Damon Chen

Damon Chen is a San Jose-based indie founder and former Cisco software engineer. He started side hustling during the pandemic in 2020, when he was a new parent, and spent around $2K to launch Testimonial.to, a tool that lets businesses collect video and text testimonials and embed them on their sites. An early lifetime deal brought in its first revenue, and he grew it while still employed, eventually quitting his corporate job after eight years.

In 2023 he bought a small chat-with-PDF app for about $20K, rebranded it as PDF.ai and used a lifetime deal to fund an engineer. Within months it was making three times its purchase price per month, and it grew into one of the best-known AI document tools, later expanding beyond chat into broader PDF and AI workflows.

Damon credits Pieter Levels, Courtland Allen and Lynne Tye as his inspirations and runs a portfolio of smaller products including Chat.sh, PDFgen, QuickyAI, Docsium and VividShare. He is known for strong domain choices, buying and improving existing products, and sharing candid revenue updates on X.