How I Earned $800,000 at 15 from My Open-Source Project

The Story of a 15-Year-Old Who Earned $800,000 from a GitHub Project from china 

Hi everyone, I’m Zmh, the creator of Chat Nio. Today, I’m going to share my entire entrepreneurial journey with you. 

I’ve posted a few things on Twitter in the past, so some of you might already know me. Haha!

By the way, I don’t usually share much publicly, but I thought today would be a good time to talk about my journey with this project.

My Middle School Development Journey：

It all started back in early 2023. Looking back, I had won a few provincial and city-level championships in various competitions, but eventually, I got tired of spending so much time in the computer lab focusing on algorithms. At that point, I had already learned a bunch of programming languages like Pascal (which I forgot!), Assembly, C, Python, Arduino, Lua, and more. Haha!

I was part of the school’s tech group, and after class, we’d stay and mess around with anything fun we could think of — building scrapers, reverse engineering, big data, frontend, backend, and more. I even created a native TCP socket IM chatroom back in 7th grade to solve issues like TCP packet loss. I also worked on big file transfers, which was a lot of fun! Over time, I developed a habit of tinkering with open-source tools.

At one point, I started taking on small freelance projects online — just a few thousand dollars worth, but it was great. Those were some of the happiest times of my life. I had a “snack budget” throughout middle school, and at the time, I was running open-source projects that required setting up servers to run APIs. So, I started taking on orders just to fund those projects — basically, I was “self-funding open-source.” Haha!

How to start Chat Nio ?

Back to the main story, how did this project start? Well, initially, it was just for fun — something to share with my friends. GPT-4 required a $20 subscription each month, and although I had some income, my friends didn’t have any. So, I decided to share it with them. I learned a lot during this time, including things like how OpenAI’s API worked and how to create virtual cards.

Chat Nio

By the summer, my friends brought in more people, and my income from donations wasn’t enough to cover the growing expenses. So, we made the decision to move from fully free to a non-profit model. On advice, we open-sourced the code and hoped to co-develop it with the open-source community. I even introduced new features like online search and file uploads — at that time, I believe I was one of the first to support online search? I also created a new file parsing standard called “blob-service 151,” a universal restful API standard for parsing text, PDFs, PPTs, EXCEL, DOCs, audio files, etc. At the time, OpenAI and Anthropic didn’t even support most of the things I was supporting.

When we started the open-source project, we were around the same time as NextWeb and LobeChat, and I thought one of the coolest features was how we stored conversations in MySQL, optimized with Local First. For example, NextWeb synced conversations via WebDAV, while Lobe used WebRTC. But Chat Nio worked with zero configuration and seamless cross-device synchronization.

I didn’t use any publicity strategies — I just relied on the price and features to get users, who then referred others. Slowly, the project shifted into a more commercial model, and we created a “commercial version” branch. By early this year, our team grew to four people, and we hit 100k+ MAU and around $27000 MRR.

One turning point was when we implemented API key routing, something like the One API feature. We made significant algorithm improvements, creating our own channel distribution algorithm with priority, weight, and automatic error downgrading. One API had initially relied on external HTTP 307 redirects for downgrading, which later got changed to internal retry and downgrade. Chat Nio became a one-stop solution for both C and B end users, supporting commercial LLM systems for individual users and OpenAI API routing for businesses.

My friend posted about it on V2, and the open-source project gained some traction, getting over 3k stars. After that, I had to focus on my exams, so I didn’t do much promotion.

A lot of people who helped me were ones I met along the way — many of them were VCs (like ZhenFund, YC, Qiji, Oasis, BlueChilli, and more). I got to attend casual meetings and improve my communication skills, which was great!

In any case, I’m super grateful for everyone who’s been with me on this journey!

The end:

I’m excited to share with you above inspiring true story I recently heard. This story truly moved me and made me dream big. As a computer science graduate working in the tech field, I often imagine the day when I can create something as incredible as what the person in this story has achieved. This young guy is only 15 years old, yet he accomplished things that many of us in our 30s and 40s haven’t even touched.

But Zmh’s journey teaches us a powerful lesson: success isn’t some lofty, unattainable goal. It’s about starting with the pain points of your users, continuously improving, and moving forward step by step. This teenager’s success is not just admirable; it’s something every developer should reflect on and learn from.

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