DEV Community

Cover image for The Journey of a Developer in Affiliate Marketing
Huỳnh Nhân Quốc
Huỳnh Nhân Quốc

Posted on

The Journey of a Developer in Affiliate Marketing

#affiliatemarketing #webdev #developer #startup

🏝️ 2020 — The End and The Beginning

When my startup collapsed in 2020, I packed my few things and went back to my hometown — a small, quiet city.

Every morning, I’d raise my hand toward the sky and ask silently:

“Where is my life even heading?”
I watched the waves, the fields, the traffic passing by…

and wondered: what do I really have after all these years?

2017 — Dropped out.

2018 — Quit my job.

2019 — Started up.

2020 — Fell apart.

Well, maybe not completely apart.

Because 2020 was when I started writing my own platform — line by line, piece by piece.

While everyone was obsessed with frameworks and ready-made stacks,

I was stubborn enough to build my own from scratch — a foolish, beautiful kind of rebellion.

⚡ Awakening

After a year struggling financially, my website and ads brought me just two paying clients.

Then one random evening, over coffee and casual talks with friends, a thought hit me:

“Why not use the data I’ve been collecting… for affiliate marketing?”
That night, Samdy was born —

a little web app that helps people find the best deals across Lazada, Tiki, and Shopee.

I started building Samdy in July 2021,

right around the time I was flirting with the woman who would become my “Miss Affiliate.”

By November, Samdy finally went live.

That’s when the real journey began.

💸 The 14,000₫ Beginning

Early 2022.

We were both stuck at home during the lockdown — me and my girlfriend.

I started posting my affiliate links from Samdy all over Facebook.

When my first commission came in, she laughed so hard I thought she’d choke on her coffee.

It was 14,000₫ (about half a dollar).

I told her,

“Don’t laugh, babe. Samdy just needs time to grow.”
She kept laughing.

But the next month, it was 300,000₫.

Then 500,000₫.

Then 800,000₫.

Then 1.5 million.

Until finally — 12 million a month.

Then bam.

Google de-indexed half my site, and the income crashed.

💼 The Rejection Arc

By June 2022, my income had dropped to 2.5 million a month — barely enough for instant noodles and a few beers.

I decided to get a job again.

I applied to three companies:

  • one interviewed me,
  • one said “we’ll review your application,”
  • and one threw me into the “maybe later” pile. All three said no.

Maybe it was because I asked for $1000 — which, for a Golang dev in Da Nang, was “too much.”

Or maybe because I’m just… not built for office life.

I took it as a sign.

Back to my own path.

💕 Recruiting My Girlfriend

My girlfriend was studying to become an English teacher when I met her.

She had this calm, trusting energy — the kind that makes you think,

“Yeah, I could probably convince her to join my weird startup someday.”
And I did.

Step #1: I tricked her into being my girlfriend.

Step #2: When she couldn’t find a job, I told her to move back to my city—

“I’ll find you a job,” I said. (I did not.)

Step #3: Then I tricked her again — this time, into doing affiliate marketing with me.
Now, we’re a couple of two broke marketers,

running campaigns by day, debugging Golang by night,

laughing at our own stupidity between every failed ad run.

☕ The 1000-Dollar Campaign

By October 2022, things took a surprising turn.

AccessTrade approved over $1000 in commissions from my Highlands Coffee campaign.

It was the first time I’d ever made four digits online.

The secret?

Two things:

  1. Timing — catching the trend before it went mainstream.
  2. Courage — to invest even when results looked bad. When the campaign first dropped in August, Facebook had a tagging bug. If you tagged someone, all your friends saw it.

I saw that bug… and saw opportunity.

I told my girlfriend:

“Spam time. Two hours. Let’s go.”
We spammed hard. It wasn’t pretty.

That month, we generated 16 million in transactions — but only 3% was approved (500k commission).

Still, I reinvested that 500k into ads.

In September: 15 million transactions → 15% approved → 2.3 million commission.

In October: 100 million transactions → 29% approved → 12+ million earned.

That’s when I realized — I wasn’t just guessing anymore.

I was learning.

🎭 The Psychology of Curiosity

If you’re afraid of marketing, you’ll never truly earn from it.

One of my strategies was simple: make people curious.

I started working at Highlands Coffee every day — laptop open, sipping cappuccino, typing away.

I never said I worked for Highlands…

but people started to assume I did.

When curiosity kicked in, they asked questions —

and I’d simply hand them a voucher with my affiliate link.

No explanations.

No begging.

Just curiosity doing the work.

That’s how I got my “warm Tet season” — paid for by caffeine and human psychology.

🚀 Direction and Vision

What I’ve done so far isn’t stability. It’s momentum.

I’ve learned that affiliate success comes and goes.

To go long-term, you need to build reviews, build trust, build a voice.

So, I invested in my own server to host reviews on my site.

I’m slowly building my ecosystem — piece by piece, line by line.

As I always tell other affiliate devs:

“MMO is an industry built on money, traded with money, paid by money —

but it’s also how we learn, grow, and turn dreams into something real.”
Affiliate life is emotional.

Some days you’re rich, other days you’re broke.

Some nights you sleep with a smile, other nights you can’t sleep at all.

It’s chaos.

But it’s our chaos.

I’m writing this at 3:03 AM.

So yeah — that probably tells you how rich I am. 😅

🌸 From Affiliate Dreams to Coffee Dreams

A year later, affiliate marketing gave birth to something beautiful:

Hoa House — my own little coffee shop.
Built entirely from the money I earned doing affiliate work.

It’s small, quiet, filled with hope — just like how I started.

I call it “The Flower Dream.”

Maybe here, I sell dreams as much as coffee.

🧭 The Fool Who Keeps Building

I’m still chasing my vision of technological independence.

Still coding. Still dreaming.

Still foolish enough to believe small things can grow big.

Affiliate taught me how to turn ideas into income,

but also how to stay humble when the income fades.

Every line of code, every blog, every campaign —

it all leads back to the same thing:

“A thousand miles always begin with one step.”
My first step? 14,000₫.

NOTES

Thanks for reading Huỳnh Nhân Quốc's article! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Top comments (0)