Sitting on a project? This Maker Grant recipient's motto: "just f*cking ship it"

We took a moment with Danny Postma, one of our first-ever Maker Grant recipients, who has launched a handful of products on PH. Multi-project experimentation is part of his process. In January he merged two of his projects — a landing page builder with headline generator, Headlime 2.0, to create Pages by Headlime, a GPT-3-powered landing page builder for creating custom pages in minutes.

What was your inspiration behind Headlime and more recently Pages by Headlime? What was the first step you took?

A few years ago I wrote an ebook that contained 200 headline templates. This one sold pretty well. But ebooks aren’t worth that much. So I decided to turn it into a micro-SaaS so I could charge a bit more for it.

Back in April 2020, I launched the first version of Headlime which was a simple headline generator. You could fill in certain text variables and the tool generated headlines for you. It earned over $48,000 within a week so I knew this was a valuable tool to continue working on.

I was working on adding way more templates until June 2020; I got access to GPT-3 by OpenAI (an autoregressive language model trained with 175 billion parameters). I started experimenting with it and realized how powerful it was to create marketing copy with. I also realized that it would quickly kill my current, template-powered app. So I decided to go all-in on the AI part.

I launched the new version of Headlime in December 2020 which included AI copywriting, growing my MRR from $1K to $6K within a month. I realized this would be the future of copywriting, so started to experiment further with what was possible. I had code for a landing page builder laying around (another side project I never launched) and tried to merge them. To my surprise GPT-3 was even capable of writing landing page copy and that’s how Pages by Headlime was born.

What has been your biggest challenge as a Maker?

My biggest mental challenge has been the large amount of developers that decided to 1:1 copy Headlime V1. [Headline was accused of being a cheap CodeCanyon script that I was reselling.] This took a large mental toll, resulting in me taking a break for a month.

During that month, I realized that being copied is part of the process. Instead, I had better use the energy to build a better product. I think this fueled me to ship the new version of Headlime in such a short timespan. I spent 5 months working on Headlime V2 in secret. And as you can see now, it was totally worth it.

What has been your biggest reward?

The amazing people I’ve gotten to meet during this journey of working in the open on my Twitter. Growing my SaaS from $2K to $20K MRR in three months while documenting every step got me in contact with entrepreneurs I would have never expected to interact with in my life.

What are your next steps for Headlime?

The next step is to turn Headlime into the #1 copywriting tool for all your copywriting needs, enabling anyone to write high-quality content, no matter if you’re a native English speaker or not.

Words of wisdom you can share for Makers looking to get started?

Share your journey. I wouldn’t have been able to reach my current success without all the amazing and helpful people I’ve met during this process and got to learn from.

Also, just f*cking ship it. No one cares about what framework you use. People care if your product can solve their problem. Launch quickly and validate your idea, talk to your customers, listen to their feedback and make your product 1% better every day. Try building multiple projects and stick to the one that works. Oh, and don’t forget to do some marketing in the process ;).