August 20, 2026. 11:08 PM. Jonathan Wilke, indie hacker and founder of supastarter, shared a link on X. No press release. No launch campaign. Just a link. Sixty-five hours later, the thing he built in three hours had made $139,041.
How Jonathan Wilke built outbid.lol in 3 hours and made $139k
$139,041
Revenue
1.1M
Unique visitors
3 hrs
Time to ship
65 hrs
To $139k
The Journey
Every milestone, in order
Aug 20 · 11:08 PM
Launch
3-hour sprint. Ship it.
Jonathan built outbid.lol using his own supastarter stack. The premise: a pay-to-rank leaderboard where your position equals your total spend. No ads, no API keys, no algorithms. He shared the first link on X with no paid promotion.
supastarter stack
$0 marketing budget
Aug 21 · First morning
200k visitors. Analytics breaks.
Screenshots of the leaderboard spread through developer timelines before Jonathan woke up. The site logged 200k+ unique visitors in its opening hours, fast enough to break his analytics provider. He switched to datafa.st on the fly. 1,500 new X followers in the same window.
200k+ visitors
+1,500 followers on X
Aug 21 · 24 hours in
Revenue
$21,499 before the first full day ended.
Solo developers started with $5 to $10 test bids. Then serious founders joined. Once you've spent $300 for a spot, spending $20 more to reclaim it after someone outbids you feels completely reasonable. Revenue climbed through the afternoon.
$21,499
Day 1
Aug 21 · Afternoon
Offer
$100,000 acquisition offer. Declined.
An offer arrived while traffic was still spiking. Jonathan shared it publicly on X and turned it down. The decision itself drew a new round of attention and brought more visitors back to the board.
$100k offer
Declined
10+ clones launched
Aug 22 · 48 hours in
Scale
Top bid hits $14,013. A new product listed every minute.
reactbits.dev held the top spot at $14,013. 867 products had been listed. Jonathan kept sharing running stats on X, and every update brought in founders who hadn't heard of it yet.
$14,013 top bid
867 products
190k+ product link clicks
Aug 23 · Now
Ongoing
$139,041. 1.1M visitors. Still live.
Sixty-five hours after launch. The clones didn't stick because people weren't coming for the mechanic, they were coming because of Jonathan's posts. Every update he shared added more people to the story. The board is still running on the same rules from night one.
$139,041 total
1.1M unique visitors
Still live
The outbid story gets shared a lot. But the number isn't the reason. It's the way it happened in public. Every milestone Jonathan hit, he posted about it. Each post gave people another reason to pay attention, and brought new people to the board who hadn't seen it yet.
Take away the public updates and you've got a clever side project that made some money over a weekend. Keep them in and you've got a story people are still passing around three days later.
Most builders are in the middle of something like this right now. Day 12 of a project. Week 6. Six months into something that hasn't launched yet. Those updates, the ones that get posted and forgotten, the threads that disappear into the feed, that's the actual story. It just doesn't have anywhere to live.
Your story is forming right now.
Jonathan's story had six milestones across 65 hours. Every one of them was worth sharing. Alongly is free. Start a Journey the day you begin something, share updates and milestones when they happen, and the people following you get the full story in order, forever. No streak pressure. No algorithm.
Free. iOS and Android.
All stats sourced from Jonathan Wilke's public posts on X (@jonathan_wilke) and outbid.lol. August 2026.