Upstream and the Five Years of My Life

Until then, I’ll keep writing — line by line, dream by dream, building my story through every keystroke and every heartbeat of code.

Life Journal

On January 8, 2020, I returned to my hometown with nothing but two empty hands after my startup collapsed in Da Nang.

The dream was gone. The company dissolved. All that remained was exhaustion — and silence.

I felt like a flower that bloomed too soon and withered before spring.
I asked myself:

“What will I live for tomorrow? Where does my life go from here?”

Being broke was painful enough.
But having no tools, no platform to earn again — that was far worse.

In those days, I wandered to the sea, the mountains, the lakes — anywhere that would listen.
The sound of flowing rivers and crashing waves became the only therapy I could afford. Nature didn’t judge. It simply reminded me that even broken things could flow again.

Shipper Days and the Dark Shadows of the Pandemic

When COVID-19 struck, I had nothing but a fragile dream — to write a platform using Golang.

Back then, I was just a newbie developer, still fumbling through syntax and structure.

An older brother once asked,

“What will you do with it once it’s done?”

I smiled and said,

“I don’t know. But I’ll keep building until I can’t anymore.”

Maybe it was because of the pandemic — the chaos, the isolation — or maybe it was because I had nothing left to lose. Either way, I started Giao Vặt Tam Kỳ, a small local delivery page.

It wasn’t a startup. It was survival.

I still remember sitting alone after a long day of deliveries, eating a small watermelon under a dim yellow light. The sweetness of that fruit tasted like defiance — proof that I was still alive, still trying.

Nietzsche once wrote:

“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”

That quote became my anchor. My why.

The First Website Project

After six months of building my Golang foundation, a younger friend asked me:

“Hey Quốc, do you know anyone who builds websites?”

I laughed and said,

“You’re looking at him.”

That was the start of my first client project — built on top of my own early platform, which, at the time, only had a rough DNS system and a Dynamic Template engine.

That one small project gave me a lifeline. I could finally quit being a shipper and return fully to what I loved most — coding.

In the early days, there were no customers, no team, no capital. I had to figure out how to survive online.

One day, I asked my mentor:

“If I could build multiple websites at once, what should I do with that ability?”

He said:

“Try making money online.”

Simple advice. But it sparked something new.

Samdy: A Big Experiment

With my growing skills, I decided to build a price comparison platform — and called it Samdy.

The goal was to compare products across e-commerce sites. After months of grinding, I managed to get real traction — thousands of visits, affiliate clicks, data syncs. For a brief moment, Samdy was one of the most visited comparison sites in my niche.

But the dream didn’t last long.

The server bills kept rising, and I couldn’t afford to maintain it. Watching Samdy fall was painful — but it was also a priceless lesson in burn rate and reality.

The Journey Didn’t End There

Samdy’s failure didn’t stop me.

I pivoted into affiliate marketing, ads experiments, and micro-campaigns — testing, learning, and slowly earning from scratch.

It worked for a while. I made money. But deep down, I knew affiliate work was temporary — not ownership, not independence.

I needed to build something truly mine.

The Dream of Technological Independence

From 2020 to 2025 — five years filled with failure, learning, and quiet persistence — one dream has never faded:

The dream of technological independence.

Today, I proudly call myself a Golang Indie Hacker — an independent developer building my own path, one product at a time.

Right now, I’m working on my first major product:
a link shortener and QR code generator that tracks analytics.

It’s not just a tool — it’s a stepping stone.
A small piece of a much bigger dream: to build a SaaS ecosystem that serves real users, built entirely with my hands.

I’m still that small fish, swimming upstream, chasing sunlight through rough waters.
But I believe in the current.

Someday, my dream of technological independence will come true.
Until then, I’ll keep writing my story — line by line, code by code, dream by dream.

And when the day comes,

the cactus will bloom under the right sun.
Happiness, too, is waiting — somewhere along the way.

NOTES

Article originally posted in 2024 and reposted
AI-powered translation
Read the original Vietnamese version here: hqn.vn/blog/upstream-va-5-nam-cuoc-doi-toi