# 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](https://huynhnhanquoc.com/blog/upstream-va-5-nam-cuoc-doi-toi) * * * ### 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)