About Me
Hey, I'm Damian Hodgkiss.
I'm a senior staff engineer at Sumo Group where I lead the development of the AppSumo marketplace for solopreneurs and the FiveTaco SaaS directory.
In the past, I built Sumo.com (now Bdow) and the original KingSumo, scaling to hundreds of thousands of users and millions of dollars in revenue.
I'm also technical solopreneur, using my software engineering skills to create my own version of freedom.
Background
I started my developer journey in 1995 as a self-taught software engineer. I started developing Turbo Pascal BBS applications and moved to C applications on Linux.
After that, I started developing GUI applications for Windows, including one of the first Windows GUI changers, eFX.
This led to starting my first company and developing a SaaS website for software skins allowing users to upload and share their own skins.
Following on from the success of eFX, I co-developed Napigator, a software utility for Windows that allowed users to view and connect to different servers on the Napster peer-to-peer file-sharing network.
In the mid naughties, I had a web development agency where we developed a number of websites and software applications for clients.
In 2013 I teamed up with Sumo Group to develop the prototype for what would become Sumo.com, and over the years developed other projects including KingSumo and FiveTaco, and the Next.js frontend for AppSumo.
Things I like
- Music
- They say music calms the savage beast. I can't speak for the beasts but it calms my mind at least.
- Kayaking
- We have some great kayaking at Garden Island and I love visiting the dolphins.
- Learning
- I enjoy learning new things, especially when I can teach them to others.
- Fishing
- I enjoy taking the boat out and trying to catch a feed of fish, crabs and calamari.
Start Creating Freedom today
Learn to build fast, scalable SaaS as I document my journey towards freedom. Follow along for real-world lessons and insights from my experiences.