Hey man, what's up?
I should not be awake right now.
I feel terrible.
I barely got any sleep last night.
I'm like the living dead right now.
Hey, what's up, Tony?
Hello, Tony.
Hello, Channing.
Hello, Colin.
Welcome to the chef.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me.
What time is it where you are?
You're in Ho Chi Minh City, right?
Yeah, I mean Ho Chi Minh City is 11 p.m. now.
Yeah.
And are you typically a night owl?
What kind of hours do you work?
I usually stay up late until midnight and then go to work at around an hour.
So this is the last hour of my usual day, but for today I think we can go a little bit
further than that.
It's totally fine.
Yeah, I appreciate you making the time.
Channing, I pitched Tony and I was like, hey, we can do the episode at any time between
like 1 to 3 p.m. Pacific time because I'm just an arrogant American who just assumes
that it's not Pacific time.
Everyone should get on our time.
I'm in Vietnam.
That's going to be like 3 a.m. for me.
I can't do that.
But I am glad that it's 9 a.m. for you, right?
Are you also a night owl or early bird?
I'm like a both.
I have an excellently healthy sleep schedule where I stay up super late and then I wake
up really early.
Wow.
I get like four or five hours of sleep every night.
It's actually it's horrible.
I don't recommend it.
Wow.
You're still doing that now.
You're still doing it now.
I remember you mentioned that in one of the earlier episodes, but still now you're still
doing it.
I've got a whoop, which is like, do you see this wristband?
I don't know.
It's got like a fitness device, like a Fitbit or an Apple Watch that records all your stats.
And I can go through and I can see like my average sleep every week or every month.
And it's horrible.
So like yesterday I got four and a half hours of sleep.
This month I'm averaging, what am I averaging?
We're in a group, Channing's in my group with me along with his girlfriend and some of my
friends.
I'm averaging five hours and 11 minutes of sleep.
No, man.
I know.
Five hours and five in July.
And I don't even have any sort of like bragging like, oh, I can't say like this is like hustle
porn.
I'm not like staying up late to work.
I'm actually very chill with my work hours.
My theory is that Cortland doesn't have a very good ability to sense the way that his
body feels.
And so the negative effects of getting terrible sleep just don't immediately affect him.
Maybe it's just nature, I guess.
I think so, but it's still not good.
And Channing's absolutely right.
Like it took me, I didn't realize until I was like 31 that if I eat a lot of food, I
get sleepy.
Like it takes me a while to like connect what's going on, what's going on in like my environment
to my body because I get too scientific with it.
And I'm like, how do I know this is why I get sleepy?
There's like, do you notice when you put your hand over fire that it burns?
I figured that was going to be a big problem.
Well, Tony, I'm glad you're on the show.
You were one of my favorite indie hackers in the last year.
Thank you.
Your story is crazy.
A year ago, almost exactly a year ago, last August, you tweeted, you penned a tweet.
You said after seven years working as a developer, I quit my job to pursue my dream, to build
software I love and make a living out of it.
So that was like a year ago that you quit your job and you pretty much just had a dream.
You only had like a thousand followers on Twitter at the time.
You had a handful of like side projects really, and they were only doing like, you know, a
couple hundred dollars in revenue.
And now just one year later, you're at 50,000 followers on Twitter.
You have multiple products, I think three main ones that are bringing in a total of
close to $20,000 a month in revenue.
That's awesome, man.
That's like one of the fastest sprints I've ever seen an indie hacker make.
Yeah, I think I got lucky here and there a few times in the past one year.
But I also learned a lot in the process as well.
So I'm glad things are working out for me.
What's the cost of living in Vietnam?
Like if you're making like $20,000 a month, you know, as this indie hacker just working
from home, like how well can you live off that?
Incredibly cheap.
In Vietnam, I think I used to live here for like less than one K a month.
So when I was about to quit my job, I was thinking that at least I can survive in Vietnam
for one K a month.
And now I have a few hundred dollars MRR.
So I am pretty sure I can do this.
Right.
And now I do much more than that and also living in Vietnam.
So yeah, that's ridiculous.
At three K a month, you can live somewhat like a middle income average household.
And at 10 K, you will be like a Missouri lifestyle.
On your tweet that you penned where you said I'm going to quit my job, you also mentioned
that you have no wife and no kids.
So on top of the background cost of living in Vietnam, you also don't have to pay for
a family.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's one of the big reason to encourage me as well, because a lot of other India
girls I know have wife and kids.
It makes the decision a lot harder for them.
So for me, I just want to give people a context of where I'm at to see the full picture of
my situation.
It will be different to everyone.
So if you have kids and you have a family to feed, it will be different.
So yeah, I was pretty much free when I quit my job and I have a lot of ideas and I feel
traction, initial traction.
So yeah, I think that's, I contributed a lot to my success today.
So let's talk about a few of your products real quick, because you've got a lot of them.
I think we'll maybe just limit our focus to three of them today, because it's like, it's
confusing when we talk about too many.
One of them, I'm a user, I'm paying customer of two of your products.
So one of them is called Snapper, like literally the word X Snapper.
Am I pronouncing it right?
Yeah, it's right.
Yeah.
Like Snapper.
Yeah.
It's super simple.
It's like a screenshot tool.
So every time I take a screenshot on my Mac, instead of just copying the image to my clipboard,
I get this beautiful interface where the image gets this cool gradient background that I
can change.
I get all these like super power features, like I can select the text from the image
if I really want to, and it saves into a special folder and I can drag and drop it anywhere
I want.
And I can add rounded corners and a drop shadow.
And Snapper just made $4,200 last month, and I think you just launched it yesterday.
Then you've got Blackmagic, a Twitter growth tool.
It's almost like a hodgepodge of these really cool individual tools that you made for Twitter,
and you just like stuck them all together.
And I got that too.
So every time I go to Twitter, I can open up Blackmagic.
I can see all this extra information about everybody's profile who I'm looking at, their
best tweets, who's following them, their best engagement.
I can see cool information about every part of my Twitter.
If I go to my notifications, I can see which of my people who've notified me or like have
been following me for a long time or the recent followers, et cetera, et cetera.
Blackmagic is making something like $10,000 a month, and then you've got DevUtils, the
only one of your apps that I don't use yet.
And that's basically just a giant toolbox of tools for developers.
How much money is DevUtils making?
It's average about 4K a month.
It's not recurrent.
So it's dependent on the month.
Right.
And then you add all these things up together and you get to $18,000, $19,000, $20,000 a
month in revenue.
Yeah.
Close to 20.
Yeah.
Crazy.
That's a lot of ideas.
Yeah.
Well, you know that at introducing my products, I was thinking about how to introduce it, but
wow.
That's very a good description of Blackmagic and Snapper and DevUtils as well.
So I really like to work on multiple products at the same time.
It's one of my life motives to build a diversified portfolio of multiple products, you know,
just for safety, just if one goes down, have the other ones to bring to revenue.
I don't know about your childhood though.
You're not just making these apps that are incredibly successful.
You're also designing them.
Every one of them is beautiful.
You're super ambitious.
I mean, to build this many things, you've got to be a hard worker.
So I want to know what kind of parents did you have?
Where does this drive come from?
My generation in Vietnam is the first generation that experienced peace.
So before that, my parents were born after the war.
So they are all very poor.
My dad was a construction worker and my mom just sell stuff at home.
The point where I started to be passionate about technology and computers was at high
school.
My parents got me a computer and then I started to learn to go with Pascal and Visual Basic
6 at the time.
And well, before that, I was addicted to games.
I think like you, Colin.
Yeah.
So I'm so curious about Vietnam.
How common of an experience was it for like, you know, you were on the internet as a kid,
you're learning programming, you're playing video games, how common was that in Vietnam
at the time?
Well, first of all, not many kids had computers in the first place.
And then for people who have computers, they don't really get into programming like me.
I remember joining some programming competitions.
And from all of Vietnam, from my city, there are only three people.
So me and two other people from my hometown.
So I would say not many people have access to the internet.
And also from those people who have access, not many people are into programming.
So it's one of my advantages as well.
Are you in North or South Vietnam?
Or were you when you grew up?
I was in the middle.
Right in the middle.
Yeah.
What was it?
You mentioned like you were kind of the first generation that grew up with like no war,
you know, like part of that generation.
Like what major generation different from the generation that came before you?
Because like as an American, it's like we learned very little history about Vietnam.
We know very little about, I mean, it wasn't even part of my curriculum, like anything
I know about Vietnam, I've read subsequently as an adult.
And like, obviously there's like a war in Vietnam.
It's like a very controversial topic, and I'm sure you have different opinions on it
maybe than people in the West.
So I'm curious to hear what was it like being part of your generation and like, how does
that contrast with like your parents' generation?
My dad was a soldier, and then he became a construction worker.
So at the time, it is the North Vietnam and the South Vietnam.
It was a difficult time for everyone, I think.
So my parents were not an exception.
They were poor, really poor, and me and my brother were born poor as well.
Later on, they feel our way to escape the poor.
So when I was 10 and above, our families started to get better.
But before that, my childhood was really, really poor.
And those people from the previous generation, they had to work very hard on very physical,
heavy work to provide for our generation.
So yeah, it was a difficult time for sure.
Your father was a poor construction worker in this period in Vietnam.
And it seems like he didn't have a lot of other friends locally who are also working
on doing coding and working with computers.
What did your parents think that you were doing?
Did they think that you were wasting your time?
Did they encourage you?
Like how did you stay on this path toward doing something that maybe there wasn't a
vocabulary, a culture around that being like a business?
Yeah, absolutely.
Excellent question.
I think they, right now, they absolutely have no idea what I do.
I only know I work on computer and on internet.
And that's it.
Do you really show them the money that you're making?
Yeah.
Do they know how successful you are?
They do.
But they don't know what I do for money.
So they know that now I don't work for companies anymore.
And I work for myself and I make money.
They're like, Tony, are you doing anything illegal?
I think they, no, I don't think they think that.
But when I was young, I was trying to convince them that if you can buy me a computer and
buy me this CD and that CD, I remember that was a window in stone CD or some kind of a
tool CD that allows me to fix the computer without going to the repair shops.
I told them, if you do this for me and do that for me, I will be working on computers
and I will no longer play games.
I was really addicted to games and somehow they are convinced.
And that's how I get my first computers and it changed my life, I think.
Yeah.
So you eventually you learn how to code, you stop playing as many video games, I presume
get addicted to coding, which is kind of a game in a way.
It's got like that addictive feedback loop.
What company was it that you worked at for seven years that you eventually quit last
year?
Oh, I worked for three companies and I feel lucky that I worked for three types of companies
each time.
So my first company was an outsource company.
We do outsource work.
The second one was a startup.
They did not go well.
The company went bankrupt.
And then I move on to the third company, which is a big corporate company is Gendesk.
If you know about it, I think it's okay to mention here.
It was a big company in Singapore.
So being able to participate in the work of art, three types of companies, I think I gain
some knowledge in the industry that a normal person who worked on a corporate since the
beginning of the career to the end, who doesn't experience the works in an outsource and in
a startup.
There are things that we learn on each type of company.
So I'm glad that I had that experience and I never regret working for those companies
at all.
I think it's background and knowledge that I can learn in order to build up the advantages
that I have when I quit my job to do my own thing.
I'm going to fanboy for a second.
Cortland mentioned that he's got two of your products.
I bought Znapper for screenshots and I posted a tweet storm just yesterday using it and
thought it was awesome.
So clearly you've learned really amazing skill sets at these different companies.
You're an excellent designer, you're clearly a competent developer.
At these different companies, were you always just doing the same thing or how did you get
so well-rounded?
Yeah, what did you learn at the companies that you worked at that gave you the advantages
that you have now?
Yeah.
When I graduated, I was a front-end engineer.
So a lot of front-end and the front-end back then is not like front-end today, it's more
like CDs, animation, doing the stuff that is so perfect.
And I was doing that for a few years and during that I learned about design and USUI.
I'm not necessarily learn but I kind of get the feeling and get a sense of design, what
is good, what is not good.
So that was the first company, front-end engineers.
And then the second company, I kind of worked as a mix of front-end and back-end.
We were working on Ruby on Rails and that gave me the experience as well.
At the third company, I worked solely on the back-end side and I was able to touch on some
of the biggest systems in the company and we were serving users from all around the
world.
So it was a different experience at this time.
And beside my full-time job, I also have a lot of side project.
I was doing freelance work when I was in college doing Android apps and I have a side
project where I work with PHP.
And on the back-end side, I work with a lot of other technologies that I do not have the
chance to practice in my full-time job.
I do that all in my side project.
So basically a few first years of my career is all learning and 100% focusing on being
a good engineer.
Where did you get this dream to be an ND hacker?
Because I mean, a lot of people are happy to just work at jobs their whole life, right?
Like you could have just been a good engineer and worked at companies until you were 40,
but like last year here you are tweeting, like you can't wait to quit, right?
Or you did quit.
Where did that itch come from?
Yeah, it's amazing how it changed so fast.
Like five years ago, I was dreaming about being an excellent engineer working in a large
complex system for a big corporation.
Now I just want to build software that bring value to people and that's it.
After I graduated, I kind of get into the flow of all the people around me who always
want to get into a good community with a good pay and make money.
So I kind of forget about everything else at the time and kind of get into the flow
to get in the rat race, you know?
And when I was in high school, I made a lot of Windows apps.
So Windows application and I was having fun back then.
I did not sell for any money, but I was having fun.
So in the last few years of my career, I kind of remember back into those days and I feel
like I enjoyed that more.
I enjoy building applications that serve the end users and provide value for them more
than I want to be an expert in, let's say, some backend engineering role.
And it started to grow on me over and over again in the last few years of my career.
And then when COVID hit, I was forced to be home alone all day.
It really hit me hard in the feeling when you cannot go anywhere, nobody to talk to.
So that combined with the urge of going back to build apps and stuff, it made me think
of going on a new journey.
And at the same time, I think I learned about indie hackers community and Twitter as well.
So I feel like there's an urge to quit my job and pursue this.
I sometimes feel like I'm unemployable, like technically I work at Stripe now, but this
is the first like actual real job I've had.
And I feel like a lot of indie hackers are the same, like, Chan, you don't really want
to be employed.
Like you've had jobs before, but you're never that happy at your jobs.
I had jobs with a very specific goal to get out of them.
Yeah, like there's never a point where you're like, I love working this job.
You know, like what you were like selling copy machines for a while and you got a job
as a developer, but I'm kind of the same.
But for me, it's like, I just don't like the idea of not being able to work on whatever
I want.
I have another theory on top of all of that for what convinces people or persuades people
to try to move beyond going and working for the man.
And that is you build something for yourself and you get a taste of the freedom.
You get a taste of, you know, sort of getting, building something with your own brain, seeing
people pay money for it, et cetera.
And I see that before you quit your most recent job and like May of last year, you actually
built and sold a product on micro acquire for like two grand.
Was it called drive stats.io?
And that was before you quit.
So it seems like this edge was there and you were even, you know, finding some indie success
before you were free from the nine to five.
I think that's the smartest thing to do is start a side project before you quit your
job and just see what it's like.
Yeah, that's absolutely, absolutely accurate.
And the test of having customers, direct customer that you serve directly is very different
than what I have in the corporation where you just tweak a little cog in the machine
and it takes so long to reach to the end, to the end users.
And it grow on me a lot in the last year and the COVID made it happen.
So you're at this point now, you've made a side project, you've gotten a taste of freedom
a little bit and you really want to quit your job.
But like, obviously you didn't have, you didn't have a successful project that was like spitting
out cash.
You didn't have any of the stuff that you have now.
What do you, what do you do in the situation where you want to quit your job, but you're
not, you're not like, you know, totally set ready to do that.
So in my case, I set a target to quit my job when at least I have a one or two KMR or I
have a very clear path to reach that point in a year.
I have savings, so it, it gave me a good runway if I quit my job without any income at all,
but I don't want to take that risk is a little bit too much for me.
So in my case, I was seeing some, some traction from my Twitter audience and also black magic
at the, at that time, I think it has 300 or 400 MRR, which is enough for me to boost the
confidence that I will be able to double this in a year, at least double this.
So the point would be 800 MRR, which is close to the, to, to the remain profit in Vietnam,
you know, and then I moved back to Vietnam and it should be good, should be good.
So this was black magic was, was at 400 MRR and at that time you didn't have any revenue
coming in from separate projects yet.
I do have revenue from debut deals, but it's really low.
I think less than a hundred dollars or maybe $200 a month and it's not even recurring.
So I remember there's a period three months or two or three months.
I haven't worked on it at all.
Like I lost the motivation to work on it because there's no traffic to the website, no customers,
no sale, no revenue.
So I started, I started working on it to find new ideas.
But then because I, I use my product a lot and then I keep coming back to add new feature
here and there just for me.
And then somehow it's a, there's a few customers out there.
Then the app just keep living.
I don't sell it down.
It just keep living because it's a, it's a downloadable app.
I don't need to, I don't, I don't have a lot of maintaining costs for that.
So even though I don't work on, on those, I still leave and, and later on turn out is
pickup.
So I, I got popular on, on Twitter.
It's big up again.
So it's good.
So you wanted to get to like one to $2,000 a month in revenue before you quit your job.
What like, how does that compare to your salary?
Like were you making like a ton of money before that?
Would that be like a huge downgrade for you or would that be like just right on par?
It's, it's way, it's like nothing.
So my last salary was last, my last salary was 10 K a month on average USD.
It was in Singapore, but you know, conversion and stock option and stuff.
So it's around average around 10 K a month.
So one K is nothing.
I don't think I can survive it in Singapore, but in Vietnam, maybe.
But because I also work in the companies for a few years, three years, so I got a bunch
of saving.
I don't have wife, no kid, no wife, you know, so I'd only spend money for myself, sometimes
spend home, money home for my parents.
That's it.
So I think the saving was good and combined with the fact that the Vietnam living cost
is low.
And I was confident to do that.
So you're like, like hardcore, ready to take the sleep.
If you're willing to take like that big of a salary cut, like you're, you're willing
to go down like a tenth of a salary, move back to Vietnam.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I know it's like $9,000 different every month, but I was having enough.
I remember, so this is a confession, right?
I remember around this time, last year, around this time, exactly last year.
I already handed over my notice to quit my job and every day I would go out for lunch
alone because of COVID.
And I will listen to Indie Hacker podcast every day to all of those stories about Indie
Hacker making 10K a month and jumping on the podcast.
So I learned a lot.
And most of all, a huge motivation for me that I will do it.
I can do it.
I can make it.
Yeah.
So today is like dream come true for me.
So yeah, that's my little confession.
I'm glad we can inspire people to make irresponsible career decisions.
We're doing something right now.
Motivation is good.
Motivation is good.
Yeah.
But yeah.
9K USC is a huge pay cut for me back then, but I was confident that I can get it up to
1K MR.
So what was your strategy?
Like, cause now you've got like this array of different products from the beginning.
Did you think like, I'm going to have like, you know, three different apps that I make
and they're all going to make a small amount of money and it's going to add up to a lot?
Or did you like, think you're going to make one?
Like, do you think it was going to take you 10 years?
Like one year?
Like what was going through your head for what this process would actually look like?
At the time I had like magic, which is the only product that I had for current revenue.
So it had 300 MR.
So I was very confident that I can bring it to 2K in about two years.
Even before that, like when you first started like tinkering, I'm curious cause like by
that time you'd already come up with the idea for black magic.
You had the idea for deaf utils, like you were like already kind of like started working
on these things.
But even before that, like how did you decide like what your strategy was going to be as
an indie hack?
Cause I think it's pretty unique.
Like most people don't have an array of different things.
Like most people would be happy just to get one thing to work.
At first, I only had one product is, uh, that you do, uh, that you do was my first product
and I was trying to make it work.
I didn't have an idea about the black magic and snapper later on, but I just want to try
it to make it work.
And one of the things that people told me, friends told me that I should do to get more
sales on deaf utils is to jump on Twitter.
So that's why I started to use Twitter, you know?
And when I started to use Twitter, I started to see problems around Twitter and that's
how I created black magic and it's just keep going, you know, right?
The black magic stuff started to get traction with bring traffic back to my deaf utils.
And at the same time, I also built in an audience and joined into the movement of building in
public.
And I think it's all, all combined together, like compounded interest, compounded benefit.
It, uh, it bring the, the, all the products up together.
Yeah.
In the beginning I didn't, I had no idea what I will be doing next.
I just wanted to have more revenue for that YouTube.
I noticed a pattern now that you say it with, if you started with deaf utils, um, black
magic as a browser extension for Twitter, Znapper is this screenshot app that makes
it so that you in a sense make images look good on social media apps like Twitter.
And so there's like this domino effect where you began working on a product if you, and
then the kinds of problems that you ran into trying to build that product gave you the
ideas for other products, right?
It's like, you know, you want to build an audience for deaf utils and then you build
black magic.
Cause that's, you know, and you recognize that other people have that problem.
Yeah.
So one question I have is these three products are successful.
You know, are we to assume that you have a big graveyard of other ideas that seemed interesting
and that didn't get off the ground?
I do.
I do.
I have never counted them properly because I don't know where at which point I should
count them dead, but I have a few, uh, fair project.
And that you deals was not my first Mac OS app.
I was building an app to view locks and that was the first attempt into indie hacking.
And that was a huge failure.
So coming from a hardcore engineering mindset, right?
I was trying to build an app that looks so good, not only from the functional, but only
from the good base perspective, you know?
So I was, uh, I was writing unit tests like coverage at around 80% or maybe 90% of coverage
full unit tests and a full architecture involved three different programming languages, like
Golang, Swift and JavaScript and doing so many stuff.
But as some boy, I started to lose motivation because it takes so long.
It took me like three months or four months to build.
And I have no prototype to show and I have nothing to show to the world.
Only an escort project in my machine and that assets and it's barely working.
I was, I remember trying so hard to make the app work.
So it's a lock viewer app, right?
So I tried to make it work for terabyte size locks file.
So really, really big lock files, terabyte size, and it was a really hard problem.
It's a hard problem and it took me a lot of time.
So that was my first lesson.
I ended up never release it and it was in my reach out right now.
So you had one lesson.
You tried to build a product.
It failed.
You made some of the classic mistakes of working on building before you work on trying to make
sure, you know, validate and see, get it out in front of other people and it's like the
classic developer mistake of making like a really nerdy developer tool that's like requires
a ton of coding and takes forever behind the scenes.
Yeah, it can work.
I mean, like we've interviewed people who are like, you sell developer tools and make
a lot, but it's just a totally different type of business.
And Tony, based on like the things you've done now, which are like way more visual,
like I think it's a different type of motivation between like putting something out on Twitter
where every time you add a feature, you can like tweet it and people will love it versus
like doing this developer tool and you're just sitting there for months coding this
stuff.
No one can even literally, there is no visual element, it's like a log for you or like it
just doesn't, it's not your cup of tea.
Yeah.
I remember I was thinking like, I going to do this for maybe six months and then when
I release it, it's going to be so huge.
Never happened.
So I never think about who I'm going to show it to, like a few people, a few friends are
going to go viral or what?
Turnouts to be very, very, very difficult.
Even now, when I have a bunch of channels and a lot of followers, it's also difficult
to make something go viral, not let alone, back then I have nothing.
I have no audience, no channels, no newsletter, no nothing, it will be impossible.
To me, one of the most distinctive things about your story is how confident you are.
The fact that you jumped ship when you were making 300 MRR with your product and you decided,
hey, in the next two years, I'll definitely get to 2000 and it's one big leap of confidence
after the next, but you had this big failure and that was to start your indie hacking career.
What made you confident that the next thing would happen that was good?
So after that first failure, I did not need any confidence to work on the next thing because
after that, I feel like I'm going to keep my full-time job forever until I can do something
with my side project.
So DevYutios was the second attempt and I still keep my job, my full-time job and building
DevYutios on the side at night and at weekends.
So I was thinking that if DevYutios doesn't work, I will keep working on the job.
I don't have enough confidence to do anything else, so I will, yeah, I will at least risk
it.
Yes.
And if DevYutios doesn't work for a long time, I may move on to something else, but one thing
at a time, you know, because I have a full-time job.
So if any other people who are looking to quit the job, make sure you have a side project
that earns some money first or at least something that gives you the confidence that you will
make it in a year or two.
I only quit my job after DevYutios was popular on Twitter.
I get somewhat popular on Twitter and get some regular revenue.
And besides, I have a lot of advantages, like living cheap in Vietnam and you know, no wife,
no kids and stuff.
You posted on Niacos, like you've got actually a lot of great posts that have done really
well where you kind of just tell the story of your different products.
I think my favorite is Blackmagic.
The first one you did that was like subscription revenue, you started it before you quit your
job and in the very first like month, you went from like, hey, I made this cool thing
for my Twitter profile.
I think you made it so like, as you got closer and closer to a thousand followers, like your
Twitter profile image would have like a ring that would go around it and eventually when
the ring got to the top and completed it, it would be like, you're at a thousand followers.
And then you tweeted this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like very few people were even following you at the time when people were like, oh, this
is kind of cool.
And then eventually you like launched it on product hunt.
It got like number one product of the day, like it was just crushing it.
Like everybody loved it.
And you started charging money for it.
Like, how did you, how did you do that?
Or how did you get it from like, you're someone who was like, no followers, no one even cares
that you're building this thing to like suddenly you have a ton of followers.
Everyone cares.
I think someone like tried to buy it from you for $40,000.
Like a few months after you started, you're like, no, this is hot shit.
I'm going to keep it.
But how did you get to that point?
Because like most people just like build stuff in obscurity and they tweet about it and no
one responds like that.
It never goes anywhere from there.
I think the 1000 follower milestone is a big milestone for me.
So before that, I have no idea what I was doing.
What I did is to try to build an audience on Twitter and get traffic to my debut.
I did not really believe in, in black magic at the time.
Black music was a thing, but it's a script that I built for my own to do the progress
bar thing.
You know, so, so at that point I already have a thousand followers.
So it is something is not nothing is something, something.
So if I can do something, you know, unique and creative and, and can go viral, I can
use that 1000 followers as a base to, to make things go viral.
And I think the progress bar is one of the things that go viral in the early day.
So that progress bar, I tried to make my tweets somewhat unique and visually compelling so
that I think it went viral a few times.
And then next, the next thing was the real time banner.
The real time banner is the thing that is a very special one that it helped me going
from 1000 followers to 5000 followers in, I think 48 hours or three days or something.
This was a, there was a viral loop in that tweet.
And that was around the time when I think a few tools that I made for black magic get
me viral on Twitter.
And because of the new audience coming in, I launched new product and then it kind of
compound together.
I love it.
It was like viral loops inside of viral loops because it's like, okay, you're on Twitter
where your audience is.
Then you're making tools for yourself on Twitter and everyone else, like who you tweet about
these tools to like cares because they're also on Twitter.
And then like your product itself is viral because like your product, when you updated
the sort of background image.
So everybody on Twitter has like, you know, the banner image behind the profile image
and the way Chang, you know, like what his banner product does, it like shows you recent
followers.
So we made it so like every time somebody follows you, your Twitter banner image will
update and show that person's name, which was super viral because then everyone wanted
to like follow him so they could see their own name photo and his banner image.
And so he just shot up the follower charts.
So it's like, probably like the, you're in the best possible environment to grow this
app because we're around a bunch of people who like are on Twitter and want these tools
to themselves and want to like advertise themselves.
So it's like, I don't know if you did that on purpose, but it's genius.
Yeah, I was messing around a lot with Twitter, IBI back then I was trying to do, I would
say abuse everything that is allowed by them.
I will try to use it to do something interactive and fun and creative.
So that banner thing was a huge success.
And then after that, people want to do that for themselves.
So I think, well, okay, why not chart for it?
And then I make from my little script into a SAS, let them log in by Twitter and then
use that script to update their banner and their profile pictures so they can do the
same as me.
And I gave it for free for a very long time.
I let people use it for free, but I tell them that this is free for now.
Then later on when I launch it, you will have to pay.
So I made that very clear upfront.
And because it was free, a lot of people jumped in and tried the product.
And that's why when I launched it on product hunt, a lot of people knows about it already.
And then they gave on to give their reviews about the product and it got popular.
You also seem like you do some non-obvious things with launching on product hunt.
For example, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think I read that you three days before
you launch, you just make a tweet and you say, Hey, I'm going to launch on product hunt
in a few days.
And you give your followers the option like, Hey, do you want me to notify you when I'm
launching?
And then a lot of them are just like, yes.
So, and this isn't rocket science necessarily.
It's just sort of leveraging the fact that people are already your fans are already your
building in public for them.
And in a sense, you just straight up just ask them.
I think that's so smart.
It's so smart.
A lot of people, like they just launched something right after they build it.
But I think you should definitely talk to your early customers or early beta users or
your early like testers of your product and try to incorporate them into your launch.
Cause I did the same thing with indie hackers.
Like by the time I launched indie hackers, I had interviewed, I had like emailed like
200 people to try to get them to like do interviews with me and like a bunch of them had.
So the day, like a week before I launched, I was like, Hey, everybody I've talked to,
I'm going to launch next week.
You know, do you want to help support the launch?
Cause I notify you same exact thing.
And then when you launch, like all these people show up at your back to help you out, to upvote
you, et cetera.
Whereas everyone else is launching.
They've like, nobody even knows who they are.
I think that's a very important to get the Jackson very early in the, in the launch.
And yeah, this is a, this strategy is, is quite old already.
One thing I do new is I ask people to reply on Twitter and then I will DM them manually.
But people have been doing this for a while.
Maybe they send an email in the beginning, a few days earlier or a week earlier to announce
their launch.
And then after they launch people jump in.
Yeah.
So having an audience is a huge advantage.
Yeah.
Tell me about this, like acquisition offer because someone tried to buy black magic.
They're like, Oh shit.
This is killing it.
I mean, you message Tony off from $40,000.
Where did that, where did that come from?
And how did you feel about it?
So I posted a black magic to micro acquire just to see how people would pay for it.
Oh, okay.
You know, you made this.
I don't.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I made it happen.
I posted on a micro acquire and I don't, I don't give a price, but like magic back then
is very different.
It doesn't have the Chrome attention yet.
And the Chrome attention was the one that, uh, the money maker.
Okay.
So, uh, yeah, I got a few buyers and, uh, one of them was very interested and they even
gave an offer of 40 K. So it was at 300 something.
I mean, all right.
So if I did the convolution, it was like 10 S of IR or even more, but yeah.
So as I said, black magic was not like today.
It did not have the Chrome attention.
And by the time I had that offer, I already have a few ideas about the Chrome attention
already.
I just have not built it yet.
So I feel like, okay, this is a very good deal, but if I'm going to go into sell this,
I will have to do something about this Chrome attention idea that I have.
And if I do that, I may get into triple of, you know, you, you already sell that to the
other person.
Now you do something kind of similar, it's going to be to person.
So I thought about it and because of that, I did not accept the offer.
And also another reason is 40 K. Okay.
It's good.
It's high.
But after tax and stuff, uh, fee, I don't think it is, um, let's say 20, 30, 35 left
35 K left.
It's not a life changing money for me.
I definitely not needed the cash right there.
And then, so it wasn't that important to me.
Is that part of the end game that you have in mind?
So you've got a product that's making about six grand W tails, black magic around 10 grand
snapper on four grand.
Are you looking to, to get these projects acquired?
Do you have this idea where it's like, no, it'd be dope just to keep growing them and
they're running them and having this free lifestyle.
Do you have like an exit strategy in mind?
I don't think about it a lot.
Actually I am open for sale.
It's okay if I am totally, uh, it's possibility to sell the products with any amount.
Like I'm always open to hear how much money I'm going to give me.
There's a price for anything.
I actually given a really brief note for this a while ago because I get too many, so many
offers to buy.
And I write a brief note saying that, okay, all of my products are for sale, but it will
be $1 million.
But then it make no money, it make no sense, I'd say, okay, if you buy this, you are not
buying the product.
You're just buying my fun away from me.
Well, of any of the products, I think, uh, black magic is the smartest one not to sell
because you had to have utils out at the time, but like that one, as you said, you didn't
charge a monthly subscription.
People would just buy that out the map store, download it once, pay for it once.
And that's it.
But black magic, you're making like, you know, a few hundred dollars a month in revenue.
I think you said $300 a month.
And yeah, that wasn't that much, but it was recurring.
And so, you know, why sell this thing that's recurring revenue?
And you know, you've got a plan to add the Chrome extension and add more features and
make it even better.
True.
Uh, and now it's like your big, it's like your big money generator.
It makes half of all the money you make comes from black magic.
It's a $10,000 a month of revenue.
How did it grow so fast?
Like most people who are trying to sell a SaaS don't grow from a couple hundred dollars
a month to $10,000 a month in just a year.
Like what's the, what's the black magic behind black magic?
Yeah.
I think the reason is I use Twitter a lot and I have an audience building an audience
on Twitter and the product is also about Twitter.
So there's a fit of the audience and the customers.
So that's why I was able to grow the product without doing any other type of marketing.
I tried, but it was not a succeed.
I tried, uh, paid ads and, and, uh, and blogs and stuff, but in the end I think it's not
sustainable for me as one person.
So because it is a product about Twitter, I just keep tweeting and it should be able
to get traction as people visit my profile.
And another reason is that I think I had created something useful for people and I keep getting
recommendation from other people that totally not affiliated, um, kind of a word of mouth
marketing.
So that's why it roll by itself.
As of now, every day I got a 50 people, 100 people signing up for black magic, um, just,
just stably.
So I, and I do nothing, uh, for marketing except tweeting.
So I think it's a, it's a kind of a perfect fit for audience and customer that make it
roll so fast and so stable between dev utils, black magic and snapper.
How many hours a week do you think you put in total?
Okay.
Uh, in the, in the beginning, I think it was quite equal between that you deals and black
magic, but, uh, later on black magic took me like 70% of my time.
Yeah.
Because it is a online product is a SaaS product and it has servers and stuff run everything
running in background, require more attention and also customer support.
So compared to that you use, which is a standalone application where you can download and use
it black magic took me a lot of time.
So the same for snapper as well.
Snapper at the beginning when I was actively building it, um, I spent two days to build
it and then, uh, a few weeks later I spent maybe a few hours a week to build.
And then that's it.
Most of my time, like 70% spent on, on black magic.
And what are you doing like 20 hours a week, like 80 hours a week?
Are you, are you working around the clock or like, uh, you know, what's, what's like
a, a week in your life in terms of just how much time you spend working on all these projects?
Yeah.
I look at the numbers recently and, uh, it say I work on average four hours a day.
Uh, I think six months ago, it about six to eight hours in the beginning.
When I was, uh, I just, uh, quit my job.
I think I worked at 10 hours or even more and mostly, uh, mostly coding, but also not
accounting for the time I spent on Twitter, so I browsed it a lot addicting.
Four hours or five hours or whatever, the number of hours working for a company is totally
different qualitatively than four to 10 hours or whatever, working for myself.
Like I love working for myself.
I have friends who are like, dude, you need more work life balance.
You're working on a Sunday and they're like, Oh, I'm so sorry for you.
And I'm like, I'm sorry for you.
What are you doing?
Like dreading that Monday is coming around.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So true, man.
Yeah.
Does, was there a point where you like realized your revenue where it clicked for you that
your revenue was going to like surpass the 10 K a month you're making it your job and
you're like, holy shit, like this worked and I, I'm never going to have to go back to work.
Yeah.
I, that happened to me when I was at five K M R. So five K M R R is the war that I said
when I quit my job, uh, even before I quit my job, I was thinking like, okay, if I get
to five K M R R, I will be able to provide for myself, for my future family.
And I can even send money back to my parents.
That is a perfect point that I will be fully sustainable in Vietnam.
So when I reached five K M R R, I feel like I'm free, you know, totally free, but, but
now looking back, actually I did not work less after I reached five K. I mean, when
I reached five K I was in a, I think I was in the middle of, uh, of a growth curve.
It was going up and at the time I was doing something very special for black magic or
something I could not remember now, but I worked a lot at, at the time much until later
on when I reached to seven K and then eight K and then nine K I, uh, I started to, to
realize, okay, I'm looks, looks like I'm going into a treadmill of wanting more and more
and more and more forever.
You know, I should, I should do less.
Why am I doing more?
And sometimes I, even though I can dress whenever I want, I feel assaulted because sometimes
it's like addition, you know, is you cannot control yourself.
So yeah, when, when I reached about seven K or eight K, I was focusing more on forcing
myself to relax.
I traveled a lot more and I enjoy a lot more time.
And also, uh, the last few months I live in near a beach.
It has incredibly increased my mental health, just living near a beach and having a walking
distance to a beach, you know, so good.
Yeah.
What's your ideal lifestyle?
Because you have to like, everybody has to think about this at some point.
Once you hit this point to financial freedom and you're like, Oh shit, I don't have to
work for anyone else.
I can do whatever I want all day.
And people like do fall into these buckets.
So some people get under that treadmill and they're just like, okay, well I wanted to
make 10 K like now I want to make 20 K. Okay.
I made 20 K now I want to make a, I want to make 50.
Okay.
I made 50 K like I'm trying to hit a million dollars a year and they just keep going up
and up and up.
And like, that's just their life.
Like these ever increasing goals.
And some people were the exact opposite.
They're like, okay, I got to my goal.
Like now I want to like have fun, right?
I want to make a lot of friends.
I want to spend my time on the beach.
Like you were saying, I want to have a really chill life, put everything on autopilot, put
everything in the passive mode.
And some people are more like creative, like Peter levels is like, well, you know what?
Like I love tinkering on my projects.
That's his favorite thing.
He just loves doing that.
And so he's got a very well balanced life, but he doesn't have any sort of plan to retire
or to try to go for like billions of dollars.
So like what bucket do you fall in?
I think that the dream life would be, I will only do the stuff that I enjoy, which is somewhat
product designing and coding right now.
I'm still doing that most of the time, but there are still some kind of grand work like
customer support and you know, for symbols and some other boring features that, you know,
necessary for, for business, but not fun to work on.
So I think the dream life for me is I can start to delegate some of those work for other
people that I trust so that I can focus more on innovating new ideas and new products.
I was thinking like if I get to, you know, to the point where I can snap a company out
of existence to work on some new product, new idea, and if it is fail, I would not feel
regret for spending the money.
I would get into the point where can I just experiment with stuff at a larger scale, you
know, right now I can do, I can still do that, but I have to do that with my own time.
So it's kind of costly for me.
And because the opportunity cost is increasing for me day by day, because every time I don't
work for on black magic, it's making money, right?
So if I don't work on it, I kind of feeling kind of losing money.
So I feel like that opportunity cost is putting me on a stretch that I need to continue working
on this, but I don't really enjoy all of the parts of my daily work.
So yeah, I still want to reach out to 50K and a million and stuff, but I wanted to do
that in a sustainable way and enjoy my life at the same time.
It's easy to get to a point where you forget like that fire you have when you're trying
to like first become financially free, like in every day, like you're willing to do all
this shit that you don't like doing because you're like, I need to make it.
And it's like, I think it's really easy eventually, like I'll check in on you in a couple of years
to like, to lose that fire.
It's so easy to be like, uh, you know what, I don't want to do any of the hard things
that I used to do.
I don't want to do the stuff I like to do because that's where I am.
I also only want to do the stuff that I like to do.
But then it becomes harder to do hard things.
Like when I think back to like, when I talked to people who were like, you know, just crushing
it on marketing and sending all these cold emails and, um, or, you know, like tweeting
every single day.
I'm like, man, that seems exhausting.
But then I'm like, wait, that used to be me like four years ago and it wasn't that hard.
So I feel like there's like a get in a Yang like Channing, you're always talking about
this too, about like how you structured your life to like always want to do hard things.
Well, the way that I see it is I think that one approach you could take is to just keep
your foot on the gas pedal and just keep growing.
But another approach you could take is to take that same fire and ambition and look
at other areas of your life that sort of are lacking or, you know, like, you know, things
that you haven't ever felt that you had the time and the freedom to work on.
So for example, with indie hackers, we still have a lot of growth to do.
So I don't want to make it seem like that's on autopilot, but it's like, you know, I've
had the foot on the pedal for many years and like a lot of my immediate friend group is
dwindling.
So I'm like, well, I'm going to take my ambition and my fire and like build an awesome friend
group in New York City, et cetera.
So that's in a way, that's the way that I like to not let my sense of effort and ambition
get dolled by working on things that are not really like giving the same excitement returns
that they once did.
I see.
That's an interesting approach.
Yeah.
I mean, you launched Snapper more recently than Dev U Tales and Blackmagic.
So like even after Blackmagic is like doing so well, you've decided to like continue adding
new products and Snapper is really interesting to me.
So this is the screenshot tool.
It's interesting to me because it's also kind of like Dev U Tales, your first one.
It's not a recurring revenue product.
Like I just pay for it once and that's it.
I don't ever have to pay you any money again.
Why go that route?
You know, what's it like making these like Mac apps versus like these like websites that
charge subscription revenue and like, what are some of the advantages and challenges
of like of going that route?
Because if you decided to do it a second time, like there might, there must be something
good about it that you like.
Yeah.
So I think for Mac OS apps in general, I don't want to pay a subscription cost.
So I wouldn't want to sell it to customer like that either.
The pay ones use forever model that I'm using for Dev U Tales and Snapper is not exactly
a lifetime.
So when you buy, you will buy that one exact version and you can use it forever.
Never have to pay me again.
But let's say if one year later or two years later you want to update to the latest version,
you had to pay a little fee to, to renew it.
So that is the model that I find perfect for Mac OS app.
And a lot of other apps are using the same model.
If you are into Mac OS app, you know, a few popular apps like Sketch, the design app,
it used to be on that model.
The IntelliZ, the IDE app for developers, also the same model, TablePlus, Prosimen,
Nova app, all coming from that same model because that is the only way that can give
the customer a lifetime license and also having a sustainable business.
So that's good.
About the Mac OS app, I think there are a lot of web apps these days and if I want to
make a difference, I going to do something different.
So Mac OS app is something that one can build to, to deliver a better experience for the
users.
That's what I'm, I was trying to focus on.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You just posted about how you launched Snapper and you've already made like, I think $4,200
in earnings.
Was that just like on your launch day or is that like in the last month or so?
Yes, just for the launch day.
In this month I already made like $7,000, $8,000 for this month.
And in the month earlier, I think I made like 10K because I was selling early bird sale
so when I, when the first person came out, I already letting people use for free, but
I, but I tell people that if you want to buy it early now, you can get very, very cheap.
So I was able to sell like 10K on Gumroad and on Pardo in total.
So it's the first app that I built that have a big audience, a customer base, you know,
that you use is only for developers, but the screenshot to everyone can use it.
So I think it's got more potential, it got more potential.
But is it, is it harder to sell stuff?
Like cause you're so used to Twitter, which you have this feedback loop, okay.
All of your audience is on Twitter, but like a screenshot tool.
It's like, well, it's in the app store.
It's not as discoverable.
It's probably harder for you to like keep tweeting about it and stuff.
What's the difference between marketing and growing that app versus growing a Twitter
app?
So for Snapper, I use it a lot.
So when, before I use Snapper, right, I have a combination of three different tools to
make that same screenshot and it took me a lot of time, but I still have to, I still
do it because I find it very beautiful.
So before Snapper, I did that and a lot of people asked me, how did you make this happen?
How did you make a screenshot look beautiful like this?
So I keep having to answer to people again and again, again, again, how I did it.
So I figured out if I make an app for this, I will be able to market it easily, authentically.
When people ask me how I did this, I just say, I will use Snapper.
And that's how I, that's how I was thinking about marketing the product.
So it will be word of mouth marketing from me.
And actually I was not very concerned about the growth of Snapper because it's a smart
OS app, right?
I built it for me.
So even if it doesn't get any traction, I will still use it myself.
And I only spend a few days on it.
I don't have a lot to lose and I saved my time.
So even if it doesn't make any money for me, I'm okay with that.
So everything comes as a bonus for me.
It is a tiny bit of built-in marketing, right?
In the form of, if you have the free version, you don't want to pay for it, then it has
like a, whatever, it's napper.com watermark.
Yes.
Yes.
That is something that I wrote into it.
Yeah.
The watermark thing.
I don't think a lot of people will use that.
People kind of hate watermarks.
I turned it off immediately.
Yes.
Yeah.
If you pay for it, you're going to get rid of that, but like, you know, in a sense like
you're hoping for like a couple of cheapskates who might at least like do some free marketing
for you.
Yeah.
I kind of hope that would be a marketing loop, but I don't think so many, many people care
about design.
They will care about the watermarks.
They will try to turn it off.
I think it's naturally viral though, because when you share something beautiful with other
people, they usually ask you how you made it, and screenshots are something that people
share.
So every time I take a screenshot now, it's got this cool gradient background, and I'll
send it to my friends.
I'll send it to like anyone I'm working on a project with, and like a good percentage
of the time, once I've sent like two or three screenshots, they'll figure out like, oh,
every screenshot I take looks like this, and I'll ask me how I did it, and I'll say, oh,
just check out Snapper.
And so it's got like this kind of, it's like you're building something that people naturally
want to show to other people.
Yes.
It's very visual.
Only if it is beautiful that people will ask how you did it.
So I think that that's something that I can, that I was able to unlock.
And then hopefully that will drive more people to be aware of the app.
Yeah.
In a way, this is like a sneaky benefit of these, you know, pay once, own forever kinds
of products.
We made a post on our forum, whatever, a couple of weeks ago, and it was like, hey, you know,
here's how I'm, you know, defying all of the startup, not all the startup advice to only
focus on one product.
And I've got three separate products, they're making 18 grand a month.
And since Snapper doesn't really require a lot of your continual time, in theory, I could
imagine like over the next 10 years, you ballooning up to having like seven products, right?
As long as they're not all subscription based.
And it's like, yeah, no, I only spend time working on two or three of them.
Right?
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
I have known a lot of people who make a bunch of app, like tens or even hundreds, they don't
need much maintenance.
It just keeps growing and bringing revenue.
So app is a way.
And even though it's one time budget, it doesn't require much of your time, which is I think
more valuable.
Why do you, why do you think your, uh, your approach to building in public is so successful?
Cause I'm like just scrolling through your Twitter, dude, and you've got so many tweets.
And I know a ton of people who build in public and it's like, it's not a new thing, right?
People have been building in public for years and years and years to the point where now
it's almost like pass a, it's like, you know, you're just one of a million indie hackers
tweeting about your revenue and your marketing strategies.
But for you, like, it works like you're getting a ton of likes.
Your follower count is blowing up.
Why do you think it's working for you and it doesn't work for so many other people?
I find that, uh, even though many people are doing the same thing in building public as
me, they did not get the, the actress and I thought about it a lot, um, in conclusion,
I think there's something about the creativity that, uh, of the stuff that I tweet that trigger
people to be curious about the stuff that I do.
So let's, let's take an example when the early days when I have only a few hundred followers,
I build something fun with JavaScript, uh, a little water simulation.
So it was, it was something just, I do it just for fun, but because it was so strange
and so creative and, and it looks so fun, got people attention.
So like later on when I build in public, I, I feel like no matter what I do, it has to
be special.
It has to be something that people have never seen anywhere or something that make them
curious or something they was, wasn't able to do before then the tweet will get attention.
So that is something I think will be difficult to get for all the people that you use is
a boring product, but black magic and snapper is kind of interesting because it's touched
it on the market where I don't think there's anything exist like that before.
It makes people curious about the product and then they want to try.
The fact about I build, I build Mac OS app also contributed to it.
I think, um, people use web app too much.
Like there are only already a lot of web apps and something on your Mac OS, it will be more
engaging and, and, and, uh, more beautiful.
And uh, I think that I think they like it more.
There's no coincidence that, I mean, probably the main place to build in public is on Twitter,
but if everyone building in public on Twitter is then linking back to their website or they're
linking back to their app or they're linking to their newsletter, there's extra effort
that people have to go through to see what they're doing.
But if you are building in public and the thing that you're building on Twitter is a
Twitter product and everyone sees your awesome profile and they see this dope like banner,
like it's just sort of this direct demo.
Then there's a tremendous amount of public credibility that you have, right?
Everyone can kind of see themselves using that product and benefiting from it.
Yeah.
I, I heavily invested into the totally invested in is everything.
So everything I do, I share it on Twitter.
Yeah.
Well, it's smart.
I mean, you've got such a variety too, because it's like, if I follow your Twitter, I can,
it's not just like one thing.
It's like, you've got three or four different products that you tweet about.
Almost all of them are visual.
So there's cool stuff to look at and as like a follower, I'm like, I'm also your user.
So you're like tweeting about like stuff that I, is relevant to me because I'm like using
your products.
Then you're also tweeting about your progress as an eddy hacker, celebrating your successes,
asking for help.
You're like, Hey, what's the best subreddit to post snapper and, and Hey, I'm going to
launch going to do this.
So you're like really engaging and it's just like a huge variety of stuff.
And so there's like, you've given people like half a dozen reasons to follow you as compared
to someone who's just like working on one thing and just tweeting about that one thing
all the time.
It's like, well, now I only have one reason to follow you.
And if I get bored, yeah, I keep coming back.
I also really like what you said that you have a big focus on making things that are
fun.
Tony, have you ever heard of absurd trolley problems?
There's a new, uh, website coming out for that, right?
Interactive website in new fun, new, new data, right?
He was, he was famous.
Yes.
That was fun.
I did that.
And like, that's awesome.
Yeah.
Absurdive trolley problems.
It's, you know, it's just this old philosophical problem where, you know, you see a trolley
going, it's going to kill three people, but you can pull the lever and then it'll only
kill one person.
But then you have to sort of own the consequences in any case.
He took this philosophical problem and he made it this fun game.
And the cool thing about this is that it went so viral that a friend of mine who doesn't
even go to hacker news, send it to me.
He's not like that techie, but he's like, dude, this, this, this game is awesome.
And then I saw it and then I wanted to know every other thing that this Neil guy built.
So I'm like browsing his website, I'm playing all these different games and I'm like, fuck
you know, I want to see what he's doing on Twitter.
And so I think there's such a huge untapped benefit of like, you know, instead of just
going for what's just, you know, useful, what can I make money on every now and then just
letting your hair down and building fun games.
It's also fun to build those things.
You can, you can add any constraint you want to, to any of your work as an anti-hacker.
You can say, I'm going to be super fun or everything's going to look super well designed
or everything's going to be like really simple, right?
And it doesn't have to only be about like, Oh, how do I make money?
But it can be about any of these other things where you put your personality or your own
sort of touch onto what you do.
And I think that like when people do that, it just makes it much, much more fun for them
to be anti-hackers, but also it makes their products stand out.
Like every Tony didn't product is like very, like obviously from you got your touch on
it.
Every product from Peter levels is like, got emojis all over it.
It's like a very like Peter levels ask, you know, and then you speak, yeah, you can always
guess.
And then you can see other products as people are like ripping you guys off, you know, or
like people don't have their own vision or their own interests.
They haven't thought about like what they want to put into their own products.
And so they copy Peter levels or something.
But when it's like you or Neil or Peter, anyone who's got like their own touch, you seem like
you're having a really good time.
What's your parting advice for any hackers listening to this?
What's something that you've learned in your journey that they might not, you know, have
heard somewhere else that you think they should take away?
Yeah.
One thing is to focus on solving the problems that they are experienced by themselves and
even better if they are the users for their own product.
So as an, as an indie hacker, you don't have a lot of resource as a, as a big company.
So that if you are the user of your own product, you get a huge advantage of having a look
inside the product and having the insides of the problems.
So always try to look for, for problems around you and solve those problems.
Solve your own problems.
Tony Den, thanks a ton for, uh, for joining us.
Thank you for having me.
Thank you so much.
Can you let listeners know where to go to find out more about what you're up to, like
your Twitter or your websites, et cetera?
Uh, that would be Tony Den dot com, my website.
Uh, and in there you will be, you'll be able to see my newsletter and my Twitter and everything
else about me.
Cool.
Thank you.
Thanks, guys.