Very inspiring story and well written, heartfelt kudos.
For all the negativity comments here, I feel like these commenters read the intro paragraph and started complaining.
Unlike most of the similar indieHacker stories, this one has most details I would want to know. 99.999999% of the stories by “IndieHackers” are mostly self-congratulatory marketing bs leading to selling a consulting/book mostly about how they “followed their passion while everyone else was naysayer and how their corporate boss was a d*k” while handwaving the whole real details.
As I read the article from top-2-bottom, here are some useful tl;dr
* he had plenty time during COVID working from home while polishing his first product
* he started posting interesting daily hobby stuff(most of us do) on twitter, which people found interesting and follower grew
* he gained some initial traction from one HN & then ProductHunt posting of his product
* he lived in Singapore and earned ~$8800(~12k in SGD) and average cost of living is nearly half(or cheaper if he lived as single person) and usually tax is progressive reaching up to 22%, so he saved a good amount of cushion money(he mentioned in the post that he saved up for 2 years of living cost if he moved back to Vietnam or if frugally living then easily 4 years)
* in his post, he mentioned that $1k/month is adequate for comfortable living in his home country(Vietnam), so at $45k/month, even accounting for all taxes and misc. he is probably a very wealthy person if he moved back to Vietnam
* majority of his marketing channel was newsletter and twitter followers(first difficult 100 were probably gained from HN & PH posting)
* his products might not be ground breaking but it was very useful for average joe on twitter(remember we HN folks are very tech sophisticated, to most average joe, finding some pretty numbers about how many people their tweet reached is like feeling lightyears ahead and magic!)
* unlike other high ego IndieHackers, Tony didn’t engage in hiding his risks, he came clean about his twitter product being unsustainable due to sudden subscription model of twitter-post-elon, and sold it off($128k) which gave him good amount of cash to grow his other projects
* COL in vietnam is pretty cheap compared to our Western lands of dream and $45k/month minus other stuff is still a lot of money, which can give a QOL x10 better than what we can afford for x10 that amount here
* from the article he is not selling any coaching/tutoring/here-is-how-I-won-some-lottery-pay-me-money-to-read book or anything.
For all the negativity comments here, I feel like these commenters read the intro paragraph and started complaining.
Unlike most of the similar indieHacker stories, this one has most details I would want to know. 99.999999% of the stories by “IndieHackers” are mostly self-congratulatory marketing bs leading to selling a consulting/book mostly about how they “followed their passion while everyone else was naysayer and how their corporate boss was a d*k” while handwaving the whole real details.
As I read the article from top-2-bottom, here are some useful tl;dr
* he had plenty time during COVID working from home while polishing his first product
* he started posting interesting daily hobby stuff(most of us do) on twitter, which people found interesting and follower grew
* he gained some initial traction from one HN & then ProductHunt posting of his product
* he lived in Singapore and earned ~$8800(~12k in SGD) and average cost of living is nearly half(or cheaper if he lived as single person) and usually tax is progressive reaching up to 22%, so he saved a good amount of cushion money(he mentioned in the post that he saved up for 2 years of living cost if he moved back to Vietnam or if frugally living then easily 4 years)
* in his post, he mentioned that $1k/month is adequate for comfortable living in his home country(Vietnam), so at $45k/month, even accounting for all taxes and misc. he is probably a very wealthy person if he moved back to Vietnam
* majority of his marketing channel was newsletter and twitter followers(first difficult 100 were probably gained from HN & PH posting)
* his products might not be ground breaking but it was very useful for average joe on twitter(remember we HN folks are very tech sophisticated, to most average joe, finding some pretty numbers about how many people their tweet reached is like feeling lightyears ahead and magic!)
* unlike other high ego IndieHackers, Tony didn’t engage in hiding his risks, he came clean about his twitter product being unsustainable due to sudden subscription model of twitter-post-elon, and sold it off($128k) which gave him good amount of cash to grow his other projects
* COL in vietnam is pretty cheap compared to our Western lands of dream and $45k/month minus other stuff is still a lot of money, which can give a QOL x10 better than what we can afford for x10 that amount here
* from the article he is not selling any coaching/tutoring/here-is-how-I-won-some-lottery-pay-me-money-to-read book or anything.