$100K revenue after 2 years indie hacking

Hello everyone 👋

Super quick intro in case you’ve already forgot which newsletter you’re reading:

I’m Daniel Nguyen on Twitter. 2 years ago, I quit my job to start indie hacking. After building 3 products, I’ve reached the $100k revenue milestone recently.

I also make memes about startups in my spare time.

My indie hacking journey

I've been a product engineer for more than 12 years.

Then one day, I discovered Indie Hacking and find it fascinating.

I quit my cushy job to start building in public.

My first product was KTool.io, a tool to send articles & newsletters to Kindle.

I'm half blind, and so I started KTool as a way to offload reading to the Kindle as much as possible.

After 1 year, I didn't find a good way to grow it to ramen profitability, so I decided to learn more about generative AI & OpenAI API, hopefully to find a good freelance gig.

I did land a couple of interesting gigs, but what more interesting is I found a new product idea: BoltAI - a better way to use OpenAI & other AI services on macOS.

I started it purely to learn more about SwiftUI development & OpenAI app development (the so called "AI wrapper")

It's now my top revenue generating product.

During building BoltAI, one customer asked about the ability to chat with PDF natively on Mac (another "AI wrapper" idea), I find it interesting and so I decided to build it.

PDF Pals recently reached 666 paid customers (about 23% of my total revenue in 2023)

And finally, I build ShotSolve as a lead magnet for BoltAI (engineering as marketing, or side project marketing)

Clueless Solopreneur?

Most of you are probably new indie hackers or developers wanted to build a business on the side.

So I figured maybe I should share more on what I’ve learned the last 2 years.

I strongly believe in the advice “learn from someone who is two steps ahead of you” and I think I might be that person.

So say hello to the Clueless Solopreneur newsletter where I will share all my learnings on building an indie Internet business.

If you’re going to build your first indie business, I’m happy to answer your questions in the next newsletter issues. Reply to this email with your questions!

Memes?

I find memes are fun. I was use memes as a strategy to grow my Twitter account (38k followers now).

I will also share my tips and tricks on crafting a good meme.

This was one of my most performing memes:

Until next time 👋

P.S: I gotta admit, I’m super nervous about publishing my first newsletter issue. Writing is never my strong suit. I’ve been postponing this for too long. Please let me know what you think after reading it 😅