Two Years for a Journey

#programming #webdev #affiliate #passion

I Still Remember the First Lines of Code I Wrote for My Own Platform

When the world already had WordPress, Shopify, Laravel, Flask, Spring, and countless others —

I chose my own path.

I started building a platform from scratch with Golang (a language from Google).

Looking back, it was probably foolish.

Those first days were rough — constant rewrites, confusion, countless restarts.

But I kept going, because somewhere between frustration and curiosity, I found joy.

I had already written code in Angular and many other frameworks,

but eventually, I decided to walk alone — with Vanilla JS.

I’m a stubborn person. I like to handle things my own way,

even if that means it’s harder.

Out there, there are millions of people doing different things —

but I gave two years (and more) to this dream.

I’ve done delivery gigs, freelance work, websites, Facebook ads —

anything to fund my passion.

I’ve written endless lines of CSS, JavaScript, Golang, and HTML.

I designed everything myself, paid for my own servers — all for my little cloud of dreams.

“You don’t have to be great to start.

But you have to start to be great.”
I don’t argue with existing platforms.

I simply chose my own path.

One Day I Thought About Affiliate Marketing

Out of nowhere, it hit me —

why not make money online, like the first days I fell in love with the web?

I remembered my early blogging days on Blogspot — tinkering, learning from tutorials,

copying snippets of CSS and HTML from other people’s themes,

and feeling ecstatic when it finally worked.

That was my first introduction to MMO (Make Money Online).

I read everything I could find — tutorials, forums, guides —

and taught myself bit by bit.

No mentor, no guidance, just persistence.

But eventually, I gave up for a while — because I wasn’t making any money.

I tried everything — URL shorteners, ad views — but never earned a single dollar.

And even now, technically, I still haven’t withdrawn a dime from MMO.

But this time… I have direction.

I have skills.

The First Signs of Hope from MMO

There was a moment when I thought:

Maybe it’s better to just get a job.

Because my server couldn’t handle what I was doing.

Just two weeks ago, I was running 20 websites on a 1-core, 1GB RAM VPS.

Then came the moment I went public with Samdy — and the system hit its limits.

I didn’t want to abandon it halfway.

But I realized maybe I needed to take on some work for a while —

to let Google learn what I was building.

Samdy.vn was my first real MMO project.

It started showing small signs of life — about ~20,000 VND/day,

just enough to pay for the VPS.

But it gave me hope.

I told myself: I’ll work a bit more, earn money,

and use it to fuel this dream —

to pay for my servers, to pay for my future.

Over the past three months, Samdy learned 100,000 products.

In one more year, I want it to reach 1,000,000.

That’s the goal — a small dream turning into something real.

I still remember those days — the ones filled with my very first lines of code.

I can’t even count how many times I deleted and rewrote them.

Sometimes they were clumsy, sometimes stupid — but they were mine, and that made me happy.
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