Testimonial

Damon Chen spent eight years as a software engineer at Cisco in Silicon Valley, climbing the career ladder like his peers. But in 2018, when his first child was born, everything shifted. He wanted a better job with higher pay to support his growing family. He spent months preparing for interviews at the big tech companies—Amazon, Google, Facebook—grinding through LeetCode problems and coding puzzles. The process was painful and boring. When the rejections came, they devastated his confidence.

Desperate for change but unable to crack the interview gauntlet, Damon considered his options bleak: stay at Cisco for the rest of his life, or find another way to make money. He tried moonlighting—driving for Uber, selling on eBay, working as a photographer—but trading time for money would never match a software engineer's income. Then he discovered the indie hacker community. The realization hit him like lightning: people could build internet projects and make a living without trading their time, without working for "the man," without being rejected in interviews. He quit Cisco in 2020 with a deal with his wife: make $100k in a year, or go back to a traditional job.

Before Testimonial, Damon built LonelyDev, a video-focused community where makers could post updates about their projects. It was struggling—communities require constant effort to stay active. But it taught him something crucial: building in public. He had to stay engaged with his community members on Twitter, tweeting updates, sharing progress. It was this public-building muscle that would become his superpower.

When Testimonial launched, Damon didn't validate the idea with customer interviews. He'd seen that feedback loop fail before—people are too nice, too encouraging. Instead, he built an MVP quickly by reusing code from previous projects, then launched it on Twitter and Product Hunt with a lifetime deal offer. The strategy was simple: test if people would actually pay, not if they *said* they would.

The lifetime deal resonated immediately. In just two weeks, Damon sold 20 lifetime deals for $5-6k total. What shocked him was the demand: customers kept asking for lifetime deals even after he announced they were ending. A key insight came from Ryan Hoover's comment on Product Hunt asking why he wasn't offering a subscription model. Damon had dismissed subscriptions as unworkable, but he reconsidered. The demand was real.

His first customers came from three channels: his small Twitter following (a few hundred highly engaged makers from LonelyDev), Product Hunt, and unexpectedly, private martech groups on Facebook where someone shared the deal. He gave free access to LonelyDev community members, who became his unpaid evangelists, tweeting about their experience with Testimonial. The social proof flywheel was spinning.

Damon's growth strategy was ruthlessly simple: maximize his solo effort through social media and product-led growth. He built a flywheel: ship features → tweet about them → get new customers → collect their feedback → ship more features. In the early days, 80-90% of his customers came from Twitter. He stayed deeply engaged with his community, trading retweets and likes, genuinely supporting other makers. The product itself did marketing work: the Testimonial logo appeared in free-plan widgets, so users who wanted white-label solutions upgraded to paid plans.

Cold email outreach, which many indie hackers swear by, didn't work for him. The effort-to-return ratio was terrible, and as a solo founder, he couldn't sustain the volume needed to make it work. He abandoned it quickly, choosing to double down on what worked.

What he didn't expect: SEO. As Testimonial grew and accumulated organic content, Google started ranking it highly for "testimonial" searches. Today, SEO is his top acquisition channel—surpassing Twitter—even though he never deliberately optimized for it.

Two weeks before this interview, Damon hired his first employee to handle marketing and sales. He'd hit nearly $360k ARR ($30k MRR) in less than two years—well beyond the $100k annual promise to his wife. His pricing tiers ($50, $150, $300/month) had terrified him at first, but he overcame the fear by remembering that higher prices attract customers with real budgets and real problems. Each feature addition justified the price; the product kept becoming more valuable.

Damon also discovered an unexpected benefit of testimonials: having one on a high-profile company's website gets you noticed by researchers, sometimes leading to $500-1000/hour consulting calls. The network effects were building.

Throughout this journey, LonelyDev—his first "failed" project—never really failed. It solved his real problem: loneliness. It built the community and habits that launched Testimonial. He formalized it as LonelyDev Inc., the parent company of Testimonial. His advice to other indie hackers struggling with isolation: find or build your own community. Don't feel lonely, and don't build alone.