Okay, we're here with Damon Chen.
What's up, Damon?
How's it going?
Yo, yo.
Good.
What's up, guys?
You are an indie hacker.
You're the founder of a company called Testimonial.
And I think you have a super inspirational story.
So you were like a developer at Cisco for eight years.
You saw a lot of other people take lucrative jobs elsewhere, and you eventually started
interviewing all the major tech companies, Amazon, Google, Facebook, all of them.
Today they're all just doing a bunch of layoffs, but at the time they weren't.
They were like hot shit, and they turned you down.
But then you started building lots of apps.
I think you built like five apps in 2020 alone, most of which generated zero dollars.
But you quit anyway and became an indie hacker, and you launched Testimonial.
And eventually that made like, I think, $3,000 in the first 10 days.
What's your revenue at today?
The monthly revenue is at $30K, MRR.
And the annual revenue is almost approaching half a million dollars.
Dang.
That's crazy.
So from working a corporate job, making apps or making any money to making almost half
a million dollars on your own.
Do you have any employees?
Do you have a co-founder?
How many people are working on Testimonial with you splitting that revenue?
Well, actually, two weeks ago, I hired my first employee who will be handling the marketing
and sales, all those kind of code outreach, running paid ads campaigns, doing some social
media stuff.
And I hired a guy to complement my skill.
Very cool.
Let me just get some clarity.
So you're at $30K MRR now, and you started these apps in 2020.
So how long just Testimonial, how long ago did you build Testimonial?
How long did it take you to ramp that up to $30K?
I launched Testimonial December 2020.
So it's almost two years anniversary.
Initially I launched Testimonial with the Lifetime deal, which a lot of indie hackers
use this kind of a strategy to just attract some initial users.
And after I saw some initial traction from the Lifetime deal, I saw a huge demand.
People asking for Lifetime deals even.
I shifted my pricing model from Lifetime deal to subscription model.
People still asking for Lifetime deal, and I'm saying, no, sorry, the Lifetime is gone,
and you got to subscribe, pay me monthly or annually.
So yeah, starting going from there.
So the Lifetime deal campaign only lasted two weeks.
And after I earned $5K, $6K from 20-ish Lifetime customers, I just stopped Lifetime and focused
on the subscription and growing the recurring revenue from there.
Nice.
I see on your Twitter, you've got a little progress bar in your bio saying that you're
aiming for a million dollars in revenue for Testimonial.
I think one thing I notice a lot of indie hackers doing is thinking about these revenue
milestones they want to hit for themselves.
So maybe it's like, OK, once I make $100 and then my idea has legs, I'm going to keep
working on it.
And once I make a couple thousand dollars in a month, I can quit my job.
And once I make $10,000 a month, I know I've made it, et cetera, et cetera.
What milestones do you have for Testimonial?
Why did you pick that $1 million a year milestone?
What do you expect to happen when you hit that?
If you check my Twitter profile again, and you will not be able to see the one million
the progress bar anymore, I just took it off because the one million-
Let me see, it just goes to $1 now.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true.
Because I used to have the one million a year goal for myself, and myself made 40% there,
which was the $1 million goal.
And it's really fun to document my solo journey, and all the effort is just by myself.
But as I said, two weeks ago, I had my first employee, so it's no longer my own effort.
It's kind of like a team joint effort.
So I kind of removed the progress bar, but I still want to show some progress bar there.
So as you said, now the progress bar on the left side is just $0, and on the right side
is $1.
And I think it just says something like, I made it by making my first online dollar.
And that's actually my biggest milestone.
And always, the first online dollar is the most difficult.
And after the first dollar, I set my next goal to $100K ARR.
That's actually the number that I promised to my wife.
Before quitting my day job, I told my wife, if I can't make $100K in a year, I'm going
to go back to find another job.
So luckily, I made it.
Now, is that the number that you promised to your wife, or is that the number that your
wife demanded of you?
Both myself and her had no choice, because we live in the most expensive area.
I had to make some money.
So $100K is not even the average software engineer salary in Silicon Valley, but at
least it's not nothing.
It is something to prove, to give both her and myself some confidence that this app could
be a thing so that I can stick with it for the long term.
So let me try to describe testimonial to the audience.
Testimonial is a tool that allows your customers to collect testimonials from their customers.
And it can be both texts and video testimonials.
And then it gives them a copy, kind of a code snippet, that lets them display all of those
testimonials on their website.
So let's say I'm an indie hacker, I've got a business.
I want a slick website.
I want that website to be covered in testimonials from happy customers who all say they love
my product.
Or maybe if I'm just getting started, I'll get some fake testimonials from my friends
and my family.
It doesn't matter.
I just want my thing to look cool.
So that when my customers come, they think that people are using my product.
But maybe I suck at asking for testimonials.
Maybe I don't know how to code, so I don't know how to add the testimonials to my website.
I see all these other websites that have these super slick video testimonials, and I'm not
sure how to do that myself.
They have tweet testimonials, they have other testimonials, and all these fancy things.
That's where your product comes in.
I go to testimonial.to.
You make it easy.
I just sign up.
You give me all this stuff that I want, and you just make it easy for me to collect testimonials
and put them on my website.
Is that an accurate description?
Am I missing anything?
Maybe anything else?
Yeah.
You describe it perfectly.
Thanks.
I probably can use it as one of the copy in my ad.
I'm just trying to sell it for you here.
I think it's a great idea, because pretty much every indie hacker wants it.
There's almost no business that doesn't want testimonials.
Everybody has a website, and so your market is humongous.
You can sell to basically all of your people.
You can sell to your audience.
You can sell to your fellow indie hackers.
You can sell to your peers.
If people are going to have testimonials, they're going to want to have good ones, so
they might as well just come to you because you are the expert in this edge.
Also, it's like no code is on the rise, so a lot of people don't have the technical competence
to get this slick new element of their UI in place.
I think testimonials, also it's valuable proposition is pretty straightforward.
Like Courtney said, every business needs testimonials, so people just get it.
It somehow reminds me, recently, if you guys are on Twitter and on Twitter, and other makers
launched an AI-powered tool to generate avatar, the tool is a pretty simple idea.
I guess Peter and others don't need to do too much marketing.
People just get it, and for testimonials, it's just a tool that you can use to collect
testimonials.
It saves you effort managing your testimonials, and also most of my customers are not really
tech-savvy.
They are marketing folks, and they can easily just use it as a no-code tool to plug in testimonials
as a widget on their website without too much developer effort.
Right.
Let's talk about how you got started here, because sort of alluded to it, you were applying
to all these tech jobs, but most people on Earth are pretty happy just working their
job.
It's stable to work a job.
It's easy to work a job.
Frankly, you generally make more money working a job and trying to be an indie hacker, and
being an indie hacker is challenging.
It's risky.
It's uncertain.
It's been years working on projects that make zero dollars.
I know I did.
What inspires you to become an indie hacker?
Why not just stay working that job at Cisco for the rest of your life?
I didn't want to be an indie hacker, just to be honest.
I was kind of forced to become an indie hacker.
I was a software engineer in Silicon Valley, so like many other software engineers here,
I was coming in my career ladder.
Like you said, I applied jobs for working for fan companies.
The first year companies, that's the path that most of my friends and colleagues followed.
But things changed.
In 2018, we had our first kid, and changing my job desire became super strong.
I used to work for Cisco, and it's definitely not the first year, and the pay is definitely
not the first year as well.
I just wanted to get a better job with higher salaries so that I can provide my family a
better life.
I did spend many, many months preparing for the job interview.
If you're familiar, I prepared a coding interview, doing the lead coding, basically those kind
of coding puzzles, and you just told things didn't go well as I expected.
I felt all interview from fan, and it's pretty devastating to my confidence, and to be honest,
spending a month on just preparing those coding puzzles is not a fun thing.
It's pretty painful and boring process.
Just make me think, what's the point, right?
Even if I get a job, maybe the salary will be better, but it won't be drastically different.
It's still a nine to five job from a big corporation, so I decided to quit that route because I
literally have no confidence in facing a job interview.
After that, the only choices left are either being a lifer at my current company or make
some money elsewhere because I worked for Cisco as my first job.
I worked there since 2012 after I graduated from college, and it's been eight past years,
and the things got boring, and I literally had no motivation to continue.
The only thing left for me is to make some money elsewhere, so I started to do some moon
lighting stuff.
My goal is always to make more money for my family.
I even tried being an Uber driver on my way to community work, and off from work to go
back home, and trying to be a part-time Uber driver, and start selling some stuff on eBay,
and being a photographer.
I did make a bit of money, but it's definitely not the same level as being a software engineer.
Not to mention, it cost my time.
I had to trade my time to make money from those part-time jobs.
It's definitely not going to work, but I was very lucky to find any hackers community during
that time.
That totally opened up my mind that people can make some internet projects to make a
living, and I don't need to trade my time for money, and I can basically work from home
or even wherever I want, whenever I want.
If you ask what inspired me to become any hacker, the short answer would be indie hackers
inspire me to become an indie hacker.
Very cool.
I don't think I've ever had anybody on the show before who's talked about becoming an
Uber driver.
I think the other parts of it are some of the stuff you talked about I could see myself
in.
I could see a lot of indie hackers basically being unemployable, either because they don't
want to work for the man, or because they're struggling in interviews and they don't like
being judged.
I had that same thing in college where I was studying for coding interviews, and it wasn't
fun.
I'm learning all these algorithms, and I interview somewhere, and they reject me.
It doesn't feel good.
It's just like, fuck it.
I'd rather work for myself.
I don't have to go through this crap.
I could just build my own thing.
I think a lot of indie hackers have that attitude, but reaching out to these different freelance
jobs to fund yourself is really interesting.
What was it like being an Uber driver?
Was it lucrative enough that you could support yourself and supplement your income to the
degree you wanted?
I'm curious how it felt being a software engineer and an Uber driver at the same time.
Uber is just for the local community, but I always think that I'm browsing Craigslist
and people will send a lot of requests doing some carpooling from San Francisco to Los
Angeles.
This kind of mid to long distance carpooling, and there's no such kind of app.
In my mind, I was thinking that probably I could build an app for the mid to long distance
carpooling.
Being an Uber driver is kind of like an experience that I just want to experience how to request
a Uber drive, and if I'm an Uber driver and what that experience looks like.
I actually spent several weekends being a full-time Uber driver, and I made something
like $200 to $300 just by driving an Uber for eight hours.
I would say compared to the minimum pay in California, and that's still above the minimum
pay.
I think that driving an Uber while I'm commuting to work, I'm not wasting too much time while
I can make a more solid income that will have our first kit, and I can make some extra money
to support my family.
That's another reason.
I'm curious.
I mean, I know that you worked on multiple products that didn't work out before testimonial,
and a common challenge that founders run into is they invest a lot of time and projects
and they get emotionally attached to them, and then it becomes really hard to pull the
plug when things clearly aren't working out.
In fact, there's like an official term in psychology for this phenomenon, right?
They call it the sunk cost fallacy where you just invest emotionally, and then it's like
this cost that you just feel invested in and you don't pull out.
So is that something that you struggled with because I know that you eventually moved on
from those?
Yeah, for sure.
I did struggle with those existing projects, and actually for the first project that I
built, The Long and Deaf, to someone who didn't know, the Long and Deaf is a community where
makers around the world can just post a short video about what they're up to, and it just
gives people a more personal feeling when connecting with other makers as everything
is in the video.
But it's a community.
It is still far, far away from being successful.
I don't have to put a ton of effort into injecting new fuels to make the community active.
It's damn hard.
You guys were in the community, and you must know it.
The Long and Deaf was still active by the time I launched Tazmono.
But after Tazmono took off, I had to shift all my focus from the community to my SaaS.
One good thing is that I can reconnect with my community members to Twitter, so we never
lose touch.
After all this kind of communication migrated from the Long and Deaf to Twitter, the community
thing gradually faded away, it's just gradually less and less active.
And for other projects, it's relatively easy for me just to get out.
If it is not money making, I lose my motivation, or I get burned out, I just want to move on.
Normally within a few weeks, I just will get a sense whether it's a good product or not.
I think the other hard part for a lot of people is coming up with the initial idea, which
obviously you solved that problem.
Tazmono is making more than $30,000 a month, so it was a good idea.
How did you come up with that idea?
I love to just bury myself into coding and this kind of stuff, but my marketing skill
really sucks.
I just wanted to find a solution to solve my marketing weakness.
As an engineer, we always love to find some life hacks, and obviously to me, to convince
people to buy my product, the shortcut is to just throw some Tazmono on my website.
Like I said, I built Lonely Def, which is a video-focused community, so a quick idea
that popped into my mind is to add video Tazmonos to the stuff.
I feel that if it is a pinpoint for me, I guess it's also a pinpoint for many others.
Also, the value proposition is pretty straightforward, so I'm like, you know, let me just build an
MVP and test it out.
And what does that testing process look like?
Because you build the MVP, and then it might not actually work, you haven't quite validated
it.
And you're the kind of guy where it's easy for you to move on, so if it doesn't make
money quickly, you're going to move on, right?
So you've got some sort of process I presume to figure out, like, okay, is this going to
work?
How did you validate that MVP?
I actually never validated the idea of the MVP from anywhere else.
I just thought it's a problem of mine, and not to mention I can quickly build the MVP
by using some existing code from my previous projects, so why not wasting time on the validation?
And to me, the ultimate validation is whether people will buy it or not.
If I can run some pre-sale campaign to buy this, that's totally fine.
But if I'm asking the feedback from just from this kind of service level, I'm going to probably
waste a lot of time, and probably even distracted by the people.
Because people tend to be really nice, people will say, great idea, just go for it.
Even nice people will say, oh, they will buy it.
But those kind of feedback is bullshit to me.
I definitely appreciate their kindness, but those kind of service level feedback, validation,
I don't think it really helps.
You mentioned earlier, actually, when we were talking about validation, you mentioned that
you did your lifetime plan and you had a lot of interest.
Was that right around when you launched, or was that later?
Because if you have a lifetime plan and a lot of people sign up, and then there's such
an influx that you feel like, oh, crap, I got to turn this off and just move to subscription,
that seems like it might be good de facto validation, right?
Yeah, that's kind of like a validation, for sure, yes.
I think that's the best.
The best validation is you put a product down to the world and people use it, or they don't
use it, right?
And you talk about why.
And I've seen so many people who go through this grueling process of calling up hundreds
of customers and interviewing them and trying to find out all the right, perfect information
about whether they will or won't buy, and it takes them six months, and they're doing
everything by the book, and then they think they have a good plan, and then they launch
their product and get smacked in the face, and none of the stuff they learned is true,
and none of it works.
So, I like your approach.
Just build it, get it out the door, get it in the real people's hands as quickly as possible.
That's all the validation.
I think I saw this tweet by Sahil, and he said, it's not that you learn, and then you
do.
It's that you do, and then you learn.
And it seems like you have kind of that approach.
But okay, what if you do, and then what you learn is that it doesn't work.
So, I mean, you already had a few products that didn't work out.
Do you have a backup plan here?
If Testimonial didn't have all those lifetime signups, what would you have done if Testimonial
hadn't paid the bills?
I actually don't have any backup plan.
Maybe the only backup may be my working wife, which I prepared for many, many years.
She paid all bills and mortgage in the first one and a half years, and yeah, I really appreciate
her support, mentally, financially, everything.
I owe forward the episode to my wife so that she can listen.
The biggest indie hacker hack is get married to someone who's going to pay the bills while
you mess around tingering with apps.
Yeah.
And we also have some decent savings from years of our engineering job in the Bay Area.
So things won't be that bad.
We can't pay our bills.
I wouldn't see this kind of thing happen in the next a year or two.
Also, by the time that I quit my job, I basically timebox everything.
If within a year things won't work, I go back to find another job.
And if you are asking the backup plan, that's one of my backup plan.
So at this point, you've got the MVP belt, you launch it.
I think this is also the other hard part for the vast majority of indie hackers.
It's how do you find your first customers?
You clearly had this cool audience that you had built because you built lonely dev.
It was a small community.
So they kind of knew what you were up to.
You had your Twitter account, which at that time, I think was pretty small.
I don't think you had thousands of followers at that point.
Building is hard, but like finding these first customers is even harder.
How did you get your first paying customers?
Let's walk us through the process step by step because I think a lot of people struggle
with how to get this to work, even if they do build a good product.
Yeah, I think I kind of set a good foundation with those connections from my early community,
lonely dev.
We just basically support each other no matter what we do.
And if someone has a hard time, we're going to provide our help.
If someone wants to promote something, we're kind of no brainer for us to just do a retweet
and like on each other's tweet.
So yeah, in the early days, it's basically building public from those few hundred followers.
But those followers, the number is small, but we are pretty engaging.
Someone said, you only need a thousand true fans to start everything.
So I would say my initial few hundred followers friends are pretty super valuable for me in
the early days.
And I also share my updates on indie hackers.
And for the launch, I used the lifetime of your strategy.
I announced it on my Twitter and launched it on product hunt.
I even got someone to share the deal in some private MarTech groups on Facebook that I
didn't expect.
I didn't plan to launch anything on private groups on Facebook.
That's probably another really valuable customer acquisition channel.
Yeah, all these channels give me 20 plus early adopters.
And after that, they just collect feedback from initial customers, use this kind of flywheel
marketing strategy.
The more features that I added to the product, the more stuff that I can tweet on Twitter.
So that brought me more closure to more potential customers.
And things started going like a snowball from there.
I love it.
So you're on product hunt, you're on Twitter, your customers are sharing, everything was
going well.
I think a lot of people have this grand plan for their launch, where they're, sure, it's
going to go well.
And they have ABCDEF.
They're going to check all these boxes, do all these things, and it's going to go well.
You clearly had some sort of a plan.
Was there anything in your plan that didn't work out?
Was there anything in your launch plan that didn't go how you expected, or was it just
all perfect?
I remember that when I launched on product hunt, Brian Hoover asked me a question, why
not go with the subscription plan?
And by then, I was naive and stupid, I just replied right in that, I don't think a subscription
model will work.
And I'm just going to stick with the lifetime deal and the usage-based pricing model.
But that's definitely something that I am planning to go the subscription model.
And I thought that the lifetime deal may be just enough.
And I'm not even expecting people to buy for the lifetime deal.
And I thought, maybe like my previous projects that never make any money for testimonials,
maybe nobody will buy it.
If people buy it, that's like a dream.
But in the end, people buy lifetime deal, and the demand is extremely high.
And I go back to check those product hunt comments, and I revisit Brian Hoover's comments.
And I kind of think that maybe Ryan made a good point, and I should give subscription
a shot.
So yeah, it's changing to a subscription model.
It's definitely something not on my checklist.
And I'm lucky that I made the change.
Yeah, I'm reading his comment right now.
It's pretty crazy to see.
This is what's good about building in public and launching and getting stuff out, because
it's like, you will give really intelligent, talented people who will then see what you're
doing and offer suggestions.
And if you'd never launched this on product hunt, then Ryan Hoover never would have seen
it and he never would have made a comment with a suggestion for the subscription fees.
And you maybe never would have charged subscription fees, and maybe testimonial wouldn't be where
it is today.
So I mean, that was the launch.
And so you had to do a little pivoting things in your launch.
You went from the lifetime to the subscription.
What about since then?
You've been growing for another year and a half or more since then.
I know you're really active on Twitter, and you mentioned that you've got a flywheel.
So do you have a growth strategy?
What has worked?
What hasn't worked?
Yeah, I want to hear about this flywheel.
I love marketing flywheels.
Yeah, the marketing strategy, I would say, is pretty simple.
Two weeks ago, I hired my first employee.
But before that, I did everything just by myself.
And I tried to leverage, you know, I tried to maximize my effort as much as possible.
So I pretty much just use social media to build the word of mouth.
That's a more scalable approach to me, and it worked pretty well.
And also, I use a lot of product-led strategy for testimonial.
They can always start with the premium plan from which they don't need to pay anything.
They can just start collecting testimonials right away.
But the premium plan always comes up with some limitations.
And if they collect more testimonials, they're going to hit a paywall that, you know, prompt
them to upgrade so that they can access more additional testimonials.
And yeah, I just love this kind of growth hacks.
And another growth hack definitely work is I will put the testimonial logo inside the
embedding widget for those users who are still in the free plan.
And you know, some users who don't like our logo and prefer a wide-label solution, they
normally will choose to upgrade to a pay plan.
And for things that didn't work, I will say maybe code outreach.
I wouldn't say that it's not 100% not worth, it might worth if I sent more code emails.
And in the end, it's just the volume gain.
And for me, by then, I was just a solo founder, and doing the code outreach took me a lot
of time.
And I have to build a sequence to start sending the code emails, follow up with them, and
set up a demo course.
And the return from it just couldn't really justify my effort.
I would say, you know, doing the code outreach didn't work really well for me.
So that's why I prefer to stick with my product-led strategy.
How much of your growth is like product-led growth, where people are, you know, seeing
the product and it sort of advertises itself, versus Twitter, because you've grown from
like a few hundred followers in the early days to over 40,000 followers now.
And it seems like the sort of building-in-public tweeting-a-lot thing goes hand-in-hand with
your growth.
I would say initially, nearly 80% or 90% customers are from Twitter, because I'm pretty all in
social media, and I didn't focus on any other acquisition channels.
But one good thing is that the wave will rise a lot of the most.
So if you go to Twitter and just search testimonial, and you probably see that testimonial ranked
really high on Twitter, and also, it just affects the word of mouth and some organic
traffic from Google.
So if I check the customer acquisition channel nowadays, and, you know, Twitter is no longer
the top acquisition channel, and the top one is from the SEO, from the Google, that's the
thing that I'm pretty proud of.
I'm still super curious about Twitter, though, because like, even in the beginning, the fact
that it was like 80% or 90% of your customers is amazing.
And I think most indie hackers, when they try to grow on social media, they'll send
out like one or two tweets, you know, maybe five or six.
It won't work well.
They won't catch fire.
They won't go viral.
They won't see any returns.
And they'll just stop.
For whatever reason, like you kept going, and you kept tweeting, and you got tons of
customers from Twitter.
And now you get, you know, customers from a different source.
But like, what's your advice for somebody trying to make Twitter work?
What kinds of things can they tweet about?
How do they keep going when it's not working?
And why do you think Twitter works for you so well in the early days?
Yeah, in the early days, I kind of still really engaged with my long-in-depth community members.
The beautiful part of long-in-depth is it accidentally pushed me to build in public
because I'm the maker of my community.
And I have to be super active.
Like you, Carly and Jenny, you have to be super active on indie hackers.
And you know, if you don't be the driver, and nobody would take the drive.
And after testimonial took off, and I shifted all my focus from long-in-depth to Twitter,
I still got my community members' support.
And for testimonial, actually, another strategy that I use is I just give away the access
to my friends from long-in-depth, let them give it a try for free.
I don't charge them anything.
And they can start collecting testimonials and embed the testimonials onto their website.
So that kind of, you know, contributes quite a lot for the initial word of mouth because
they were tweets, hey, I use this kind of testimonial tool to collect testimonials.
And here is how I put it on my website.
So by now, you're like an expert in testimonials, an industry expert, so to speak.
What have you learned about testimonials that other people might not know?
For example, what makes for a good versus a bad testimonial, or where should testimonials
go on people's websites, these kinds of things?
What do you know about testimonials that other people should know?
I think, good, testimonials are always personalized and tell its own story.
People share their own stories.
And if I am a potential customer, and those unique stories might resonate with me, unlike
some bad ones, if it's just saying, oh, great product, great service, five-star.
I would say, you know, if you build a product and if you have one factor that really stands
out, the factors can be, you know, if the product is really good or you provide great
service or support, if you can offer all of them, and it probably can have many, many
happy customers.
For me, you know, I like to ask my customers for testimonials if I ship anything that they
desperately want.
And that's my strategy to collect testimonials.
And I know that they are super happy at that moment.
And you know, it would be highly possible that I get a shout out from them.
Yeah, that makes sense.
I like the idea of testimonials telling a story that audiences can relate to.
Because people will ask me for testimonials sometimes that will go on their websites.
And I have no idea what to say.
I'm like, oh, yeah, it was great.
I enjoyed using it.
That's not a good testimonials.
But it's much better if I'm like, oh, you know, I was, my website was on fire.
And I couldn't, you know, I couldn't, you know, keep it up.
And then I started using Render.
Now it's so much easier than using AWS or something like that.
Like, yeah.
Well, yeah, like my testimony was on the front page of render.com, or at least it used to
be.
And what's kind of funny about it is, as a result of having my testimonial there, I get
a lot of researchers who email me and say, oh, hey, we're trying to research, you know,
this particular industry.
We see you have a testimonial on this website.
You seem like an expert.
Why don't we, you know, interview you.
And like, sometimes they will literally pay 500 to $1,000, like an hour long call, just
to enter you because they put a testimonial on somebody's site.
So I think that's one reason to give testimonials too, is because you've got to appear on people's
radar and they want to come and talk to you.
That leads to something that might be kind of an issue of availability bias on my part,
because I just see founders constantly posting about their ideas and indie hackers.
But one type of product that I've seen a lot of, and Damon, you've probably seen a lot
of it too, is like, there are a lot of other testimonial products.
Like that seems to be like the hot thing.
Like maybe they see you on Twitter or who knows what their inspiration is, but like,
how do you feel about competition?
Like do you feel like, you know, you got to keep your secrets hidden behind the curtain
or do you feel like, you know, the more the better?
How do you, how do you kind of like approach the competitor's landscape?
You know, I'm a human being and, you know, sometimes that, you know, my Twitter friends
just DM me, oh, found a very similar product like a testimonial and oh, and some, or even
some copycats just trying to rip off testimonial and, you know, I'm a human being and I won't
feel happy just to be honest in the beginning, but I try not to focus too much on competitors.
In the end, I'm not trying to provide service to them.
What I'm providing service to is my own customer.
My goal is always to get my customer's feedback and then injecting their feedback into my
product, and that's the thing that I try to focus myself on.
If I focus too much on the competitors, my mentor is not healthy and that's not some
good feeling and up until now, I still do several demo calls and I'm also in the frontline
with doing the customer support so I know what they really want and I think my job is
to turn my customer's feedback into the product, I would say, you know, some, some customer
feedback is pretty valuable and they do have the potential to open a lot of new opportunities
for us.
I would say that's kind of like our competitive advantage and in the end, it all comes down
to the feedback loop, whether or not we can take our customer's feedback and turn it into
the product in a way that they like.
And I would say that the whole market is not like social media, it's not definitely not
something that, you know, one winner takes all and in the end, we also have our own customers
and I'm happy that social proof, this kind of niche vertical is growing nowadays, it's
still new and sometimes I think that our competitors and we all together help increase the total
addressable market and if I think that way and I think that's kind of like a bonus.
Right, yeah, in a way like their advertising is sort of increasing general awareness that
testimonials are a thing and then people might, you know, sort of window shop and find you
because of your competitors.
I have another question that's related to that about the industry which is that I think
one of the challenges for a lot of indie hackers, especially programmers, is that it's easy
to believe like, oh, I don't want to build this simple tool because people could just
build it themselves.
So if somebody's making a to-do list app, they might just say, oh, you know, my number
one competitor isn't other to-do list apps, it's people writing down their, you know,
their to-dos on a sticky note.
For a testimonial app, you remember a competitor isn't other testimonial apps, it's people
just bringing up their own testimonials on their website without using you and I think
that can discourage people from building ideas but then I look at what you're doing, you're
making over 30 grand a month and look at your pricing page and it's like 50 bucks a month,
150 bucks a month, $300 a month for your pricing fees.
Like these are like not small price points.
They're really big and that's probably part of why you're making so much money.
Why do you think people are willing to pay so much money?
I mean, it's very counterintuitive that people will pay for this kind of thing and I like
talking about pricing decisions because I think it helps other indie hackers gain the
confidence to charge more for what they're doing and realize the value and what they're
building.
I'm kind of afraid to offer those pricing, different pricing tiers and that's why I only
offered a lifetime deal when the product was just launched.
After I saw the high demand for the lifetime deal, I wanted to try the subscription model
which I think is more sustainable for me because testimonial is a lot of cost comes from the
video stuff and hosting video is a very costly infrastructure and I was scared by making
this kind of pricing model shift and I would say the only way to overcome the fear is just
to give a little more time when you will see new customers pay for the new pricing in a
few days and in the end, if I see the revenue growth isn't changed or even gets better but
by that time, I would know that I made the right decision and also I believe that if
I keep adding new features and the product will become more valuable and there's no reason
that I just devalue my product, I should charge more.
Yeah, I think that's one of the cool things about charging more is it's almost like the
self-fulfilling prophecy.
If you charge $5 a month or something tiny, you're never going to find those customers
who are willing to pay more because they're not even going to consider your thing, they're
looking for heavy duty things.
If you charge $150 a month for your thing, then you're going to find customers who essentially
are like, okay, I might pay this but I really need this feature, I really need this work.
You start finding different customers and attending to their needs and suddenly, it's
like you've sort of made it true that you know who's willing to pay all this money and
what they need and you start building for them instead of building for the people who
are only going to pay $5 a month and those people are way more lucrative because they're
worth 30 people who are paying $5 a month and so it's cool to see you've got these bigger
customers who have huge budgets at big companies and I think it would have been probably hard
for you to find them if you didn't do the scary thing and charge a lot of money.
Something that I can strongly relate to about this life as an indie hacker is that you're
not surrounded by a bunch of co-workers, you don't have this cultural constraint that has
you socialized constantly, it can be a very lonely way to work.
Number one, do you feel that personally?
I mean, you've got a wife and kids so maybe I can't relate because I'm a single dude but
do you feel that and if you do, is there anything that you do to kind of alleviate that?
Do you find ways, do you go to meetups or any of that kind of thing?
Yeah, for sure.
I definitely feel lonely.
That's why I built the first project that I built is called Lonely Dev and I built it
to solve my own loneliness problems.
It is literally called Lonely Dev.
You know what?
The parent company behind testimonial is Lonely Dev, Inc. that I just registered in Delaware
and name it Lonely Dev, Inc.
So I just named it to just memorize my starting point of my solo journey.
So yeah, Building Lonely Dev is just accidentally opened up a new world to me that I don't feel
lonely anymore and I know that many founders like me are doing our own stuff and trying
to make a living and after I get to know some awesome friends from my community, maybe I
just want to name a few here like Jane from Japan, Andre from Norway and Brandon from
the States and we basically share our updates every single day and I see their face and
they see my face but by doing that, I never feel lonely anymore and I would say to many
other makers who are listening to this and you got to fund your community, like any hackers
or any other Discord channels.
It doesn't have to be super big, you can keep it very small and intimate.
If you find that like me and I bet you won't feel lonely anymore.
I love that.
It's sort of advice to end the episode for other indie hackers.
Find your community.
It doesn't have to be big.
Or in Damon's case, build your own community.
I love that.
You build a community of people, you're like-minded people, there are other indie hackers.
It takes care of the sort of loneliness working by yourself problem.
You get great ideas from others and then you have an audience to launch to once you go
on with an even better idea.
So I think that's brilliant advice.
Damon Chen, thanks a ton for coming on the show.
Can you let listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and about testimonial?
You can check out testimonial.to or testimonial.io and I bought several other type of domains
with redirect to testimonial.to and for me, if you want to follow my post rep journey
and you can check out my Twitter at D-A-M-E-N-G-C-H-E-N.
Nice.
All right.
Sweet.
Thank you so much, Damon.