Damon Chen: Testimonial.to from $1.99 in Failures to $100K+ MRR
Cisco engineer who quit after a family promise, reused failed-project code, and bootstrapped a video testimonial SaaS via Product Hunt, build-in-public, affiliates…
- MRR
- $109K (self-reported Nov 2025)
- ARR
- $1M+ (self-reported milestones; later third-party estimates higher)
- Users
- Thousands of businesses (exact current count not publicly specified in primary sources)
- Founded
- 2020
- Team
- Small (solo until ~$400K ARR, then first hire; later small team)"
- Stack
- React, Firebase, Tailwind (early public details)
How did Testimonial.to start after four failures?
Damon Chen spent eight years as a software engineer at Cisco. When COVID hit in 2020 he was working from home with his wife and one-year-old. He took six months of unpaid leave to try building products. The first four side projects (Indielog, Howdy, Influeswer, and Backlogs.co) generated a combined $1.99.
Testimonial.to was the fifth. It solved a problem he knew firsthand: collecting authentic social proof for his own failed products. Video and text testimonials felt more credible than generic one-liners, yet most tools made the process clunky. He reused roughly 80% of the code from earlier work, built an MVP in about a week (or less, depending on the account), added a landing page and Stripe, and launched on Product Hunt in December 2020.
Early sales came from lifetime deals at $199. Public posts and Indie Hackers updates show roughly $3,000 in the first 10 days and around $6,000 in the first two weeks from about 30 deals. That was the first real revenue after months of near-zero. He quickly shifted away from one-time licenses toward subscriptions so the business could compound.
The promise to his wife and the decision to quit
After returning to Cisco, Chen kept building nights and weekends. Four months later the product reached roughly $2K MRR. In the Bay Area that was not life-changing money, but it was enough signal. He and his wife agreed on clear conditions: he would quit only if he could hit $100K ARR within a year; otherwise he would return to a regular job. She would cover the mortgage and bills in the meantime. Household income would drop by about half.
He quit in March 2021 after crossing roughly $1K MRR. Public posts describe the decision as both the best and the scariest of his adult life. Days involved short daytime breaks for bug fixes and support (sometimes from his phone at the playground) and longer night sessions after the kids were in bed. Support and feature work happened in the margins of family life.
By September 2021—nine months after the launch and well inside the one-year window—he publicly reported hitting $100K ARR. The promise had been met. Later self-reported milestones included higher six-figure and seven-figure ARR figures for Testimonial.to itself.
How distribution actually worked
Early customers came from the Indie Hackers community, Twitter/X, and the Product Hunt launch. Chen documented the journey publicly: milestones, pricing experiments, feature decisions, and the reality of juggling a young family. He has described build-in-public as a flywheel—shipping features that excite existing users while exposing the product to new ones.
Two structural growth loops mattered more than pure audience size (he has noted starting with under 1,000 Twitter followers). First, the “Wall of Love”: customers embed testimonials on their sites with a Testimonial.to logo. Visitors who like what they see sign up. The logo also created an upgrade incentive to remove it. Second, an affiliate program offering 30% recurring commission (and a first-year discount for the referred customer). Chen has said this channel contributed roughly 10–15% of revenue. He mentioned the program in onboarding emails so new users could opt in.
SEO grew in importance over time. He also spent $35,000 buying the typo domain testimonial.io; later updates indicated it had generated meaningful lifetime revenue (he has cited figures in the tens of thousands). Pricing was raised multiple times as value was added. He accepted funding from Calm Fund (then Earnest Capital) around the low-thousands MRR stage—under $100K total, with limited equity dilution—primarily for the network and as an emergency fund rather than for paid acquisition. Most growth remained organic and product-led.
In November 2025 he posted that Testimonial.to was at $109K MRR, describing it as “just a traditional app. No AI, no hype. Not a hockey-stick curve, but $109K MRR still feels good.” Earlier public figures (for example, around $70–83K MRR in 2023–2024) show steady compounding rather than viral spikes. Third-party sites have published higher aggregate portfolio estimates; those are not treated here as primary self-reported numbers for the single product.
He stayed largely solo until around $400K ARR, at which point he made a first hire focused on marketing. The company has remained lean. In late 2026 he publicly noted replacing Intercom on Testimonial with his own product, chat.sh.
Portfolio and what the work looks like now
Chen has treated the early failures as training. He has acquired and grown additional products (including PDF.ai, bought for a reported $20K when it had little or no revenue) using similar logic: narrow problem, fast ship, self-serve customers, low operational overhead. The portfolio spreads risk without requiring a large team or heavy sales organization.
Day-to-day work still centers on product. Video handling, embeds, onboarding flows that hit the “aha” moment (for example, allowing free users to collect beyond a credit limit but gating access), and clear pricing have been recurring themes in his public updates. Support and infrastructure remain manageable because the core use case is relatively focused.
Lessons and caveats
Ship the version that solves a problem you have personally experienced. Reusing code from failed projects shortened the path to a sellable MVP. Lifetime deals provided early cash and validation; the faster transition to recurring revenue made the business durable.
Set explicit constraints with the people who share the downside. The one-year, $100K ARR promise created a real deadline and forced prioritization. Family logistics (naps, bedtime, playground support tickets) shaped the actual work schedule more than any productivity system.
Build distribution into the product. Embeds with attribution and a recurring affiliate program compound without constant founder time. Build-in-public amplified both, but the conversion happened because the product solved a visible problem for people already looking for social proof.
Numbers are self-reported and unaudited. Growth has been steady rather than explosive. Exact current user counts, full team size, and precise tech stack beyond the early React + Firebase period are not exhaustively documented in primary public sources. Later portfolio revenue figures from secondary sites should be treated as estimates unless directly attributed to Chen.
The four projects that made $1.99 were not wasted. They taught what did not sell and supplied reusable code. The fifth product worked because the problem was real for the builder and for a larger set of customers who needed the same shortcut for credibility.
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