#265 – From Full-Time Job to $30k/Month with Damon Chen of Testimonial

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 $0. 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 ten days. What's your revenue at today? The market recurring revenue is at 30 k MRR, and, the annual recurring revenue is almost approaching a half million dollars. Dang. That's that's crazy. So from working a corporate job, making apps aren't making any money to making almost half $1,000,000 on your own, do you have any employees? Do you have a cofounder? How many people are working on testimony with you splitting that revenue? Well, actually, two weeks ago, I had my first employee who will be handling, the marketing and sales, all those kind of, you know, code outreach, running paid ads campaign, doing some social media, stuff. And I had a guy to complement my skill. Very cool. Let me let me just get you some clarity. So you're at 30 k MRR now, and you started these apps in 2020. So how long just testimonial. How long ago did you build testimonial? Like, how long did it take you to rep ramp that up to 30 k? Tesla I launched Tesla on December 2020, so it's almost, it's a two year anniversary. Initially, I launched Tesla with, the lifetime deal, which, you know, 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, you know, shift my pricing model from lifetime deal to subscription model. People are still asking for lifetime deal, and I'm saying, no. Sorry. Lifetime is gone, and you gotta subscribe. Pay pay me monthly or or annually. So, yeah, starting going, from there. So the lifetime deal campaign only lasted, two weeks. And, after I earned 5 k, 6 k from twenty ish, lifetime customers, I just stopped lifetime enough. And, focused on the subscription and growing the, you know, recurring revenue from there. Nice. I see on your your Twitter, you've got a little progress bar in your bio saying that you're aiming for a million dollars in revenue and a testimonial. …