Damon Chen spent eight years describing himself as an average engineer at Cisco, then built two products past a million dollars a year with a toddler in the next room

The indie hacker canon is full of people who were obviously going to make it. Ex-Stripe, ex-Google, a Twitter following before the first product. Damon Chen is the opposite case and the more useful one. Eight years at Cisco. A job he calls mediocre with no apparent embarrassment. A one-year-old at home. Then the pandemic arrived, everyone was working from the kitchen table anyway, and he asked for six months of unpaid leave to find out whether he could build something of his own.

He built five things. That number is the story. Not one careful bet but five swings in half a year, with a baby, on no income. Indielog, a place for indie makers to vlog, came first. Three more followed and made nothing. The fifth was a way for businesses to collect video testimonials from customers, which is not a glamorous idea, and it worked from the day it launched.

Six thousand dollars and an ultimatum

Testimonial went up on Product Hunt selling lifetime access for a hundred and ninety-nine dollars. Thirty people bought it in two weeks, six thousand dollars in the bank, and he had a business. Not a big one. Two thousand dollars a month by the time the leave ran out.

Here is the part most founder stories cut. He wanted to quit. His wife agreed, with a condition that is a masterpiece of household negotiation: get to a hundred thousand dollars a year within twelve months or go back to a tech job. That is a real number and a real clock, set by the person with the most to lose if it went wrong. He made it in nine.

Then he did it again

Testimonial kept climbing: four hundred thousand a year and the first hire, then past eight hundred. Meanwhile customers kept describing the same unrelated problem, which was that they had documents they needed to interrogate and no good way to do it. He built PDF.ai in the early months of the AI wave, before the category filled up, and it moved faster than the first product. Two hundred thousand dollars in its first three months. Past one and a half million a year by May 2026.

The method has not changed since the kitchen table. He says he does not understand marketing or sales, so he never built a sales team. The product sells itself, search engines find it, and affiliates take a cut for sending people. Two businesses past a million a year on that alone, built by someone who started the decade calling himself average. Average engineers, it turns out, can ship five things in six months. Most people just never get the six months.

I'm an engineer who doesn't know much about marketing or sales. Instead, I focused on product-led growth.

Damon, explaining a business that has since passed a million a year without a sales team