Tony Dinh on how he runs 3 profitable projects simultaneously

• Indie Hacker: Tony Dinh (@tonydinh)
• Founder of: Black Magic, DevUtils, Xnapper
• Monthly revenue: $15K - 20K

@tonydinh is a name many indie hackers know well. He's making things happen — multiple projects at a time. I'm always amazed by people building multiple profitable products, so I caught up with Tony to ask him how he does it.

The short answer? He builds for himself… mostly.

A quick MRR Breakdown

Black Magic is at $11K MRR, and it's the only product with a subscription model.

DevUtils and Xnapper are one-time purchases, both average out about $3K - $6K a month each. It fluctuates quite a lot.

My total revenue per month is about $15K - $20K from all 3 products.

On why he's building multiple products

I want to use my own products, so I can make them perfectly fit my workflow. I have a lot of ideas that I would build for myself, but I only build ones that have the potential to also get paying customers.

It’s the sweet spot between “what I want” and “what people want” that allows me to build for myself and sell to other people.

These days, I have a decent size audience on Twitter, so I can use that advantage to validate ideas. I usually tweet about the idea or build a small prototype to see if people are interested. It was definitely harder in the early days when I didn't have an audience.

Another thing that inspired me to work on multiple products is having diverse income streams. If one product fails, by the market or by accident (you never know), I will still have other products that bring in revenue.

On how he structures his work week

I break 90% of my tasks into small chunks of work that can be done within one working session (about 3-4 hours). This includes building, testing, deploying, and writing docs.

Because of that, I can be fully focused on one task, of one product, on one specific day.

And on a typical working day, I only do one task. Then, I spend the rest of the day on marketing, customer support, and interacting with the community (mostly on Twitter).

Other days, I do smaller tasks with a lot of context-switching, which I find quite fun and relaxing.

The trick to building multiple projects

Build products that require low maintenance effort.

SaaS products are very needy and require constant attention — customer support, keeping the system up, etc. I don’t think I could handle many SaaS at once. Right now, I only have the one SaaS (Black Magic).

Downloadable apps are much more relaxed, with no server to take care of. There's only customer support. For me, most customers’ emails are feature requests and require no action. So it’s quite good.

Info products are even better, with almost nothing to maintain. I don’t have any info products at the moment, but I’m looking to add this to my income stream in the future.

I also think using your own products every day is the best advantage you can give yourself as an indie hacker. Without this, it is very difficult to find the motivation to keep improving the product.

On the best and worst parts

The best part is multiple income streams.

The worst part is that the management can become very messy, real quick if you are not careful. Mixed revenue reports, shared accounts, email support, partnerships, multiple payment accounts, etc. — it took me quite a while to find a workflow to consolidate all this and I still have to improve it day by day.

On whether multiple projects are sustainable

Honestly, I have no idea if this is sustainable — it’s my first time, haha. As of now, I find working on multiple products fun and pretty easy.

I have seen successful indie hackers who have one single focus, and I've seen successful indie hackers with multiple ones. Some who have multiple eventually drop the less-successful products to focus on the one that gets the most traction.

I have no idea if that will be me in the future, but let’s see.