Developer tool launches with Nico Botha
Nico Botha built Ship SaaS because he kept losing interest in his own side projects before finishing them — rebuilding the same boilerplate code every time burned him out before he ever got to the actual idea.
Nico Botha is the founder of Ship SaaS, a Next.js SaaS boilerplate built with Supabase and Tailwind CSS, and co-founder of Supermeme.ai, an AI meme generator.
We get into why he built the boilerplate he couldn't find on the market himself, why building for developers means being ready to justify every technical decision, how a single well-ranked SEO keyword became his main growth channel, and why he thinks a well-chosen meme can carry a message more efficiently than a paragraph of marketing copy.
The Q&A below is experimental — extracted from the episode transcript with AI. If you spot a mistake, let us know at jack@scalingdevtools.com.
What made you start Ship SaaS?
Like a lot of indie hackers, I'm someone with a lot of ideas, and at some point I got tired of rebuilding every idea from scratch. I'd lose interest before finishing a project because I had to keep rewriting the same code. So I went looking for a SaaS boilerplate with the stack I wanted — Next.js, Supabase, and Tailwind CSS — and couldn't find one on the market. I realized I could build it fairly quickly myself and make it available to other people too.
How did you go about getting your first customers?
I tried a few different strategies — sharing a lot on Twitter, posting on Reddit, sharing on Indie Hackers. Twitter was where I got the most traction early on, so I decided to focus there, and it's remained one of my main acquisition channels since.
Do you have advice for someone starting to build a tool for developers specifically?
It's more or less the same as building for any other audience, except your customers are technically very skilled, so expect a lot more technical questions. You always have to be ready to justify certain decisions. A normal audience won't necessarily ask why you made a specific tech choice, but developers are a naturally more critical customer base and will push on that.
How do you prepare a product for that kind of scrutiny?
Always be ready to explain why you made a certain decision. Your choices are never going to be perfect, and sometimes customers raise valid concerns — that's actually a good thing, since it's input you can use to improve the product. But most of the time you just need a solid reason for the choice you made. There are thousands of libraries you could use to connect to a database or add a component, and you need a good reason for the one you picked.
What's your plan for growing Ship SaaS from here?
I looked at my landing page analytics recently and realized most of my conversions were coming from SEO — people searching Google for a Next.js SaaS boilerplate. I'm fairly high in the rankings already, with room to improve, so my main growth strategy for the coming months is doubling down on SEO: more content, blog posts, and videos showing what you can actually build with Ship SaaS.
How have you approached SEO so far, since you've already written a fair number of blog posts?
I use a tool called Katlinks, built by another indie hacker, which shows you SEO issues on your site and helps you plan a strategy. I use it for keyword research, to check what keywords competitors are ranking for, and to optimize posts to capture some of that traffic. There's a whole range of things you can do with it, and it's really my main starting point for planning SEO tasks.
You've managed to rank quite fast for what's presumably a decent-volume search term. How?
I was a bit lucky — there aren't many Next.js SaaS boilerplates out there. There's one other one that ranks above me, but if you search for the term, there isn't an abundance of relevant products competing for it; most results are irrelevant. So it looks like a difficult keyword to rank for, but it actually wasn't.
Did you specifically target that keyword, or did it happen from writing content you thought would be useful?
I focused on that term specifically, while also including related keywords like Supabase, Stripe, and Tailwind CSS. But that specific keyword combination has been the most successful one so far.
Your other project, Supermeme, generates memes with AI. How do you think memes fit into developer marketing?
Memes are a very powerful way to convey a message in a condensed form. Where you'd normally need a couple of sentences or a blog post to get a point across, the right meme can convey the same message with a single image. It's much easier to consume and much easier to share, so in my opinion it has a much bigger impact.