How do successful founders find their idea? Interview 1 w/ Damon Chen

Hey everyone!

In my last post, I had mentioned that I would ask 3 questions to successful indiehackers to learn from them.

1. How did they come across the idea?
2. How did they validate the idea?
3. How did they acquire the initial customers?

I just finished my call with Damon Chen and he has interesting answers for these questions. Man this guy is so kind and down to earth. For people who are not familiar with Damon's work, he created https://testimonial.to . It is a product that makes it very easy to collect authentic and engaging video testimonials from your supporters.

Let’s not waste time and go right to Damon's answers

Questions

How did Damon come across the idea for testimonial.to ?
tl;dr - Scratching his own itch
Damon told me that he likes to check out new products and landing pages to see if they are doing anything interesting. He started noticing a pattern in the landing pages - they all had testimonials but most of them were one line text and did not come across as authentic. In one website, he even saw the stock image that comes with Tailwind CSS. Given his experience working with video creation workflow in his previous products (IndieLog and inflenswer), he thought why not a video testimonial platform?

How did he validate and acquire initial customers?
tl;dr - email/DM friends
Damon did not do any validation focussed research. It was easier for him to build the product and test it out rather than validating it. (he built it in 4 days). Having built the product, he gave away lifetime access copies of his product to some of his friends for free and asked for their feedback. Since his friends liked his product, they gave a shoutout on Twitter and word of mouth started spreading, resulting in customers. He thinks it is vital to ask for feedback and iterate the product in the initial stages.

Other interesting tidbits

Damon uses ReactJS to build his products. One hard to believe thing he told me was that he started taking courses on ReactJS in December 2019. Yeah, you read that right. He has created a successful product in under a year. This is great to know for people who are just getting started and are intimidated by the whole process. You can do it 🔥🔥🔥 One tip that Damon suggests is to find courses that teach you web development through building a product. This is the course that he took.

Kindly visit https://testimonial.to to support Damon :)

BTW, I plan on interviewing more and more interesting founders in the coming weeks. I have Kenneth Cassel of vim.so for next week.

Follow me on Twitter for updates @sughanthans1. Comment down if you have any thoughts :)