Quitting my job to pursue full-time indie hacking

A recap of August 2021

Hello everyone, it’s me again, Tony 👋

A quick update.

💼 I quit my job

After a long time of consideration, I have decided to quit my job to pursue full-time indie hacking. 🥳

Tony Dinh 🎯 @tdinh_me

Gonna pin this 📌 After 7 years working as a dev, I quit my job to pursue my dream: build software I love and make a living out of it. I have: – Ideas – Backup plans – No wife, no kid – Saving for 2+ years – And most of all: Faith in myself Let's see if I can make it! 👊

During 7 years of working as a Software Engineer, I have learned a lot about both technical skills and some sense of how the software industry works. I’m now ready to go on by myself.

I have prepared for this journey for a long time. I have some revenue from my side projects, lots of ideas, and lots of savings 💰.

What will I be working on?

For the moment, I will be focusing on my projects: DevUtils.app and BlackMagic.so. I’m thinking of picking up the 3rd project now that I have 40 more hours per week!

I have a lot of ideas, mostly focusing on developers and small businesses. I also find the remote working space interesting and want to do something about it. I’m still not sure what yet.

I will share my journey here in my newsletter and on my Twitter. Probably consider jumping to Youtube and TikTok too! So stay tuned! 😊

🎁 New update for DevUtils!

In August, I dropped another update for DevUtils with a lot of new features. This is the 8th update of the year!

DevUtils.app @devutils_app

DevUtils 1.11 is released! 🎁🎉 New stuff: 📖 Markdown Preview ⚡ Instant Clipboard Replace 🆔 Generate Nano ID, Object ID ⏰ Show formatted time in JWT Debugger 🌈 Format JavaScript/Python objects to JSON ... and many more! 📜 Full changelog: devutils.app/changelog/

The landing page has also been updated with more information and fancy demo videos. Give it a look and let me know what you think! 😄 https://devutils.app

🤫 PS: I’m testing out new (increased) prices for DevUtils, if you want to grab a license before the price changes, now it’s the time!

🖤 BlackMagic.so updates

Because of the new update for DevUtils, I haven’t been able to work on Black Magic much this month. However, I still have a lot to share.

New templates:

Showing your local time! A few of you have asked for this, and it seems easy enough. So here it is! 😁

Tony Dinh 🎯 @tdinh_me

Just fixed a bunch of bugs and added a new template to Black Magic! ⏰ Show your local time!

BlackMagic’s stats in August 2021:

I discovered this chart from Paddle recently and want to share it with you all.

Black Magic MRR

To be honest, I’m surprised that Black Magic passed $100 MRR. This is a great motivation for me! Also, 2 customers churned 😞, I’m hoping to get some feedback from them. Let’s see.

Other stats:

• Website visits: 9,760

• Total users: 4,911

• Active users: 2,592

• Revenue: $318 MRR

What will be next for Black Magic?

There are a lot of directions I have in mind to grow Black Magic:

• Continue adding more unique fun tools for Twitter that people can’t find anywhere else.

• Pivot into something more serious: CRM, analytics tool, thread composing, tweet scheduling, etc…

• Or both!

I’ll put more thought into this. For the moment, I’ll be focusing on refining the existing features and bug squashing 🏹🐞.

That’s all I have…

…for now!

Thank you for reading and following my journey!

Until next time! 👊