000 a month in 2026.
The highs made me happy. The lows taught me more than I ever expected.
He did not frame it as a postmortem or a lesson in disguise. He wrote that the product changed his life, that the highs made him happy and the lows taught him more than he expected, and he signed off with a thank you to ShipFast.
The post he was answering
The numbers came out as a quote of shirish, who had put the same decline next to what Marc Lou is earning elsewhere. By shirish's count, TrustMRR and DataFast are pulling $84,000 a month combined right now. That matches the tally ILIAS ISM ran earlier, which put TrustMRR at $53k a month and DataFast at $31k.
shirish's line under it was blunt.
The business read
Two things are true at once here and only one of them is bad news. A boilerplate product that was doing $126,000 a month in 2024 is doing roughly 1.6% of that two years later. That is not a dip, that is the market moving out from under a product category while the founder watched.
The other thing is that it barely dented him, because by the time ShipFast hit $2,000 a month the replacement revenue was already larger than ShipFast ever was. That is the whole argument for running several products instead of one flagship, and it is rare to see it laid out with real numbers by the person who lived both sides of it.
Worth being precise about what these figures are. They are a founder's own posted numbers, not audited accounts, and there is no detail in the post about why ShipFast declined, whether it was competition, AI making boilerplates less necessary, or Marc Lou simply stopping work on it. Nobody has said yet.
What is clear is that he published the decline voluntarily, with the peak number attached, which is not the usual direction of travel for founder revenue posts. Most people post the $126,000 month and go quiet for the two years after.
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