Jonathan Wilke
@jonathan_wilke
Built Outbid.lol in three hours. It earned $120K in 48 hours.
Last updated · Content reviewed
Jonathan Wilke is a full-stack developer from Germany who created Outbid.lol, the original pay-to-rank leaderboard. He built the site in roughly three hours using Grok in the Cursor editor, launched it on X on August 19, 2026, and reported over one million visitors and $120,000 in bids within 48 hours. He is also the founder of supastarter, a SaaS starter kit for Next.js, Nuxt, and SvelteKit that reached $10K monthly recurring revenue as a side project.
Our take
Wilke did not invent a new business model - keyword auctions predate him by decades. What he nailed was packaging a dead-simple mechanic with a viral launch on X. Dozens of clones appeared within days, but none replicated his distribution. The real lesson of Outbid.lol is that the mechanic is trivial to copy; the audience is not.
By the numbers
Boards tracked
1
Combined revenue
$220,621
Top bid
$17,000
supastarter MRR
$10K
supastarter ARR
$120K
Boards on this directory
From freelancing to SaaS starter kits
Wilke started freelancing in web development at 16. After years of repeating the same boilerplate for client projects - authentication, billing, internationalization - he packaged those patterns into supastarter, a production-ready SaaS starter kit. He launched the first version in August 2021 and rewrote it a year later with Prisma and tRPC for greater flexibility. By 2026 the kit supported Next.js, Nuxt, and SvelteKit and had reached $10K in monthly recurring revenue.
Outbid.lol and the pay-to-rank explosion
On August 19, 2026, Wilke launched Outbid.lol as a side project with no ads, no API keys, and no revenue sharing. The concept: pay more than the person above you and you take their rank. Within 48 hours it reported over one million visitors and $120,000 in cumulative bids. Traffic overwhelmed his analytics provider mid-launch. Dozens of copycat boards appeared within days, turning a single joke project into an entire genre.
Why the clones flopped
Every clone reproduced the mechanic but not the launch reach. Wilke had an existing audience on X and timed his launch for maximum virality. Most copycats launched to near-zero followers and never found distribution. The lesson, echoed across indie-maker coverage, is that distribution beats product when the product is a single-page auction.
Frequently asked questions
- Who created Outbid.lol?
- Jonathan Wilke, an indie hacker and full-stack developer from Germany. He also founded supastarter, a SaaS starter kit for Next.js, Nuxt, and SvelteKit.
- How was Outbid.lol built?
- Wilke built it in roughly three hours using Grok in the Cursor editor. The site launched on August 19, 2026 with no paid promotion.
- How much revenue did Outbid.lol generate?
- It reported over $120,000 in cumulative bids within 48 hours of launch, alongside more than one million visitors. Revenue figures are founder-reported.
- What is supastarter?
- A production-ready SaaS starter kit for Next.js, Nuxt, and SvelteKit. It includes authentication, billing, internationalization, and mail templates. It reached $10K in monthly recurring revenue as Wilke's side project.