From $0 → $45K / month in just 24 months

I’ve been deep-diving into one of the most transparent founder journeys on the internet, and I can’t not share it with you.

Tony Dinh went from bored software-engineer-in-lockdown to someone who makes $45k/month - just under 2 years. This is amazing.

Ready? Let’s unpack everything.

Two years ago, Tony Dinh was just another senior software engineer, staring at COVID-era Zoom screens in a rented Singapore apartment.

Bored out of his mind, he started listening to business podcasts and eventually decided that he would start something of his own.

He took the leap on 20 September 2021, quit his job, and flew home to Vietnam with two years of runway in the bank and the modest goal of scraping together $1k MRR within twelve months.

$1k/month is an ideal goal to target. It is achievable and it is not something too big that it feels unreal.

His first “practice” project—a lovingly over-engineered Mac log-viewer—died after six months of perfectionism.

Lesson learned: Perfection is expensive, and momentum is king.

So he tossed every test file, sprint-coded a new app in fourteen days, slapped on a $9 one-time price, and called it DevUtils. This one made him his first $1. It came from HackerNews.

But Hacker News spikes don’t last, and Google ads were a dumpster fire, so Tony wandered onto Twitter and did something clever: he started showing every tiny step of DevUtils in public.

Nobody cared about the app itself, but they loved the code experiments, the memes, and the transparent revenue screenshots.

Six months later, his follower count grew from 100 to 700. Sounds like nothing but it is a 6X jump.

Fast-forward to May 2021. To celebrate 1000 followers, he hacked a tiny script that drew a live progress bar around his profile pic. People wanted their own, so he packaged it into Black Magic, slapped on a $4/month subscription, and voilà—recurring revenue was born.

By the time he quit his day job, he was at roughly $300 MRR from Black Magic, $200 from DevUtils, 8000 followers, and a gut feeling that the timing was perfect.

The next twelve months were wild. A Chrome extension called Magic Sidebar turned Black Magic from a cute engagement toy into a bona-fide painkiller for power users;

MRR jumped to $4k, then $13k by October 2022, while Tony’s workload dropped to a breezy four hours a day.

He filled the rest of the time travelling Vietnam and tweeting about it, which—no surprise—grew the audience even faster.

Because boredom is a feature, not a bug, he knocked out a third product: Xnapper, a beautifully opinionated screenshot tool that now pulls in about $6k a month.

Life was good until February 2023, when Elon’s Twitter cranked the API price to $42k/month. Black Magic was grossing $14k—no way that math worked. Tony sold the whole thing for $128k and walked away.

Three days later, OpenAI dropped the ChatGPT API. Tony registered TypingMind.com before breakfast, shipped a working MVP over the weekend, and took in $22k in the first seven days.

The price has inched from $9 to $39, the feature list keeps ballooning, and today Typing Mind alone averages around $30k a month.

Add DevUtils and Xnapper, and he’s sitting at roughly $45k/month—all with a team of one full-timer and three freelance devs so he can keep surfing every morning.

This is an amazing story of how one person can do wonders, and you don’t actually need a big team to do anything these days.

Thanks for reading, see you next time.

Jewel