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Comment by trungdq88 | Hacker News Reader

Hello HN,

I see another post sharing their success micro startups today on HN so I thought I should share mine.

I started working on this browser extension for Twitter 8 months ago.

It took 3 months to reach $60/mo, 3 more to reach $400/mo, and 2 more to reach $3K/mo – where I am now.

When I start, I had 0 followers on Twitter. When it reaches $400/mo, I quit my job. I now live freely from corporate drama and travel as much as I can while building products I love.

I share my entire journey publicly on Twitter and my newsletter, including revenue, stats, product launch process, and marketing strategies, etc.

I just want to say that opportunities are everywhere, and it's never easier to start a profitable micro startup to sustain yourself and live an independent life.

Cheers!

View on HN

Some browser extensions turned into paid products have morphed into $B dollar companies: (postman.com) https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/mQkDX9-zvcI

Good luck!

Thanks! :)

Your products all look very well done - just curious, do you build them all yourself (including your awesome landing page)?

Congrats on the early growth and best of luck. What a great product - I’ll be looking out for your post on how you built your 13.9k audience!

Yes, I'm a 1-man army :)

I used to work on frontend/backend/mobile/devops, so I have the advantage of doing everything on my own.

Thanks for the kind words! I'll write another piece about my audience building journey soon!

I second this, your landing page is very well done

Thank you! I spent a lot of time on that :)

Your profile page is nice and notiony. I'm kinda new to Notion and curious if that custom desing / layout is defined within notion?

Nope, it's just CSS. https://github.com/trungdq88/tonydinh-com

I like Notion style too!

Being familiar with every aspects of software development definitely gives an edge when creating your own product. Well done on your success, and I'm also looking forward to read your post about building your Twitter audience.

Thank you! I'll definitely write about it soon in my newsletter :)

Impressive output for a single person. How do you organize yourself to get so much done and prioritize the areas you focus on? I work mostly on frontend stuff so when I work on personal projects I tend to focus on that area and neglect other ones. What backend stack are you using?

Overall I think the aesthetic is very polished. Very well done!!!

Isn’t quitting at $400/month a bit premature? That’s $4800 a year, which isn’t even more than one paycheck from a software engineering job.

Depends on where on Earth you live, I guess.

Being able to see a quick video of each feature in the pricing page is a genius idea !

How do you generate those and keep them up to date though ?

Congrats for your success

Thanks!

I recorded every single feature with LICECap and update them manually.

More details here: https://tdinh.notion.site/Every-pricing-page-should-have-GIF...

Good question!! - there is definitely a market for a product for automatically capturing UI screenshots and demos on every UI release, with a permalink usable in documentation that will always show the latest image / video. Could be driven by an existing automated test framework. I know this as a web UI product owner with several years experience in enterprise software doing documentation updates after new features are added.

How do you source the data to provide such analytics? Do you have to be constantly scraping Twitter?

Yes :)

On average, I send 3 requests/minute/user to Twitter API.

So you're not really "scraping" Twitter, just using their API (but carefully not to go over rate-limiter/flagger)?

Yes, I only use the official API.

How did you build the follower base in such a short time?

I spent 3 hours/day everyday for a few months straight. I'll write about it in more details in my next newsletter issue :)

...writing on twitter? wow! It seems hard work is paying off, congrats!

How did u grow the twitter followers at the start?

I'll write about that soon in my newsletter.

You’ve got a sign up!

thank you!!

which payment service do you use?

I use Paddle.com

Is there any reason for using Paddle instead of Stripe or something else?

Good question. I can't seem to find out anything about them on their website. It's just buzzword after buzzword. WTF is "revenue delivery"?

I figure a pricing page would tell me what they do, but they don't even have one of those.

For those who wonder Paddle pricing like I was, it is in their privacy page :)

Paddle Checkout: 5% of SRP plus $0.50 https://paddle.com/legal/

The only reason I use Paddle is because it handles VAT tax for me as the merchant of record. Stripe doesn't.

They have a comparison here: https://paddle.com/compare/stripe/

Frustrating that I can't find a price.

I agree, I tend to avoid products without pricing page out of principle, but in this case I think the tax liability will force me to go with paddle for a product I'm working on.

They take about 5%

congratz on the success of new launch, Trung.

Thanks! Do we know each other? :)

How long have you been programming professionally? YOE?

7 years

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