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One company paid $14000 to a simple bidding app

The story of overnight success via vibe coding by Jonathan Wilke

Aug 23 2026

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One company paid $14000 to a simple bidding app

X is always the most famous and interesting platform for gathering information, launching products, and sharing your work.

Jonathan Wilke is one of them, the so-called indie-hacker, the solo developer and founder-turned Entrepreneur.

Jonathan was like others, the everyday indie-hacker sharing the story of building in public for his products daily over x.com(Twitter)

Until last week, the story flipped, and his simple idea of bidding to get on top is almost close to generating $1m, one million USD, in total revenue within a week.

History

First a bit about Jonathan Wilke: he was a normal indie-hacker building products and sharing on x.com. Most the indie-hacker does the same: build and sell while sharing the building journey. Jonathan was no difference, neithe he is from a top university, but his last products were stunning, and one was supastarter.dev

Supastarter was the boilerplate starter kit, just like shipfast and buildsaas.dev. Supastarter was a success for him; as per Jonathan's earnings tweets on X, he was generating more than $10k per month, which is a decent amount.

Until one day, he got the idea to launch a simple bidding app; the biggest inspiration he had was that he “How much he hates sponsorship Advertisements 😃”

> I couldn’t agree more 😄

Outbid.lol: Simple bidding website but fastest revenue-generating product

His idea was simple: pay and get the first rank; the more people pay, the more the minimum bid will become or increase.

For example, the first user can pay $1, and if others want to bid and rank first, they have to pay more than $1 and so on. The Maths was simple as per databases and as per the user's understanding: you want to get rank 1, pay one more than the last bid.

But as they say, House Always Wins

In this case, Jonathan’s outbid is the casino house, and in the end it will always win; the bidding is gambling that always invokes the users' dopamine and rushes the adrenaline, hence teasing more and more audience to pay and bid more.

Not Just the Product

As always, the best product is not the one that has more features, but the better website, good design and faster than every other competitor.

Instead, sometimes, the best product is the simplest product that does one small thing perfectly better than others.

Not just the product but the website needs the marketing technique and customers to keep coming to the website and keep bidding. Jonathan uses his social media appearance on X to build the product in 8 hours, vibe coding, launch on X and got viral within 24 hours.

The idea was simple, the product was simple, but the marketing was not.

https://x.com/jonathan_wilke/status/2090184058810544467?s=20

His followers simply love the product and quickly start bidding, as initially the bidding amount was low mathematically, so everyone wanted a piece of the cake.

> $100k in 3 Days

Yes, outbid.lol crossed $100k in total revenue in 3 days through bidding. Who knows that in the world of sponsorship and Affiliate marketing, bidding will generate money 😅

>$14000 for one bid

https://x.com/jonathan_wilke/status/2091197672325607773?s=20

Revenue tweet crossing $132 in total in 4 days,

What are bidding websites and why are they trending?

Bidding websites are websites that take money and display the buyer's product at the top

Pay $1 more than the last buyer and get the first slot on the website's list.

Bidding can be for any website, product, SAAS tool, Blog website, Canvas, Directory website or best video, etc

It’s similar to sponsoring an aggregator for launching your product on their website; a few examples are Uneed, Product Hunt, and more, but instead of paying fix amount, the buyers can pay any amount to get on the top of the lists.

These websites are trending because of a simple concept: to gain traffic and grab a spot on the trending spot, adrenaline rush, more traffic, top spot, more money in the pocket. Since this is the first concept in the market, bid and get your product ranked #1, which creates so much hype in the indie-hacker space.

How to Build Your Bidding Website?

In the last week, dozens of outbid.lol clones have been launched in the market.

One tweet estimated the total number of 800+ outbid.lol clones to be launched in the market.

Building one was not a task; the basic requirements for building your own bidding website are defined below

Nextjs, Tailwind, Shadcn frontend client-side website
Payments to pay and book the slot: webhooks and API keys
Database to store all bidders along with payment amount
Hosting platform

iHateReading.lol: Bid the best blog on the internet

I’ve covered the basic blog on our bidding website, ihatereading.lol

I’ve built our bidding one using Buildsaas.dev, read more about how to build products using one boilerplate or starterkit in days, not months.

In just 12 hours, my bidding website was live and generating revenue 😅

AI Agent Prompt for Building Bidding Website

I’ve added the prompts for building the bidding website, but a different tech stack for different needs.

A few developers work on Supabase, a few want Firebase, and a few want Prisma and PostgreSQL as the DB

A few need Cloudflare, and a few need Vite instead of Nextjs.

To avoid any confusion, I’ve added the detailed AI agent prompt or Cursor prompt for each tech stack for building the bidding website.

Press enter or click to view image in full size

Building Bidding Website with Nextjs, Firebase and stripe

Choose your preferred stack, copy the prompt and let him build your bidding website.

Conclusion

Jonathan Wilke's story was not something we usually read now and then. It’s magic and simple thinking with precise execution that makes his product the fastest revenue-generating product.

His story is inspiring and makes everyone go crazy over building and marketing your product/idea and tool.