Why We Built ShipFree: From Personal Need to Open Source Success

Building products is exciting, but the initial setup can be a major roadblock. This is the story of how a weekend project to solve our own problem turned into a thriving open-source community.

The Problem We Faced

My friend Irere Emmanuel and I had been shipping products for a while, but the process was consistently stressful. The market offered solutions like ShipFast, but at around $200, they were quite expensive for independent developers like us. We needed something more accessible, so we decided to build our own solution.

From Personal Tool to Open Source Project

What began as a simple internal tool quickly evolved. As we used our boilerplate, we realized many other developers faced the same challenges. That's when we decided to optimize it and make it open-source as ShipFree.

Our Launch Journey

Once we had a working version, we shared it on multiple platforms:

• We posted it on daily.dev, where it gained 2.6k views and 120 upvotes
• We launched it on Product Hunt
• We built in public on Twitter, sharing our progress
• We featured it on Peerlist Launchpad

Facing Criticism

Not everything was smooth sailing. We faced criticism, primarily because our landing page design resembled others in the space. But as a team, we didn't let that discourage us. Our focus remained on the functionality of the boilerplate itself, not just the aesthetics.

The Power of Community

Despite the initial criticism, the project attracted amazing contributors:

• Yuss, who refined the UI components
• Chiliseo, who added Drizzle ORM and Docker support, taking the project to another level

These contributions transformed ShipFree from a simple boilerplate into a comprehensive development toolkit.

Explosive Growth

The response exceeded our expectations:

• On launch day, we gained 180+ GitHub stars
• We crossed 500 stars in less than a week
• We built the entire project over a single weekend (Saturday to Tuesday) and launched on Wednesday

A huge thank you to Miguel Ángel Durán for tweeting about our project—it brought in a massive amount of traffic and helped us reach developers worldwide.

Key Takeaways

This has been one of the biggest projects I've built so far, and it taught me several valuable lessons:

1. Don't wait for perfection - We launched a buggy project and iterated as we went
2. Embrace uncertainty - Honestly, we had no idea what we were doing at first—but that's the beauty of building in public
3. Community matters - The contributions from others took our project further than we could have alone
4. Just ship it - The most important lesson of all

What's Next for ShipFree?

We're continuing to improve ShipFree based on community feedback and contributions. Our goal is to make it the go-to solution for developers who want to ship products quickly without breaking the bank.

Remember, the perfect moment to launch doesn't exist. The best time to ship is now.