Tony Dinh

Tony Dinh is a Vietnamese indie hacker and software developer best known as the creator of TypingMind, a chat interface for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and other AI models, and of the developer toolbox DevUtils. He builds and runs his products without outside funding and has sold two of them, Black Magic and Xnapper.

Before going independent, Dinh spent around seven years as a software engineer and was working in Singapore when he started shipping side projects. His first paid product was DevUtils, an offline all-in-one toolbox for developers on macOS, which made its first sales after a Hacker News launch in 2020. In September 2021 he left his six-figure engineering job to build full time, with no team or audience.

His next hit was Black Magic, a power-user extension and analytics tool for Twitter that grew to around $14K in monthly revenue before Twitter's API changes; he sold it in 2023. That year he also launched TypingMind, a polished chat front end that users run with their own API keys and buy with a one-time license. It passed $500K in revenue in its first year, grew into team and business plans, and helped him reach $1M in annual revenue in 2024. He also built the Mac screenshot tool Xnapper and sold it for $150,000 in 2024.

Today TypingMind is his main focus, and his X bio lists it at about $137K per month and DevUtils at about $5K per month. He works with a small team, relaunched TypingMind on Product Hunt in June 2026 with an Agent Skills feature, and keeps experimenting: an AI email client called Midday, the iPhone website builder Make Website, released in June 2026, and Survive 10 Waves, a free browser shooter he built in 2026 entirely by directing Claude Code. He also co-runs the Hacker Residency Group, an in-person retreat for indie hackers in Da Nang, Vietnam.

Dinh is one of the most followed build-in-public makers, with more than 200,000 followers on X, and shares revenue and lessons in his newsletter and in My Indie Book, his book about building a one-person software business.