Startup and the Friends

#webdev #startup #technological #buildinpublic

2019 — The Day I Met Parker

It was sometime in 2019 when I met Parker, by pure coincidence.

I still remember the first time we met.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

“What are you doing?”

“Pồ rô gờ rem,” I replied (that’s my version of “programming” in broken English).

“What is your programming language?”
I frowned a bit but still answered, “Golang.”

(Thankfully, most developers — no matter where they’re from — know what that is.)

That conversation turned into something deeper. We started talking about ideas, projects, dreams.

At the time, I was sketching the foundation for my own platform — something I couldn’t yet describe, but I knew it was mine. I told him I planned to go back to my hometown to work on it, to give it all my time because it was my dream.

Then he looked at me and said:

“Why don’t we start a startup?”
He mentioned he had a friend — a designer.

That’s how the three of us came together.

And that’s how DIMODO was born.

Building DIMODO

The early days were chaos.

We argued over the name, the roadmap, and what problem our app would actually solve.

If you’ve ever heard of Agile Software Development, then you’ll know startups often revolve around something called the MVP (Minimum Viable Product). Parker understood that well — he was a visionary, practical, and market-aware.

We all had our differences:

Parker wanted to focus on the startup spirit — building and shipping fast.
Lychee, our designer, cared deeply about making things beautiful.
And I just wanted to build the platform — the foundation that everything else could stand on. I once told them:

“A product can fail, but a good platform will create better products.”
In startups, there’s always success and failure.

But I believe every failure is just another step toward a better version of success.

“Din Din” — Our Little Team

Our group name was “Din Din.”

It came from a funny story — since my English was terrible, I’d often just point at the screen instead of talking. “Din Din” actually means “chimpanzee” in Chinese — a playful nod to how we communicated.

Parker was Korean. Lychee was Chinese. Both had studied abroad and spoke perfect English.

Only I struggled.

But somehow, we understood each other — through translation apps, gestures, and laughter.

We were more than just collaborators.

We were friends — dreamers sharing the same rhythm.

2020 — The Year Everything Changed

Then came 2020.

Lychee returned home to Wuhan. I went back to my hometown for Lunar New Year.

I thought 2020 would be the year we’d grow — the year I’d finally learn proper English and we’d launch DIMODO for real.

But then, the pandemic happened.

We all got separated.

Different countries. Different realities.

And without in-person meetings, communication became... impossible.

So I went quiet.

Back in my hometown, I didn’t know what to do next.

Until one day, I decided to just start building again — brick by brick.

I rewrote my code over and over. Refactored endlessly.

Every iteration got a little better.

From my first template render code to structured CSS, from early JavaScript experiments to database prototypes — I built, broke, and rebuilt everything myself.

UI/UX. Database admin. Backend control.

No team. No budget.

Just me and the code.

Every night was a new experiment.

Every small success felt like a quiet victory.

Why I Built It

You might look at what I’ve built and wonder: What is all this even for?

So here’s the story behind it.

I started building small websites — from simple to complex — just to understand how request flows actually work in browsers.

But it wasn’t just technical curiosity.

It was about experimenting with SEO and passive data collection — what I call Passive Collection Data.

It’s not crawling. It’s listening — collecting only what users naturally generate, so I can improve the final experience for them.

Take SAMDY, for example.

It started as a primitive data-collection engine — an experiment.

But it worked.

In just over a month, SAMDY collected more than 60,000 data entries, writing nearly 6GB to disk — roughly 1,500 records per day.

The Stack Behind the Dream

Right now, I’m running everything on a VPS: 1 Core CPU, 1GB RAM, and 20GB storage.

But that single VPS doesn’t just host SAMDY — it runs the entire platform.

No microservices. No Kubernetes.

Just raw, handcrafted simplicity — small enough for me to handle, like the JS components and the lines of code I’ve written for my own ecosystem.

Looking Back

I wrote this post to remember what I built in 2021 — and to say thank you to the friends who started it all with me.

Wherever you are, Parker and Lychee — I hope we meet again soon.

There’s so much more to talk about — not just code, but life.

Next year, I hope to gather enough data to build a Vietnamese search engine, something truly ours.

Maybe it’s a bit foolish.

But you know what?

It feels good to dream.

NOTES

Article originally posted in 2022 and reposted.
AI-powered translation.
Read the original Vietnamese version here: https://hnq.vn/blog/khoi-nghiep-va-nhung-nguoi-ban