Daniel Nguyen is a Vietnamese solo founder making $15,000 a month from his AI app, BoltAI. This is a Mac desktop app which lets you use LLMs straight from your Apple machine. I talked to Daniel about his tips for learning to code, how he made BoltAI and the mistakes he has learned from in the process.
Can you introduce yourself?
My name is Daniel Nguyen. I’m a solopreneur based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. I’m 35 years old. I love building things on the Internet. The first dollar I earned from the Internet was roughly 15 years ago when I was selling a plugin for an open-source forum software called Invision Power Board. I dropped out of college to start an internet business, where I provided WordPress consulting services and reached $100K in revenue.
I later shut it down and then joined multiple startups as a founding product engineer. In 2022, I joined Twitter and found the indie hacking community there. I’ve launched 4 products since then.
Can you tell us what Bolt is ?
BoltAI is a native, high-performance all-in-one AI client designed for power users, allowing interaction with multiple AI models via a chat interface or inline within any app. Instead of paying for multiple subscriptions, users can use BoltAI with their API keys and only pay for the services they utilize.
Unlike other clients, BoltAI integrates deeply with the operating system, enabling users to perform tasks significantly faster. I’m going to launch BoltAI for Teams soon. It’s the B2B version of BoltAI with team features such as centralized AI portal, shared prompts & advanced user management…
What have you achieved so far?
I launched BoltAI in May 2023, and it now serves more than 7,000 customers, having received over 100 updates that constantly improve the platform based on customer feedback. It generates about $15k per month.
