# Startup and the Friends ### 2019 — The Day I Met Parker It was sometime in 2019 when I met **Parker**, by pure coincidence. I still remember the first time we met. > “Hi.” > “Hi.” > “What are you doing?” > “Pồ rô gờ rem,” I replied (that’s my version of “programming” in broken English). > “What is your programming language?” I frowned a bit but still answered, “**Golang**.” (Thankfully, most developers — no matter where they’re from — know what that is.) That conversation turned into something deeper. We started talking about *ideas*, *projects*, *dreams*. At the time, I was sketching the foundation for my own platform — something I couldn’t yet describe, but I knew it was *mine*. I told him I planned to go back to my hometown to work on it, to give it all my time because it was my dream. Then he looked at me and said: > “Why don’t we start a startup?” He mentioned he had a friend — a designer. That’s how **the three of us came together.** And that’s how **DIMODO** was born. * * * ### Building DIMODO The early days were chaos. We argued over the name, the roadmap, and what problem our app would actually solve. If you’ve ever heard of **Agile Software Development**, then you’ll know startups often revolve around something called the **MVP (Minimum Viable Product)**. Parker understood that well — he was a visionary, practical, and market-aware. We all had our differences: - **Parker** wanted to focus on the startup spirit — building and shipping fast. - **Lychee**, our designer, cared deeply about making things *beautiful*. - And **I** just wanted to build *the platform* — the foundation that everything else could stand on. I once told them: > “A product can fail, but a good platform will create better products.” In startups, there’s always success and failure. But I believe every failure is just another step toward *a better version of success*. * * * ### “Din Din” — Our Little Team Our group name was **“Din Din.”** It came from a funny story — since my English was terrible, I’d often just point at the screen instead of talking. “Din Din” actually means “chimpanzee” in Chinese — a playful nod to how we communicated. Parker was Korean. Lychee was Chinese. Both had studied abroad and spoke perfect English. Only I struggled. But somehow, we understood each other — through translation apps, gestures, and laughter. We were more than just collaborators. We were *friends* — dreamers sharing the same rhythm. * * * ### 2020 — The Year Everything Changed Then came 2020. Lychee returned home to Wuhan. I went back to my hometown for Lunar New Year. I thought 2020 would be *the* year we’d grow — the year I’d finally learn proper English and we’d launch DIMODO for real. But then, **the pandemic happened**. We all got separated. Different countries. Different realities. And without in-person meetings, communication became... impossible. So I went quiet. Back in my hometown, I didn’t know what to do next. Until one day, I decided to just **start building again** — brick by brick. I rewrote my code over and over. Refactored endlessly. Every iteration got a little better. From my first **template render** code to **structured CSS**, from early **JavaScript experiments** to database prototypes — I built, broke, and rebuilt everything myself. UI/UX. Database admin. Backend control. No team. No budget. Just me and the code. Every night was a new experiment. Every small success felt like a quiet victory. * * * ### Why I Built It You might look at what I’ve built and wonder: *What is all this even for?* So here’s the story behind it. I started building small websites — from simple to complex — just to understand how **request flows** actually work in browsers. But it wasn’t just technical curiosity. It was about **experimenting with SEO** and **passive data collection** — what I call *Passive Collection Data*. It’s not *crawling*. It’s *listening* — collecting only what users naturally generate, so I can improve the final experience for them. Take **SAMDY**, for example. It started as a primitive data-collection engine — an experiment. But it worked. In just over a month, **SAMDY** collected more than **60,000 data entries**, writing nearly **6GB** to disk — roughly **1,500 records per day**. * * * ### The Stack Behind the Dream Right now, I’m running everything on a **VPS: 1 Core CPU, 1GB RAM, and 20GB storage**. But that single VPS doesn’t just host SAMDY — it runs *the entire platform*. No microservices. No Kubernetes. Just raw, handcrafted simplicity — small enough for me to handle, like the **JS components** and the **lines of code** I’ve written for my own ecosystem. * * * ### Looking Back I wrote this post to remember **what I built in 2021** — and to say **thank you** to the friends who started it all with me. Wherever you are, Parker and Lychee — I hope we meet again soon. There’s so much more to talk about — not just code, but life. Next year, I hope to gather enough data to **build a Vietnamese search engine**, something truly *ours*. Maybe it’s a bit foolish. But you know what? It feels good to dream. * * * ### NOTES - Article originally posted in 2022 and reposted. - AI-powered translation. - Read the original Vietnamese version here: [https://hnq.vn/blog/khoi-nghiep-va-nhung-nguoi-ban](https://huynhnhanquoc.com/blog/khoi-nghiep-va-nhung-nguoi-ban) * * * ### 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/huynhnhanquoc](https://ko-fi.com/huynhnhanquoc) Thanks for reading Huỳnh Nhân Quốc’s article! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.