Tony Dinh — From a $105K Developer to a $1 Million Indie Hacking Marvel 🚀
Aug 15, 2025
Tony Dinh (@tdinh_me) was born in 1993 in Vietnam and has crafted one of the coolest indie hacking tales of the last ten years.
No family cash, no fancy contacts, and no start-up résumé; just a determined software engineer who in late 2024 was clearing $83K a month and had clocked over $1 million from 20,000+ happy customers by August 2025.
He’s rolled out 10 products and figures the score is 4 out of 10—meaning 4 tied into long-term success. Those digits showed him that sometimes failing is just the way to the next win. He opens his entire playbook on X (formerly Twitter), through newsletters, and in podcasts, spilling the details behind both the glory and the mess. His build-and-sell game fuses deep coding chops with honest marketing, and every last piece—coding, design, ads, emails, and even the tricky customer questions—gets run by him alone.
What you’re about to read is a year-by-year breakdown of every step he took, laced with launches, cool wins, the crashes, money milestones, little-life stories, and the wisdom that kept him moving forward.
🛠 Pre-2019 – Building Skills and a Safety Net
Tony arrived in the world in ’93 inside a small house in Vietnam. In ninth grade, he clicked his way through a semester of Visual Basic 6 and wrote a game. By university, he slipped on the official robe and studied software engineering. Instead of eyeing shop shelves, he hunted for ways to turn his code into shiny side projects that would catch recruiter eyeballs and fill his brain’s toolbox.
Between 2014 and early 2021, Tony signed a steady developer contract at five different startups, then one big corporate ship. The career ladder took him to Singapore for the second gig, and by the moment he signed the last offer, his payslip showed a cool $105K a year.
He stacked skills in every corner of the tech city: he built portals people clicked, bent clouds into databases, sent code to pocket phones, doodled game levels, and learned how to make buttons pretty.
Behind the screen, he stashed his salary like a squirrel. By the end, two years’ worth of rent and food were waiting in a separate account. After each 9-to-6, he ducked into makers’ night and spun new ideas, treating the office code sprints as a gym for muscle memory and discipline. He often said at the hacker cafe:
“Learn to build and learn to sell, you will be unstoppable.”
And added:
“Never jump ship on day one. Use the paycheck to sharpen your skills, to pocket cash, and to play with side projects, all at the lowest risk.”
📉 2019 – Learning Indie Road Bumps
Tony kicked off his indie journey in 2019, taking his first real swing at side projects. The lead-off was Simple API, a no-frills API tool he slapped together in a few coffee-fueled afternoons. The code worked, but no eyes or wallets showed up, so he quietly closed the tabs and filed it under “experience.”
Juggling the day job still, he treated each attempt like a mini science fair project. Indie Hackers podcasts were his backstage pep talk, but a crowd and crafty marketing still felt like next year’s homework. A clear pattern started to sketch itself, though: ship fast, learn hard, and don’t stay at the party when the music dies.
💥 2020 – Lockdowns, Zero Distractions, and the First Real Win
When the world hit pause in 2020, Tony was already remote in Singapore and fighting the urge to refresh his email for the 50th time. He wandered over to IndieHackers.com for the first time and lost a week in podcasts. The energy from Pieter Levels, Kyle Gawley, and Jon Yongfook hit him like cold brew.
With a backpack full of fresh ideas and zero distractions, he dove back in.
His first shot that year, Log Viewer App, was a macOS gadget meant to display log files. The design was sleek, tests covered over 95% of the code, and he spent a solid half-year on it. By the end, though, he’d watched the feature list balloon and waves of exhaustion roll in. The launch never happened. The app never made a dime, but the deep dive into Swift paid off later.
Next up was DevUtils, a small macOS toolbox that let him work offline with JSON, JWT, and other fiddly bits. He hammered it out in a two-week sprint just to fix his own headaches. Friends and co-workers liked it, so he switched it from free to a one-time $9. The first few sales made the code feel like a keeper.
A post on Hacker News blew up for two days straight and sent the first sales sky-high. He also dropped it on Product Hunt. Tony said he literally “jumped like crazy in his bedroom” when the first dollar hit. DevUtils peaked at about $20K a month early on and still cashes around $8K a month on autopilot in 2025. The tool is just about done and needs almost no help.
He played with other marketing tricks—paid ads, SEO, sponsorships—still, nothing beat that early wave. The big lesson: launch fast and skip the over-polishing. The extra time from COVID had pushed him, and with one project out of four landing a hit, his success rate rounded to 37.5%.
📈 2021 – Audience Building and the Birth of Black Magic
At the start of 2021, Tony zeroed in on Twitter. He kicked off November 2020 with 100 followers and hit 700 by May 2021 through real engagement—tweeting code snippets, spinning up threads, posting memes, and replying to everybody. The first tweet to pop hit 100 likes, and he saw that helpful content beat hard sales every time.
He rolled out DriveStat, a tool to make sense of driving data, but no one really picked up the hook.
His big win was Black Magic, a Twitter analytics and CRM tool that sprouted from the followers he’d been gathering. It kicked off as a small script that gave his headshot a progress bar, celebrating the moment he cracked 1,000 followers. After that, he couldn’t stop adding features, slapped on a $4/month subscription, and finally saw money show up on a recurring basis.
By August, Black Magic was humming at $300 MRR. By August 2022, it crawled to $10K a month, topping out later that year at $14K. The product lineup grew to include the Magic Sidebar—a Chrome extension, thread scheduling, and the ability to track quote tweets. Promotion was simple; about 30% of the people following his account turned into paying customers.
August 2021 was the month he flipped the switch and quit his 9-to-5. The paycheck was only $500 monthly, but two years of saved cash felt big enough to risk it. He adopted a nomad’s anthem, bouncing from coffee shops to low-cost hotels to the ocean, all while the follower count grew to 8,000. He kicked off a newsletter, zipping out 12 issues by the middle of 2022 that landed in 6,000 inboxes.
Main takeaway: own and love one channel for distribution, and the rest will follow.
🎯 2022 – More Experiments and Xnapper’s Launch
Not every egg landed in the basket. He shipped EmojiAI and AskCommand, two AI experiments that never saw a dollar in revenue. Each flop reminded him that leaning too hard on a single platform could backfire and pushed him to keep shipping versions as soon as they felt alive enough to share.
Tony’s breakthrough in 2022 was Xnapper, a slick macOS tool that dresses up screenshots for creators. A short tweet demo scored 1,700 likes almost overnight. On Product Hunt, it bagged the #1 spot for the day, the week, and came in #2 for the month (August 25). Launch month alone, it pulled in over $10K, then coasted to a comfy $6K-a-month run throughout 2023.
By August, Black Magic was at a steady $10K MRR. Tony roamed Vietnam, clocked just four hours of work each day, and nudged his newsletter to nearly 10,000 subscribers. He dropped by the Indie Hackers podcast to share the ride, and by the end of the year, his following had surged to 97,000.
⚡ 2023 – Platform Risks, TypingMind Takes Off
2023 kicked off on a rocky note. In February, Twitter hiked API fees after Musk’s buyout, cranking Tony’s tab for Black Magic to $42K a month—triple its $14K net revenue. Selling the product for $128K stung but proved he needed to spread risk across more outlets.
A month later, OpenAI rolled out the ChatGPT API. Annoyed by the slow web app, Tony cobbled together TypingMind during a weekend, layering in snappy search and chat history. He flipped the switch on March 6.
First-day sales: $1K
Week one: $22K
By March 10: another $10K rolled in
The next day, TypingMind snagged the #1 slot on Product Hunt. By October, it was pulling $30K monthly. Tony kicked off a self-serve B2B push, landing $10K accounts and spinning out a self-hosted option. A Hacker News post on his $45K month in September trended hard, swelling his follower count to 130K.
💼 2024 – Enterprise Push, $83K by Month’s End
Growth got the attention of bigger players. In July 2024, Tony wrapped SOC 2 cert in under $10K and two months. The stamp of security approval sped up contracts and let him skip long stacks of vendor security checklists.
By the end of 2024, Tony wrapped up the month at $83K in revenue, keeping 85% of it for himself. DevUtils was still quietly depositing cash, but TypingMind became the star of the show. He clocked in 20 to 30 hours a week, rarely kept the same schedule, and kept his health and family at the front of his mind.
🥂 2025 – A Million in Earnings, a Book, and a Bigger Community
By May, Tony was ready to share his book, My Indie Book, for $19 to early readers. The pages cover 70+ subjects: mindset, ideas, building, marketing, growth, and finishing strong, with a sprinkle of his own story. After pushing it back since 2022 because of impostor feelings, he sold 1,700 copies before the first page was printed.
In July, he teased a month-long hacker house in Da Nang, Vietnam, popping up in November, ready to roll with $25K of his own and $20K from sponsors. He opened ten free spots and promised a demo day every week.
On August 10, 2025, his earnings crossed the million mark. As he posted the stat, he think-backed: seven years of learning, two years of trial and error, and two years of fast scaling. His follower count hit 165K, and he was still bouncing from cafés to hotel rooms but started daydreaming about a quiet house for a family of his own.
🔑 Last Patterns from Tony’s Road
❌ Failing is part of the deal—six out of his ten ideas didn’t make it.
👥 Gather your fans now, and watch your chances grow.
🚢 Get stuff into the world fast; waiting for “perfect” will work against you.
🛡 Don’t put all your eggs in one online basket; spread the risk.
🎨 Take what others teach and remix it until it feels like you—there’s no one right way to play.
📍 Catch Tony at @tdinh_me, grab his newsletter at news.tonydinh.com, or snag his book at myindiebook.com.