# SEO to the Top 100 E-Commerce Sites in VietnamPowered by Golang ## ⚙️ Golang & The Dream of Building My Own Platform I’m an **Indie Web Developer**— a lone builder chasing the dream of creating something meaningful without funding, without a team, and without loud marketing. I learn, I build, I deploy, I break things, I fix them again. I keep my servers alive, find ways to monetize what I create, and document every small victory and failure along the way. When I first picked up **Golang**, I wasn’t just trying to build another website. I wanted to build a **platform**. Before that, I used Angular — but it drove me crazy when it came to SEO. Optimizing a JavaScript framework website for search engines was a nightmare, especially when I didn’t fully understand **SSR (Server-Side Rendering)** and **CSR (Client-Side Rendering)** yet. Things started to click when I discovered **Next.js**, **GatsbyJS**, and the **JAMstack** philosophy. Around 2019, I managed to bring one of my static websites to the **#1 spot on Google** — and that was when I realized something powerful: > Static websites are SEO beasts. But I didn’t want to stop there. I wanted something more **dynamic, flexible, and powerful** — something that could combine the speed of static sites with the interactivity of dynamic systems. That’s how I began designing my own architecture — a hybrid I called **“Dynamic Stack Web”** — blending static and dynamic rendering, harnessing both client and server power to achieve SEO efficiency without sacrificing performance. And of course, I wrote it all in **Golang** — a language that, to me, represents clarity, control, and scalability. ## 💻 The Indie Hacker Way — Learn, Build, Survive As an indie hacker, I don’t have a company, a boss, or deadlines — just me and my code. I don’t have funding, so I pay for my **domains**, rent my **VPS**, and maintain my **infrastructure** using whatever small income I make online. By day I delivered food as a **shipper**. By night I coded. No mentors. No community. Just documentation, curiosity, and a stubborn will to figure things out. At first, I thought I’d make money by freelancing — building websites for clients. But then I asked myself: > “Why not build something of my own?” And that’s how I discovered **Affiliate Marketing**. ## 🌍 Samdy.vn — When an Indie Hacker Creates Real Value I used what I knew about **SEO**, **Golang**, **data**, and **user behavior** to build **Samdy.vn** — a **price comparison website** that aggregates data from Vietnam’s biggest e-commerce platforms: **Shopee, Tiki, and Lazada**. No ad budget. No marketing team. I seeded the content manually — sharing links across **Facebook groups**, **forums**, and **communities**. Then one day, traffic came in. Someone clicked. Someone bought something. And I earned **14,000₫ (~$0.50)**. It wasn’t much, but it was everything. It proved that my system *worked*. A month later — 500,000₫. Then 1.7 million. Eventually, **Samdy peaked at 10 million VND/month (~$400)**. Every click, every sale, every line of code — it all felt like magic. ## ⚠️ Growth, Trade-offs, and Lessons Learned As traffic grew, I made a critical mistake: I was running **Samdy** and **20 other websites** on a **single VPS** — 1 Core CPU, 2GB RAM, 20GB SSD. When traffic spiked, the server choked. The site slowed down. Users left. That’s when I realized how little I knew about **infrastructure optimization**, **VPS management**, and **scaling systems**. But instead of quitting, I turned that pain into knowledge. Now, the e-commerce landscape is changing. Crawlers are restricted, SEO algorithms are AI-driven, and data scraping is tougher than ever. Yet, what I’ve learned remains **priceless** — because lessons built on failure stick forever. ## 🏆 From a Lone Developer to Vietnam’s Top 100 E-Commerce Websites No growth hacks. No ads. No investor money. Just pure **code-driven SEO**. Within **6–8 months**, **Samdy.vn** ranked among **Vietnam’s Top 100 e-commerce websites** — built entirely from scratch, powered by **Golang** and a relentless belief in self-reliance. But the real success wasn’t the ranking. It was the understanding that: > Persistence matters more than speed. > > Learning from failure is more valuable than short-term wins. > > Technologies change every day — but problem-solving mindset never goes out of style. Today, I’m still an indie hacker, still building, still learning — but I’m not rushing anymore. I know now that moving slowly, steadily, and purposefully is the only sustainable way to grow. I might never build a million-dollar startup, but I’m a happy indie hacker — because I’m creating real value with my own hands and mind. ## 🧠 Notes - Article originally written in **2024** and **reposted in 2025** - **AI-powered English translation** - Read the original Vietnamese version here: [https://hnq.vn/blog/hanh-trinh-indie-hacker-seo-website-len-top-100-thuong-mai-dien-tu-viet-nam-bang-golang](https://huynhnhanquoc.com/blog/hanh-trinh-indie-hacker-seo-website-len-top-100-thuong-mai-dien-tu-viet-nam-bang-golang) ## 💌 More About Me - **Blog:** [huynhnhanquoc.com](https://huynhnhanquoc.com) - **GitHub:** [github.com/huynhnhanquoc](https://github.com/huynhnhanquoc) - **Open Source:** [github.com/kitmodule](https://github.com/kitmodule) - **Buy me a Coffee:** [buymeacoffee.com/huynhnhanquoc](https://buymeacoffee.com/huynhnhanquoc) - **Keep me Dreaming:** [ko-fi.com/huynnhanquoc](https://ko-fi.com/huynnhanquoc) Thanks for reading Huỳnh Nhân Quốc’s article! 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