{"id":731388,"date":"2026-06-04T16:55:15","date_gmt":"2026-06-04T13:55:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/inside-the-mind-of-a-viral-indie-hacker\/"},"modified":"2026-06-04T16:55:15","modified_gmt":"2026-06-04T13:55:15","slug":"inside-the-mind-of-a-viral-indie-hacker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/inside-the-mind-of-a-viral-indie-hacker\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside the mind of a viral indie hacker"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"ez-toc-container\" class=\"ez-toc-v2_0_84 counter-hierarchy ez-toc-counter ez-toc-custom ez-toc-container-direction\">\n<p class=\"ez-toc-title\" style=\"cursor:inherit\">Table of Contents<\/p>\n<label for=\"ez-toc-cssicon-toggle-item-6a26e12a04cae\" class=\"ez-toc-cssicon-toggle-label\"><span class=\"\"><span class=\"eztoc-hide\" style=\"display:none;\">Toggle<\/span><span class=\"ez-toc-icon-toggle-span\"><svg style=\"fill: #dd3333;color:#dd3333\" xmlns=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg\" class=\"list-377408\" width=\"20px\" height=\"20px\" viewBox=\"0 0 24 24\" fill=\"none\"><path d=\"M6 6H4v2h2V6zm14 0H8v2h12V6zM4 11h2v2H4v-2zm16 0H8v2h12v-2zM4 16h2v2H4v-2zm16 0H8v2h12v-2z\" fill=\"currentColor\"><\/path><\/svg><svg style=\"fill: #dd3333;color:#dd3333\" class=\"arrow-unsorted-368013\" xmlns=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg\" width=\"10px\" height=\"10px\" viewBox=\"0 0 24 24\" version=\"1.2\" baseProfile=\"tiny\"><path d=\"M18.2 9.3l-6.2-6.3-6.2 6.3c-.2.2-.3.4-.3.7s.1.5.3.7c.2.2.4.3.7.3h11c.3 0 .5-.1.7-.3.2-.2.3-.5.3-.7s-.1-.5-.3-.7zM5.8 14.7l6.2 6.3 6.2-6.3c.2-.2.3-.5.3-.7s-.1-.5-.3-.7c-.2-.2-.4-.3-.7-.3h-11c-.3 0-.5.1-.7.3-.2.2-.3.5-.3.7s.1.5.3.7z\"\/><\/svg><\/span><\/span><\/label><input type=\"checkbox\"  id=\"ez-toc-cssicon-toggle-item-6a26e12a04cae\" checked aria-label=\"Toggle\" \/><nav><ul class='ez-toc-list ez-toc-list-level-1 ' ><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-2'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-1\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/inside-the-mind-of-a-viral-indie-hacker\/#From_a_bedroom_app_to_a_billion_documents\" >From a bedroom app to a billion documents<\/a><\/li><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-2'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-2\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/inside-the-mind-of-a-viral-indie-hacker\/#Gaining_experience_as_a_founder\" >Gaining experience as a founder<\/a><\/li><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-2'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-3\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/inside-the-mind-of-a-viral-indie-hacker\/#A_one-click_fix_that_found_150000_users\" >A one-click fix that found 150,000 users<\/a><\/li><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-2'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-4\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/inside-the-mind-of-a-viral-indie-hacker\/#The_city_he_engineered_to_go_viral\" >The city he engineered to go viral<\/a><\/li><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-2'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-5\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/inside-the-mind-of-a-viral-indie-hacker\/#More_than_a_developer\" >More than a developer<\/a><\/li><\/ul><\/nav><\/div>\n<div id=\"article-main-content\">\n<p>When the 29-year-old Samuel Rizzon is asked what he does, he answers with a single word: \u201cdeveloper.\u201d While accurate, it\u2019s a modest label for someone whose work has stretched well beyond writing code.<\/p>\n<p>At an age when many engineers are still settling into a single specialty, Rizzon has built products embraced by large enterprises, online classrooms, and the open-source community, three arenas that rarely reward the same instincts. His is a story of versatility, of an engineer who has never been willing to be only one thing.<\/p>\n<h2><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"From_a_bedroom_app_to_a_billion_documents\"><\/span>From a bedroom app to a billion documents<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>Interested in <a href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/technology\/\" data-internallinksmanager029f6b8e52c=\"4\" title=\"Technology\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">technology<\/a> and building software from a young age, Rizzon developed and shipped his first product at 19: a Bible quiz he published to the Play Store and the App Store in 2015. It picked up 22,000 <a href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/download-scripts-themes-apps\/\" data-internallinksmanager029f6b8e52c=\"9\" title=\"Download Scripts &amp; Themes &amp; Apps\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">download<\/a>s, and that response was enough to convince him that making things people actually used was worth pursuing. Not long after, he joined TOTVS,\u00a0Brazil\u2019s largest technology company, where he would spend the next five years and lay the foundation of his career.<\/p>\n<p>That foundation took shape around a single product. It started as a proof of concept for one client that wanted a way to sign documents digitally. Rizzon wrote it from scratch, and the prototype worked well enough to become a product in its own right. It grew into a standalone electronic signature platform comparable to DocuSign, and today it processes more than a billion documents for over a million customers.<\/p>\n<p>Building it was largely a solo effort. Working before AI coding assistants existed, Rizzon architected the whole stack himself, from an Angular front end and a C# back end to a Chrome extension and a desktop application that reverse-engineered the physical A1 and A3 devices Brazilians use to authenticate documents. As the product matured, a team formed around him, eventually reaching roughly 10 engineers, designers, and product staff, with Rizzon leading the work that turned the prototype into a full product line.<\/p>\n<div class=\"inarticle-wrapper latest channel-cta hs-embed-tnw\">\n<div id=\"hs-embed-tnw\" class=\"channel-cta-wrapper\">\n<div class=\"channel-cta-img\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"js-lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/media.thenextweb.com\/hardfork-2018\/uploads\/visuals\/tnw-newsletter.png\"\/><\/div>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/media.thenextweb.com\/hardfork-2018\/uploads\/visuals\/tnw-newsletter.png\"\/><\/p>\n<div class=\"channel-cta-input\">\n<p class=\"channel-cta-title\">The \ud83d\udc9c of EU tech<\/p>\n<p class=\"channel-cta-tagline\">The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol&#8217; founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It&#8217;s free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>From there he spent a year at the consultancy CI&amp;T before taking a remote role as a full-stack engineer for a New York startup, a job that gave him his first direct contact with the U.S. technology scene.<\/p>\n<h2><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Gaining_experience_as_a_founder\"><\/span>Gaining experience as a founder<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>Around the same time, Rizzon set out to build a company of his own. He ran it out of his room in Brazil,\u00a0without investors, without a team, and without a network to lean on. What he had was persistence, and it showed: he took the business from nothing to 30 paying customers across Brazil, the United States, and Ireland, with 8,000 people using its web app.<\/p>\n<p>Since there was no one else to do it, he handled sales, client conversations, support, and marketing himself, the parts of a business most engineers never touch. He even started a <a href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/social-mediaa\/\" data-internallinksmanager029f6b8e52c=\"1\" title=\"Social Media\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">YouTube<\/a> channel during this period, which grew to 3,000 subscribers.<\/p>\n<p>He doesn\u2019t romanticize how hard it was, and he is especially frank about the difficulty of doing it from Brazil, far from any real startup network. \u201cI had nothing, really nothing,\u201d he points out. \u201cIt was just me in my room. Creating something and trying to sell it and reach customers. It was a very specific niche, and it was a hard niche.\u201d That isolation forced him to operate on his own, and the founder instincts it produced would resurface later in the viral consumer projects that made his name.<\/p>\n<h2><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"A_one-click_fix_that_found_150000_users\"><\/span>A one-click fix that found 150,000 users<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>Amidst the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, with so much of work and school suddenly happening over video, Rizzon built a Chrome extension that muted every participant on a Google Meet with a single click, a product that could solve a problem he kept running into himself. The fix was simple, but it turned out plenty of other people had the same complaint.<\/p>\n<p>That became clear fast. Within a year the extension had reached 150,000 users,\u00a0almost all of them arriving by word of mouth. Its most devoted users were teachers, who were running online classes for 15 to 30 students and had no way to quiet the room without clicking each child one by one. \u201cIt was a pain for me, and I just fixed that with an extension,\u201d Rizzon says. \u201cIt ended up being useful for a lot of teachers in particular.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The traction caught the attention of the founder of MP3.com, who emailed Rizzon with an offer to buy it. He sold, marking his first exit and an early sign of the instinct for shipping consumer products that would shape his later work. He has stayed close to open source since, serving as co-founder and core component developer of Zard UI, a shadcn-style component library for Angular developers that has crossed 1,000 stars on GitHub.<\/p>\n<h2><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"The_city_he_engineered_to_go_viral\"><\/span>The city he engineered to go viral<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>After years of shipping one project after another, the one that finally broke through was\u00a0<a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.thegitcity.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">GitCity<\/a>. The idea came from a post on X about rendering a city, and Rizzon had a first version live within a day. He didn\u2019t write any of it by hand; instead,\u00a0he built the entire codebase with Claude Code. What it produced was a pixel-art 3D metropolis that renders GitHub developers as buildings, with one structure per coder.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOn the first day, when I had the idea of creating the city, I noticed that this could be a viral product,\u201d he says. \u201cSo I prepared and made everything to go viral.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>People took to it immediately. In its first week the city grew from 12,000 buildings to 40,000, and it currently holds more than 80,000. Over two months GitCity drew 180,000 visitors, more than five million social media views, and 5,000 GitHub stars, with roughly 20 people contributing code. Rizzon\u2019s own audience grew alongside it, climbing from 200 Instagram followers to 6,000 and an X account to nearly 4,000.<\/p>\n<p>None of that happened by chance. Rizzon\u00a0treated distribution as part of the product itself, wiring a one-click \u201cshare on X\u201d button into every action a user could take. He also added a feature that lets one building attack another, which fires off an email to the target and pulls them back in to retaliate, and he also opened the experience with a cinematic shot of the skyline and made the 3D rendering run smoothly on phones.<\/p>\n<p>Inspired in part by the indie developer Pieter Levels, he\u2019s also begun earning money from it, taking in $2,000 from sponsored buildings and lining up companies to back a week-long event in which users hunt down a \u201cdark boss\u201d hidden in the city.<\/p>\n<p>The project did more than rack up numbers; it brought recruiters from Delphi, who were looking for someone to carry that same obsession with user experience into their consumer product, and he\u2019s now joining as a product engineer on their San Francisco team. He treats the move less as a destination than as a long apprenticeship, a chance to build a network and learn how the U.S. startup world actually works before starting a company of his own.<\/p>\n<h2><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"More_than_a_developer\"><\/span>More than a developer<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>Whether the right title is developer, founder, or product engineer, Samuel Rizzon has spent a decade declining to choose just one. The same engineer who built a signature platform now handling more than a billion documents at TOTVS also turned GitCity into a viral calling card, proof that the instinct to ship and the obsession with how a product feels follow him regardless of the label.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<blockquote><p><strong><span style=\"color: #ff6600;\">If you liked the article, do not forget to share it with your friends. Follow us on\u00a0<span style=\"color: #ff0000;\"><a style=\"color: #ff0000;\" href=\"https:\/\/news.google.com\/publications\/CAAqBwgKMN63nwsw68G3Aw\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener noreferrer\">Google News<\/a><\/span>\u00a0too, click on the star and choose us from your favorites.<\/span><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong>If you want to read more like this article, you can visit our <span style=\"color: #ff9900;\"><a style=\"color: #ff9900;\" href=\"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/category\/technology\/\" target=\"_blank\" >Technology category.<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"color: black;\"><a style=\"color: #ff9900;\" href=\"https:\/\/thenextweb.com\/news\/inside-the-mind-of-a-viral-indie-hacker\" target=\"_blank\" >Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When the 29-year-old Samuel Rizzon is asked what he does, he answers with a single word: \u201cdeveloper.\u201d While accurate, it\u2019s a modest label for someone whose work has stretched well beyond writing code. At an age when many engineers are still settling into a single specialty, Rizzon has built products embraced by large enterprises, online&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":731389,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/media.thenextweb.com\/2026\/06\/samuel-rizzon-viral-indie-hacker-gitcity.avif","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-731388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=731388"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731388\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/731389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=731388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=731388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=731388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}