How Shipper grows

Posted a daily build-in-public series on X (counting days), dogfooding the product by building with Shipper itself. Used X Premium and Typefully for posting. Around day 50 it started working and growth went parabolic.

Offers no free tier because the AI product is expensive to run in time and money; invests the money instead into the product for paying users. Cheapest plan is $25/month.

Users pay a monthly subscription for credits (cheapest $25/month) used to build apps. Two credit types: builder credits for general building and cloud credits for back ends. Users can buy one-off top-ups when they run out.

In summer 2025, seeing AI app builders explode (Base44 $3M ARR in 6 months, Lovable $1M ARR in a week), entered the category with a small team (the brothers plus one developer), aiming for 1% of the market by triple-downing on one common pain point. Watched competitors closely to copy what worked and avoid their mistakes: working product by month 3, caught up by month 4, ahead on features by months 5-6.

Shipped a rough, often-breaking MVP instead of waiting for polish and launched it on Product Hunt in the first week.

After the Product Hunt launch, posted on Reddit; posts regularly got around 400 upvotes. Subreddits and post format were not described.

Tip learned from Rob Hallam of SuperX: always add the product's link in the second tweet (the follow-up/reply) rather than the main post, to get more reach and extra traffic to the website.

Read competitors' Trustpilot pages and public roadmaps and joined their Discord servers to see what users complained about; also watched their own support chat (e.g. 'I want to turn this website into a mobile app'). Result: Shipper builds mobile apps, Chrome extensions and Telegram/Discord bots, not just websites and web apps. By months 5-6 they shipped features competitors did not have.

In parallel with Reddit, targeted high-intent SEO keywords built on competitor names, such as 'alternatives to X' and 'how much does X cost', using a WordPress blog and programmatic SEO pages.

Built Shipper around eliminating technical terms, since rivals aimed at non-technical people still had scary parts. Messaging: Shipper turns your thoughts and ideas into a live business that can make money, with zero skills required.