Testimonial.to's Marketing Strategy: $0 to $400K ARR in 2 Years
$33K
Revenue/mo
Business Type
SaaS
Monetization
Subscription
Founded
2021
The Problem Nobody Wanted to Solve
Picture this: You've built a fantastic product. Your customers love it. So you ask them for a testimonial to prove it to other people.
What happens? Radio silence.
Or worse—they ghost you after you send them a complicated form to fill out.
This was the exact problem Damon Chen kept running into.
Damon wasn't new to trying. He'd spent years building side projects during the COVID pandemic. He'd discovered the Indie Hackers community while working as a senior software engineer at Cisco. He had the skills. He had the time. But nothing was working.
His projects weren't gaining traction. No customers. No money. No wins.
During this process, he kept bumping into the same wall again and again.
Every business needed social proof. Every founder he talked to struggled to collect it. And video testimonials? Forget about it. People hated being asked. The process was messy, awkward, and painful for everyone involved.
That's when something clicked.
Damon decided to build a tool to solve this exact problem.
Not because he was trying to get rich. Not because some VC told him to. But because he kept hitting this wall, and he was tired of it.
Building the MVP
Here's what makes this story so good: Damon didn't waste time reinventing the wheel.
He'd built a video product before called Indielog. Most of the code was already there. So he did what any smart engineer would do—he reused about 80% of it.
He added a landing page. He integrated Stripe payments. And he shipped it.
No perfectionism. No endless tweaking. Just fast iteration.
He launched Testimonial.to on Product Hunt. This was his first test of market demand. Did people actually want this? Or was he chasing another dead project?
The answer came quickly.
The First Win
Testimonial.to's first customers didn't come from fancy marketing campaigns or paid ads.
They came from people Damon already knew.
He'd met other indie hackers on Indiehackers.com and through his previous project Indielog. These people understood his problem because they had the same one. So when he launched, they signed up.
But here's where it gets interesting.
Damon did something that most founders only talk about but never actually do—he built in public.
He tweeted his progress. He shared his milestones. He was honest about what was working and what wasn't.
One day, he tweeted that he was getting close to hitting $1,000 monthly recurring revenue (MRR).
That tweet was seen by Andrew Gazdecki, the founder of Acquire.com. Andrew didn't just retweet it. He signed up for the highest-tier plan.
That single customer move,this small signal of credibility, became powerful social proof. If a successful founder like Andrew believed in Testimonial.to, maybe it was worth checking out.
This is the power of building in public. You're not just marketing. You're inviting others into your journey. And when others see real growth happening, they want to be part of it.
Twitter brought Damon 80-90% of his early customers.
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