From four experiments to a video testimonial business: Damon Chen

What $1.99 in revenue left behind

In a record Damon Chen published in late 2020, the combined revenue of the four projects he had built before came to $1.99. The fifth project, Testimonial.to, generated thousands of dollars in payments from the first days after launch. That product carried the video-processing feature he had built for his very first project. By selling a feature left over from an earlier attempt to a different customer and for a different purpose, the potential of the business opened up.

Chen worked at Cisco for about eight years as an infrastructure software engineer. His interest in the job faded, he tried to move to a large tech company but was rejected in interviews, and afterward he turned his attention to building his own products. He started learning web development in late 2019 with a $9.99 course he bought on Udemy. He was adding the skill of building personal internet services to the development career he had built at the company.

In 2020, when COVID-19 sent people to work from home, his house held his wife and a young child. Chen applied for six months of unpaid leave to secure time with his family, and during that stretch he built several personal products. It was a choice that bought him time to test a business while keeping his job.

The first project, IndieLog, started from the loneliness he felt while working from home. It was a community where independent developers shared their process and daily life in short videos of two minutes or less. Chen posted his own work almost every day and encouraged participation by adding topic-based discussions and a product-introduction feature. Users came, but since he did not charge the community, activity did not turn directly into revenue.

While running IndieLog, he also built Backlogs to organize the feature requests and bug reports coming in. He then tested Howdy, which finds nearby makers on a map, and Influenswer, where influencers answer their followers' questions and get paid. Revenue from each product was small or nonexistent, but he experienced firsthand the tools a product needs to run and the problems customers actually have.

Turning the community's video feature into a customer testimonial tool

The idea for Testimonial.to took shape while he was looking at other products' sales pages. Chen thought a testimonial made of only a short blurb and a photo did not feel authentic. On one page he even found a default photo that had shipped with a design template being used in the testimonial area. Having already handled video recording and playback in IndieLog, he hit on a way to easily collect testimonials in which customers speak for themselves.

In Testimonial.to, a business creates a testimonial-collection page and sends the link to its customers. When a customer leaves a video or a text, the business manages it and publishes it on its own website. He bundled the work that runs from requesting a testimonial to publishing it into a single product.

The buyer was also clearer than for the previous products. A business selling a product or a service has a reason to show an existing customer's testimonial to the next buyer. Even without waiting for an entire community to grow, one business could confirm the value once it received and used testimonials from a handful of customers.

According to Chen's account, about 80% of the initial code came from IndieLog, and the minimum viable product was built in four days. By attaching a testimonial-collection screen and a sales path to the video feature he had already implemented, he tested paying demand quickly. Behind the short development period was the time he had put into the first product.

Before launch, he gave friends free lifetime deals and asked for their opinions. People who liked the product introduced it on Twitter, and other customers came in. The relationships he had built in IndieLog and the independent developer community became the channel for first telling people about the new product.

From lifetime deals to subscriptions

On December 22, 2020, Chen launched Testimonial.to on Product Hunt and sold a $199 lifetime deal. The amount that came in over the ten days after launch was $5,124. Unlike the revenue from the four earlier products, real buying interest appeared, and early customers also sent feature suggestions and bug reports.

On January 1, 2021, however, he stopped selling new lifetime deals. Storing and streaming video keeps costing money, and the more visitors wanted a lifetime deal, the harder it became to sell subscriptions. He also needed recurring revenue to replace his job income. When he changed new sales to focus on subscriptions while keeping his promise to existing buyers, revenue fell sharply.

For about three weeks after the switch, there was no new revenue. The sales page still carried copy that emphasized the lifetime deal, and the reason to subscribe was not getting through to visitors. After a friend helped him rewrite the copy, subscription payments began to come in again.

The figures he published on February 19, 2021, were 29 subscription customers and about $500 in monthly recurring revenue. It was smaller than the one-time sales total at launch, but it was the result of having customers who paid every month. Chen explained that selling subscriptions is far harder than selling a lifetime deal.

After that, he tightened up the product guide, the post-signup emails, and the boundary of the paid features. He reworked the user flow so that customers pay after they have actually received a testimonial and experienced how useful the product is. In an October 2021 retrospective, he said he had doubled the price twice over the previous six months. Rather than holding to the price he first set, he adjusted it to match the value customers receive.

The criteria for leaving his job

After the unpaid leave ended, Chen went back to the company and ran Testimonial.to at night and on weekends. In March 2021, once monthly recurring revenue passed $1,000, he left Cisco. It was not yet an amount that could replace his salary, but he decided to put more time into a product whose paying customers were growing.

With his family, he set a deadline for the challenge. He promised that if he did not reach $100,000 in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2021, he would go back to a job at a tech company. In the meantime, his wife's income and their savings carried the household. The switch to full time came with a goal, a deadline, and the conditions to cover living costs.

In May 2021, he received investment from Earnest Capital, later Calm Fund. Chen said the investment was under $100,000, and he valued the advice and relationships he would gain from the investor and the founder community. It was a sequence of confirming paying demand first and adding outside resources after.

In September of the same year, Testimonial.to reached $100,000 in annual recurring revenue. That was the subscription revenue at the time converted to an annual figure. By hitting the goal inside the one-year challenge he had agreed on with his family, he gained a basis to continue full time.

Turning the assets of earlier attempts into the next sale

The 'Wall of Love,' a page collecting the testimonials customers had made public, also became a new channel for traffic. Visitors saw the Testimonial logo on that page and discovered the service, and removing the logo became a reason to upgrade to paid. In a November 2023 interview, Chen disclosed that Testimonial.to's annual recurring revenue had passed $800,000.

In this case, the four earlier projects did not simply end as failures. The video-processing experience cut development time, and the relationships built in the community became the channel for meeting his first customers. In the stretch when payments stopped, the reason to fix the sales page and the pricing came into view. Chen reused what he had already built to fit new customers' problems and focused his time on the product that produced real payments.