Partial Blindness Led Him To a $1000/Month Business

Daniel Nguyen is the founder of KTool, a freemium tool that allows users to send news articles, newsletters, and RSS feeds to their Kindle device.

According to a recent interview with Daniel, KTool recently hit the $1,000 per month mark 🤑

The idea first came to him when he read a Hacker News post…

• Ask HN: I’m a software engineer going blind, how should I prepare?

Daniel has worn glasses since age 5 and is blind in his right eye, with doctors saying there is no chance of a cure…

I was genuinely scared. Like holy crap, if my left eye stops working, my life is done. Since then I’ve been very conscious about time spent on computer screens. That’s when I started using Kindle-related products: to offload as many reading materials as possible to the Kindle.

He soon ran into limitations like not being able to read web articles within Kindle, which led him to build KTool 🛠

When building the first version, Daniel focused on solving one core problem: taking an article link and converting it into Kindle’s native format.

He soft-launched KTool on Twitter in February 2022 and got his first sales when someone mentioned it on Hacker News 🥳

Daniel’s biggest learning in the early days…

To be vulnerable and tell my story on why I built the product. I was afraid that it would feel too personal, but to my surprise, it was well received.

Since launching, App Store Optimization (ASO) has become the most effective acquisition channel for KTool, constantly bringing in traffic without ongoing work.

Daniel was also able to rank #1 for important keywords related to Kindle and reading 😎

His strategy now is to double down on what already works by investing more in ASO and SEO.

Last words from Daniel 👇

Getting started is always the hardest. The fear of failure is strong. Rejections hurt. My advice is to get past that ‘first scary moment’ as fast as you can. Just start and figure out the rest on the go.