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Huỳnh Nhân Quốc
Huỳnh Nhân Quốc

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SEO to the Top 100 E-Commerce Sites in VietnamPowered by Golang

#webdev #seo #go #ecommerce

⚙️ Golang & The Dream of Building My Own Platform

I’m an Indie Web Developer— a lone builder chasing the dream of creating something meaningful without funding, without a team, and without loud marketing.

I learn, I build, I deploy, I break things, I fix them again. I keep my servers alive, find ways to monetize what I create, and document every small victory and failure along the way.

When I first picked up Golang, I wasn’t just trying to build another website. I wanted to build a platform.

Before that, I used Angular — but it drove me crazy when it came to SEO. Optimizing a JavaScript framework website for search engines was a nightmare, especially when I didn’t fully understand SSR (Server-Side Rendering) and CSR (Client-Side Rendering) yet.

Things started to click when I discovered Next.js, GatsbyJS, and the JAMstack philosophy. Around 2019, I managed to bring one of my static websites to the #1 spot on Google — and that was when I realized something powerful:

Static websites are SEO beasts.
But I didn’t want to stop there. I wanted something more dynamic, flexible, and powerful — something that could combine the speed of static sites with the interactivity of dynamic systems.

That’s how I began designing my own architecture — a hybrid I called “Dynamic Stack Web” — blending static and dynamic rendering, harnessing both client and server power to achieve SEO efficiency without sacrificing performance.

And of course, I wrote it all in Golang — a language that, to me, represents clarity, control, and scalability.

💻 The Indie Hacker Way — Learn, Build, Survive

As an indie hacker, I don’t have a company, a boss, or deadlines — just me and my code.

I don’t have funding, so I pay for my domains, rent my VPS, and maintain my infrastructure using whatever small income I make online.

By day I delivered food as a shipper. By night I coded.

No mentors. No community. Just documentation, curiosity, and a stubborn will to figure things out.

At first, I thought I’d make money by freelancing — building websites for clients.

But then I asked myself:

“Why not build something of my own?”
And that’s how I discovered Affiliate Marketing.

🌍 Samdy.vn — When an Indie Hacker Creates Real Value

I used what I knew about SEO, Golang, data, and user behavior to build Samdy.vn — a price comparison website that aggregates data from Vietnam’s biggest e-commerce platforms: Shopee, Tiki, and Lazada.

No ad budget. No marketing team.

I seeded the content manually — sharing links across Facebook groups, forums, and communities.

Then one day, traffic came in.

Someone clicked. Someone bought something.

And I earned 14,000₫ (~$0.50).

It wasn’t much, but it was everything. It proved that my system worked.

A month later — 500,000₫.

Then 1.7 million.

Eventually, Samdy peaked at 10 million VND/month (~$400).

Every click, every sale, every line of code — it all felt like magic.

⚠️ Growth, Trade-offs, and Lessons Learned

As traffic grew, I made a critical mistake:

I was running Samdy and 20 other websites on a single VPS — 1 Core CPU, 2GB RAM, 20GB SSD.

When traffic spiked, the server choked.

The site slowed down.

Users left.

That’s when I realized how little I knew about infrastructure optimization, VPS management, and scaling systems.

But instead of quitting, I turned that pain into knowledge.

Now, the e-commerce landscape is changing.

Crawlers are restricted, SEO algorithms are AI-driven, and data scraping is tougher than ever.

Yet, what I’ve learned remains priceless — because lessons built on failure stick forever.

🏆 From a Lone Developer to Vietnam’s Top 100 E-Commerce Websites

No growth hacks.

No ads.

No investor money.

Just pure code-driven SEO.

Within 6–8 months, Samdy.vn ranked among Vietnam’s Top 100 e-commerce websites — built entirely from scratch, powered by Golang and a relentless belief in self-reliance.

But the real success wasn’t the ranking.

It was the understanding that:

Persistence matters more than speed.

Learning from failure is more valuable than short-term wins.

Technologies change every day — but problem-solving mindset never goes out of style.
Today, I’m still an indie hacker, still building, still learning — but I’m not rushing anymore.

I know now that moving slowly, steadily, and purposefully is the only sustainable way to grow.

I might never build a million-dollar startup,

but I’m a happy indie hacker —

because I’m creating real value with my own hands and mind.

🧠 Notes

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