I bought a domain for 1€ and generated x577

A joke that lead to an extra passive income

Hey, listen!

One day I was binging on Twitter — as usual.

I started a joke with a twitter friend.

Ended up buying a domain for 1€ and building a website.

Today is sunny in Gijón! I finally get rid of the curse! ☀️

During the last days, I’ve been watching the Lex Friedman’s podcast with Pieter Levels.

Yes, during days, because it is about 4h long 💀

So I did the same as with the Justice League by Zack Snyder, and watched it in episodes as if it was a TV show.

There was one thing that resonated with me and I’d like to bring to this issue — in fact it resonated a ton of things, I encourage you to watch it.

Some times — or most of times — the very first fresh idea that comes to your mind is the best version of it.

This is a thought that I’m having for a while and it impacted to me when they commented about it.

Have you ever had a tweet idea, wrote it, then tweaked and refined it a couple times, and finally post it after some revisions, and then the tweet was a flop?

And have you ever tweeted the first thing that came to your mind and went kind of viral?

That’s what I’m talking about.

It happened to me also with startup ideas.

Marvin was a sudden decision.

WrapFast was a click in my brain while laying on the couch.

I made PhotoCaption in 8 days impulsively after seeing a tweet.

In fact, Tibo (@tibo_maker) just tweeted today one thing that also resonated with me a lot:

This is an excellent playbook to start indie hacking — and eventually succeed.

Actually, it’s kind of the same I’m doing since I started on this last year.

I was just doing it by pure instinct and also influenced by what I see daily on Twitter.

One of those impulsive decisions was Boilermat.es

I was joking on twitter with Serg, which is the creator of Larafast — a boilerplate for Laravel.

We made a pun about being boilerplate mates, and he found out that the domain Boilermat.es was available.

Funny enough, .es is the Spanish domain (I’m Spanish if you haven’t noticed it yet 😜)

I checked just for curiosity the prices of the domain and… LMAO it was just 1€ (for the first year)

So I instantly bought it because YOLO, without having a clue if I was going to do anything with it.

After some random thoughts, I just decided to make a super simple —almost plain— list of boilerplate creators.

I announced it on Twitter and a lot of folks joined the initiative — we are now 76!

A few weeks later, I started checking the ones that had affiliates and putting my affiliate link on the website.

I also implemented lately the ability to feature randomly the “Boilermate of the day”

This way, I would notify the creator and they’d spread the word on 𝕏 — if they want.

I’m not going to retire with this, but I had fun with the community and made so far 577€ in affiliates.

Eventually I can also sell the directory. I already had a couple of proposals but ditched them.

Boilerplate directories is a niche that is growing lately, so who knows if this effortless passive income continues to grow :)

And this started from a random, quick, subconscious idea.

Thus, stop the overthink mode and jump into the build mode.

See you next week!

Juanjo