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Researched profile. Starter Story's AI research system compiled this page from 68 public sources — the founder didn't write it. Automated research can misread or misattribute a source, so treat figures as best-effort. How this works →
How TypingMind Grew
AI-powered chat tool enhancing your ChatGPT experience
How did TypingMind grow?
Summary of the sourced claims below
TypingMind grew primarily through organic social media channels, especially Twitter, where the founder built a large following by frequently engaging, sharing updates, and posting revenue numbers. The founder also leveraged his newsletter audience and Product Hunt launches to gain initial sales and visibility. Additional growth came from word of mouth, mentions on Reddit, and building an online community, which helped sustain ongoing user interest.
Channels
21 channels · grouped by how TypingMind grows
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Organic social media
· 16 mentions · 16 sources“On Monday, 5 days after OpenAI announced their API, I finished the first version and shared it on Twitter. It got a lot of attention, so I decided to add payment. Then I got my first sale. That feeling of the first sale never gets old! ... Every time I added a new feature, I tweeted about it and ...”
highShow 15 more quotes
“A year ago, almost exactly a year ago, last August, you tweeted – you penned a tweet. You said, after seven years working as a developer, I quit my job to pursue my dream, to build software I love and make a living out of it. So that was like a year ago that you quit your job and you pretty much ...”
medium“I also share about that on my newsletter and in the short form of tweet. And YouTube is also something I wanted to share as well.”
high“On Monday, 6th March, 5 days after OpenAI announced their API, I finished the first version and shared it on Twitter ... The app got a lot of attention, so I decided to add payment ... Every time I add a new feature, I tweet about it, and more sales come in! ... 99% of the sales are from my Twitt...”
high“At first, I posted the app on my Twitter and quickly got lots of good feedback. ... How did you spread the word for TypingMind in order to get more users? Mostly via Twitter. I have a decent audience size on Twitter, so that helped a lot.”
high“I've been following Tony's journey building and designing products in public on Twitter for years now. And that's what I wanted to talk to him about today. Indie hacking in public. ... And I think that's incredibly impressive.”
medium“I'm more, I know more about the marketing side of like launching on product hunt and like I have my Twitter and I understand that part and he understands a lot of like branding. He created already a few brands, so he knows how to create the brand and how to do like this kind of Instagram, social ...”
high“I released the app. I shared on my Twitter and people liked it a lot. And one thing that they really liked about it is that you don’t have to like you have to use your own API key. And whatever you use, you pay OpenAI to use your key. You don’t have to pay me for everything for every chat that yo...”
high“built an audience of 97K followers on Twitter”
high“Very little time to do anything else like marketing, SEO, trying paid ads, cold outreach, building community, etc. The good thing is that I enjoyed building/coding. New customers still come in every day, so the overall experience wasn’t so bad for me personally.”
medium“Tony Dinh has achieved remarkable success, not just with his profitable products, but also with his impressive Twitter following. He's got 130,000 followers, which puts him in the top tier of Twitter influencers among developers... Looking at his Twitter strategy, he emphasizes a few key points. ...”
medium“Tony Dinh has not only created profitable products but also built an impressive Twitter following of 130,000, placing him among the top tier of Twitter influencers in the developer community. This large following has been a crucial factor in Tony’s success, providing a direct line to potential us...”
medium“People may discover the app via organic mentions on social media, word of mouth, or via my Twitter profile since I have quite a lot of followers.”
high“The Moat: Build in Public. Levels streams his coding sessions and tweets his revenue numbers. This turns his 300k+ followers into a real-time focus group and distribution engine.”
medium“Tony has written that the vast majority of initial sales came from his audience on Twitter and from his newsletter. That was not an accidental advantage. He had spent years documenting his work and building trust before the AI wave arrived.”
high“They say I make $45K/month just by pure luck and just by posting my MRR on Twitter 🙃”
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Product Hunt
· 7 mentions · 7 sources“when I reached $10,000 of revenue, I prepare a launch on product hands. And I basically use all my resources that I have, all the years of the last two years. I only started this two years ago. So I use all of my resources to focus on that product and launch. And at the launch, I made like, anoth...”
highShow 6 more quotes
“And then eventually you like launched it product on it Got like number one product of the day Like it was just crushing it like everybody loved it and you started charging money for it”
medium“On 11 March, I launched the product on Product Hunt. With a lot of help from my audience on Twitter and in this newsletter, TypingMind got to #1 product of the day. ... Revenue went from $10K → $22K in a day.”
high“ended up as the #1 Product of the Day on Product Hunt”
medium“when I reached $10,000 of revenue, I prepared a launch on Product Hunt, and I basically used all my resources that I had all the years, all the last two years. ... At the launch, I made like another $14,000, if I remember correctly, from the launch itself.”
high“Then, I posted the app on Hacker News. I think I got lucky, the post received some positive comments, and I got to the top of Hacker News for a few hours.”
high“That was my entire marketing strategy. That and Product Hunt. ... We launched on March 11. With a lot of help from my audience on Twitter and my newsletter, Typing Mind got to #1 product of the day. Revenue went from $10K to $22K in a day.”
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Online Community
· 2 mentions · 2 sources“Build an audience. This is not for everyone, but if you can, give it a try. Build an audience or a community of your own on Twitter/Reddit/internet forums. Anything you do later will be much more easier. The benefit is compounded. I built an audience of 97K followers on Twitter over the past 2 ye...”
highShow 1 more quote
“The Moat: Network effects; the community data is the product.”
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Brand Videos
· 2 mentions · 2 sources“it went viral a few times and then next, the next thing was the real time banner, the real time banner is the thing that is a very special one that, uh, it helped me going from 1000 followers to 5,000 followers in, I think, 48 hours or three days or something. It was, uh, there was a viral loop i...”
highShow 1 more quote
“most of my videos are just like me talking about a topic I was thinking about recently or updating some progress I've made on my product, and I just take one take.... and then just throw it up there, and that's what I've done. And it's worked for me, at least in that, you know, like I'm able to c...”
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Building in public
· 2 mentions · 2 sources“I built something fun with JavaScript, a little water simulation. So it was something I did just for fun, but because it was so strange and so creative ... it got people's attention. So later on, when I built in public, I feel like no matter what I do, it has to be special.”
highShow 1 more quote
“I've been following Tony's journey building and designing products in public on Twitter for years now. And that's what I wanted to talk to him about today. Indie hacking in public.”
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Word of mouth
· 2 mentions · 2 sources“I keep getting Recommendation from other people that totally not affiliated Kind of a word-of-mouth marketing, so that's why it rolled by itself as of now every day I got 50 people 100 people signing up for black magic”
highShow 1 more quote
“People may discover the app via organic mentions on social media, word of mouth, or via my Twitter profile since I have quite a lot of followers.”
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Email List Growth
· 2 mentions · 2 sources“With a lot of help from my audience on Twitter and my newsletter, Typing Mind got to #1 product of the day.”
highShow 1 more quote
“With platform risk becoming more real these days, I really hope to get my audience to this newsletter as much as possible. ... This newsletter is where I can control my own destiny.”
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Leveraging existing platforms
· 1 mention“I posted the app on Product Hunt and got another traffic spike, and that was it.”
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Reddit
· 1 mention“TypingMind is famous for being the most comprehensive LLM frontend for AI models. It gets mentioned positively on Reddit almost every day!”
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Newsletter
· 1 mention“Tony has written that the vast majority of initial sales came from his audience on Twitter and from his newsletter. That was not an accidental advantage. He had spent years documenting his work and building trust before the AI wave arrived.”
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Weekly newsletter
· 1 mention“created this newsletter with 6,000+ subscribers”
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Content marketing
· 1 mention“I tried Google paid ads, wrote SEO articles, looked for sponsorships on newsletter/YouTube channels, and tons of other things. There were some small results, but in the end, I didn’t see a way that could give me traffic for the long-term without continuous effort. (Except for SEO, but SEO is extr...”
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Open-source community
· 1 mention“The Moat: A "founder-first" philosophy and open-source transparency.”
medium -
Freemium
· 1 mention“So yeah, my, just to share a little bit of my plan, not, I won't go into too much detail, but kind of the plan is use Notion widgets in a way. So Notion widgets are things that people use and they like embed them in their Notion workspace. ... if it can have that viral effect of, you know, maybe ...”
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Viral growth
· 1 mention“if I could hit on one that's like actually like really valuable and people start like sharing it, maybe that would work. That's my hope. That's what I'm kind of thinking about.”
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SEO
· 1 mention“I tried Google paid ads, wrote SEO articles, looked for sponsorships on newsletter/YouTube channels, and tons of other things. There were some small results, but in the end, I didn’t see a way that could give me traffic for the long-term without continuous effort. (Except for SEO, but SEO is extr...”
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Twitter
· 1 mention“People may discover the app via organic mentions on social media, word of mouth, or via my Twitter profile since I have quite a lot of followers.”
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Direct sales
· 1 mention“B2B sales means I have to get on a lot of video calls, long sales cycle (sometimes a few months!), but get rewarded with a big contract deal value and potentially super low churn.”
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Partnerships
· 1 mention“This is another path that I’ve explored to bring TypingMind to more companies by partnering with resellers.”
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Pay Per Click Advertising
· 1 mention“I tried Google paid ads, wrote SEO articles, looked for sponsorships on newsletter/YouTube channels, and tons of other things. There were some small results, but in the end, I didn’t see a way that could give me traffic for the long-term without continuous effort.”
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Side project marketing
· 1 mention“In the early days, I did that on purpose. But then one of my ideas to get attention, it catch up and then it turned out to be a real like money making feature of Blackmagic.”
high
How 3,289 businesses grow
Of businesses with mapped growth channels, the share using each —
TypingMind’s highlighted.
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Social media64% ◀
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Referral/Word-of-mouth64% ◀
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Search/SEO58% ◀
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Email47% ◀
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Community37% ◀
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Content/Inbound35% ◀
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Partnerships32% ◀
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Events24%
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Paid ads23% ◀
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Outbound/Sales19% ◀
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Press/PR17%
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Marketplaces/App stores12% ◀
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Podcasting4%
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Influencer partnerships3%
