August 19, 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. He'd built the thing in three hours using an AI coding tool, while cooking dinner. One hundred and thirty-one hours later it had made $207,000 — and it's still running.
How Jonathan Wilke built outbid.lol in 3 hours and made $207k
$207k+
Revenue
1.1M+
Unique visitors
3 hrs
Time to ship
10
Public milestones
The Journey
Every milestone, in order
Aug 19 · 11:08 PM CEST
Launch
Built with Grok in Cursor. 3-hour sprint.
Three hours. Grok 4.6 in Cursor, cooking dinner. A pay-to-rank leaderboard: minimum $2 bid, position equals total spend, no algorithm, no categories, no editorial. One link shared on X. No paid promotion.
Grok 4.6 in Cursor
$0 marketing budget
Min bid $2
Aug 20 · First morning
200k visitors. Analytics breaks. Emergency switch
Screenshots spread through developer timelines before Jonathan woke up. Traffic overwhelmed his original analytics provider mid-launch - he switched overnight to datafa.st to keep the counter running and posted the switch publicly. 200k+ unique visitors. 1,500 new X followers in the same window.
200k+ visitors
Analytics provider #1 → datafa.st
+1,500 followers on X
Aug 20 · 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. The mechanic created an escalating commitment loop once you've spent $300 for a spot, $20 more to reclaim it feels rational. 705 companies listed. First ROI receipts arrived: CrowdReply spent $12,700 and booked 50+ demos and $50k in monthly pipeline.
$21,499 Day 1
705 listings
CrowdReply: $12.7k → $50k MRR pipeline
Aug 21 · Afternoon
Offer
$100,000 acquisition offer. Declined. Publicly.
The offer arrived while traffic was still spiking. Jonathan shared it on X, then declined it. The decision and the transparency about it generated its own wave of engagement. 10+ clones appeared within the first 24 hours. Two of them bid for placement on the original board.
$100k offer · declined
10+ clones in 24 hrs
Aug 22 · ~48 hours in
Crisis
Payment provider shuts it down. Pivot to dodopayments. $1,335 Vercel bill.
Polar flagged the site as outside their Acceptable Use Policy and forced an emergency payment switch. Jonathan posted the problem publicly on X, asked the community for advice, and migrated to dodopayments while the board kept running. In the same window: a $1,335 surprise Vercel bill and multiple DDoS attacks. He shared all of it.
Polar → dodopayments
$1,335 Vercel bill
DDoS attacks
Still live
Aug 22 · Same day
Scale
$132k. 1.15M visitors. 867 products. A new listing every minute.
Jonathan posted the full dashboard: 1,147,442 visitors, $132,263 revenue, 867 products, 190k+ outbound product clicks. The top spot belonged to JONI at $14,013. Every stat shared as a screenshot each one pulling the next wave of founders into the board.
$132k revenue
$14,013 top bid
190k+ product clicks
Aug 22–23
Product
New mechanic shipped: outbid.lol/today. Daily reset board.
A $14k all-time #1 was pricing out smaller founders, so Jonathan shipped a fix: outbid.lol/today same rules, but the board resets to zero at midnight. "You don't have to beat a $15k all-time #1 to get seen. Spend a bit today and you can own the top until midnight." Announced publicly. A live product decision, shipped and shared in real time.
/today board launched
Daily reset at midnight
Lower barrier to entry
Aug 24
Scale
New #1: tutti.so at $16k. Then see.io retakes at $17k.
The top spot flipped twice in one day. Jonathan posted each change publicly. The competition between bidders became its own content every leadership flip was another reason to share, watch, and bid. The leaderboard was generating its own media cycle.
tutti.so → $16k
see.io → $17k
#1 still flipping
Aug 26–28
Proof
$207k. 131 hours. The ROI receipts are in.
Within 131 hours, outbid.lol drew over one million visitors and generated $207k in revenue. Buyer results started arriving publicly: one user spent $42 and drove 64,000 visitors to their site, generating $29k in a single day. The clones — warmap.lol, rankbid.lol, premierdelaclasse.lol — captured a rounding error of the original's volume. The mechanic was never the moat. Wilke's distribution was.
$207,329 total
1.1M+ unique visitors
$42 spend → $29k (user result)
Now · Ongoing
Live
The board is still running. The story is still being written.
outbid.lol is live right now. New products are being listed. Bids are being placed. The #1 spot is still worth fighting for. This is not a post-mortem it's an ongoing journey with no scheduled end date and no finish line. Jonathan didn't build something for a launch week. The best build-in-public stories don't end. They just keep going.
● Live now
Visit outbid.lol →
The outbid story gets shared a lot. But the number isn't the reason. It's the way it happened in public — all of it. The traffic spike and the analytics crash. The payment provider shutting it down and the pivot to dodopayments. The $1,335 Vercel bill. The DDoS attacks. The daily board launch. Jonathan posted every one of them, and each post gave people another reason to pay attention and another reason for new people to find the board.
The chaos milestones matter as much as the wins. A payment provider crisis posted publicly isn't a weakness it's proof that a real person is building something real, in real time. That's the thing feeds can't sustain and threads can't hold.
Take away the public updates and you've got a clever side project that made some money over a long weekend. Keep them in and you've got a story people are still passing around nine days later, with buyer ROI receipts still arriving. Most builders are in the middle of something like this right now. The updates, the pivots, the unexpected bills — that's the actual story. It just doesn't have anywhere permanent to live.
Your story is forming right now.
Jonathan's story had 10 milestones — and it's still going. Every one of them was worth sharing: the wins, the chaos, the pivots, the proof. Alongly is free. Start a Journey the day you begin something, share updates when they happen, and the people following you get the full story in order, permanently. No streak pressure. No algorithm. No disappearing threads.
Free. iOS and Android.
All stats sourced from Jonathan Wilke's public posts on X (@jonathan_wilke) and outbid.lol. August 2026.