I discovered Indie Hacking in Summer 2024 with Marc Louvion's YouTube channel, and I immediately loved the idea of building and launching products by myself, without any external funding, and being able to live from it. Marc's biggest success is Shipfast, a boilerplate for SaaS applications built with NextJS and TailwindCSS, with more than 7500 customers. Honestly, I didn't really understand why it worked, so I moved on, but I kept the indie hacker idea in mind.
Couple weeks later, I started building my first app : WiseCart, a simple web app where you can create shopping lists just by choosing the meal you will eat during the week. It was a fun project, and quite good for a first project, but when I started my second project, I realized that I was spending a lot of time building the same features over and over again: authentication, dashboard, settings, billing, etc..'. That's when I understood the power of Shipfast, and boilerplates in general.
So, I forked a public boilerplate from Vercel called "SaaS Starter", I decided to build my own boilerplate. The goal is to have a solid codebase with all the essential features already implemented, so I could focus on building the core features. I called this boilerplate "Boilerplate.md", because "md" are my initials and I discovered that there was a top-level domain "md" for Moldova, so I thought it would be funny to name it that way (A/N: I just checked the price of the domain, it's 50$ per year, I probably won't buy it for now).
I'm not directly working on this boilerplate, it's a project that gets improved and updated as I work on my other projects. For example, when I built WiseCart, I added a feature to manage user roles and permissions, and I thought it would be useful for the boilerplate, so I added it there. Same thing when I built my Life OS project, I improved the dark mode, improved the product and subscription management with Stripe, etc...
If ever you are interested in the boilerplate, it's one of the many bonuses I give away for free when you buy one of my courses. This is the only way I will distribute it, so you might want to check them out if you are interested !