Four Side Projects Made $0. The Fifth Reached $800,000 a Year

Damon Chen took unpaid leave in 2020 and built five side projects. Four of them made nothing at all. In his own words, from an interview about the years that followed: "During that time, I worked on 5 side projects. The first was a community...I then worked on 3 other projects that all failed and made no money."

The fifth was Testimonial, a tool that collects written and video testimonials from a company's customers and displays them as an embeddable "wall of love". He launched it on Product Hunt at the end of 2020. It made $6,000 in its first two weeks, largely from 30 people buying a $199 lifetime deal. Four months in it was at about $2,000 a month. He later describes it passing $400,000 a year, at which point he made his first hire, and then $800,000 a year.

The product was mostly already built

This is the detail that makes the story useful rather than intimidating. The failed projects were not wasted; they were parts. Video recording, user accounts, embeddable widgets: the components a community app needs are the same components a testimonial tool needs. The fifth project was faster because four had already been built.

Most people treat an abandoned project as a sunk cost and a small humiliation. The more accurate accounting is that you now own a set of working components and know exactly how long each took. Chen's sequence, four zeroes and then a business, is the normal shape of this, not an unlucky one.

Why it grew without advertising

Testimonial's core growth mechanism is embedded in the product. A customer collects testimonials and puts the wall of love on their own website, and the widget carries the product's logo. Every customer's homepage becomes a placement. The people who see it are, by definition, visiting a business that cares about social proof, which is the exact buyer.

The second engine is an affiliate programme paying 30% monthly commission, which Chen says accounts for 10-15% of revenue. That is a substantial share for a mechanism that costs nothing until it produces a sale. Builtplain has covered what it takes to run one of these on Stripe, including the tooling costs and the disclosure wording, and the short version is that this is one of the few growth channels a solo founder can set up in an afternoon.

The third is less repeatable and more interesting: he paid $35,000 for the domain testimonial.io, which he says produced $80,000 of lifetime revenue. He makes the same argument about his later product, PDF.ai, in a separate interview: "The domain name explicitly tells Google what we do...Most of our traffic is organic."

An exact-match domain is a bet that the category name is worth more than a clever brand. For a tool whose entire job is described by one common noun, that bet keeps paying, which is a version of owning the channel rather than renting it.

The first customers came from a forum

Before any of the compounding started, Chen sold to the Indie Hackers community and to people who saw his posts on social media. One early customer took the highest plan after seeing a tweet.

That is the unglamorous first mile that almost every product in this series has in common. There is no channel at the start: there is a person posting in a place where potential buyers already gather, one at a time, which is where first customers actually come from.

The lifetime deal as a launch instrument

Both of Chen's products opened with a lifetime offer. Testimonial sold $199 lifetime access to 30 people in its first fortnight. When he acquired PDF.ai in May 2023, he relaunched it with a $99 lifetime deal that drew more than 300 buyers over a three-month campaign, with the first sale arriving inside 24 hours. He used that cash to hire a full-time engineer.

Note what a lifetime deal is doing here. It is not a pricing strategy; it is a financing strategy. It converts uncertain future subscription revenue into cash today, at a discount, from the small group of people willing to bet on an unfinished product. For a founder with no capital, that trade buys the one thing that is otherwise unavailable: time to keep building.

It has a cost, and the cost arrives later. Those 30 buyers never pay again. If the deal is too large a share of the customer base, the business inherits a permanent support obligation with no revenue attached. Chen's version worked because the deals were early, capped by their own novelty, and followed quickly by real subscriptions.

What the price looks like now

Testimonial today, according to its pricing page, runs a free tier, then $25 a month, then $50, then $95, with an enterprise option. The page states it is "Trusted by 50,000+ businesses" and lists names including Mixpanel, Intuit, McKinsey, Superhuman and Lululemon.

The distance from a $199 lifetime deal to a $95 monthly tier used by large companies is the entire commercial arc of the business, and it happened in the ordinary way: the free tier feeds the paid tiers, the widget on every customer site feeds the free tier, and the price ladder catches whoever needs more. It is also a reminder that the first price is a starting position, not a verdict, which is the argument Builtplain made in defending a first price.

What a reader could take from this

1. Inventory your dead projects. Not for sentiment: for components. The next product is probably 60% built already.
2. Put your name in the deliverable. If your product outputs something a customer publishes, that output is a billboard.
3. Sell a lifetime deal to fund the first months, deliberately, in small numbers, knowing what you are giving up.
4. Turn on an affiliate programme early. It costs nothing until it works and it can carry a tenth of revenue.
5. Consider paying for the obvious name if your category is a word people type into search.
6. Hire when a specific job is on fire, not before. Chen's first hire came at $400,000 a year, and it was for marketing.

The parts to be careful about

The figures here are Chen's own, given in interviews, not audited statements, and no source opened for this article reports what either product earns in 2026. The $35,000 domain purchase was made by someone who already had revenue; it is not a starting move.

And the timeline deserves respect. Four dead projects came first. The story only looks like a straight line from the end.