Jonathan Wilke (Outbid, Supastarter)

Type: person | Domain relevance: Solo indie developer whose pricing confidence and build workflow are transferable to a solo consultancy

Summary

Germany-based indie developer. For about four years he has sold Supastarter, a SaaS starter codebase with authentication, payments, email, and blog scaffolding pre-built so buyers can focus on their own product. In 2026 he built Outbid.lol, a pay-to-rank leaderboard, in roughly three hours with Cursor and it earned about $212,000 in days after going viral on X and Hacker News. The transcript gives only “Jonathan”; the surname is inferred from the Supastarter product, whose creator is Jonathan Wilke. He matters to this wiki as a concrete example of a solo operator who charges from day one, raises prices as evidence of value accumulates, plans before building with AI tools, and outsources infrastructure risk to managed providers.

Key Facts

• Supastarter launched at about $29 to $49; now $349, which he still calls too low (Charge From Day One).
• Outbid.lol: about 1.3 million visitors in five days, top rank about $17,000, about $212,000 total revenue.
• Uses Cursor with automatic plan-mode switching and Matt Pocock’s “grill me” skill for complex features (Plan Before Build (AI-assisted development)).
• Launch tactic: repost every new leaderboard entry with the buyer’s link on X (Launch Attention Loop).
• Rates the outcome 99 percent luck, 1 percent execution; execution being non-generic design and simplicity.
• Polar’s fair-use policy excluded the business; evaluating Stripe and other providers (Merchant of Record vs. Direct Payments).
• Vercel spend limits paused the site during a botnet attack; Vercel restored it and refunded the overage.
• Switched analytics to DataFast after the previous provider crashed at about 400,000 visitors per hour.

In the Sources

Related

Entities: The Next New Thing Concepts: Charge From Day One, Plan Before Build (AI-assisted development), Merchant of Record vs. Direct Payments, Launch Attention Loop, Productized Services (services-first, productize later)