#24 - FullTime Indie Hacker
38K Followers on Twitter | Focusing on ChatGPT and AI
I am lucky to have Daniel on our interview series as he is one of the well-known indiehackers and bootstrappers on Twitter.
I am so thankful that he shared all of his journey in full transparency including his approach to building an audience on twitter, his story behind indie hacking and so on.
Enjoy reading.
Notes from our side:
Sorry for missing the last week, it was hectic. Our interview series will be ending next week and I will be sharing weekly news about bootstrappers for a while to keep you updated.
Besides the newsletter, I have been focusing on building a product for RevOps people to minimize data entry and get the most out of it from the CRM.
Currently, I have been doing interviews with sales and revops people. If you are one of them please ping me on LinkedIn.
Background?
My name is Daniel Nguyen. I'm an entrepreneur based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. So, my background is in development. I was a software engineer, product engineer to be exact. So, yeah, I love building things on the internet. So the first dollar I earned on the internet was probably 15 years ago. I was selling software at that time.
Since then, I worked for a few other startups, and then I came back to freelancing and consulting. And so, two years ago, I started being active on Twitter, and I discovered the Indie Hacking Community.
And then I saw, a couple of my friends also doing that. And so I'm interested in the idea.
So I started being active on Twitter before I built the product.
And I just enjoy talking to other indie hackers and other makers on Twitter.
It's very fun for me. During that time I built a side project called ktool.io.
It is a tool to send newsletters and web articles to Kindle. I still working full time off a consulting job at that time, and I started selling lifetime deals back then like two or three months after the development.
I got around $3k in lifetime revenue. So, I quit my job and I started working on ktool full time.
At that time you have some savings also, right?
I always have savings. And so I created and I started working intensely on ktool, almost full time. After one year, I grew it to $1K MRR.
But I haven't found a way to grow it beyond that to make the ramen profitable point.
And so I decided to pause and start learning about generative AI, ChatGPT, and so on.
Hopefully, I could find a good freelance gig on that.
And so I did find two good gigs on generative AI.
One is not actually related to OpenAI API, but the other one is on Generative AI. And so during that time, I wanted to learn more about AI.
So I built boltai.com to show my own pain point. And so, to my surprise, it did pretty well back then.
I also tweeted about it and it went semi viral.
Which one have you been talking about? Boltai.com became viral, right?
Yeah, it's still a super early version, the MVP. It's not the full version right now, but people were curious and wanted to try it.
So I tweeted and it went semi-viral and I got an initial batch of early adopters to support the project and so on. And I made 100$ or so. Not a lot, but I was quite happy with that. And so I keep developing that two months. And then it went viral again.
This time it got crazy viral. And I think I can stop freelancing and focus full-time on this one. And since then, it’s been my most profitable product till now. So it is doing pretty well.
At last, during building boltAI, one of my customers asked for the ability to chat with a PDF.
If you heard about chatPDF before, it went viral multiple times. So, this is not a original idea at all, but one of my customer asked about and so I decided to build it.
But first, I decided to build a landing page for it. And I did a pre-sale on Twitter to see if people actually want to pay for it.
If they not, then I probably not going to build, but it did extremely well. Like. On the day I tweet about the landing page with only the video demo, the product is not even finished yet. It's not even working yet. And people were like okay. This is exactly what I want. And so on.
And I got like 2.000$ in pre-sale for that. And so I thought I got to build it too.
And so now, right now, my primary focus is on boltAI and PDFPALS.
Thanks for sharing all of the things in transparency, Daniel. I've seen boltAI on Twitter as well. And right now it has many competitors in the same space.
Both of them are generating revenue and you are not working as a freelance or consultant at the moment, right?
Daniel:
No, no, I don't. I stopped at the moment I started getting consistent revenue.
And for most of the AI products, I'm just wondering about the retention rate of the user because most of the people want to try the product and some of them churn after a month or after two months.
Is this the same for your solution as well or is something different?
Daniel:
So, both of my applications follow the bring your key model.
So they pay the license for the software and then they start using it. It's a one-time payment.
However, after one year, if they want to get a new update, new feature, and support, they will need to renew that license.
And if the user decides not to do that, they can continue to use the latest version they have access to. So I think it's fair for both the founder, the developer, and the user.
And you are the only guy building this solution, right? Is it challenging to control your feelings? How do you manage it?
Daniel:
I had the initial savings when I started. It's quite three years of savings. So it's enough for us to not worry much.
And when you quit, people are supportive on Twitter when whoever quits and starts indie hacking.
And for a developer; it's pretty hard to market their product.
So I feel like it's a constant battle uphill every day.
At one point, our family got into a financial crisis and we lost our savings. At that point, I feel like settling down.
It was a difficult time for me as I was thinking about looking for a job. At that time, I talked openly with my wife a lot, even if she had no idea about what I was building. However, she was listening and helped me to gain clarity to go beyond that.
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For most of the people like you; it's important to build an audience on Twitter, as you mentioned, because a Twitter audience helps you to maybe increase your products awareness and also sell more.
For the ones who have no idea about how to build an audience, what do you recommend?
Daniel:
So, people should care that you don't need an audience to build and grow a product. Many founders did not actively build an audience. But they put their focus on other channels; such as Paid Ads or SEO and it worked pretty well. So I think that building an audience is not necessarily the best investment in terms of time, right?
But if someone is new and doesn't know much about SEO or Paid Ads or other channels and still wants to build an audience first then it still works. But I think it will cost you a lot of time.
So what do you recommend for other people in terms of indie hackers, bootstrappers?
Do you have any advice for those people who would like to start their own journey? Anything that you would like to share?
Daniel:
So, I think the hardest thing in indie hacking is there are so many things we need to learn. But most of the advice from founders is to pick one or two or maybe three channels, a marketing channel, and stick with it.
And if it experiments fast and if it doesn't work well for you or you are not a good fit for that channel or the work, then find one that works for you because there are many ways to build a profitable product. Each folder has their method, their strategy, their tactic, and their favorite channel.
Sometimes this channel works with one folder, but it doesn't necessarily work with other folders.
So if there's one advice, I would give it to quickly find a way to test those channels, to test those approaches, and to see how fast you can learn and how fast you can improve. Get visitors, get customers from that channel.
There are many channels that you cannot test, for example, SEO. You can’t test SEO, you can only write a really good article and wait for that like 3-6 months.
But others, I would call it a fast channel. You can test it very fast like paid ads or social media tweets.
So you can join Indie Hacker Groups or other maker communities like Indie Hacking. Many Indie Hacking communities will support you even if you have no audience or don't want to be still in it. If they see they are super supportive, join them.
Any books, any persons, any accounts, any videos you recommend for people like you?
Daniel:
I don't read a lot, but there are a few books that changed my mindset into an entrepreneur. So this is one bookholder. Start small, stay small by Rob Walling.
It is like 10 years ago or so. Rob shows the developer how to change the mindset from a software engineer to an entrepreneur, and how to look at the process of building the product and the marketing part.
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