Hit $100K ARR after 9 months grinding as a solo founder. AMA!

Respect man, really glad to see what you‘ve built there!

My questions:

1. What is your honest thought on the impact the funding had on your business & revenue? What did help the most with that, the network or the money? If you had to pick one…

2. what is your design secret? The landing page looks so clean. Using any tailwind libraries / templates, or designing from scratch?

3. Did you „scratch your own itch“ with testimonial.to? Did you just think it was a good business opportunity? Or was it just one of the ideas you wanted to build? I saw that you‘ve shipped quite a few projects in a short time.

Very inspiring man. These stories are what got me to find IH.

Thank you!

Congrats Damon! Your story is awesome—so cool to see you take a few swings and then immediately realize the opportunity with Testimonial.to.

A couple of questions:

1. How much did you raise from Calm fund, and how did you decide on that number?
2. What have been your most productive customer acquisition channels?
3. Did you experiment with pricing at all?

Geoff

So proud of you, I love that you kept hustling, what an inspiring story. I am curious to know more about what you mentioned in response to @GeoffRoberts & @JimS about product onboarding and increasing conversions.

You mentioned "product tours, onboarding email campaigns, paywall for premium features" brought great success. Something I am working on at Motionbox is adding upgrade levers and improving our email outreach.

How big of an impact did adding an upgrade lever make?

How big of an impact did adding drip emails make on revenue? What tool are you using for emailing?

GREAT WORK!!!!

Posts like this help me to keep going. Thanks for sharing.

Congratulations Damon! ;) Inspiration for me. I saw your journey from the start.

Damon the shipping machine, congrats man! So happy for you and just glad to know you early on! The sky is the limit, I have a feeling this is still the "early days" ;) Go get em man!

Amazing work 🎉 Well deserved!

Inspiring!

Huge, well done dude !!

Great Stuff. $100K is not easy as Solo Founder. My questions for you.

(1) How much time It take to hit the first $10k?
(2) How did you market it?

( I have not read the previous comments. So If you have already answered any of these, You can skip and I will chat again in comments.)

Hey @damon , Incredible work!
Just a quick feedback: the link for ToS in the Sign Up page is redirecting to the wrong address.

Congrats Damon! Your product is great and it even inspired me for some design 😅
Good luck for the 200k ARR 👉

NIce! You mentioned that Twitter, then SEO, then the affiliate program were your top 3 channels.

1. How big was your Twitter following before starting testimonial.io? Did you do anything particular to get customers directly using Twitter?

2. How long did SEO take for you to notice that it starts to bring user?

3. How did you seek out affiliates?

Thanks!

Very inspiring @damon, congratulations for your incomes 👏 and thank you for sharing with the community !

Congrats Damon! That's a big milestone! Here is my question

How did you get your first 10-100 customers? Any strategy that worked for you?

I have a MVP currently and looking to get initial customers to validate and hopefully find product-market fit.

Thanks and congrats again! :)

I'm a big fan of testimonial.to, lately I've seen this on many websites. At first, I thought it was a brand new start-up with a team of 10 people. I would never have imagined that it was a solo founder in the shadow. Huge congrats !

Here's my question : what would be the step beyond video testimonials ? I'm thinking about augmented reality for example or maybe you believe that it should stay within a human format because it is more relatable ?

congrats!

Congrats Damon! I can see how hard you've worked for Testimonial, especially with you sharing the journey in Twitter.

Let's go 20k MRR!

Hi Damon, been seeing how you grow and what an amazing journey now that you don't have to find a job (the promise with your wife 😆).

Curious about which sites/channel works for your LTDs at the beginning?

Great milestone Damon

• How are you marketing your product
• How are you upping your SEO game
• How does your day look like when you were building products
• 3 people you would recommend everyone to follow
• 3 books that helped you in your journey
• Do you feel stuck sometimes, if yes how do you overcome that

I dont have any questions, just wanted to say @damonchen is a G 👊👊👊👊👊👊

Congratulations Damon! -- great inspiring journey.

Really inspiring stuff Damon.

Here's what I'd like to ask...

1. Did set out to raise funding, or did they find you? Why/How?
2. I'm interested in (but not experienced with) handling video, any pointers or libraries you can recommend?

Really inspiring stuff!
Roughly how long does each project take you to build and launch? I have a bad habit of biting more than I can chew, instead of going for the simple projects.

Also, any recommended dev tools/technologies for solo makers?

That’s an awesome milestone! Congrats!

How did you decide on your apps? Was this a “solve your own problems” situation? And how did you seek product validation?

Congratulations Damon! 🎉

This is very inspirational @damonchen.

Your journey is very motivating for software engineers stuck in high-paying jobs but who aspire to be self-employed.

Amazing!

Love it, I hope my saas will be a success as well lol (:

Super impressive --I'd love to have you on my Podcast. Takes 15-20 min, features thought leaders like yourself..... Interested?

It's great to see what you've done with testimonial.to. I had a look at your site and it's just plain cool. The site looks super-clean. I'm an email copywriter for SaaS by the way and would love to write some sales emails for you, not for pay, but for your testimonial. Testimonials are really important for freelancers as I just found out. You're in?

Love your journey and your tool's utility was immediately clear when I hit the landing page. Great work.

As a solopreneur I'm curious, do you have plans to add members to your team? Any plans to scale or are you planning to stay as small as possible?

Love the tool! Aren't you afraid of competition?

Wow great work. I'm interested to know at what point you'll consider bringing on growth marketing staff? I saw bannerbear has really accelerated growth and brought on staff.

what have been some of the most effective proactive tactics in converting free users to paid customers?

This is a great story and sounds like you went through a number of experiments before this one really took off. How was the journey to secure your first few dozen customers?

hi @damon, this had made me curious about how did you keep yourself motivated all along?

Awesome @damonchen :) How did this idea > your other projects accelerate? I'm sure the other products were as good, did you market this differently or approach users differently?

Although it is hard to hit 100k as a solo founder but you made it. Nice. All the best for the Future.

This kind of post really motivate me a lot, I hope I will be able to do the same as you've been able to accomplish. Keep going

Quite inspiring Damon. Interested to know how did you acquire your first initial users?

Congrats on the milestone!

Very inspiring story! Congratualtions on the progress !

Congrats 🥳

Congratulations Damon! 🎉

Love the push dude! I appreciate that you didn't give up. Can you describe in more detail how you acquired your first initial customers? Congrats again!

This is downright amazing my man! Many congratulations

Hey,
I'm Brian Mena and I'm launching an on-demand car wash app project on Indiegogo.

I would appreciate you review it, and if you like it you will support it and share it with others

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/abi--3/x/28254233#/

Your story is really cool to know
And show we might be courageous to do some actions. When you quit your job you just saw a sign something is happening but were not sure to have really something great in your hand.
Most of the times what is designed us is the fact as startuppers we see things another people will not be able to see.
Congrats to you and to your success

congrats damon, loved the product. hope to need to use it soon

Amazing

Hey! A bit late to the party here...

1. May I ask if you had to give up a lot of stake in the company for the funding?
2. What did your funding help with most? Did you need for the company or yourself after you quit?
3. What was this 9 months like in terms of hours worked, social life etc?

Congrats!!

Do you have a team or you are doing every business activity by yourself ?

I love the way you shared this, very factual and personal as well.

Congrats on the amazing milestone 🙏🙌

Congratulations🎉 So inspiring, thanks for sharing!

I wanna know about LTD marketing.
I'm wondering if I should do LTD for my SaaS app.

So

1. LTD worked for you?
2. How so?
3. Is there a darkside of LTD? ( ex: AppSumo fee is too high )

Congrats!! You're an inspiration to many indie hackers here :)

Your ARR is fantastic, but can't help but wonder what all your server costs and also expenses are for third party API's ?
If I'm correct you use Mux, and their costs can skyrocket quite fast.

Inspiring to see you shipped again and again despite $0.

One question: when did you decide to throw in the towel on those other products?

That's incredible

Great work! Love the hustle and your product looks sweet.

Congrats Damon, happy to see someone succeed!!! Also great questions in this thread. So mine goes like this:

• will you now stay with Testimonials or are you thinking about new projects already?

Hello! my question is pretty easy (maybe I got answer of it too), I live in india and every thing is 6-7X cheaper here than US, do you think I can charge SAAS service in dollars instead of my currency(Rs.)?

Really cool and inspiring story! Super happy for you Damon! Keep up the hustling and building product(s) what people want.

Q: You said you "started learning web dev from a Udemy $9.99 course at the end of 2019" What courses did you take to start, and what provided lot of value? Any you can recommend?

@damon I have been creeping on your twitter for a while now. NICE work 🤜🏼🤛🏼

Question, what are you using for the video capture and recording? Tokbox? Twillio?

We just added a similar streaming feature to Median using Tokbox but I am an EX Vonage guy so I felt obligated.

PS: If you used Jitsi and designed a cost free solution we need to talk ASAP!!!!

Congrats @damonchen. Very inspiring! Bookmarked to re-read when wallowing in the trough of sorrow! I've got a feeling that Neil Cummings over on Udemy may has seen a sharp rise in his React/Redux/Firestone course today too!

Great inspiring journey mate. I wish i could hit same ARR, we launching soon. Suggest best roadmap for coming into market

How did funding happen? Did you reach out to them or vice versa? How much equity did you need to give up?

Thanks Damon for answering my questions earlier! Next one,

What has been the biggest value add to you from joining the calm fund community ?? Customers ? Mentor ship? Introductions ?

Congrats Damien! Really enjoying your story and journey so far.

Was testimonials.to a solution to a problem you faced? How did tut come up with your app ideas?

Congrats Damon! How did you manage to create 5 apps in one year? I'm guessing you have a good skeleton framework, or something like that.

Congrats! What was the story behind getting your very first paying customer? What did they spend, and was it monthly or annual?