# I earn $3,287/day with this SIMPLE tech stack

Channel: Marc Lou
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETkhHZS-Sbk
Duration: 16 min
Language: English
Words: 3611
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/ETkhHZS-Sbk

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[0:00] pick one text tag and stick to it forever. 3 years ago, I made the decision to never ever change my text tag ever again. And since that, I have built over 30 website that gets around 500,000 page views per month and make over a million dollar per year. Okay, let's start with the front end because front end is always funnier than back end. H I use React, the most popular library, uh to build all my user interface. What I love about it is that they have a bunch of libraries. So, for instance, the beautiful charts I showed you earlier, it's coming from the Rechart library. It's just so easy to

[0:27] build pretty much anything with React. And often people say React is hard. I don't think React is really hard if you're using for like building little uh internet businesses. Those are all the stuff. I don't know how it works in React. I just use those three hooks and it works pretty well for my 30 websites. Okay, now moving on with my favorite

[0:44] part of coding, the design and styling. Uh I use Tailg CSS instead of CSS. Uh man, this is just so good. I don't even know why someone would use CSS. It comes with a bunch of pretty fine colors. Uh you also have all those animation transitions like uh it's super easy to write helm in CSS. I use it for every single my website and even this little uh game I made on top of it. I add Daisy UI. So it's my UI component library. Be very careful here. This is where people will try to get you to switch to their new trendy UI library. Don't fall for

[1:14] it. Stick to one UI library you like. Mine is Daisy UI. You have access to uh all of those components and a bunch of others like toggles, form, etc. And you can also customize each of them if you want. And so for instance, I always start with the same base project. So the buttons always have a similar look. And then I would customize the colors. For instance, uh on this website, it's more of a gradient style, but they behave the same. So there's this like a little animation, popsup animation, but under the hood, those two website are using the exact same Daisy UI templates. And also they have over 30 themes, so you

[1:45] can customize to um as deep as you want. And finally, I wrap everything inside of a Nex.js project. And I absolutely love it. If I want to create a new page, I just create a page.j js file. If I want to create a new layout that applies to all of my other pages, I just create a layout.js file. It's just so easy. And then I can easily have a bunch of pages created for me. For instance, this is another of my project that gets a couple hundred pages ranked on Google. And uh it's using basically pages and layout from Nex.js. So I have those like programmatic SEO pages automatically

[2:15] generated for me. This is just make it so easy to create a proper page and have it indexed on Google. And here we go. For the backend part, I use uh Nex.js js for all of my API endpoint. It's literally that simple. I just create a route.js inside of a big API folder and boom, I have a post endpoint. I have a patch endpoint. I have a delete endpoint. I have literally everything I want inside of the exact same project. I don't have to uh bother creating a new server. I don't have to uh maintain the server. I don't have to update my server. Uh this is using serverless. And

[2:46] this is just so simple. And for the database, I use MongoDB. I don't know why whenever I tweet about MongoDB people say that this is one of the worst database in the world. I have no idea because all of my projects are running on MongoDB. They have a free plan so you can get started for nothing. They have automated backup so I don't have to think about you know what if something goes wrong. And also I forgot to add the icon but on top of MongoDB I use mongus just to organize a little bit my document. So in every of my project there is a models folder. Uh there's one

[3:13] usually for the user who sign in. There is usually a model for every type of data the users can create and inside I have just a bunch of keys that you know I want to say for users a name email customer ID that I get from stripe etc etc and then in any API endpoint I just do userfind by ID and then I retrieve the user I update whatever the data is uh it's just so simple and now for the hosting part where where is the money spent uh in versal and MongoDB Atlas for Versal I host uh my front end and my back end because once again I'm using

[3:44] Nex.js. So I have my API and my front end in the same project. So everything is hosted on Versal. Uh those are all of my projects. I have been using Versal since I guess 2021 or something. And I just love it because it's just so so so easy to I just click and it deploys. All I have to do is to uh commit and push to prod and then it will be redeployed automatically on the internet. And also I wanted to show you what this tech stack costs. Uh so for Versal it is a tricky situation because I have been on the pro plan for like years and um I

[4:15] think about 6 or 12 months ago they changed their pricing structure. Uh for most people they ended up paying more and I was one of them. So I don't know exactly how much I should be paying because around the same time they reached out to me. Uh they say that because I have 30 websites on their on their platforms they want to get some feedback from me in exchange of $0 bill at the end of the month. I am technically not paying for Versal. I am not sponsored by Versal. I am not sponsored with any of the tools I'm mentioning in this video. Uh but I also

[4:42] want to be totally transparent. So they are just uh paying my bills at the end of the month. Um if we look at January for instance, I would have have to pay $1,000 for January, which is roughly 50 times more than what I used to pay at the same date last year. But at the same time I also ship a bunch of new apps get way more traffic and one of them is datafast where u it's a web analytics platform and I use versal API endpoints to track those events uh which means like if I have let's say 200 customers who are sending me events from 200

[5:12] websites my API endpoint is called like a multiple time per which is probably also why my versal bill went up and for the database hosting I am using MongoDB Atlas and those are all of my project on the left side I create one cluster per project And then I have usually a prod database. And usually if I want to test stuff, I have like a testing database on my computer. And same for MongoDB since I am now running like this web analytic tool. Uh my bill went up by crazy. It was uh it was at $9 a month. At top I was at $67 per month. And then in

[5:46] October when I launched this web analytics tools, my bill went crazy up. So right now I'm paying about $500 a month for the database. So 10x what I used to pay uh at the same time last year as well. Uh I think for this one I can just optimize a little bit. I need to think I just didn't have time for that. Okay. So this is like the foundation of uh everything I built with. And then likely I will need a third party tools for I don't know processing payments, user authentification, etc. Not all of those tools are used in all of my apps. So I'm

[6:16] going to cover each of them, how much I pay for them and what I use them for. The first one uh is one you're likely going to need to is OJS to authenticate users. Um, I use it for all of my websites. Like I have this like a page build. Then I can just input my Google API key. I set up magic links and then I have an entire login system set up. It's free. It's open source. It's working super well. Now for emails to send transactional emails. I broke my rule of never changing my text tag because I used to use Mail Gun to send emails and

[6:42] I still use Mail Gun for all the apps that I didn't migrate. But every new app I use now are using recent. It's a more I would say friendly like it's uh the user interface is much easier to use than mail gun. But the number one reason I use them is because they don't only have transactional emails which are email you send for like signups and stuff but they also have marketing emails and since I build my product in public I need to update my power users after a week a month about new features that I've released and this is why I switched to recent and so I can create

[7:12] audiences of people when they sign up to my app for instance and then I can broadcast messages. So for instance, the other day I released a new feature. So I can just write an email with like some placeholder stuff and I can just broadcast this email to the exact same emails of people who signed up for my products. The fact that recent have transactional and marketing emails makes my life so much easier. And billing wise I am at $60 a month. So the the

[7:35] transactional emails are pretty cheap. And then marketing as always it's uh it's higher more expensive. And this is pretty much what I'm paying right now. the most expensive and also the most important part of my tech stack, Stripe. I use Stripe to process payments on all websites I create. They take about 5% cut on every payment. So, uh by the end of the year, that's $60,000, but I guess uh you know, that's the the only way to uh get make money on the internet. Uh so, I'm more than happy to pay that. And I mean, the software is just beautiful. I create one project every single time uh I have a new

[8:08] business idea, I will create a new Stripe account. And all those Stripe accounts are owned by the same exact company, my company. I know Stripe is a little uh tricky to uh to set up when you're getting started. If you want, there is a video on my channel called the easy way to set up recurring payments with Stripe. Um you can check that out. All right. Now, moving on with the next product and uh this one is one product I own called Datafast. It's a web analytics platform. Um I build it for myself initially because um all the analytics tool I find are either like very boring like Google Analytics which

[8:38] is just a complete headache or they're more made for like developers. But since I'm on the middle between developers and entrepreneur I wanted to have payment. I wanted to see how does the revenue connects with the traffic. So my dataf dashboard is going to show me a little bit like all the traffic and the revenue I make in the past 24 hours. And for each website I have more information about um you know the data the analytics. So, for instance, for this one, um I can compare what it does compared to the previous month. Um it calculates some metrics like the the revenue generated per visitor. Uh this

[9:08] is good because then I know if I spend less than $1, um in Facebook ads to drive traffic to this product, I am still profitable. For instance, it also connects the revenue to the visitor. So, I know uh which marketing channels bring the most money. Uh I know which countries uh are more profitable. I know

[9:23] which internet browser they're using. And also one thing I was really curious about is what do people do before making a purchase. So I've created this like little thing here called journey where uh I can see for one person what they have done before making the payment. So I can see that this person has found the website through uh YouTube. So likely my YouTube channel uh what they did during that day came back a month later then came back 5 days later and the next day through egg so through Twitter they probably found one of my tweet and ended up making a purchase. It helps me as a

[9:52] business owner understand a little bit what is going on on my site. Now what I want to do is to connect that with an AI and hopefully the AI will find patterns in what are some recurring actions that people do before purchasing a product. So I can just see what do I need to double down to make more money. Okay, next part we have AWS. I use it only when I need to make some stuff with images and videos. For instance, for these little websites it's like a link in bio like a portfolio builder tool. Uh

[10:17] people can upload logos if they want. they can change their profile photos, etc. I put all of those images into a big S3 bucket and then I use Cloud France to load those images fast. Then I use Upstash for background tasks that are pretty long. For instance, I have this little um leaderboard where anyone can sign up and share their revenue uh using Stripe. Um holy wow, this guy crossed 10 million. Crazy. here. Um, for instance, for a guy like him, it would take a long, long time to fetch all the payments from his stripe account in

[10:48] order to display this amount of money. And I do that using up stash. And I also use currency API for uh this website here, this little board, uh, because some people are making money in foreign currencies and I want to unify that in US dollars. So like it's I can compare and like rank them uh based on their uh, revenue. And I use the the actual the

[11:07] actual currency rate from currency API. Also, I forgot to mention this cost me maybe5 or $10 a month. And this is a paid plan and I think it's $30 a month. I use namecheep when I need to buy domain name. This is my favorite place to go for just shopping. And sometimes I need to buy like a exotic domain. For instance, I have this like shipa.st. If

[11:28] I want to buy ST domain names, Namechip. NameChip does not let me do that. So I use Netim instead. Each of the domains I own cost me around $20 a year. So I guess I have maybe four or $600 a year or maybe even more than that of domain name payments. Okay. Uh this is new in my text tag because I didn't need that before but recently I launched a course named codefast where I teach people um how to code an entire software from scratch and I wanted the platform to be good. I wanted to know fast and for that I use Mox. It's like a I don't know it's

[11:59] like a mix of AWS with a good user interface where you can just drag and drop videos and then they will be able to stream your videos with a very nice player uh that you know it looks good like I can go forward backward they will load in 720p if I don't have much data coverage uh you can go up to 4K if my internet connection is great it just feels great and because I started using this for the course I also uh start to use the Mox player for pretty much any product I make because it's just good it's pleasurable to see so for instance

[12:26] for data fast there's the change log where I update people about what's new. Um, I also use the master layer here. Uh, they have this like amazing feature like English autogenerated subtitles. So, I just push the video. It has perfect quality. People can stream it. Their subtitles is just so good. On the downside, it's pretty expensive. Uh, I think for my course, I spend around $500 a month just to stream videos. Uh, luckily there's something if you ever use their service where if you make content for developers, they have this like little uh badge that you can add to your site and they will cover up to

[12:59] $1,000 worth of spent on your bill. Okay. And finally, uh, Capacitor. Man, this tool changed my life. This is crazy. I don't know anything about building iOS or Android apps. I just I am a web developer and I built this uh, habit tracker as long as two other uh, web apps and I turned them into a mobile app. though for instance this habit tracker has it's it's actually an app on the app store so you can uh download it on your phone and I still don't know how to code native apps but I use capacitor just to basically wrap like a a native view around my web app I can just push

[13:31] it and boom I have a little uh apps app right here um that is ranked on the app stores and finally we are in 2025 80% of my code is written by an AI so I think I need to mention uh the AI part of my text stack um I use cursor as the code

[13:46] editor and I have a little LLM inside. So, at the moment I'm using code 3.5 set. Uh, I use the chat heavily to create stuff. I also use the composer sometimes when I know what I want. Uh, the AI is actually really good and really fast. You can go on the internet. It can open my terminal and run some comments. But I also use cursor AI to do a bunch of other stuff. For instance, since it knows my entire codebase, I can ask if there are any like a security

[14:11] flaws or endpoints that are not secure. It is really good at finding uh security issues in my codebase since it knows the entire copy of my site. It's also really good at writing uh documentation, change logs and also just copy itself and I think very few very few people are using this feature uh but cursor AI is so good at design. What you can do is if you want a time picker just go on Google uh you find whatever link of a time picker you like. You just take a little uh screenshot of it and then in cursor you

[14:39] just well you just copy past the image. you can just write a little piece of text like recreate these components and you know change the colors, change the border radius, whatever it is getting really good at designing at the moment. All right, that's the end of the video. Uh these are all the little website I've created in the past 3 years. If you want to check out, there's a link in uh the description. Also, each of those websites are connected with my Stripe account. So, um my actual revenue is on this page. It took me almost 7 years to get to this point. And in the first 3 to

[15:05] 5 years, I kept changing my tech stack over and over. And I really wish I knew that tech stack don't matter. Your customers really don't care about the invisible. They care about the problem you're solving for them. Your tech stack is like a muscle. The more you practice, the more you build apps with the same text, the better I get at it you get. So the faster you'll be able to ship. And the faster you ship, the faster you will get customers because you're going to make a bunch of small bets. And that's the end of this video. If you liked it, well, you can like it. And until the

[15:29] next video, I hope you keep shipping. Oh, I almost forgot. I just made this video. It took me about a month to make that. It's an entire video about how to learn how to code using AI. It goes from complete beginner to learning how to build a SAS. And it's completely free. It's about 3 hours long. So enjoy it.

[15:47] Cheers.

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