Damon Chen is a serial creator and bootstrapper. He founded Testimonial.to and embed.so.
He builds his projects in public.
Testimonial.to
Damon launched Testmonial.to on December 20, 2020. It took him four days to create. However, a lot of code was re-used from his previous projects.
Within 2 days, he had his first paying customer. He got an acquisition offer 4 days after the Product Hunt launch. He got his second offer just days later.
He launched it on Product Hunt on December 22. It led to 10 paying users, 5.4k pageviews and 3.1k visitors. It brought him $1,600 in one day. It was still sending him traffic 50 days later.
Initially, he offered a lifetime deal to customers. He stopped offering the deal at the end of 2020. He made $1990 on the last day the deal was offered.
He didn’t get his first subscription user until January 22. By February 25, his MRR was $580.50.
Embed.so
Embed.So is a service that allows you created embeded videos.
He built the embed.so MVP in 2.5 days
He earned his first revenue from the product 3 days after launching.
Other Projects
FansAsk
FansAsk is a product made exclusively for Youtubers. It allows users to receive video messages from their fans.
It took him four days to create the website.
He used code from previous projects.
IndieLog
IndieLog is a community for indie hackers. It lets users vlog about their journey.
IndieLog was Damons first project. It was created for fun and doesn’t have a monetization plan.
Damon launched IndieLog in April, 2020. Initially, it was called lonely.dev. He had been working on the MVP as a side project for a month.
He launched it on Product Hunt on April 17. He rebranded it as IndieLog on June 24.
He shared IndieLog on Hacker News on July 31. He got to number #2 on the front page. 11 hours later, he was at #14. He shared more about the day on Indielog. He also shared some of the stats on Twitter.
In August, the service crossed 10k streamed minutes in a billing cycle for the first time.
He posted his first video on April 7. Within 36 days, 22 developers had uploaded videos. Damon had recorded 100 videos for the website by July 30.
Backlogs
Backlogs is a single place to manage customers’ feedback. It allows creators to show your commitment in a public roadmap and engage everyone with a product changelog.
Damon launched Backlogs in July, 2020.
OfferHunt
Damon launched the MVP of OfferHunt on Indie Hackers in February, 2020. He had 33 applications within 6 hours.
Howdy
Howdy is an app for sharing your social links. He added a visual element to it so you can discover people according to their location.
It is a project that was made for money. He has no monetization plans.
Damon launched Howdy in September, 2020. At that time, he had called it FOMO. He quickly rebranded it as the FOMO brand seemed negative.
He launched it on Product Hunt on September 25.
Influenswer
Influenswer is a platform that allows people to get paid to answer questions from their fans.
Interesting Facts
In December, 2020, he took four months unpaid leave from his full time job to focus on his projects.
He learned a lot about web development from this course. (source)
It took him 9 years to get his first 1000 followers. It took one month to get his next thousand.
Damon shipped 5 apps in 2020. Most of them generated $0. He curated his stories in this thread.