Founder of Typing Mind - My Independent Developer Story: From 0 to 45000 dollars per month in 2 years

September 20, 2021 is the first day when I lose my job and start my own business.

This is the best decision I have ever made. Starting my own business has given me a freedom I have never experienced before.

In the past two years, I have done the following:

• Created Four Small and successful products (all will be mentioned later in this article)
• Established on Twitter 97K followers 's audience
• Created this has More than 6000 Subscriber's Newsletter
• Keep up Artificial intelligence boom , and successfully created a related product
• And spent a lot of time destroy My business disputes

At present, the total revenue of all my products is about 45000 dollars per month, and the profit margin is about 90%.

I would like to take this opportunity to review my entrepreneurial process so far. I hope this will help those who want to be their own boss.

A little background

Before quitting my job, I was a software engineer with 7 years of experience (up to 2021).

I like writing software. My first software product was written in Visual Basic 6 in high school. In my career, I have always had some part-time projects.

The following is a summary of my complete career history:

After working in the industry for 7 years, I have mastered many useful skills: front-end, back-end, DevOps, mobile applications, game development and some UX/UI design.

These skills have become my greatest advantage, and have given me great help in my later entrepreneurial process.

Learn about independent hackers

At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 broke out. I was forced to work remotely at home alone (in a foreign country).

This is really boring.

I found out IndieHackers.com , start listening to their podcasts every day. I like Pieter Levels 、 Kyle Gawley 、 Jon Yongfook (And many others) The story of such a successful independent developer is very interesting.

This kind of inspiration, the boredom of COVID-19 and the extra time without having to commute to and from work let me return to my passion: developing software products.

So I tried. I started a new sideline project, hoping to generate some income.

First failure

My first attempt was to develop a log viewer application for macOS.

As an excellent software engineer, I hope this application has a beautiful user interface, rich functions, comprehensive architecture and a unit test suite with test coverage of more than 95%.

This is the failed application. I still keep it in my Xcode

It took me about 6 months to develop it. I don't think this project will ever be completed. Then I got bored and gave up the project.

It failed completely.

But at least I got something from it: I have accumulated a lot of experience in using Swift, which means that I can now build macOS and iOS applications faster.

The first successful application: DevUtils

It took me some time to recover from my first failure.

About a month later, I decided to try again (this time, you can be sure I didn't write any test cases 😂）。

I built it in about 2 weeks DevUtils The first version of. This is an application that packs all common development tools into a unified interface and can be used offline on the macOS.

I sent this application to friends, family and colleagues (free), and received some good feedback. People love this app!

This is the sign I have been looking for. I was excited and decided to add the payment function to the application: $9 – a one-time purchase, and use the application permanently.

Then, I Published this application on Hacker News 。 I think I'm lucky to receive some positive comments on this post. I ranked in the first few hours on Hacker News.

This is the first dollar I got. At that time, I was still jumping crazily in my bedroom in Singapore (I was still working full time at that time).

I found Twitter

After the initial traffic peak on the homepage of Hacker News, things began to slow down. I released this application on Product Hunt, and there was another traffic peak, and then there was no traffic peak.

A week later, there were almost no visitors to my website. No sales.

I know that publishing applications to websites and forums on the Internet and hoping to get peak traffic will not work in the long run. I can't rely on luck forever.

Therefore, I began to look for a long-term distribution channel.

I tried Google paid advertising, wrote some SEO articles, found sponsors of newsletters/YouTube channels, and many other things.

Although there are some small achievements, in the end, I have not found a way that can bring me traffic in the long term without continuous efforts. (Except for SEO, the result of SEO is very slow)

At this time, I thought of Twitter and the # buildinpublic community.

I decided to try to become a Twitter influencer.

The plan is that if I can get a lot of followers, I can get continuous traffic to DevUtils without doing too much.

So I reactivated my old Twitter account and started to build my personal brand. Most of my tweets are about DevUtils, which is boring.

Create a fan group

I soon realized that just tweeting about DevUtils would not help me get followers. People don't care.

Of course, I interact with other people in the community, reply to their tweets, joke, just hang out. But in the end, if there is nothing interesting on my own timeline, people have no reason to pay attention to me. It is not enough to just tweet about DevUtils.

I need to do something interesting to attract attention.

So I began to do many interesting things, using my skills and advantages: coding.

For example, this experiment is My first "viral" tweet , got more than 100 likes:

In short, my Twitter strategy is:

• Build interesting things and share them openly
• Interact with others
• Write thread
• Lots of stems and jokes
• In general, be an interesting person and be friendly

After six months of continuous efforts, from 100 followers in November 2020 to May 2021, my account has grown to 700 followers 。

The first real business: Black Magic

in my submission Black Magic It is my first "real" business, because it has a subscription pricing model based on recurring revenue.

That's how things started.

Around May 2021, when I was close to having 1000 followers on Twitter, I decided to do something special to celebrate it (and also to get more interaction!).

By checking the Twitter API documentation, I learned that I can update my profile image through the API. So, I built a small script to display a progress bar around my profile picture.

progress bar It will get closer to 100% as I get 1000 followers.

People love this idea! Therefore, I turned this script into a Web application and added a monthly subscription fee of $4 for the "Pro" version. Users can customize the color of the progress bar.

This is what I got First repeat income USD ！

At this time, I am still working full-time.

After gaining this momentum, I used all my free time to develop Black Magic.

I added many other functions to Black Magic, mainly to help users create more interactive Twitter tools.

By building and tweeting at the same time, my monthly income and number of followers are growing rapidly.

resignation

By August 2021, I will have:

• About 300 dollars of monthly income from Black Magic
• About $200/month from DevUtils
• About 8000 followers
• About 1500 active users (mostly free users)

On the whole, the momentum is good. I am confident that I may really have a chance to make a living on Black Magic and DevUtils.

This is when I quit my job, I formally quit my job. September 20, 2021 is my last day of work and my first day as a full-time independent developer.

I remember going out for a walk, breathing fresh air, and feeling the freedom I had never had before.

At about the same time, I began to write a press briefing (that's the briefing!). If you are a long-term reader, you may remember that I introduced it in detail. This is the article:

Quitting my job to pursue full-time indie hacking

I have 2 years' deposit in the bank. If I live in Vietnam (my hometown), I can easily live without income for 4 years. My backup plan is to return to full-time work if things don't go well.

At that time, I had no family, no wife and no children. This is the best time for me to make the biggest bet in my life. So I did it.

My goal is to earn 1000 dollars a month in the first year, which is enough for me to live comfortably in Vietnam.

Profit in the first year

After quitting my job, I spent all my time on Black Magic/DevUtils, and continued to tweet to build an audience.

Growth began to accelerate. I've added many new features to Black Magic, the most striking one being Magic Sidebar – A Chrome extension for Twitter that provides analytics and CRM functions.

This function has completely changed Black Magic as a product. From an interesting interactive tool to a real pain killer, it solved the major problems faced by many large Twitter accounts at that time.

Later, I changed the whole product around this function. I changed the homepage to introduce this function, rather than the profile progress bar and other interesting functions. You can BlackMagic.so See above.

In a few months, through building, tweeting, and releasing products on Product Hunt, my monthly revenue grew to $4000 per month.

Many things have happened during this period. Fortunately, I write everything in this communication every month like a machine.

You can read relevant articles during this period:

$322 → $2K MRR in 60 days by building in public

Jan 2022 updates: 4K MRR, new release, new features, new learnings

By February 2022, I will have 4K monthly income and 28K followers on Twitter, which is far beyond my goal.

Travel, work and play

In the first few months after my resignation, I worked a lot. Maybe 12 hours a day, or even 16 hours a day, if you count Twitter as "work".

So when I reached 4K monthly income, considering my living cost in Vietnam, I began to slow down.

I still hope to get more income, but I realize that this is a constantly changing goal, and it will never stop. 10K dollars, then 20K dollars, then 50K dollars. I know I will never be satisfied.

Work and play at the same time is a better choice.

So I traveled. I went on a trip to Vietnam.

During this period, I worked an average of 4 hours a day. I still tweet a lot.

About September 2022, a magical thing happened: I was invited to participate in Indie Hacker's podcast! This is the podcast I listened to every day when I first started. It's like a dream come true!

This podcast is on September 22, 2022 It was released almost exactly one year after I resigned.

Fast forward to October 2022, and Black Magic will grow steadily to 13K monthly revenue.

My third product: Xnapper

In addition to continuing to develop my existing products, I have also been trying and exploring new things.

I built several small products, some of which failed (Emoji AI, AskCommand).

One of, Xnapper – A screenshot application that caused my Audience interest , has become my third successful product. It now earns monthly 6K USD 。

In this article, I introduced the origin of Xnapper in more detail:

Jun 2022 updates, $100K ARR, reflections, and a screenshot app!

Developing multiple products at the same time allows me to switch to other products when I am tired of one product, reducing my pressure.

This is also a good way to provide fresh content for Twitter audiences. I actively participate in "open build" and share everything when building applications.

For example, This tweet Showcased mobile application demonstration, and got 1700 likes! It's almost like free marketing.

Twitter story and my fourth product

Around February 2023, shortly after Elon Musk acquired Twitter, they announced that the Twitter API (the API being used by Black Magic) would no longer be free.

I didn't think it would be a big problem. I have made a lot of money from Black Magic and am willing to pay.

However, I did not know that the price was announced as 42K USD/month (Monthly, not yearly). Although there is a smaller plan of $100 per month, the limits and quotas are very low, and even cannot run a weather robot.

At that time, Black Magic's monthly income was $14K. This means that I cannot afford the price of API.

I was "forced" to either close or sell.

To make a long story short, I 128K USD Black Magic was sold at a price of. You can read the whole story here:

May 2023: I sold my 2 years old business for only $128K

Up to now, I no longer own Black Magic, but I still like this product and use it every day.

Interestingly, several months later, Twitter changed their pricing strategy. They launched a new plan of $5000 a month.

This plan has some restrictions and API restrictions. It may be applicable to Black Magic, but I didn't even check it because it is no longer important.

So this is my first product exit. Although it's not the way I want, I can't help it.

At the same time, I started to develop a new product: Typing Mind.

Typing Mind: my fourth product

OpenAI on March 1, 2023 Announced ChatGPT API 。 At that time, I had used ChatGPT through the Web interface for some time.

The Web interface is very limited, and I've been annoyed with it for a long time. For example, you can't search previous chat records, text output is slow, and so on. The most annoying thing is that the application will log you out, and you have to log in again every day, which is very frustrating.

For a while, I considered writing a Chrome extension to solve my problem.

OpenAI releases the API just as I expected. I immediately thought of using the API to write a better user interface for ChatGPT.

The next day, I registered the domain name typingmind.com And start prototyping within a few hours over the weekend.

The dramatic events of Twitter made me busy in the next week, but I managed to complete the first version of Typing Mind at the weekend.

On Monday, March 6, 2023, I released the first version to the public, and Announce on Twitter 。

The application received a lot of attention immediately.

I added one $9 And gradually increased the price in the next few days as I added more functions to the application (now the price is 39 dollars ）。

On the first day of application release, I got 1K The income of US dollars was obtained the next day 2K USD, obtained on the third day 4K USD.

In 7 days, I got a total of 22K $in licensing revenue.

Making $22K in 7 days: the story

Since April, Typing Mind has become my main focus. I have been adding functions, improving products, and building a B2B version For creating their own ChatGPT user interface. The average monthly revenue of the application is about USD 30K 。

This is my current situation.

Build a team

A major change occurred in my second year, that is, I started to form a team.

I always prefer to work alone. Working alone means I don't have to spend time on discussions, meetings, and more time on building.

However, doing the same thing over and over again soon becomes boring. I know how to do things like customer support and some coding tasks, but I no longer find them interesting.

So in the past year, I have hired one full-time employee (responsible for content, marketing and support) and three freelancers (developers).

Jun 2023: How I work with employees

With the help of the team, I recovered a lot of free time without sacrificing customer satisfaction. The product also keeps moving forward (adding new features and fixing errors) without requiring me to work actively.

On average, I still work for 4 hours every day, but now I only do what I am interested in, whether it is new functions or trying new products.

So what do I do in the other 20 hours of the day?

Let's talk about lifestyle changes.

Lifestyle change: good&bad

I like working for myself very much. I no longer have a 9-5 job. However, everything has its advantages and disadvantages. After two years of travel, I can understand why this is not suitable for everyone.

Good aspects

For me, the most important benefit is freedom.

When I reach the level of "Ramen profit", I can change my "work life balance" level according to my own wishes.

I have a lot of free time to pursue other interests in life, such as Learning hardware 、 surfing 、 travel 、 play a game wait.

I can choose any day I want to work or watch Netflix all day without asking for anyone's permission.

The money is also very good. I earn much more than my last job salary (about 9K dollars/month). As an employee, it is not easy to earn 45K dollars per month. I must be very good at coding (and office politics!).

Learning is also one of the benefits.

Running a company requires a wide range of skills, which I learned in this process: marketing, law, finance, partnership, sales, etc.

Although I am small, I am more confident in talking about business now than I am just a step-by-step employee.

Bad aspects

cold boot

Nothing is free. In the process of finding a product and making it successful, you may face great challenges and pressures, especially at the beginning.

I always tell people not to quit their jobs until they have a stable income every month and a lot of savings and backup plans.

It can also be stressful to work part-time while working full-time. I'm lucky, because I don't have a family yet, I just need to take care of myself. For people with full-time jobs, wives and children, there is not much time and energy to engage in sidelines. The risk factor of failure is also greater.

risk

Even if you have a successful product, the risk still exists.

Income may fluctuate, the market may change, new competitors appear, or you may have done something stupid. This may affect the business and thus your own.

Look at what happened to Black Magic. If I could not let the Typing Mind create a new income stream for me at that time, I would be very stressed, which could lead to a vicious circle. Who knows.

This is why I prefer to have multiple products to reduce the risk of death of one product.

social life

I had to sacrifice my professional network and social life. It makes me feel very lonely.

When I quit my job, I didn't think it would be a big problem, so I didn't really pay attention to keeping in touch with people around me.

Now I'm starting to establish contacts back, but when you no longer work in the same office and don't have the same topic to talk about, it's very difficult to keep in touch with people.

My friends have full-time jobs. I don't have many independent developers around me. They all live in different countries/cities. If I want to solve this problem, my best choice is to move to some independent developer gathering places around the world, such as Bali or Lisbon, but I still think this will not work for a long time.

This is just a trade-off I have to make on this path. Fortunately, at least I have an online Twitter community to play with.

Today and the future

So this is my whole story from the beginning to the present.

What happens next? I really don't know.

Now, I have no long-term plan. I have only one general guideline for my life: keep healthy, earn more money by doing things that interest me, and do not sacrifice my freedom.

Work and enjoy life at the same time.

As for the short-term plan, I will continue to focus on my products: Typing Mind (current focus), DevUtils and Xnapper. It may even launch new products in the near future!

I hope this article will be helpful to anyone who wants to pursue the same path.

If you want to do the same thing as me, here are some key points I've come to:

• First of all, remember that all these are my stories, "my way". This is definitely not the "only way", and probably not the "best way". You can only select the part that is suitable for you from the content I share here to see if it is suitable for you. No formula can guarantee success.
• If you plan to work alone as I do, try to be an all rounder: know everything. For example, if you are a developer, don't limit yourself to front-end development. Try to dabble in back-end development, mobile applications and design, and then learn marketing. Use the 80/20 rule: use 20% of your efforts to get 80% of the value.
• Build an unfair advantage for yourself. I think my coding skills are an unfair advantage. I can build applications quickly because I have done so for many years. If you don't have any unfair advantages, go find or build one today.
• Establish an audience group. This is not for everyone, but if you can, try it. Establish your own audience or community on Twitter/Reddit/Internet forums. It will be easier for you to do anything in the future. The benefits are multiplied. In the past two years, I have established an audience of 97K fans on Twitter, which is also an unfair advantage for me.
• Early release, small-scale release, frequent release. If an idea doesn't work, don't stick to it for too long. Release products more frequently to build "muscle memory".
• When building a product, focus on the core value it brings to customers. Look at the product from the customer's perspective and avoid over engineering. Communicate with customers and incorporate them into your build process.
• Be patient and be ready for luck. This is a long-term game.

This is all I want to share now. If you like what you just read, please subscribe My newsletter 。 I write once a month to update my journey and share what I know.

Finally, thank you for all your support!

I am very grateful to the community (including you) for their great support, whether on Twitter, on the Indie Hackers forum, or from this newsletter. Especially in the early days. Community is an important factor for my success.

I hope this article can make some contributions to the community, and I hope to see more independent developers in the future.

Thank you very much, hope to see you soon!

The content is automatically translated by the GeekAI web page translation service. Original address: https://news.tonydinh.com/p/my-solopreneur-story-zero-to-45kmo