$5K/Month Selling Code to Copycats

Piotr Kulpinski built OpenAlternative, a directory of open-source software alternatives. It went viral – 100K visitors in the first week – and grew to $6,500/month.

Then people started copying it.

📝 From a recent profile…

Here’s the thing about OpenAlternative: it kept getting copied. The clean, simple design that users loved also made it trivially easy to clone. I’d see knockoffs on Reddit almost every week.

At first, it frustrated me. Then I realized something: code is not the moat anymore. With AI tools making development faster than ever, anyone can replicate a website in days. Fighting copycats was a losing battle.

So he flipped the script. He packaged his codebase as a boilerplate called Dirstarter and started selling it to them. $159 for Standard, $199 for Pro 🧐

If people were going to copy me anyway, why not make it easier for them and make some money in the process?

He built the MVP in a week. First sales came from people who’d been asking “how did you build OpenAlternative?” for months. Pent-up demand he didn’t know was there.

🤑 183 customers so far, generating ~$5K/month.

Most marketing channels flopped – Reddit, paid posts, directory submissions. Only two things worked: SEO and affiliates (30% commission).

Keep an eye out for projects that keep getting copied – then build something you can sell to those copycats 🤔

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