Testimonial

01The full story

Damon Chen built Testimonial, a SaaS product for collecting and displaying video testimonials, initially as a pivot from Lonely.dev, a video community. He launched the MVP in about two weeks by reusing its video recording, hosting and streaming infrastructure. A $199 lifetime deal generated roughly $3,000–$4,000 from around 20 sales in the first two weeks, after which he shifted to subscriptions. Chen said the business reached $1,000 MRR before he left Cisco in 2021, and later reported $16,000 MRR and nearly $200,000 ARR. At the time of the interview he was the sole operator. He first attracted customers through Twitter and building in public. Early feedback led to an embed feature that let customers publish collected testimonials on their own sites. He moved away from price-sensitive influencers toward agencies and SMB marketing and sales teams, which he said retained longer. The revenue and churn figures are founder-reported, not independently audited.