Maybe the "show, don't tell" writing advice applies to everything from Etsy listings to SaaS landing pages.

You've got to figure out how to make it painfully obvious what your product does and what your customer can expect.

I'm not sure I have a solution for my Etsy shop at Xmas time...

"Did you ship this? I need it before Christmas!"
"Will I get this before Xmas?"

All of these answers are readily available to them.

If you've had some loser months, try to keep your head up. If you're winning, try not to get complacent.

(Note, this screenshot misses a few thousand more in spend for that period).

#buildinpublic #indiehackers

I'm building SLAPPSHELL boilerplates and managed services on this exact stack.

Full-stack sites you can launch with zero programming knowledge, just fill in config files.

Follow along!

You can check out the full breakdown here: www.slappshell.com/resources/02...

EXPERIENCE. EXPERIMENT. ENJOY.

Think in reusable systems.

Once you're familiar with something, each time you use it gets easier.

Stop obsessing over the "best" stack.

Pick one. Learn it. Ship. Repeat.

The results:

Before: MINIMUM 2-3 days to launch a new project on WordPress

Now: Same day launch with this stack

Cost: ~$80/month for hosting, database, and emails

Started testing for just the cost of a domain.

Quick SEO reality check (former SEO):

HTTPS + consistent redirects

robots.txt + sitemap.xml

Title tags + canonical tags

Describe things how users describe them

That's 90% of it. No mystical secrets.

Analytics: GTM + Google Analytics

Not sexy, but it integrates with everything.

Set up conversion tracking once, wire it to all your ad accounts from GTM.

If you're running paid campaigns without good conversion tracking, pause them and fix that first.

Emails: Resend

Have used Mailgun, Mailchimp, ConvertKit.

Resend won for simplicity. Store your API key, verify your domain, trigger emails from server actions.

Works for both transactional AND marketing emails AND building a list.

Payments: Stripe

No-brainer. Handles:

Hosted or custom checkout

Subscriptions or one-time

Static products or dynamic invoicing

Stored payment methods for auto-pay

The flexibility is hard to beat, and it was super simple to create the flexible/dynamic invoicing for serviceCRM

Hosting: Vercel

Yes, I know some will push back on this.

But when I'm iterating fast:

Connect GitHub repo

Add env variables

Hook up domain

Done

Worried about runaway costs? Just set a usage limit.
Your new project probably doesn’t have enough traffic for it to matter.

Database + Auth: Supabase

Postgres database with auth, storage buckets, and RLS policies built in.

The dashboard is visual and intuitive. Their video tutorials are really helpful.

Free tier to start. Scale when you need to.

UI + Styling: Tailwind CSS + Shadcn/ui

Hot take: On mobile, most websites look the same.

Your design just needs to be intuitive. Let users find and do what they need.

Keep it simple.

Frontend + Backend: NextJS

Why:

Dead simple App Router for site hierarchy

Components feel like building with Legos

Built-in core SEO features & rendering (coming from an SEO background, this matters to me)

API routes and server actions keep logic easy to follow

My criteria for SLAPPSHELL:

Easy to use with solid docs
Extendable for different use cases
Scalable tiers (launch cheap or free)

I'm self-taught. If I can work with it, you can too.

When picking a tech stack, there are really only 3 questions that matter to me:

What am I already familiar with?

How's the documentation/community support?

How much time OR money do I want to spend?

That's it. SvelteKit vs NextJS won't be why a customer picks you.

I used to spend days spinning up WordPress sites.

Searching for plugins. Breaking things in dashboards. Copy/pasting into WYSIWYG editors.

Then I realized: I was spending more time fixing my stack than working on the actual project.