Two Years for a Journey
I Still Remember the First Lines of Code I Wrote for My Own Platform
When the world already had WordPress, Shopify, Laravel, Flask, Spring, and countless others —
I chose my own path.
I started building a platform from scratch with Golang (a language from Google).
Looking back, it was probably foolish.
Those first days were rough — constant rewrites, confusion, countless restarts.
But I kept going, because somewhere between frustration and curiosity, I found joy.
I had already written code in Angular and many other frameworks,
but eventually, I decided to walk alone — with Vanilla JS.
I’m a stubborn person. I like to handle things my own way,
even if that means it’s harder.
Out there, there are millions of people doing different things —
but I gave two years (and more) to this dream.
I’ve done delivery gigs, freelance work, websites, Facebook ads —
anything to fund my passion.
I’ve written endless lines of CSS, JavaScript, Golang, and HTML.
I designed everything myself, paid for my own servers — all for my little cloud of dreams.
“You don’t have to be great to start.
But you have to start to be great.”
I don’t argue with existing platforms.
I simply chose my own path.
One Day I Thought About Affiliate Marketing
Out of nowhere, it hit me —
why not make money online, like the first days I fell in love with the web?
I remembered my early blogging days on Blogspot — tinkering, learning from tutorials,
copying snippets of CSS and HTML from other people’s themes,
and feeling ecstatic when it finally worked.
That was my first introduction to MMO (Make Money Online).
I read everything I could find — tutorials, forums, guides —
and taught myself bit by bit.
No mentor, no guidance, just persistence.
But eventually, I gave up for a while — because I wasn’t making any money.
I tried everything — URL shorteners, ad views — but never earned a single dollar.
And even now, technically, I still haven’t withdrawn a dime from MMO.
But this time… I have direction.
I have skills.
The First Signs of Hope from MMO
There was a moment when I thought:
Maybe it’s better to just get a job.
Because my server couldn’t handle what I was doing.
Just two weeks ago, I was running 20 websites on a 1-core, 1GB RAM VPS.
Then came the moment I went public with Samdy — and the system hit its limits.
I didn’t want to abandon it halfway.
But I realized maybe I needed to take on some work for a while —
to let Google learn what I was building.
Samdy.vn was my first real MMO project.
It started showing small signs of life — about ~20,000 VND/day,
just enough to pay for the VPS.
But it gave me hope.
I told myself: I’ll work a bit more, earn money,
and use it to fuel this dream —
to pay for my servers, to pay for my future.
Over the past three months, Samdy learned 100,000 products.
In one more year, I want it to reach 1,000,000.
That’s the goal — a small dream turning into something real.
I still remember those days — the ones filled with my very first lines of code.
I can’t even count how many times I deleted and rewrote them.
Sometimes they were clumsy, sometimes stupid — but they were mine, and that made me happy.
NOTES
- Article originally posted in 2022 and reposted
- AI-powered translation
Read the original Vietnamese version here: https://hnq.vn/blog/2-nam-qua-cho-mot-hanh-trinh
More about me:
- Blog: huynhnhanquoc.com
- GitHub: github.com/huynhnhanquoc
- Open Source: github.com/kitmodule
- Buy me a Coffee: buymeacoffee.com/huynhnhanquoc
Keep me Dreaming: ko-fi.com/huynhnhanquoc
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