Tony Dinh: the Vietnamese developer who chose to ship
A Vietnamese developer quit his safe job and built a $1M solo business. Here's his story.
Hey, I’m Marco 👋
I build in public toward €1M, and you get to watch and steal everything I learn. You can read more about me and my project here.
Revenue to date: €220,069 / €1,000,000
Somewhere in Singapore, a software engineer is sitting at his desk earning $105,000 a year. Safe job, respected company, good life by any measurable standard.
And he’s miserable.
Not dramatically miserable. Not “I hate my boss” miserable. More like “is this it?” miserable. The quiet kind that builds slowly, that you try to rationalize away, until one day you can’t anymore.
That’s where Tony Dinh was in 2021. And what he did next is the reason I wanted to write about him.
He quit.
Not with a plan. Not with a product already making money. Just with two years of savings, a laptop, and the vague conviction that building things for himself would feel different than building things for someone else.
It did. Though not in the way he expected.
The Six Months That Taught Him Everything
Before Tony built anything successful, he failed spectacularly at something that looked responsible.
In early 2020, during the pandemic lockdowns, he decided to build a Log Viewer app for macOS. Beautiful design. Rich features. Ninety-five percent test coverage. He spent six months on it, working nights and weekends, doing everything right by any engineering standard.
He never launched it.
Not because something went wrong. Because nothing went wrong except the thing that mattered most: he’d been building in the dark for half a year, with no validation, no users, no feedback, nothing. By the time he looked up from his code, the idea felt stale and the motivation had drained away.
Zero revenue. Six months gone.
Most people would have gone back to the safe path after that. Tony decided to learn the opposite lesson.
Two Weeks vs Six Months
A month after abandoning the Log Viewer, he built DevUtils. An offline toolbox for developers: JSON formatter, hash generator, text encoder, all in one place. Things he used every day and kept opening different browser tabs to find.
He finished it in two weeks.
It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t trying to be. He put a $9 price tag on it, posted it on Hacker News, and watched it hit the front page for a few hours.
His first internet money.
When he talks about this moment in his book, you can feel the weight of it. Not because of the amount (it wasn’t life-changing revenue), but because something clicked. The difference between six months of building and two weeks of building wasn’t quality. It was feedback. DevUtils shipped and immediately told him something. The Log Viewer never had the chance.
That lesson became the spine of everything Tony built after.
Building in Public, the Actual Way
By 2021, Tony made a strategic decision that looks obvious in hindsight but takes real courage to execute: he started sharing everything.
Not a curated version. Everything.
Revenue numbers. New features. Things that weren’t working. The slow months. The milestone tweets that look celebratory but are always followed by “here’s what I had to figure out to get here.”
He grew his Twitter following from nearly zero to 97,000 in two years, but that wasn’t the interesting part. What’s interesting is why it worked. His audience grew because they trusted him. And they trusted him because he’d been honest with them, consistently, before he had anything impressive to show.
This is a thing most people get backwards. They think you share publicly when you’ve earned the right to, when the numbers are big enough, when the story has a clean arc. Tony shared from the beginning, when the numbers were small and the arc was nowhere in sight, which is exactly what made people care.
BlackMagic: A $14K MRR Business You Can’t Control
In May 2021, Tony built something as a joke. A script that put a progress bar around his Twitter profile picture showing how close he was to his next follower milestone.
People lost their minds over it.
So he turned it into a product. BlackMagic became a full SaaS for Twitter creators, packed with analytics, CRM tools, thread scheduling, a Chrome extension. He went from $0 to $300 MRR in three months, then kept going. By mid-2023, it was at $14,000 per month.
Then Twitter changed its API pricing. Overnight, the cost to run BlackMagic went from manageable to $42,000 per month. That’s not a business problem, that’s an extinction event.
He’d turned down a $500,000 acquisition offer months earlier. Now he had two weeks to find a buyer before the whole thing became worthless. He sold for $128,000.
I’ve thought about this a lot. Because it would be easy to frame it as a disaster, and in some ways it was. But Tony processed it differently. He’d built something from nothing, grown it to meaningful revenue, and exited with cash. The ending wasn’t what he planned, but the business worked. And the lesson it taught him about platform dependency shaped everything that came next.
TypingMind: One Day to $22K in a Week
March 1, 2023. OpenAI releases the ChatGPT API.
Tony had been using ChatGPT obsessively, frustrated by the interface every single day. The moment the API dropped, he registered TypingMind.com.
He built the first version in one day.
Not “one day” as a polished way of saying “a very fast sprint.” Literally one day. A better ChatGPT interface: faster, with persistent history, search, proper organization. He launched it, tweeted about it, and went to bed.
By the end of the week, he’d made $22,000.
The price was $9. He raised it to $39 within days. By mid-2023, TypingMind was doing $30,000 per month. By the end of 2024, including enterprise deals and B2B contracts, he was clearing around $83,000 in a single month with margins of 85%.
The product wasn’t revolutionary. The execution was. He saw the window, understood what frustrated users, and moved before the moment closed.
This is the thing that people miss when they look at Tony’s success. They see the revenue numbers and think he got lucky. But he’d been building for three years before TypingMind existed. He’d shipped, failed, iterated, built an audience, learned how to move fast, understood what his users needed. The “overnight success” was built on years of quieter work.
What’s Actually in the Book
In 2025, Tony published My Indie Book, a collection of seventy-something lessons from his journey. He sold 1,700 copies in pre-order at $19.
I’ve read through it. And what strikes me isn’t the tactics, though those are useful. It’s the tone. Tony writes like someone who’s genuinely trying to save you the mistakes he made, not like someone performing humility while telling you how to be more like him.
A few things that stayed with me:
He talks at length about the danger of building something nobody is waiting for. Not as an abstract concept, but as something he lived through. Six months of his life are the cautionary tale.
He’s honest about what distribution actually means. Having 97,000 Twitter followers didn’t make him successful. Deciding to build an audience before he needed one did. Those are different things.
And he’s clear that most of his products failed. Out of ten or more things he built, four generated real revenue. He doesn’t hide the failures in footnotes. They’re part of the story because they were part of the process.
The Pattern Underneath It All
If I had to distill what makes Tony’s approach different from most indie hackers I’ve read about, it comes down to this:
He builds for the smallest useful version, ships it before it embarrasses him too much, and then lets real users tell him what to do next. Every single time. DevUtils, BlackMagic, Xnapper, TypingMind. Each one started somewhere that felt too simple to be worth charging for, and each one grew because he was in contact with reality from day one.
Compare that to the Log Viewer, where he spent six months in his own head, optimizing for an imaginary user who never showed up.
The gap between those two approaches is everything.
There’s also something worth noting about his lifestyle philosophy. Tony works roughly four hours a day on what he finds interesting. He delegates the rest. He’s not trying to build a company that takes over his life. He’s trying to build a life that has a great business inside it. For a long time, that looked like a tradeoff. Now it looks like the point.
Why This Story Matters to Me
Reading about Tony while I’m on my own journey with Anapana, Coco, and everything else on my desk, a few things hit differently than they might have a year ago.
The first is how long the quiet period is. Tony went public with his decision to quit in September 2021. TypingMind, the product that changed everything, came in March 2023. That’s eighteen months of building things, learning, being transparent about the slow growth, not knowing if any of it would compound into something real.
Eighteen months of trusting the process before the process gave him anything dramatic back.
The second is how specific his problems were. Every successful product he built started as a personal frustration. Not a market opportunity he identified. Not a gap in a competitive landscape. Something that annoyed him enough to fix. That specificity is what gave each product its clarity, because he understood the problem better than anyone.
The third is how he handled the bad stuff. The Log Viewer. The API pricing disaster. The two products in 2022 that generated basically zero. He didn’t pretend those things didn’t happen. He wrote about them, talked about them, and kept going. That’s the version of persistence that I think actually matters: not the kind that ignores failure, but the kind that metabolizes it.
Tony didn’t build a billion-dollar company. He built a life that most people in tech would quietly trade theirs for. He crossed $1 million in total earnings in 2025, working twenty hours a week, from wherever he wants to be.
Not a bad outcome for someone who once sat in a Singapore office wondering if this was it.
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If you’re building something too, what’s your Log Viewer? The thing you’ve been working on in the dark, without feedback, hoping it’ll be ready soon?
Maybe it’s time to ship it.
Thanks for reading One Million Goal. If you found this useful, forward it to one person who’s thinking about building something solo.