It's so, so , so hard to walk the line between persistence (which leads to glory) and stubbornness (which leads to more time following already wasted time.)
Congratulations for walking this line correctly.
I agree that some sort of market validation is necessary to at least pretend you are on the former not the latter. Those early usage spikes are helpful reminders that there is a business here somewhere.
I'll also make a note that you spent time on marketing from the early days. Writing blog posts, promoting said posts, having a Discord server, committing to answer emails, all of this is marketing and its likely lead to success more than the code.
I notice whenever there was a dip in revenue, marketing (in the form of more blog posts) was the response. I suspect that was intentional, and definitely a better approach than "let me go away and silently code more features."
So there are valuable lessons to others here. Congratulations not just on the current success but also on sharing the path that leads to success. Ultimately you can show the way, but you can't make people learn from it.
Oh, and I like the bootstrapping approach. I did the same, and I'm not sorry. It's longer and harder but also skips an enormous amount of extra work.
Thanks. For a while there, it wasn't clear to me which side of the line I was walking.
Something that stuck with me from Poor Charlie’s Almanack is that low expectations are a cornerstone of a happy life. I built this for myself first, so when people actually signed up and paid, it was incredibly motivating. I was thrilled to spend my free time treating those early customers like royalty and building more of what they wanted.
If I had instead come into this with the expectation of quick success, I doubt I would have made it through those early years.
And cheers from one bootstrapper to another. It's not easy, but I can't imagine a more rewarding way to build.
Another lesson here: you built for a specific community who is passionate, money-motivated, and concentrates in specific social spaces (forums, reddit, etc.) where you can promote your business. This isn't always a recipe for success, but it's a damn good starting point. You need to adjust to the sensitivities of the community to avoid overly self-promotional content, but you always have a clear channel to promote your very specific product that meets their needs.
More importantly, the site looks pristine, with soft, artsy, techie, nature images with calming, strong, and welcoming colors and vibes, and and follows what at least used to be good SEO practices with a blog that is kept up to date frequently enough, etc.
If you don’t know a good site, you’ll never be able to develop one or pay for one without using a ok template.
+1 from someone who also bootstrapped a side project into a 7 figure business, and just happens to be absorbing some lessons from Poor Charlie’s Almanac on Audible recently.
ha I listened on Audible too. great audiobook for a walk after dinner. Charlie's advice really holds up. which part have you gotten the most out of so far?
Congrats. A word of warning: I scaled my SaaS site to $1M in AAR in a few years, but then a lot of competition appeared and a decade later it's still at only $1.5M. I have a good time running it and I can live comfortably while feeding my team, but with my initial success I had hoped it would go up further faster. So keep those expectation low, the next million may not come as easily as the first.
Good question. The main problem I had was being too slow scaling up from 1 person. Building a good team is tricky, it's very hard to convince great devs to join you when you are by yourself at a time when they had a pick of jobs from FAANG. Even if you can match the salary of well funded startups, other companies can offer working with a larger team.
So you have three options: 1. hire sub-par people, 2. get VC funding to hire an entire team, or 3. continue doing most stuff by yourself.
I tried hiring sub-par people. That was a mistake, they took way more effort and negative energy than I got in return from the salary I paid them. I did not want to take on VC funding to be able create a large team at once, and in hindsight I think that was a good idea because several of my competitors did, and then had to fold 5 years later when they ran out of funding and their revenue was not high enough. (Also, the freedom of being a 100% owner and not having anyone tell you what to do was a major quality of life improvement for me that I never want to give up again once I tasted it. I hope you savor it as I do!)
So being smarter about hiring is what I would do differently, but that's easier said than done. I think the job market today probably does have more high quality devs available that don't mind being employee number two.
Edit: to add, once competitors appeared it became much more of a marketing game than a web dev game, because customers just tend to click the first three google hits. Getting good at marketing, and hiring the right people for that, is a whole other ballgame if you're a dev.
I think there's a certain type of engineer that actively prefers working in a small team where you can make an outsized impact and wear many hats. I'm one of them lol.
I wonder if you could bring on just one really good dev who matches that description vs scaling up to a larger team. In many cases, a very small team of A+ players can beat a large team of B players.
Although it sounds like you're saying marketing/distribution may have played a larger role in your trajectory? In hindsight, do you think focusing your team-building efforts on the marketing side would have been a better strategy?
Yes, I agree, one or two good engineers should easily be enough, and preferable to a large team. In between having programmers on staff I ended up doing most of it myself. It was not for want of trying, but even getting someone to apply is hard when good engineers were getting dozens of emails and calls from recruiters a week (back then). In the end, doing too much things by myself caused my company to be a bit slower with design updates, not enough attention to marketing, etc. And although there are way more people available who claim they can do marketing, finding a good one turned out to be just as hard. But some things, like well-funded competitors appearing that outspend you on Google Ads, are not under your control. I'm still happy with the end-result though, it's a great life style business.
> It's so, so , so hard to walk the line between persistence (which leads to glory) and stubbornness (which leads to more time following already wasted time.)
> Congratulations for walking this line correctly.
As much as I like to agree with this message ... isn't there a big portion of luck involved here that makes the difference between the two sides of this line? In other words, aren't we seeing huge survivorship bias at play here?
That's what makes the line so hard to walk. Surely skill helps, but more than most like to admit it's the unpredictability of outside forces that makes the line really hard to walk.
There is a fallacy in over application of the survivorship bias concept.
Literal survival for early cultures was often a matter of luck. Agriculture was an innovation that improved the odds. Early cultures that practiced agriculture outperformed those that did not, and were more likely to survive black swan events. All major cultures in existence are now based in agriculture.
Should we assume then that because we only see agrarian cultures that that is not useful information, because of survivorship bias in the resulting sample?
On the contrary, survival itself is the signal that is useful… it’s really a matter of what behavior the signal can be attributed to- was it the agriculture, or was it the human sacrifices? Was it the red ochre face paint? The storing of grain in pots instead of skins?
Failure bias is just as large of a red herring. It’s easy to imagine that it retrospect, we understand why failures happen, and sometimes the reasons are very clear. That’s why there is often more to be learned from failures than from successes. But still, it’s easy to look at the things they did right that successful example B also did, and then conclude those things weren’t critical to success because they sometimes end in failure.
The point is that we shouldn’t judge the value of information based on ideas like “survivor bias” but instead look for more methodical and logical connections between causes and outcomes, and not fall victim to cargo-culting nor casual, hand wavey dismissal of potential lessons.
Survivorship bias mitigation is a matter of determining which survivor signals are instrumental , and those which are coincidental.
Many things are fraught with risk and low probabilities of success. That does not make them primarily a matter of luck.
Aviation is a great example of an environment that is nearly 100 percent risk, where without knowledge and the correct tools the very small chance of not dying would be purely a matter of luck.
Even carefully thought out comments like the above are only hints and ideas relating to making sense of the world. They don’t talk about building quantitative predictive or causal models to disentangle the many factors driving success, failure, and everything in between.
I recommend The Book of Why by Judea Pearl as a starting point for digging into the lesser-known techniques of assessing causality. The causality work over the last couple of decades is still under-appreciated and not used often enough.
One is unlikely to find anything close to rigor when it comes to business or entrepreneurial books. They can be a starting point for analysis, but their bias to tell an interesting story and sell copies often work at odds with truth seeking.
At the risk of oversimplification, one decent model for acting comes from decision theory. (1) Look at the data probabilistically and act accordingly. (2) If you don’t have enough data, assess the cost/benefit of acquiring more.
But we don’t have the time or the discipline to make all important decisions this way, do we? Probably not. So, (3): if you act on intuition, be honest with yourself about that. Be curious about yourself and your decisions and how you can do better. Focus on areas where improvement is likely to make an outsized impact. (This leads back to #2, except it is about seeking better knowledge and self-awareness instead of just data.)
I try not to exaggerate, but these three principles might be sufficient to subsume all other business advice.
Thanks for the book recommendation! I’ll look at that.
>> Embrace the uncertainty and move forward anyway.
This. This is the key factor that prevents attempts at success, or leads to failure by a thousand cuts.
There is no gain without risk. Significant gain usually comes through significant risk. Position yourself in life to be sufficiently resilient to take 10:1 bets with 100:1 odds until you can weather the 100:1 bets with 100000:1 odds. Avoid the 1:50 bets that pay at 1:50 odds like the plague… they are a comfortable quagmire of rotting aspirations.
We are not in disagreement here. Of course it makes sense to study successes and figure out differences in patterns of behavior making success more likely. Causal or not, that is another matter.
However, it's not black-or-white. Once an aspect that has likely contributed to success is identified, it's often framed as if focusing on that aspect guarantees success. That's an easy mistake to make if all observed cases of success exhibit it. But it's far from a guarantee, other aspects my play a role too. Like luck, for example. That's what I meant by mentioning survivorship bias.
What's missing from the application of the survivorship bias concept is that it really only applies if failure means death or a total wipeout. Pieter Levels for instance, a known success in the indie hacking scene, has created something like 70 projects and only a handful of them made any money. Presumably he also learned something from each project making the success of the next more likely.
It's hugely about luck. We can look back on any success story and identify what made it successful (sometimes) but it only has a little predictive power. Success in startupping ultimately comes from either trying a lot of things (amplifying your luck until it approaches 100%) or survivorship bias when you get lucky on your first try and then write about how smart you are.
It helps to have an idea of what might succeed, by studying things that succeeded before and the present business environment, but that increases each attempt's success chance to, like, 2% rather than 0.2%.
(There's nothing wrong with getting lucky, we just probably shouldn't plan around it being the normal case. It has extreme variance by definition.)
But it's not the only part. All the luck in the world won't win me an Olympic medal. Yes, luck plays a part. But it also takes the right work, learning the correct skills, having the discipline and so on.
Working on the right thing, at the right time, in the right way are all crucial ingredients. All the luck in the world though can't help you if you're playing the wrong game.
That's luck. No one knows the right thing, the right time, or the right way. Studying past right things, past right times, and past right ways can give you maybe a 2% chance of getting them right instead of 0.2%. Only after someone got them right (by chance) can we look back and say "Wow! That person got them right!"
I think we're not in disagreement that both play a role. But maybe not in how much each contributes. My claim is that luck is often heavily underappreciated. That's not surprising - it's hard to measure, and it feels less good to attribute your success to something outside your control like random chance rather than your hard work, dedication, skill, smarts, whatnot. Nobody gets praise for luck, and ultimately success stories are often going after praise if they are honest with themselves. Which is fine, but don't discount the luck factor.
Just being born a white heterosexual male in a developed country somewhere between the 70s and the 2000s puts you so vastly ahead of everybody else that even if you don't tick all those boxes the luck factor is enormous. Few people openly appreciate that.
> isn't there a big portion of luck involved here that makes the difference between the two sides of this line? In other words, aren't we seeing huge survivorship bias at play here?
Luck and survivorship bias may not be the same thing.
Sure, but when you can’t clearly attribute the survivor’s survival, there’s still no meaningful conclusion to draw. And given how many different ways there are for businesses to succeed or fail, that are never ever repeatable due to the passing of time in the market, then I think attribution is impossible, so having the humility to somewhat attribute luck is admirable.
> It's so, so , so hard to walk the line between persistence (which leads to glory) and stubbornness (which leads to more time following already wasted time.)
“Courage is knowing it might hurt and doing it anyway. Stupidity is the same thing.
Persistence and Stubbornness are just different words for the same personality trait. The former is used when looked at a positive light while the latter is used in the negative.
You're persistent if your project succeeded but you're stubborn if you keep at it despite unfavourable outcomes.
The way I see it, persistent founders keep looking for evidence and adapt / adjust course based on what they learn. Stubborn ones just keep going, even when there are clear signals that it's time to step back and refocus.
I would say that you are persistent if you keep getting rejected but keep improving but using feedback and you would be stubborn if you don't change a thing while keeping being rejected.
> It's so, so , so hard to walk the line between persistence (which leads to glory) and stubbornness (which leads to more time following already wasted time.)
Strange analogy. I'd say stay away from that line and run into the direction of persistence.
I love how these stories always start with “I just wanted to scratch my own itch” and end with “...and now I’m running a company with a payroll bigger than my old day job.” It’s inspiring, but also a little bit intimidating. Makes you wonder how many potential seven-figure ideas are just sitting in people’s “maybe someday” folders. The real lesson here? Ship something, even if it’s ugly. You can’t optimize what doesn’t exist.
To me, a lesson is: If you keep chugging along on your idea then you might get lucky and be the one out of 10,000 for whom this single-entrepreneur-bootstrap project works out, you get to be your own boss, have a big payroll and it ends up as a success story on HN. Without that luck, you are among the other 9,999 where it just died. But without trying, you are guaranteed failure (though with less frustration perhaps).
Yeah, this resonates with me. My side project for 6 years was generating very, very little. Enough for a few pints a month.
Fun fact: The project survived a total destruction of the datacenter where it was hosted (remember the ovh incident?) which took it offline for maybe 4 months (no backups at the time). Luckily the server it was on didn't get melted.
Also at some point I started questioning why was I still working on it for so little. My wife convinced me to keep going and to be honest I still enjoyed working on it.
Then on year 7 things started to change, and on year 8 I was able to quit my daily job!
I'm on year 10 now. It's not a 7 figure business, but I enjoy every single day. Also the flexibility it gives me is excellent.
That's an impressive number of years to stick with a product you questioned. Probably 2x longer than Google would have maintained it lol
(who says products by indie devs always have higher long-term support risk?!)
I'm really happy to hear it turned around for you. The 4 months of down time sound terrifying. Can you share more about how you navigated that, how it impacted customers, and what you were able to restore vs what you couldn't, and what processes you changed in the aftermath?
My business is transactional where email is still king for all after sales support. I guess that makes it way easier to handle than a SaaS one.
The biggest impact for the business was not making any sale during this period and my SEO rankings going down. Actually the site disappeared from search.
I guess the biggest impact for me - personally - was psychological. All production data was gone and I was seeing it as a sign I should just let it go. I had all the source code, so in theory I could do it, but not sure I would have the motivation to.
Then in the end my thingy was hosted in a section that was salvaged from the fire. I saw it as a sign that actually I SHOULD keep going, lol. I don't remember exactly how long it was off but yeah, 4-6 months. Everything was restored though.
The only thing I did was to implement automatic backups and to a different datacenter. I remember from the incident, one issue for many was their servers were hosted in Strasbourg with backups also hosted there.
I've touched on this in my last comment, but my wife is by far my biggest motivator. It's tough life for us working solo, with our minds playing tricks on us all the time. It always sounds so much easier to go and work for someone else again or to just start a new side project from scratch. Not sure if there's any Alex Hormozi fan here, but one thing he's always repeating is to not give up, not start anything new over and over and just keep pushing that one project.
Ah so with this business model there was minimal impact to existing customers? That's fortunate.
Out of curiosity, what kind of transactional product has a substantial production database that would be daunting to re-build in a 4-6 mo window given you still had the source code during that time?
And I hope you've taken your wife out for some nice dinners (or whatever she likes). Totally agree that having a supportive and encouraging partner can make all the difference in challenging times.
At the time I was working with maybe 30 providers and it would be doable to rebuild the server and reconfigure all providers, cars, insurance, etc. Content would probably take longer, but also doable. But at the time I took it as a sign to shift to something else.
Glad I didn't and that the project came back from the ashes, literally.
It was a massive difference when I started in Cape Verde. Specially the way of working, level of service and insurance options available (mostly non-existent). It's very satisfying to look back and the progress made over the years where, in a way, I helped to improve the customer service provided by the small local companies, closer to what you would see in the western world.
What's also funny is that the "1st dollar" coming in in any business is such a rush, such an excitement. That still holds true in my case! Even though the business is the same across the 3 websites, it's such an excitement to see the Madeira one growing (where I started more recently), compared to the Azores where I've been at for some years now.
It’s also entirely possible to make something that just gives you a little extra cash, which can be a huge difference. I imagine an extra $2,000 a month of fun, self-made income feels pretty incredible.
"But without trying, you are guaranteed failure"
>> But without trying you are limited to a relatively safe and certain affluent paycheck from your day job.
True but if you are building it for yourself then you will still have something useful in the end. Chances are that you also probably enjoyed or took satisfaction in the process of building it. Also, if it is truly a passion project and not just attempt to make money, it’s probably more interesting than most of the stuff shared.
There are probably tones of ideas that would be viable businesses if executed. One problem though is between "scratching my own itch" and "payroll bigger than my old day job" is working "4-6 hours every night after work, entire weekends, holidays". And even that is no guarantee of getting to a big payroll (another thread is discussing persistence vs stubborn).
Not many people are even in a position to do this (family, health etc), or have the mental and physical energy to do this for years. This is one of the potential benefits of something like UBI. It allows people to pursue these ideas without having to work another 9-5.
For me the lesson is: ship the thing that makes you feel like you are playing Golf doing it (assuming someone who plays Golf enjoys it alot).
The golfer won't regret their day on the course. And if you fail on the passion project it won't feel like a fail.
I have another idea too. It's the win anyway system. Pick something that if you fail you use those skills at work and get ahead. E.g. the side project is also the training for the gap in your career.
This is my plan now, launch a free product and use it to promote myself as a contractor or consultant. Commit to some time spent on maintenance weekly and consider it as part of the marketing time. Maybe I will be able to monetize it in the long term, but in the short term, I need it to escape the bottom of the barrel I am currently at. You don't get to have a good resume when you are tinkering with products on your own... and I realized that especially in this job market, I can only make decent money on my own. It helps that the product is quite technically complex, gives me ideas for blog posts and the idea itself is already validated (as a free product), but the existing implementations are poor. And I absolutely love developing it.
The big lesson for me is know what you are getting into. Look at the OP - he spent every spare hour he had. This is no joke. I have done something similar in the past for a time and I ended up constantly running into conflicts of priorities between that and personal life. I ended up wasting a few years, in both personal life and professional life, although the former hurts much more. This is how I ended up in a scenario where I have nothing to show and nothing to lose. I just hope I can do it all at some 50 hours per week total, where the product is just a part of the day job (promotes the consulting offering) and lower the volume of paid work as I need, if I want to have more time to make a big move with the product.
Exactly! If you can get some exposure as a « specialist », build a network or just learn a ton of new skills (marketing, accounting, PR, devops) it tends to be a win/win.
That’s what I’m currently doing and by no mean would I have better myself as much in any other way.
If you enjoy Charlie’s, you will definitely enjoy Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, especially the part about being an « expert »: a few talks in empty classrooms in a famous Uni, a radio show nobody knows and voila, you get some cred!
I don’t really like golf but I’d imagine that if I did, I might stop liking it once I had to do it professionally every day even when I didn’t feel like it.
Choose not to pursue CS because of that. I like coding a lot and can spend lots of brainpower and time coding things I am interested in. Once you start working as a programmer, coding becomes something else. Therefore I rather take a different career path and can keep enjoying my little projects.
What career path did you pursue instead, and how does that fit into the framework of your life and goals? Do you ever wonder if you could have bounced around enough to find a CS role that might enhance rather than corrupt your passion? Or do the odds of that just seem too low in your experience?
See to me the "running my own company with a payroll bigger than my old day job" isn't something I'd want - it actually sounds like a total nightmare to me.
The whole point to me is getting to a stage where you can work when and where you want and only if you want to. Having it set up in such a way where its small enough to manage but big enough to self sustain if you wanted to go off on vacation for a few weeks at the drop of a hat.
Similar approach and story to myself, in that I started a side project for my own use and interest, and then released it to great feedback as a side hustle, went part-time and over the last 2.5 years managed to go full time.
I've yet to reach your $1M ARR though.. but hopefully getting there one day!
Recently wrote up a Year in Review which touches on similar learnings as you've written over the last year:
Have also had a keen interest in FIRE over the years and hadn't heard of your product... personally I've just kept my own spreadsheet which runs through scenarios, progress etc.
Congrats on 350k downloads, sounds like you had a good year! You mentioned SEO finally kicking in. Do you attribute that to anything in particular? Any strategic changes you made? Also curious how you incorporate AI tools into your workflow, if at all.
Perhaps the age of the content helps, though I haven't done a deep dive into SEO practices myself. In the last year, when search traffic increased, I've increased the output to almost 1 article per month.
As I noted it took 7 years to actually get any substantial Google traffic – if I was to start again I would potentially change some of what I've written to be more effective or focus on different topics earlier.
However my approach is always to write what will be useful and interesting for humans, if Google search also finds it relevant then that's a bonus. I never write just for machines... as I think that's a long term losing strategy.
How concerned are you about Google’s AI summaries keeping people from going to your site as a lot of publishers are now seeing? Or maybe it does affect product sites as much?
The site's primary purpose is as a product site for my app. The content that I have written is for this purpose, with organic Google search traffic being a bonus.
Due to this, Google AI summaries are not a huge consideration.
It's an impressive accomplishment. I've always struggled to get through the valley of despair in a new project. I've decided that I can only build and sell things that I regularly use. Otherwise the signal is just too weak, and I eventually get burned out. But if I'm always a user of one, then at least it's validated for me.
Caring is kind of a superpower. And not just in terms of signal, but also the quality of work. I don't think this would have gone anywhere if I hadn't cared deeply about solving the problem in an elegant way.
Earlier in my career, I worked on some things as a corporate engineer that were hard to care about, and there's just no comparison.
On my million-dollars project (now 10 employees) I hired someone for the support. She wasn’t in the startup ecosystem. What she was most surprised of / had to train most for was our requirement of benevolence: Always help the customer, even when it’s not in our scope.
She thinks I’m a superboss, but I keep repeating her: We have to be nice to customers, we also have to give benefits to employees, otherwise both would leave us. It’s not a choice, it’s market pressure.
Thank you so much Kyle for sharing all this. This is very inspiring. I will put a few more extra hours today in my project thinking about you.
I'd love to have some info about the hiring of Jon, anything you may feel like sharing, while I realize a lot of it is very confidential. For example:
- I am wondering how the working relationship got started since you write that he "spent a year contributing real value", and he was not asking for equity upfront. Did you hire him as contractor initially, did he volunteer his time?
- the structure of the deal with him, and of course the equity part, especially _if/while_ you are not planning to sell the business. Maybe you have some pointers on "possible deal structures" that you looked into without spilling the beans on the actual deal?
I know I am asking a lot, I hope it does not hurt to ask, so realistically I don't expect any answer, but any breadcrumbs would be so valuable/helpful! In any case, thank you so much already.
> I will put a few more extra hours today in my project thinking about you.
And that's the recipe for failure right there. Your passion side project needs to be fueled by passion, not thinking about somebody else's success that you are trying to replicate.
I find this such a strange comment, to be able to reach such a conclusion so quickly without any idea what my side project is, how much passion I have put into it, and how much still have in me, with no idea how many people I've helped already with it.
Like Kyle writes keep showing up to make it a little better every day. Today again I will show up, but today I'll think of him and it will help me.
What's your passion project? How do _you_ keep the motivation every day? How long has it been?
> Your passion side project needs to be fueled by passion
Maybe he's in that valley of despair right now that the article shows occurs many times. Passion is fleeting and at times you just need a little inspirational jolt to get back into it and regain some of that passion.
Also, to share a personal experience, passion is not sufficient. You need favorable conditions as well (or the ability to create them). For example, the article talks about working nights and weekends. I'm not sure if the author has kids or what the arrangement is in his family, but personally, as much as I wanted to work whole weekends on my passion project, I would feel like a shitty father if I ignored my kids over the weekend for months, so the project gets put on the back burner a lot while I'm biking with my kids outside and having fun.
I was definitely fortunate to attempt this in a compatible stage of life (no kids yet).
I'd like to think there will still be room for craft/creation if I become a parent someday. But I doubt this level of sustained focus (obsession?) over multiple years would have been possible or responsible in that scenario.
How do you differentiate between persistence or stuborness. I have been developing a SaaS product since 2020 which currently is at 3K ARR with a very slow growth (20%). It's a B2B and are we are still missing a bunch of features to make us on par with competitors. We did survive a couple of competitors that came and go as we still have our day jobs and running it costs peanuts ($$$).
It often feels I should give up but having had customers who used us for years makes me think we have something that one day will make serious money.
Are your existing customers vocal about what they love or wish you'd add? Do you know how they found you and what made them choose you over competitors? Is there a niche/segment within your larger TAM with a specific pain point you're solving really well? And how big is that segment?
Either way, if your existing customers don't all come from paid channels, and they're loyal, and you've outlasted multiple competitors, that already sounds like a real achievement to me. My progress was slow for years before things started to really pick up, so don't discount signs of traction if there are some meaningful ones.
Very vocal, we do have a very solid TODO list for another 12 months. They are also quite loyal and number of them are with us for 3+ years and they use software daily (its just a very small customer list overall). I do wonder sometimes why they stay with us given other competitors are much better. We mostly grew through word of mouth and cold emails. I believe we are already solving a fairly niche use case (TAM is few thousand customers in USA) and my idea is to grow revenue enough to go after larger TAM (several milion).
Word-of-mouth growth sounds like a good sign. And depending on your goals, sometimes building a defensible niche business, maximizing ARPU, and minimizing churn can be better than chasing the mass market. Could something like a referral program potentially move the needle?
What I'd really appreciate is a demo/sandbox version where I can try out the functionality without having to enter anything personal.
I appreciate that you have a (generous looking) free tier and various screenshots - but it just seems like something I'd want to play around with before taking the time to create an account and start entering personal data into.
As someone that has tried and failed at many attempts over a decade, I just wanted to take a moment to congratulate you. This is so wonderful, and I couldn’t be happier for you. Thank you for sharing your journey, and lessons learned .
I’m now a single working mom supporting 2 young kiddos on my own, so my time has become limited; but I’ll be back :)
Thanks so much, that means a lot. It's challenging when time and life pull you in so many directions. Wishing you and your kids all the best. When you jump back in, I'll be rooting for you.
Co-founder of a somewhat complementary and somewhat competitive product. Just dropping in to say what Kyle has done with Projection Lab is nothing short of phenomenal. This is a tough space to build in, and he's built an amazing product.
Sometimes I wonder who makes more money: a VC backed founder like you with tens of millions in funding and 8 figure revenues, or a bootstrapped founder with a small team of contractors at $1m ARR.
Thanks Ozzie, that means a lot coming from you. Building successfully in this space requires a passion for it, and that really comes through with the work you and your team are doing too.
This story is similar to the guys at senja.io: tech founder => marketing/growth person joins => business skyrockets to 1M ARR. It looks to me like a combination of having a product with some revenue and havingthe luck of someone like Jon joining.
I'd be more interested on how to find people like Jon tbh.
Interesting to see the inflection point when Jon joined. I recall something similar when Marko joined Plausible as a marketing person, which also started as a solo effort by a developer.
To my knowledge Pieter does both himself, but he built a sizable following online, which boosts all his marketing efforts.
Amazing story and huge congrats! It's funny how the tool itself seems quite niche-y, but bootstrapping to 1M ARR in 4 years definitely proves that hypothesis wrong; fantastic job :)
It's niche, but I wasn't really able to find anything else like it. I wanted to project our some retirement scenarios and my options seemed to be:
- Any of a few dozen "retirement calculators," each consisting of 6 fields and very simple outputs
- Building out a series of buggy spreadsheets
- Projection Lab
After messing around for it a bit, it was a "shut up and take my money" situation. It was cheap, it was powerful, it was nice to use, and it has been the foundation for my personal financial strategy for the last few years!
Thanks! Initially I had been looking around for an existing tool to use myself, so I knew there was at least one person out there willing to pay for something like this. And r/financialindependence has 2.3m members, so I hoped there might turn out to be more than one.
Congratulations! But I’m disappointed with no mention of profit level in this post or another one linked. My last business I scaled to 500K ARR in less than two years, with $20K in total annual profit including the $0 my cofounder and I paid ourselves for many hours of work. I shut it down a year later and strongly regret the amount of work I put into it.
There’s an ARR metric trap in the founder community where people focus on revenue rather than on reaching a level of take-home income comparable to what they could make at a normal job. The former is a lot easier than the latter (especially in the US for people who can take home $250K fairly easily working in tech) - as the saying goes, you can make infinite revenue by selling dollars for 99 cents.
Profit margin started out around 90% in the early years, but is looking more like 65% this year now that we're making a concerted effort to reinvest into growth, building a team, etc.
If ARR grows enough, there should be plenty of room in there to pay the founders.
For extreme examples of ARR growth at 0% profit paying off, look at Uber, Amazon, and ServiceNow. I know these are very much outliers. All three had rapid revenue growth but profits at (or far below) zero. But for all three, the founders are sitting pretty today.
I share your frustration with the endless focus on revenue, rather than profit (looking at you, indiehackers.com). I suspect in many cases it is because they are embarassed to disclose their profit.
But congrats to the OP. It is impressive growth for a bootstrapped business.
Congrats! I'm a customer. Haven't used it too much but so far I like having it to check in periodically. One wish list item: live securities prices to avoid having to copy/paste values all the time. For example, with that you can have a live snapshot of the values in most brokerages
Account linking for automated balance updates is our most upvoted and most controversial feature request.
I agree it would be really nice if it worked well, but my understanding from other founders is that aggregator reliability still leaves a lot to be desired in 2025, and is always a huge expense and support burden. As a small, bootstrapped team building a long-term planning tool where current balances are only a small piece of the picture, we need to be really careful about what we choose to take on. Currently there are still dozens of other high-priority feature requests that will also deliver real value but without those downsides.
I do go back-and-forth on this though. And I think eventually there will come a time for it.
Glad to hear you're enjoying the tool, and thanks so much for your support!
p.s. also might be worth noting that there is a plugin system, and community members have built integrations that can pull in balance updates automatically from some of the popular budgeting tools.
Account linking should be reasonably straightforward in the EU with PDS2 open data. I was able to hack together some python via one of the intermediary services to get up to date bank data. There is the complication that the bank doesn't always have fully live data.
Approaches involving password sharing you're right to stay well away from.
To provide a data point from a long-time ProjectionLab user, I don't really need account linking. I use Monarch Money to link cash and CC accounts to track spending.
I use a custom Google Sheet to track retirement portfolio performance. If =GOOGLEFINANCE isn't enough, there is a nice paid extension called WiseSheets, which adds a =WISE function that fills all the gaps.
My monthly ProjectionLab process is to update the "Current Finances" values on the first of the month, using the values from the other tools. Works well enough for me!
I'm glad to hear you have a workflow for updating current finances that's already serving you well. I do plan to add a lot more automation/integration options, it's just always a question of where to invest my time to deliver the most value to the community efficiently.
Something people don't always realize instantly is that with a long-term planning tool, the point is to spend the bulk of your time focused on the future, not fixating on all the latest daily stock price fluctuations... in fact, those can sometimes be a source of noise/distraction.
I don't need/want account linking, I just want $VTSAX etc recent prices. I know it can be noise but what you're saving me from is really annoying copy/paste work when I come in quarterly to update numbers and track my progress.
sounds like that would also mean overhauling the data model to track individual positions within every account, not just balances?
and then folks would expect every account's asset allocation to be automatically derived from those positions too I imagine? that would differ a lot from how asset allocation modeling and change over time currently works in the tool.
maybe I'm missing something, but it feels like there could be a lot of complexity here that would need to be carefully weighed against the product vision and other things on the roadmap.
I think all I can do as a customer is just say what my biggest pain point is (having to copy and paste a bunch of values every time I check in with the tool) and however you think it's best to solve that, or to not solve it, is really up to you.
I think adding account linking is something you absolutely should not do, that definitely will add so much complexity and also touches up on people's security fears around 3rd party linking, so definitely don't do that.
Will keep using the product for sure. Nice work and congrats on the success so far
Live is overkill, all they'd need is an every 30-60 minute update on equity prices, which is not an overly expensive thing to acquire. With a 65% profit margin in their business, this is a dead-obvious feature they should be automating away to save their users a sizable headache.
This is probably impossible in 2025. Many stock exchanges now make more money from selling data feeds than trading fees. It is a little bit crazy. The best that you can hope for is a delayed feed, or last closes.
That's the best part about VTSAX and chill: you only ever have last closes. Really though this does not need to be real time at all, just recent enough to save me toil
This is incorrect. Almost all brokers nowadays allow for OAuth connections where you can stream any data you'd see in your broker platform to any consuming web application (given the consuming web application does all the paperwork, dev work, and so on)
That is a mighty broad brush. I can confidently say that this is untrue for many brokers in continental Europe and North Asia. US brokers? If yes, can you provide some examples?
Amazing stuff. I think I'm in the boat as you OP except I just can't get myself to commit to a project since 1) no idea if it works or is unique 2) look for better opportunity and spend time doing LC/apply for job.
There is only so many hours after work.
> Once you’ve validated your idea,
Could you really break this down. I feel you overlooked this part. How do you filter through tons of ideas into idea that for sure or has good chance for success. For example, to build a yet another crypto exchange is both super technical and far too regulated. What is a known strategy how founder/dev nail down and commit to a project?
There are many frameworks and approaches, but here are two of my filtering criteria:
1. I don't start a project unless it's something I deeply want to exist for my own personal use. That way I know there's at least one person who would pay for an elegant solution. And even if no one shows up, at least it's useful to me.
2. I don't start a project unless I can envision the solution top to bottom and feel confident about the scope of the technical work. I'm not the most brilliant person at data structures & algorithms, and I prefer solutions where a simple architecture can get the job done. If there are foggy areas in the technical design, or parts I struggle to visualize clearly, to me that's a red flag.
Do you make this decision after doing tons of research about how you could implement a solution for the gray areas or do you just decide not to pursue the gray areas that you don't know how to implement yourself?
How do you differentiate between persistence or stuborness. I have been developing a SaaS product since 2020 which currently is at 3K ARR with a very slow growth (20% YoY). It's a B2B and are we are still missing a bunch of features to make us on par with competitors. We did survive a couple of competitors that came and go as we still have our day jobs and running it costs peanuts ($$$).
It often feels I should give up but having had customers who used us for years makes me think we have something that one day will make serious money.
Amazing – congratulations. I've been using the demo version of your product every six months or so since I first saw your post here. I Really appreciate that you've kept it available, and hope you will continue to do so even as the cash continues to pour in. If I was anywhere close to retirement, I'd be a subscriber instantly, but I just like financial planning as a hobby. I recommend it to family and friends. You've created a great, intuitive product and absolutely deserve your success.
Thanks so much. Really appreciate that. We’ve always wanted the tool to be accessible to anyone interested in financial planning, even just as a hobby, so it’s great to hear the basic version has been useful.
Do you think it strikes the right balance between free access and a sustainable paid model?
I think your method is perfect. Having to make notes and re-enter my settings is just the right amount of frustrating, that each time I'm tempted to buy it. I think most people who are less stubborn (cheap) than I would pay the second time they need the tool.
Having the free no-saving model as a public service is hopefully a win-win for you. The public has access to a financial planning tool, and if they need to take their finances more seriously they can start the paid model.
I also like the prompt you've added which says something like /hey, you lost your settings because you're using the free mode, but we can recover them to save you time/. Good detail.
Wild - I hit the same "no financial software meets my needs" around the same time as you guys (late 2020 in my case), and started building for myself as well: https://github.com/mieubrisse/wealthdraft
Only, I never had the courage to make the leap to building an actual product out of it. Huge congrats to you guys; going to take a look at Projection and see if I can finally retire my homegrown stuff!
Always encouraging to see that ideas can work out. I'm not quite managing the "let's build a team" aspect just yet but otherwise similar journey and outcome over a (slightly) longer period.
I just wanted to not deal with certificates, now I deal with certificates all day every day lol: https://certifytheweb.com
Probably a couple of hours on support per day on average, some days less, some days more. The vast majority of users don't ask for support, they prefer to read the docs, read the community forum, goggle stuff or hunt-and-peck options in the app. Roughly 90% use the free version. If everyone used the paid version I could have a very large team, but the reality is the product competes with many free tools.
If you update the app or refine docs in response to previous support questions it does streamline the experience but there are always folks who just don't read docs and there are many who will purchase the app just for access to support so they can figure something out.
I'm sure some apps are more support heavy than others, but ours is aimed at system administrators and with that comes an assumed level of competence (in reality, many people are only in the role because nobody else could/would do it but even they are quite independently resourceful).
The disadvantage of users helping themselves is that you don't get feedback from them or learn about their use cases. Knowing how/why people are using your stuff is really valuable for development, so if I had the team for it then dedicated support engineers would follow up with customers early on even if they don't have issues.
Did you consider adding an optional survey (or just an input or two) somewhere in setup or the onboarding flow? I bet some % of people would willingly tell you how/why they are using the software.
Congrats! I’ve been a customer and have used it monthly since April 2021 when I first saw it here. It has been essential in planning out major life financial decisions as I’ve changed jobs, gotten married, and now as we consider children and purchasing a home.
I’ve appreciated the addition of new features over time and have recommended the tool to many friends and relatives. Hope to see another post in a couple years when you’ve hit $10M/yr!
I'm grateful to hear it's made such a difference for you, and that early support back in 2021 means more than you know. In the down months and challenging times, it's the encouragement from early adopters like you that kept me going.
I was a customer first. It was the product I had been searching for in my own financial planning, so I immediately saw the potential. When Kyle and I finally met, we hit it off right away. We aligned on the important things and shared a clear vision for where it could go. I’d always had the itch to bootstrap and help build something meaningful and sustainable, so I knew pretty quickly it was the right next move for me.
thanks! consistently putting in those hours wasn't easy. it became the only time in life I've had elevated blood pressure. but you're right that I probably wouldn't have gotten here without burning the candle at both ends like that.
at the time, I was too risk-averse to go all-in right away, and this was the best de-risking strategy I came up with. luckily, my schedule is now more balanced again. (a little lol)
I remember seeing this on HN years ago. Congrats on the growth! I think this is still an underserved field (shockingly, considering how many people it impacts).
I really wish just saving a basic plan to refer back to didn't cost $100/yr. The one-off 'Basic' plans never made sense to me, considering it takes hours to set up a relatively complete model -- might not even have time to do it all in one sitting.
Thanks! Supporting Basic users comes at a real cost, but we want planning to stay accessible for everyone. To us, one-off planning feels like a better alternative than stripping down the product or selling user data.
Funny thing is he's my fiancé's bird, which she's had for 20 years, but somehow the only person he likes now is me. Kind of a bummer for her. But he's happy I guess haha
ProjectionLab offers a lifetime plan. How does this factor into profitability - as they'll never be able to bill this subset of customers again (for the same product)? At what point does this group of users start to degrade the performance of the business - simply because there is no more input for their required output?
The lifetime plan is priced higher than expected LTV, so it's profitable upfront.
We wanted to offer an option for early adopters with subscription fatigue. From the start, it has been a way to reinvest in the project: initially to support Kyle’s time, and now to fund growth that drives recurring subscriptions.
We may sunset new lifetime sales in the future, since a one-time payment model doesn’t align as well with our goal of building and maintaining PL over the long term.
Great job on this webapp, it's a really easy-to-use platform. I've toyed with the same startup idea myself, having tracked my personal finances and life projection for years now using Google Sheets, Grafana and other tools.
Just an annecdotal bit of feedback: I would like to continue using ProjectionLab but $109/year is beyond what I'm willing to spend, especially given ProjectionLab doesn't integrate with any live tracking of property prices / investment portfolio valuation etc.
If it were $40/year I probably would subscribe. But $109 is too much to justify (and I am reasonably well off).
Have you A/B tested different pricing levels to find the sweet spot that maximises revenue?
We've done some pricing experimentation over the years, and it's possible we're actually still positioned too cheap right now for the value the platform provides.
Personal finance is a pretty broad space, and it's common for different people to come to this with varying desires and expectations.
In our experience, the people who see the value in a good long-term DIY financial plan view our current pricing as extremely affordable, especially compared to traditional financial planning services which often charge $3-5k for a PDF and a pat on the back.
Anyway, if automated tracking is the piece that's most important to you, it might be worth noting that we do plan to add more options for that. But that work -- and all the other controversial implications of it that I mentioned in another comment -- just needs to be prioritized against all the other highly requested things on the product roadmap, based on what the community really wants the most.
I tend to agree with the sentiment. The only reason I subscribed to ProjectionLab was to appreciate the hard work of Kyle. Otherwise, "New Retirement" (now called Boldin) serves my purpose. It provides similar features and it provides automatic updates too.
Thanks for the recommendation. I just tried Boldin and it looks good, but seems to be US-centric? I'm in the UK and it didn't model my situation very accurately unfortunately
I think it can vary from person to person depending on your goals. For me, an important signal was that complete strangers were willing to pay. That first Show HN post made all the difference. Without that, this could have ended up in my side project graveyard with 100 other projects.
I've only published a small handful of things with a buy button, and all of them were things I used myself. I got into coding in middle school learning how to make simple 2D games to play with friends, and the vast majority of my personal projects over the years have just been for fun.
Maybe validation isn't one big moment, but maybe validation could be many small moments. So, those first 5 users: small validation. First 1K MRR: small validation. Etc. I think the point of the article is to be persistent and if you're getting small validations along the way, then those are indicators to keep going. At least, that's my take.
I only have a product that makes $6k per month, but from my point of view, the validation is how many paying users sign up per day. Even one per day can add up. Hope this helps.
Congratulations on your progress! I’ve been in website development for almost half a year now, but I haven’t earned a single cent yet. Do you have any advice for beginners like us?
Congratulations. I will be checking it out as I am a big fan of FIRE. Also my daughter has 2 cockatiels one for each shoulder. But they usually end up on one as they like to hang out together.
oh neat! I was surprised how long their lifespan is -- my fiancé has had ours for over 20 years... although for some reason his allegiance flipped a few years ago, and now he only flies to me, not her.
It is interesting how most comments talk about “the right way to do it” but the post mostly seems to say persisting and just developing more is the important thing
thanks! I'm not a fast blog post writer, and sometimes feel guilty taking time away from building to draft updates like this (took me a couple days to write and rewrite this one). glad to hear it turned out to be a decent read.
I would like to understand what all market data is built in for the historical simulations and future predictions. I currently do financial projections in Excel, the critical missing part for my own calculations being the market data.
How long is the free trial for premium version? (I could not find on the website.)
great timing.
In fact, I was just looking for somethin like this.
Was going to vibe-code this into life, but your price point is spot on and frankly I prefer supporting other fellow entrepreneurs.
The struggle is real, thank you for being a positive light to all who are on this path. Best to you!
Also, thank you for sharing the ups and downs. Seeing the details of the monthly bars chart was super enlightening. I usually only see the nice looking overall positive growth chart without any nuance, so I really appreciate the transparency
Thanks! Seeing indie hackers building in public transparently about the ups and downs like pieter levels, danny postma, jon yongfook, etc, really inspired me early on. So I decided to try to emulate that. (Well, partly: idk how some of those guys post 100x a day)
One thing I'd do differently is quit my day job earlier. It shouldn't have taken 2.5 years to work up the courage to do that.
Partly I was scared of putting my own projections at risk. But eventually I realized I'd have way more regret if I passed up the opportunity to go all-in on something I loved.
> Back in 2021, I was inspired by the financial independence movement and wanted a better way to plan my own life. I couldn’t find the right tool, so I started building.
That sounds a bit like selling shovels to the miners. Which is not a, uh, dig at the project, just an observation.
Congrats on building a business that is both profitable and has over $1M in ARR.
Do you share any info on margins/profit, which could vary widely for a business like this (depending, for example, on how much is spent on customer acquisition)
We noticed a lot of tools neglect international use cases, so from the beginning we've focused on building with global flexibility in mind. About 80% of our customers are US-based, but we have users all over the world and offer international tax presets and account types.
I saw this, thought "wow this is great, I sure miss living in the US where good tools like this are available, everything in Europe is crap" but lo and behold, there's the Netherlands tax preset. Fantastic.
I think there may be a few wrinkles in the nl tax code that are tricky to capture with the current framework, but it has been a goal from the beginning to be as inclusive as possible for international scenario modeling. I'm continually making refinements there, and always open to ideas and suggestions if you have some.
I haven’t used the tool, but what’s the most against AI/LLM models? I ask, because I’ve used ChatGPT for similar, and it spits out decent answers. More so, the more data you feed to it.
GPT is not bad at high-level guesstimates, but there's a LOT that goes on under the hood to make a detailed, accurate, responsive, and tax-aware long-term planning system with a good UX for nuanced scenario comparisons and what-ifs. At current capability levels, AI tools aren't a great replacement for that in my experience. But we'll see if that changes as they continue to evolve...
Congrats!! I can definitely relate to that roller coaster feeling of first internet money -> "its so over feeling" though definitely not as successful as you yet :D
I noticed most tools neglect international scenarios because the US market is big and it's easier to focus on that. So I decided to be different and try to build with as much international flexibility as possible. We have a bunch of international account types and tax preseta, including some for the UK.
It is so revealing, especially to people like me who naturally tend to think that just automation of processes is going to make something people want. This book is, by far, the best resource I found to get out of that mindset and learn how to get real feedback.
Thanks for sharing your impressive journey. It's always refreshing to see a story that promotes grit and resilience, rather than the instant exponential growth often glorified by wannabe millionaires online.
Glad to hear it resonated. And also glad I didn't start this project with the expectation of quick success, hype, or exponential growth. If I had, there's no way I would have made it through the slower early years.
During the first few years, I was approached by dozens of potential “partners.” Several wanted an outsize equity stake to essentially just make suggestions.
A warning to others starting new ventures: once you get a whiff of traction, and sometimes even before then, the parasites will ooze out of various nooks and crannies, attempting to latch onto a fresh new host.
HN loves to pound on MBAs weaseling their way into startups, but opportunists may come from unexpected quarters.
I experienced a classmate sidling up to offer "translation services" for 2% of outstanding shares. Then there was a startup that proposed a "merger" which would basically allow them to walk away from failure in exchange for equity.
how do you define PMF? I keep hearing conflicting definitions. Seems like any time someone declares they've found it, there's another who jumps in to explain why they technically haven't yet.
The question is really just how big of a market does this serve? You've made it to the point where anyone entering the FIRE market will likely stumble upon your product as a top recommended tool (just judging by the praise here). Maybe it can tap into the larger, but more generic, financial/retirement planning market. To me, it seems well on it's path to be a YNAB which has a high amount of word of mouth recommendations, but perhaps covers a larger market.
one of the nice things about being lean and bootstrapped is there's less pressure to chase the mass market.
so we need to worry less than a venture-backed company probably would about just how far outside of the FIRE community this has a lot of appeal.
that being said, there are certainly a lot of people who would benefit from having a long-term financial plan. here's to hoping your ynab comparison turns out to be apt!
lol so have we gone from "wicked PMF" to just being "onto something"?
the rear-view thing sounds kinda like "you'll know it when you see it"... which I'm sure is true for some people, but idk if I would know when to declare PMF without a more precise definition.
Yes. I'm saying the first HN post was a great signal, but a probability. It could have flopped from there. But sales from a cold HN post to me is good pot odds, so stay in the game!
The rear view mirror thing is of course true: you can only know the market by testing it by trying to sell your thing to it. Anything forward looking is a prediction.
You are always making decisions that are like bets.
Definitely agree on thinking in bets and probabilities.
Is your sense that we're officially at PMF now? Or maybe last year even?
Or do you think the question is fundamentally subjective and depends on who you ask and what numbers seem compelling to them, like you kind of alluded to before?
I'd say we reached PMF a couple years ago the way I define it (solid customer acquisition from organic sources & word-of-mouth, strong retention, sustainable growth).
I was just curious if others might look at it differently, since I know definitions can vary. And like you said, some people might look at this update and dismiss it as still really small-time.
Thanks! It's interesting how easy it is to move the goalposts on product vision. It has come such a long way since the beginning, but I still wake up every day thinking about how much more I feel compelled to build.
after that first Show HN back in 2021, the majority of our growth has been product-led and word-of-mouth.
some bloggers and thought leaders in the financial independence space also found the tool and shared it in the early years, which helped get some momentum going.
we're finally starting to make a little headway now with SEO, and we're beginning to reinvest/experiment with some paid channels for the first time this year.
Kyle and I talked when he wasn't full time on this yet, I wanted to invest in it, well, anyway we talked about it a lot. Sufficed to say: I am SOOO proud of him! Genuinely awesome and brilliant dude. :)
Not really the point of the post, but it was nice to see a pic of Kyle working with his bird on his shoulder instead of a stock photo or some AI slop generated image.
How has your experience been running a discord server? I imagine it's useful for feedback but time consuming to manage? I'm reluctant to start one as I'm concerned about the time consumption.
Also, how did you find Jon and what was their skillset when you met? Did they come on as a contractor in the beginning?
I think managing any community is time consuming, but I like that discord feels real-time and efficient, with fun emojis, easy media sharing, and a mix of text channels and forum channels.
For the first few years, I was up at all hours answering questions. It feels amazing to offload some of that now that we have more of a team.
Like he mentioned in another comment here, Jon actually found me.
They can be very interesting, both in the now and historically. They often aren't, when the problems were blindingly obvious and any mistakes ones that have been made countless times already, but the same can be said of success stories: without novel specifics there are only so many ways to say “we stuck at it and eventually pushed through and/or got lucky”.
Failure stories frequently aren't posted by the authors, they don't think it is interesting enough but someone else did. Such stories are often written as a post-mortem for those originally invested (in terms of intellectual interest, being a user of [thing-or-service], or financial investment) or even just as a therapy exercise before moving on, and not pushed to a wider audience by the author.
> failure posts are way less interesting than the authors think they are.
It depends; you can learn a lot more from a failure than from a success. Every success has some element of good luck in it but that element is difficult to identify.
Every failure has a number of non-luck related reasons for failing, which are usually easily identified.
> Does it even say what the product or service is?
Do you really need spoon-feeding that directly?
The whole site is about the product. Much more information about it is literally a click-or-two away. Describing it specifically on that page, given how much information is already around it on directly linked pages, would seem superfluously wordy (even to me, someone who just used “superfluously” instead of “overly”).
> Or is it self-congratulatory spam?
Largely, yes. But no more than so people having anniversary parties are showing off, do you begrudge that sort of thing too?
I much prefer that to a self-aggrandising comment essentially stating “I'm better than them because I wouldn't post something like that” (yes, as some may be wondering, I am self-aware enough to acknowledge the strong touch of hypocrisy in that comment!).
"Spoon-feeding?" Saying WTF the product is isn't spoon-feeding. Expecting people to run around and do Web searches (or even roam around other pages at the domain) because posters are too lazy to add three descriptive words is douchey as hell, and way too often accepted (and even actively promoted) here.
"I much prefer that to a self-aggrandising comment essentially stating 'I'm better than them because I wouldn't post something like that'"
I don't see anyone saying that. What I said was, why waste our time with empty blather masquerading as a how-to?
> Expecting people to run around and do Web searches (or even roam around other pages at the domain)
One. Single. Click.
Two if you go via one of the menus not clicking the main logo.
> because posters are too lazy to add three descriptive words
As far as the writer is concerned, if you are looking at the blog you are already interested and know what you are looking at. Is it their fault that someone deep-ish linked without providing extra context for you?
> why waste our time with empty blather masquerading as a how-to?
You could have just moved on and read something else, accepting that not everything is written for everyone, and not wasted more time moaning about it…
Why are you being such a stick-in-the-mud? It's an interesting and inspiration post on HN about a successfull bootstrapped indie startup. HN is primarily a startup & tech-driven community, so obviously we're all interested in stories like this. In fact, I miss the days where HN was almost solely startup post-mortems or success stories. How is the post even remotely self-congratulatory spam?
Doesn't fucking matter even if you reach a billion dollars with a boring ass business of drawing financial charts. Those charts are manipulated by HFTs, hedge funds and what not. It is naive to think you, a retail investor, stand a chance
It's so, so , so hard to walk the line between persistence (which leads to glory) and stubbornness (which leads to more time following already wasted time.)
Congratulations for walking this line correctly.
I agree that some sort of market validation is necessary to at least pretend you are on the former not the latter. Those early usage spikes are helpful reminders that there is a business here somewhere.
I'll also make a note that you spent time on marketing from the early days. Writing blog posts, promoting said posts, having a Discord server, committing to answer emails, all of this is marketing and its likely lead to success more than the code.
I notice whenever there was a dip in revenue, marketing (in the form of more blog posts) was the response. I suspect that was intentional, and definitely a better approach than "let me go away and silently code more features."
So there are valuable lessons to others here. Congratulations not just on the current success but also on sharing the path that leads to success. Ultimately you can show the way, but you can't make people learn from it.
Oh, and I like the bootstrapping approach. I did the same, and I'm not sorry. It's longer and harder but also skips an enormous amount of extra work.
Thanks. For a while there, it wasn't clear to me which side of the line I was walking.
Something that stuck with me from Poor Charlie’s Almanack is that low expectations are a cornerstone of a happy life. I built this for myself first, so when people actually signed up and paid, it was incredibly motivating. I was thrilled to spend my free time treating those early customers like royalty and building more of what they wanted.
If I had instead come into this with the expectation of quick success, I doubt I would have made it through those early years.
And cheers from one bootstrapper to another. It's not easy, but I can't imagine a more rewarding way to build.
Another lesson here: you built for a specific community who is passionate, money-motivated, and concentrates in specific social spaces (forums, reddit, etc.) where you can promote your business. This isn't always a recipe for success, but it's a damn good starting point. You need to adjust to the sensitivities of the community to avoid overly self-promotional content, but you always have a clear channel to promote your very specific product that meets their needs.
More importantly, the site looks pristine, with soft, artsy, techie, nature images with calming, strong, and welcoming colors and vibes, and and follows what at least used to be good SEO practices with a blog that is kept up to date frequently enough, etc.
If you don’t know a good site, you’ll never be able to develop one or pay for one without using a ok template.
It’s very much what Sahil Lavingia recommends doing in The Minimalist Entrepreneur
+1 from someone who also bootstrapped a side project into a 7 figure business, and just happens to be absorbing some lessons from Poor Charlie’s Almanac on Audible recently.
ha I listened on Audible too. great audiobook for a walk after dinner. Charlie's advice really holds up. which part have you gotten the most out of so far?
also, congrats!
Congrats. A word of warning: I scaled my SaaS site to $1M in AAR in a few years, but then a lot of competition appeared and a decade later it's still at only $1.5M. I have a good time running it and I can live comfortably while feeding my team, but with my initial success I had hoped it would go up further faster. So keep those expectation low, the next million may not come as easily as the first.
Knowing what you know now, is there anything strategic you would have done differently after reaching that 1M ARR milestone?
Good question. The main problem I had was being too slow scaling up from 1 person. Building a good team is tricky, it's very hard to convince great devs to join you when you are by yourself at a time when they had a pick of jobs from FAANG. Even if you can match the salary of well funded startups, other companies can offer working with a larger team.
So you have three options: 1. hire sub-par people, 2. get VC funding to hire an entire team, or 3. continue doing most stuff by yourself.
I tried hiring sub-par people. That was a mistake, they took way more effort and negative energy than I got in return from the salary I paid them. I did not want to take on VC funding to be able create a large team at once, and in hindsight I think that was a good idea because several of my competitors did, and then had to fold 5 years later when they ran out of funding and their revenue was not high enough. (Also, the freedom of being a 100% owner and not having anyone tell you what to do was a major quality of life improvement for me that I never want to give up again once I tasted it. I hope you savor it as I do!)
So being smarter about hiring is what I would do differently, but that's easier said than done. I think the job market today probably does have more high quality devs available that don't mind being employee number two.
Edit: to add, once competitors appeared it became much more of a marketing game than a web dev game, because customers just tend to click the first three google hits. Getting good at marketing, and hiring the right people for that, is a whole other ballgame if you're a dev.
I think there's a certain type of engineer that actively prefers working in a small team where you can make an outsized impact and wear many hats. I'm one of them lol.
I wonder if you could bring on just one really good dev who matches that description vs scaling up to a larger team. In many cases, a very small team of A+ players can beat a large team of B players.
Although it sounds like you're saying marketing/distribution may have played a larger role in your trajectory? In hindsight, do you think focusing your team-building efforts on the marketing side would have been a better strategy?
Yes, I agree, one or two good engineers should easily be enough, and preferable to a large team. In between having programmers on staff I ended up doing most of it myself. It was not for want of trying, but even getting someone to apply is hard when good engineers were getting dozens of emails and calls from recruiters a week (back then). In the end, doing too much things by myself caused my company to be a bit slower with design updates, not enough attention to marketing, etc. And although there are way more people available who claim they can do marketing, finding a good one turned out to be just as hard. But some things, like well-funded competitors appearing that outspend you on Google Ads, are not under your control. I'm still happy with the end-result though, it's a great life style business.
> It's so, so , so hard to walk the line between persistence (which leads to glory) and stubbornness (which leads to more time following already wasted time.)
> Congratulations for walking this line correctly.
As much as I like to agree with this message ... isn't there a big portion of luck involved here that makes the difference between the two sides of this line? In other words, aren't we seeing huge survivorship bias at play here?
That's what makes the line so hard to walk. Surely skill helps, but more than most like to admit it's the unpredictability of outside forces that makes the line really hard to walk.
There is a fallacy in over application of the survivorship bias concept.
Literal survival for early cultures was often a matter of luck. Agriculture was an innovation that improved the odds. Early cultures that practiced agriculture outperformed those that did not, and were more likely to survive black swan events. All major cultures in existence are now based in agriculture.
Should we assume then that because we only see agrarian cultures that that is not useful information, because of survivorship bias in the resulting sample?
On the contrary, survival itself is the signal that is useful… it’s really a matter of what behavior the signal can be attributed to- was it the agriculture, or was it the human sacrifices? Was it the red ochre face paint? The storing of grain in pots instead of skins?
Failure bias is just as large of a red herring. It’s easy to imagine that it retrospect, we understand why failures happen, and sometimes the reasons are very clear. That’s why there is often more to be learned from failures than from successes. But still, it’s easy to look at the things they did right that successful example B also did, and then conclude those things weren’t critical to success because they sometimes end in failure.
The point is that we shouldn’t judge the value of information based on ideas like “survivor bias” but instead look for more methodical and logical connections between causes and outcomes, and not fall victim to cargo-culting nor casual, hand wavey dismissal of potential lessons.
Survivorship bias mitigation is a matter of determining which survivor signals are instrumental , and those which are coincidental.
Many things are fraught with risk and low probabilities of success. That does not make them primarily a matter of luck.
Aviation is a great example of an environment that is nearly 100 percent risk, where without knowledge and the correct tools the very small chance of not dying would be purely a matter of luck.
Even carefully thought out comments like the above are only hints and ideas relating to making sense of the world. They don’t talk about building quantitative predictive or causal models to disentangle the many factors driving success, failure, and everything in between.
I recommend The Book of Why by Judea Pearl as a starting point for digging into the lesser-known techniques of assessing causality. The causality work over the last couple of decades is still under-appreciated and not used often enough.
One is unlikely to find anything close to rigor when it comes to business or entrepreneurial books. They can be a starting point for analysis, but their bias to tell an interesting story and sell copies often work at odds with truth seeking.
At the risk of oversimplification, one decent model for acting comes from decision theory. (1) Look at the data probabilistically and act accordingly. (2) If you don’t have enough data, assess the cost/benefit of acquiring more.
But we don’t have the time or the discipline to make all important decisions this way, do we? Probably not. So, (3): if you act on intuition, be honest with yourself about that. Be curious about yourself and your decisions and how you can do better. Focus on areas where improvement is likely to make an outsized impact. (This leads back to #2, except it is about seeking better knowledge and self-awareness instead of just data.)
I try not to exaggerate, but these three principles might be sufficient to subsume all other business advice.
Embrace the uncertainty and move forward anyway.
Thanks for the book recommendation! I’ll look at that.
>> Embrace the uncertainty and move forward anyway.
This. This is the key factor that prevents attempts at success, or leads to failure by a thousand cuts.
There is no gain without risk. Significant gain usually comes through significant risk. Position yourself in life to be sufficiently resilient to take 10:1 bets with 100:1 odds until you can weather the 100:1 bets with 100000:1 odds. Avoid the 1:50 bets that pay at 1:50 odds like the plague… they are a comfortable quagmire of rotting aspirations.
We are not in disagreement here. Of course it makes sense to study successes and figure out differences in patterns of behavior making success more likely. Causal or not, that is another matter.
However, it's not black-or-white. Once an aspect that has likely contributed to success is identified, it's often framed as if focusing on that aspect guarantees success. That's an easy mistake to make if all observed cases of success exhibit it. But it's far from a guarantee, other aspects my play a role too. Like luck, for example. That's what I meant by mentioning survivorship bias.
What's missing from the application of the survivorship bias concept is that it really only applies if failure means death or a total wipeout. Pieter Levels for instance, a known success in the indie hacking scene, has created something like 70 projects and only a handful of them made any money. Presumably he also learned something from each project making the success of the next more likely.
It's hugely about luck. We can look back on any success story and identify what made it successful (sometimes) but it only has a little predictive power. Success in startupping ultimately comes from either trying a lot of things (amplifying your luck until it approaches 100%) or survivorship bias when you get lucky on your first try and then write about how smart you are.
It helps to have an idea of what might succeed, by studying things that succeeded before and the present business environment, but that increases each attempt's success chance to, like, 2% rather than 0.2%.
(There's nothing wrong with getting lucky, we just probably shouldn't plan around it being the normal case. It has extreme variance by definition.)
Luck plays a huge part.
But it's not the only part. All the luck in the world won't win me an Olympic medal. Yes, luck plays a part. But it also takes the right work, learning the correct skills, having the discipline and so on.
Working on the right thing, at the right time, in the right way are all crucial ingredients. All the luck in the world though can't help you if you're playing the wrong game.
That's luck. No one knows the right thing, the right time, or the right way. Studying past right things, past right times, and past right ways can give you maybe a 2% chance of getting them right instead of 0.2%. Only after someone got them right (by chance) can we look back and say "Wow! That person got them right!"
If he wouldn't he wouldn't have make it.
You have to take the risk in your life or you're gonna be stuck where you are.
Was he lucky? Perhaps.
Would he make it if he wouldn't risk it and put in all the work that he need with nothing to show if he would fail?
He would not.
I think we're not in disagreement that both play a role. But maybe not in how much each contributes. My claim is that luck is often heavily underappreciated. That's not surprising - it's hard to measure, and it feels less good to attribute your success to something outside your control like random chance rather than your hard work, dedication, skill, smarts, whatnot. Nobody gets praise for luck, and ultimately success stories are often going after praise if they are honest with themselves. Which is fine, but don't discount the luck factor.
Just being born a white heterosexual male in a developed country somewhere between the 70s and the 2000s puts you so vastly ahead of everybody else that even if you don't tick all those boxes the luck factor is enormous. Few people openly appreciate that.
> isn't there a big portion of luck involved here that makes the difference between the two sides of this line? In other words, aren't we seeing huge survivorship bias at play here?
Luck and survivorship bias may not be the same thing.
Sure, but when you can’t clearly attribute the survivor’s survival, there’s still no meaningful conclusion to draw. And given how many different ways there are for businesses to succeed or fail, that are never ever repeatable due to the passing of time in the market, then I think attribution is impossible, so having the humility to somewhat attribute luck is admirable.
> It's so, so , so hard to walk the line between persistence (which leads to glory) and stubbornness (which leads to more time following already wasted time.)
“Courage is knowing it might hurt and doing it anyway. Stupidity is the same thing.
And that’s why life is hard.”
Persistence and Stubbornness are just different words for the same personality trait. The former is used when looked at a positive light while the latter is used in the negative.
You're persistent if your project succeeded but you're stubborn if you keep at it despite unfavourable outcomes.
The way I see it, persistent founders keep looking for evidence and adapt / adjust course based on what they learn. Stubborn ones just keep going, even when there are clear signals that it's time to step back and refocus.
So the difference between the two is just luck?
I apply to a thousand job offers, get rejected every time => I'm stubborn.
I apply for job #1001, I get the job => I'm persistent.
I would say that you are persistent if you keep getting rejected but keep improving but using feedback and you would be stubborn if you don't change a thing while keeping being rejected.
Yes.
You were stubborn for applying for jobs beyond you.
Your persistence led you to finding that amazing job.
Got selected => lucky
Would not have had a chance to be lucky if not => persistent
> It's so, so , so hard to walk the line between persistence (which leads to glory) and stubbornness (which leads to more time following already wasted time.)
Strange analogy. I'd say stay away from that line and run into the direction of persistence.
I love how these stories always start with “I just wanted to scratch my own itch” and end with “...and now I’m running a company with a payroll bigger than my old day job.” It’s inspiring, but also a little bit intimidating. Makes you wonder how many potential seven-figure ideas are just sitting in people’s “maybe someday” folders. The real lesson here? Ship something, even if it’s ugly. You can’t optimize what doesn’t exist.
To me, a lesson is: If you keep chugging along on your idea then you might get lucky and be the one out of 10,000 for whom this single-entrepreneur-bootstrap project works out, you get to be your own boss, have a big payroll and it ends up as a success story on HN. Without that luck, you are among the other 9,999 where it just died. But without trying, you are guaranteed failure (though with less frustration perhaps).
Yeah, this resonates with me. My side project for 6 years was generating very, very little. Enough for a few pints a month.
Fun fact: The project survived a total destruction of the datacenter where it was hosted (remember the ovh incident?) which took it offline for maybe 4 months (no backups at the time). Luckily the server it was on didn't get melted.
Also at some point I started questioning why was I still working on it for so little. My wife convinced me to keep going and to be honest I still enjoyed working on it.
Then on year 7 things started to change, and on year 8 I was able to quit my daily job! I'm on year 10 now. It's not a 7 figure business, but I enjoy every single day. Also the flexibility it gives me is excellent.
That's an impressive number of years to stick with a product you questioned. Probably 2x longer than Google would have maintained it lol
(who says products by indie devs always have higher long-term support risk?!)
I'm really happy to hear it turned around for you. The 4 months of down time sound terrifying. Can you share more about how you navigated that, how it impacted customers, and what you were able to restore vs what you couldn't, and what processes you changed in the aftermath?
My business is transactional where email is still king for all after sales support. I guess that makes it way easier to handle than a SaaS one.
The biggest impact for the business was not making any sale during this period and my SEO rankings going down. Actually the site disappeared from search. I guess the biggest impact for me - personally - was psychological. All production data was gone and I was seeing it as a sign I should just let it go. I had all the source code, so in theory I could do it, but not sure I would have the motivation to.
Then in the end my thingy was hosted in a section that was salvaged from the fire. I saw it as a sign that actually I SHOULD keep going, lol. I don't remember exactly how long it was off but yeah, 4-6 months. Everything was restored though.
The only thing I did was to implement automatic backups and to a different datacenter. I remember from the incident, one issue for many was their servers were hosted in Strasbourg with backups also hosted there.
I've touched on this in my last comment, but my wife is by far my biggest motivator. It's tough life for us working solo, with our minds playing tricks on us all the time. It always sounds so much easier to go and work for someone else again or to just start a new side project from scratch. Not sure if there's any Alex Hormozi fan here, but one thing he's always repeating is to not give up, not start anything new over and over and just keep pushing that one project.
Ah so with this business model there was minimal impact to existing customers? That's fortunate.
Out of curiosity, what kind of transactional product has a substantial production database that would be daunting to re-build in a 4-6 mo window given you still had the source code during that time?
And I hope you've taken your wife out for some nice dinners (or whatever she likes). Totally agree that having a supportive and encouraging partner can make all the difference in challenging times.
The business is a car rental platform for niche destinations https://bonjourpaco.com/
At the time I was working with maybe 30 providers and it would be doable to rebuild the server and reconfigure all providers, cars, insurance, etc. Content would probably take longer, but also doable. But at the time I took it as a sign to shift to something else.
Glad I didn't and that the project came back from the ashes, literally.
Neat, someday I'd like to see the Azores. I've heard good things.
FYI if you click on a destination name, it's currently throwing a 500 error.
Excellent, thanks for flagging!
Btw, there is a typo: renogiate should be renegotiate
Love the business. Appreciating every market is different… the Greek islands might be interesting to you.
It was a massive difference when I started in Cape Verde. Specially the way of working, level of service and insurance options available (mostly non-existent). It's very satisfying to look back and the progress made over the years where, in a way, I helped to improve the customer service provided by the small local companies, closer to what you would see in the western world.
What's also funny is that the "1st dollar" coming in in any business is such a rush, such an excitement. That still holds true in my case! Even though the business is the same across the 3 websites, it's such an excitement to see the Madeira one growing (where I started more recently), compared to the Azores where I've been at for some years now.
Can't help thinking that your business is somehow tied to your username. Now I'm intrigued! :)
It’s also entirely possible to make something that just gives you a little extra cash, which can be a huge difference. I imagine an extra $2,000 a month of fun, self-made income feels pretty incredible.
I see it in layers: I can have fun, I can learn something, I can make some extra cash, I can start something big.
"But without trying, you are guaranteed failure" >> But without trying you are limited to a relatively safe and certain affluent paycheck from your day job.
Well, you are at least guaranteed to not get this kind of success.
True but if you are building it for yourself then you will still have something useful in the end. Chances are that you also probably enjoyed or took satisfaction in the process of building it. Also, if it is truly a passion project and not just attempt to make money, it’s probably more interesting than most of the stuff shared.
There are probably tones of ideas that would be viable businesses if executed. One problem though is between "scratching my own itch" and "payroll bigger than my old day job" is working "4-6 hours every night after work, entire weekends, holidays". And even that is no guarantee of getting to a big payroll (another thread is discussing persistence vs stubborn).
Not many people are even in a position to do this (family, health etc), or have the mental and physical energy to do this for years. This is one of the potential benefits of something like UBI. It allows people to pursue these ideas without having to work another 9-5.
For me the lesson is: ship the thing that makes you feel like you are playing Golf doing it (assuming someone who plays Golf enjoys it alot).
The golfer won't regret their day on the course. And if you fail on the passion project it won't feel like a fail.
I have another idea too. It's the win anyway system. Pick something that if you fail you use those skills at work and get ahead. E.g. the side project is also the training for the gap in your career.
This is my plan now, launch a free product and use it to promote myself as a contractor or consultant. Commit to some time spent on maintenance weekly and consider it as part of the marketing time. Maybe I will be able to monetize it in the long term, but in the short term, I need it to escape the bottom of the barrel I am currently at. You don't get to have a good resume when you are tinkering with products on your own... and I realized that especially in this job market, I can only make decent money on my own. It helps that the product is quite technically complex, gives me ideas for blog posts and the idea itself is already validated (as a free product), but the existing implementations are poor. And I absolutely love developing it.
The big lesson for me is know what you are getting into. Look at the OP - he spent every spare hour he had. This is no joke. I have done something similar in the past for a time and I ended up constantly running into conflicts of priorities between that and personal life. I ended up wasting a few years, in both personal life and professional life, although the former hurts much more. This is how I ended up in a scenario where I have nothing to show and nothing to lose. I just hope I can do it all at some 50 hours per week total, where the product is just a part of the day job (promotes the consulting offering) and lower the volume of paid work as I need, if I want to have more time to make a big move with the product.
Exactly! If you can get some exposure as a « specialist », build a network or just learn a ton of new skills (marketing, accounting, PR, devops) it tends to be a win/win. That’s what I’m currently doing and by no mean would I have better myself as much in any other way.
If you enjoy Charlie’s, you will definitely enjoy Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, especially the part about being an « expert »: a few talks in empty classrooms in a famous Uni, a radio show nobody knows and voila, you get some cred!
I don’t really like golf but I’d imagine that if I did, I might stop liking it once I had to do it professionally every day even when I didn’t feel like it.
Choose not to pursue CS because of that. I like coding a lot and can spend lots of brainpower and time coding things I am interested in. Once you start working as a programmer, coding becomes something else. Therefore I rather take a different career path and can keep enjoying my little projects.
What career path did you pursue instead, and how does that fit into the framework of your life and goals? Do you ever wonder if you could have bounced around enough to find a CS role that might enhance rather than corrupt your passion? Or do the odds of that just seem too low in your experience?
See to me the "running my own company with a payroll bigger than my old day job" isn't something I'd want - it actually sounds like a total nightmare to me.
The whole point to me is getting to a stage where you can work when and where you want and only if you want to. Having it set up in such a way where its small enough to manage but big enough to self sustain if you wanted to go off on vacation for a few weeks at the drop of a hat.
Tell that to my brain, it's always optimizing what does not exist!
Thanks for the reminder.
Great post and congratulations.
Similar approach and story to myself, in that I started a side project for my own use and interest, and then released it to great feedback as a side hustle, went part-time and over the last 2.5 years managed to go full time.
I've yet to reach your $1M ARR though.. but hopefully getting there one day!
Recently wrote up a Year in Review which touches on similar learnings as you've written over the last year:
https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/ad-blocker-year-in-review...
Have also had a keen interest in FIRE over the years and hadn't heard of your product... personally I've just kept my own spreadsheet which runs through scenarios, progress etc.
Congrats on 350k downloads, sounds like you had a good year! You mentioned SEO finally kicking in. Do you attribute that to anything in particular? Any strategic changes you made? Also curious how you incorporate AI tools into your workflow, if at all.
> You mentioned SEO finally kicking in. Do you attribute that to anything in particular? Any strategic changes you made?
I attribute the search traffic growth to:
1. A critical mass of content, after a number of years of writing - without a lot of search traffic for the first few years
2. Re-wrote and polished some of my earlier articles so that they were improved
3. Wrote more guides related to my app which were helpful to users; such as:
Safari Extensions Guide - https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/safari-extensions-guide/
Best Web Browser - https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/best-web-browser-2025/
> Also curious how you incorporate AI tools into your workflow, if at all.
Not a lot myself, except for sometimes helping with polishing and checking of writing and sometimes coming up with options etc.
In my experience AI tools are like having a junior assistant – they can be helpful but you always need to check and polish everything they do.
In terms of scale/footprint, roughly how many articles did it take to achieve that critical mass of content?
And yeah, with the state of AI tooling, I think junior engineers, assistants, new grads, etc, may currently have the most to worry about.
It's not a lot of articles in total - only 35, with the first being published over 7 years ago.
You can see the full list here: https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/
Perhaps the age of the content helps, though I haven't done a deep dive into SEO practices myself. In the last year, when search traffic increased, I've increased the output to almost 1 article per month.
Would you have the same strategy if you were to do it again?
Do you have LLMs in mind in your SEO strategy (like really long articles bragging about how good your app are in a non human readable way?
Would love to have your thoughts on that!
Thanks for the question.
As I noted it took 7 years to actually get any substantial Google traffic – if I was to start again I would potentially change some of what I've written to be more effective or focus on different topics earlier.
However my approach is always to write what will be useful and interesting for humans, if Google search also finds it relevant then that's a bonus. I never write just for machines... as I think that's a long term losing strategy.
Ok thanks!!
Not the OP, but a quick look at the /sitemap.xml shows about 55 pages, the oldest of which seem to be dated 2018.
How concerned are you about Google’s AI summaries keeping people from going to your site as a lot of publishers are now seeing? Or maybe it does affect product sites as much?
The site's primary purpose is as a product site for my app. The content that I have written is for this purpose, with organic Google search traffic being a bonus.
Due to this, Google AI summaries are not a huge consideration.
This is great.. thanks for sharing!
It's an impressive accomplishment. I've always struggled to get through the valley of despair in a new project. I've decided that I can only build and sell things that I regularly use. Otherwise the signal is just too weak, and I eventually get burned out. But if I'm always a user of one, then at least it's validated for me.
Caring is kind of a superpower. And not just in terms of signal, but also the quality of work. I don't think this would have gone anywhere if I hadn't cared deeply about solving the problem in an elegant way.
Earlier in my career, I worked on some things as a corporate engineer that were hard to care about, and there's just no comparison.
>The willingness to doggedly show up every single day can take you to some really suprising and amazing places.
>Caring is kind of a superpower.
>the quality of work.
>I was thrilled to spend my free time treating those early customers like royalty
Well, the secret's out, thanks for that, now anybody can do it ;)
On my million-dollars project (now 10 employees) I hired someone for the support. She wasn’t in the startup ecosystem. What she was most surprised of / had to train most for was our requirement of benevolence: Always help the customer, even when it’s not in our scope.
She thinks I’m a superboss, but I keep repeating her: We have to be nice to customers, we also have to give benefits to employees, otherwise both would leave us. It’s not a choice, it’s market pressure.
What ecosystem was she in before?
Aw shit.
*drawing-board
Thank you so much Kyle for sharing all this. This is very inspiring. I will put a few more extra hours today in my project thinking about you.
I'd love to have some info about the hiring of Jon, anything you may feel like sharing, while I realize a lot of it is very confidential. For example:
- I am wondering how the working relationship got started since you write that he "spent a year contributing real value", and he was not asking for equity upfront. Did you hire him as contractor initially, did he volunteer his time?
- the structure of the deal with him, and of course the equity part, especially _if/while_ you are not planning to sell the business. Maybe you have some pointers on "possible deal structures" that you looked into without spilling the beans on the actual deal?
I know I am asking a lot, I hope it does not hurt to ask, so realistically I don't expect any answer, but any breadcrumbs would be so valuable/helpful! In any case, thank you so much already.
> I will put a few more extra hours today in my project thinking about you.
And that's the recipe for failure right there. Your passion side project needs to be fueled by passion, not thinking about somebody else's success that you are trying to replicate.
I find this such a strange comment, to be able to reach such a conclusion so quickly without any idea what my side project is, how much passion I have put into it, and how much still have in me, with no idea how many people I've helped already with it.
Like Kyle writes keep showing up to make it a little better every day. Today again I will show up, but today I'll think of him and it will help me.
What's your passion project? How do _you_ keep the motivation every day? How long has it been?
> Your passion side project needs to be fueled by passion
Maybe he's in that valley of despair right now that the article shows occurs many times. Passion is fleeting and at times you just need a little inspirational jolt to get back into it and regain some of that passion.
Also, to share a personal experience, passion is not sufficient. You need favorable conditions as well (or the ability to create them). For example, the article talks about working nights and weekends. I'm not sure if the author has kids or what the arrangement is in his family, but personally, as much as I wanted to work whole weekends on my passion project, I would feel like a shitty father if I ignored my kids over the weekend for months, so the project gets put on the back burner a lot while I'm biking with my kids outside and having fun.
I was definitely fortunate to attempt this in a compatible stage of life (no kids yet).
I'd like to think there will still be room for craft/creation if I become a parent someday. But I doubt this level of sustained focus (obsession?) over multiple years would have been possible or responsible in that scenario.
How do you differentiate between persistence or stuborness. I have been developing a SaaS product since 2020 which currently is at 3K ARR with a very slow growth (20%). It's a B2B and are we are still missing a bunch of features to make us on par with competitors. We did survive a couple of competitors that came and go as we still have our day jobs and running it costs peanuts ($$$).
It often feels I should give up but having had customers who used us for years makes me think we have something that one day will make serious money.
Are your existing customers vocal about what they love or wish you'd add? Do you know how they found you and what made them choose you over competitors? Is there a niche/segment within your larger TAM with a specific pain point you're solving really well? And how big is that segment?
Either way, if your existing customers don't all come from paid channels, and they're loyal, and you've outlasted multiple competitors, that already sounds like a real achievement to me. My progress was slow for years before things started to really pick up, so don't discount signs of traction if there are some meaningful ones.
Very vocal, we do have a very solid TODO list for another 12 months. They are also quite loyal and number of them are with us for 3+ years and they use software daily (its just a very small customer list overall). I do wonder sometimes why they stay with us given other competitors are much better. We mostly grew through word of mouth and cold emails. I believe we are already solving a fairly niche use case (TAM is few thousand customers in USA) and my idea is to grow revenue enough to go after larger TAM (several milion).
Word-of-mouth growth sounds like a good sign. And depending on your goals, sometimes building a defensible niche business, maximizing ARPU, and minimizing churn can be better than chasing the mass market. Could something like a referral program potentially move the needle?
What I'd really appreciate is a demo/sandbox version where I can try out the functionality without having to enter anything personal.
I appreciate that you have a (generous looking) free tier and various screenshots - but it just seems like something I'd want to play around with before taking the time to create an account and start entering personal data into.
We do offer a sandbox with preset examples that lets you explore the app. No need to enter any personal data, but you will need to sign up.
Thanks - I'll check it out then!
As someone that has tried and failed at many attempts over a decade, I just wanted to take a moment to congratulate you. This is so wonderful, and I couldn’t be happier for you. Thank you for sharing your journey, and lessons learned .
I’m now a single working mom supporting 2 young kiddos on my own, so my time has become limited; but I’ll be back :)
Thanks so much, that means a lot. It's challenging when time and life pull you in so many directions. Wishing you and your kids all the best. When you jump back in, I'll be rooting for you.
You tried which is more than 99.9999999%. Keep at it and focus on learning from your experiences. It will eventually come.
Co-founder of a somewhat complementary and somewhat competitive product. Just dropping in to say what Kyle has done with Projection Lab is nothing short of phenomenal. This is a tough space to build in, and he's built an amazing product.
Sometimes I wonder who makes more money: a VC backed founder like you with tens of millions in funding and 8 figure revenues, or a bootstrapped founder with a small team of contractors at $1m ARR.
You don't have to wonder: the days that VC backed founders make shit tons of money is long gone imho.
Thanks Ozzie, that means a lot coming from you. Building successfully in this space requires a passion for it, and that really comes through with the work you and your team are doing too.
This story is similar to the guys at senja.io: tech founder => marketing/growth person joins => business skyrockets to 1M ARR. It looks to me like a combination of having a product with some revenue and havingthe luck of someone like Jon joining.
I'd be more interested on how to find people like Jon tbh.
Interesting to see the inflection point when Jon joined. I recall something similar when Marko joined Plausible as a marketing person, which also started as a solo effort by a developer.
To my knowledge Pieter does both himself, but he built a sizable following online, which boosts all his marketing efforts.
Amazing story and huge congrats! It's funny how the tool itself seems quite niche-y, but bootstrapping to 1M ARR in 4 years definitely proves that hypothesis wrong; fantastic job :)
It's niche, but I wasn't really able to find anything else like it. I wanted to project our some retirement scenarios and my options seemed to be:
- Any of a few dozen "retirement calculators," each consisting of 6 fields and very simple outputs
- Building out a series of buggy spreadsheets
- Projection Lab
After messing around for it a bit, it was a "shut up and take my money" situation. It was cheap, it was powerful, it was nice to use, and it has been the foundation for my personal financial strategy for the last few years!
Thanks! Initially I had been looking around for an existing tool to use myself, so I knew there was at least one person out there willing to pay for something like this. And r/financialindependence has 2.3m members, so I hoped there might turn out to be more than one.
Congratulations! But I’m disappointed with no mention of profit level in this post or another one linked. My last business I scaled to 500K ARR in less than two years, with $20K in total annual profit including the $0 my cofounder and I paid ourselves for many hours of work. I shut it down a year later and strongly regret the amount of work I put into it.
There’s an ARR metric trap in the founder community where people focus on revenue rather than on reaching a level of take-home income comparable to what they could make at a normal job. The former is a lot easier than the latter (especially in the US for people who can take home $250K fairly easily working in tech) - as the saying goes, you can make infinite revenue by selling dollars for 99 cents.
Profit margin started out around 90% in the early years, but is looking more like 65% this year now that we're making a concerted effort to reinvest into growth, building a team, etc.
I don't think I'd call earning $250k "easy". Yes a significant % of us on HN are there, but we're still in the minority.
If ARR grows enough, there should be plenty of room in there to pay the founders.
For extreme examples of ARR growth at 0% profit paying off, look at Uber, Amazon, and ServiceNow. I know these are very much outliers. All three had rapid revenue growth but profits at (or far below) zero. But for all three, the founders are sitting pretty today.
https://valustox.com/NOW
https://valustox.com/UBER
https://valustox.com/AMZN
> For extreme examples of ARR growth at 0% profit paying off
Pretty sure parent was referring to gross profit, because that's what you'd look at to pay your salary. These examples are not relevant.
I share your frustration with the endless focus on revenue, rather than profit (looking at you, indiehackers.com). I suspect in many cases it is because they are embarassed to disclose their profit.
But congrats to the OP. It is impressive growth for a bootstrapped business.
Congrats! I'm a customer. Haven't used it too much but so far I like having it to check in periodically. One wish list item: live securities prices to avoid having to copy/paste values all the time. For example, with that you can have a live snapshot of the values in most brokerages
Account linking for automated balance updates is our most upvoted and most controversial feature request.
I agree it would be really nice if it worked well, but my understanding from other founders is that aggregator reliability still leaves a lot to be desired in 2025, and is always a huge expense and support burden. As a small, bootstrapped team building a long-term planning tool where current balances are only a small piece of the picture, we need to be really careful about what we choose to take on. Currently there are still dozens of other high-priority feature requests that will also deliver real value but without those downsides.
I do go back-and-forth on this though. And I think eventually there will come a time for it.
Glad to hear you're enjoying the tool, and thanks so much for your support!
p.s. also might be worth noting that there is a plugin system, and community members have built integrations that can pull in balance updates automatically from some of the popular budgeting tools.
Account linking should be reasonably straightforward in the EU with PDS2 open data. I was able to hack together some python via one of the intermediary services to get up to date bank data. There is the complication that the bank doesn't always have fully live data.
Approaches involving password sharing you're right to stay well away from.
To provide a data point from a long-time ProjectionLab user, I don't really need account linking. I use Monarch Money to link cash and CC accounts to track spending.
I use a custom Google Sheet to track retirement portfolio performance. If =GOOGLEFINANCE isn't enough, there is a nice paid extension called WiseSheets, which adds a =WISE function that fills all the gaps.
My monthly ProjectionLab process is to update the "Current Finances" values on the first of the month, using the values from the other tools. Works well enough for me!
I'm glad to hear you have a workflow for updating current finances that's already serving you well. I do plan to add a lot more automation/integration options, it's just always a question of where to invest my time to deliver the most value to the community efficiently.
Something people don't always realize instantly is that with a long-term planning tool, the point is to spend the bulk of your time focused on the future, not fixating on all the latest daily stock price fluctuations... in fact, those can sometimes be a source of noise/distraction.
I don't need/want account linking, I just want $VTSAX etc recent prices. I know it can be noise but what you're saving me from is really annoying copy/paste work when I come in quarterly to update numbers and track my progress.
sounds like that would also mean overhauling the data model to track individual positions within every account, not just balances?
and then folks would expect every account's asset allocation to be automatically derived from those positions too I imagine? that would differ a lot from how asset allocation modeling and change over time currently works in the tool.
maybe I'm missing something, but it feels like there could be a lot of complexity here that would need to be carefully weighed against the product vision and other things on the roadmap.
I think all I can do as a customer is just say what my biggest pain point is (having to copy and paste a bunch of values every time I check in with the tool) and however you think it's best to solve that, or to not solve it, is really up to you.
I think adding account linking is something you absolutely should not do, that definitely will add so much complexity and also touches up on people's security fears around 3rd party linking, so definitely don't do that.
Will keep using the product for sure. Nice work and congrats on the success so far
Live is overkill, all they'd need is an every 30-60 minute update on equity prices, which is not an overly expensive thing to acquire. With a 65% profit margin in their business, this is a dead-obvious feature they should be automating away to save their users a sizable headache.
That's the best part about VTSAX and chill: you only ever have last closes. Really though this does not need to be real time at all, just recent enough to save me toil
I much prefer VOO: Vanguard S&P 500 ETF. Tight bid ask spread, good size, and crazy low fees that continue to drop.
This is incorrect. Almost all brokers nowadays allow for OAuth connections where you can stream any data you'd see in your broker platform to any consuming web application (given the consuming web application does all the paperwork, dev work, and so on)
(with a contractual obligation to never share the data with anyone else or they'll sue you for all you're worth)
Amazing stuff. I think I'm in the boat as you OP except I just can't get myself to commit to a project since 1) no idea if it works or is unique 2) look for better opportunity and spend time doing LC/apply for job.
There is only so many hours after work.
> Once you’ve validated your idea,
Could you really break this down. I feel you overlooked this part. How do you filter through tons of ideas into idea that for sure or has good chance for success. For example, to build a yet another crypto exchange is both super technical and far too regulated. What is a known strategy how founder/dev nail down and commit to a project?
There are many frameworks and approaches, but here are two of my filtering criteria:
1. I don't start a project unless it's something I deeply want to exist for my own personal use. That way I know there's at least one person who would pay for an elegant solution. And even if no one shows up, at least it's useful to me.
2. I don't start a project unless I can envision the solution top to bottom and feel confident about the scope of the technical work. I'm not the most brilliant person at data structures & algorithms, and I prefer solutions where a simple architecture can get the job done. If there are foggy areas in the technical design, or parts I struggle to visualize clearly, to me that's a red flag.
Do you make this decision after doing tons of research about how you could implement a solution for the gray areas or do you just decide not to pursue the gray areas that you don't know how to implement yourself?
Doing some research would definitely be part of the diligence process when considering a new project.
ok
How do you differentiate between persistence or stuborness. I have been developing a SaaS product since 2020 which currently is at 3K ARR with a very slow growth (20% YoY). It's a B2B and are we are still missing a bunch of features to make us on par with competitors. We did survive a couple of competitors that came and go as we still have our day jobs and running it costs peanuts ($$$).
It often feels I should give up but having had customers who used us for years makes me think we have something that one day will make serious money.
Amazing – congratulations. I've been using the demo version of your product every six months or so since I first saw your post here. I Really appreciate that you've kept it available, and hope you will continue to do so even as the cash continues to pour in. If I was anywhere close to retirement, I'd be a subscriber instantly, but I just like financial planning as a hobby. I recommend it to family and friends. You've created a great, intuitive product and absolutely deserve your success.
Thanks so much. Really appreciate that. We’ve always wanted the tool to be accessible to anyone interested in financial planning, even just as a hobby, so it’s great to hear the basic version has been useful.
Do you think it strikes the right balance between free access and a sustainable paid model?
I think your method is perfect. Having to make notes and re-enter my settings is just the right amount of frustrating, that each time I'm tempted to buy it. I think most people who are less stubborn (cheap) than I would pay the second time they need the tool.
Having the free no-saving model as a public service is hopefully a win-win for you. The public has access to a financial planning tool, and if they need to take their finances more seriously they can start the paid model.
I also like the prompt you've added which says something like /hey, you lost your settings because you're using the free mode, but we can recover them to save you time/. Good detail.
glad to hear it. thanks for the feedback!
Wild - I hit the same "no financial software meets my needs" around the same time as you guys (late 2020 in my case), and started building for myself as well: https://github.com/mieubrisse/wealthdraft
Only, I never had the courage to make the leap to building an actual product out of it. Huge congrats to you guys; going to take a look at Projection and see if I can finally retire my homegrown stuff!
cool project. I always found java a little verbose for my taste, but I bet this runs faster than our sim engine! (it's in typescript)
Always encouraging to see that ideas can work out. I'm not quite managing the "let's build a team" aspect just yet but otherwise similar journey and outcome over a (slightly) longer period.
I just wanted to not deal with certificates, now I deal with certificates all day every day lol: https://certifytheweb.com
Congrats on 100k organizations, that's impressive.
How much of a pain point is support? At that scale, is it becoming a burden without more of a team in place?
I'd be curious to hear more about what the ups and downs on your journey have been like.
Probably a couple of hours on support per day on average, some days less, some days more. The vast majority of users don't ask for support, they prefer to read the docs, read the community forum, goggle stuff or hunt-and-peck options in the app. Roughly 90% use the free version. If everyone used the paid version I could have a very large team, but the reality is the product competes with many free tools.
If you update the app or refine docs in response to previous support questions it does streamline the experience but there are always folks who just don't read docs and there are many who will purchase the app just for access to support so they can figure something out.
I'm sure some apps are more support heavy than others, but ours is aimed at system administrators and with that comes an assumed level of competence (in reality, many people are only in the role because nobody else could/would do it but even they are quite independently resourceful).
The disadvantage of users helping themselves is that you don't get feedback from them or learn about their use cases. Knowing how/why people are using your stuff is really valuable for development, so if I had the team for it then dedicated support engineers would follow up with customers early on even if they don't have issues.
Did you consider adding an optional survey (or just an input or two) somewhere in setup or the onboarding flow? I bet some % of people would willingly tell you how/why they are using the software.
Congrats! I’ve been a customer and have used it monthly since April 2021 when I first saw it here. It has been essential in planning out major life financial decisions as I’ve changed jobs, gotten married, and now as we consider children and purchasing a home.
I’ve appreciated the addition of new features over time and have recommended the tool to many friends and relatives. Hope to see another post in a couple years when you’ve hit $10M/yr!
I'm grateful to hear it's made such a difference for you, and that early support back in 2021 means more than you know. In the down months and challenging times, it's the encouragement from early adopters like you that kept me going.
Nice! How did you go about finding a growth marketer that was a good fit with your business?
I found him and he originally told me to get lost ;)
The first sign of a good marketer :)
What attracted you so much to the project at that time?
I was a customer first. It was the product I had been searching for in my own financial planning, so I immediately saw the potential. When Kyle and I finally met, we hit it off right away. We aligned on the important things and shared a clear vision for where it could go. I’d always had the itch to bootstrap and help build something meaningful and sustainable, so I knew pretty quickly it was the right next move for me.
the "Working nights & weekends after corporate job" period is probably why you made it!
Very inspiring and kudos for not giving up! Congratulations!
thanks! consistently putting in those hours wasn't easy. it became the only time in life I've had elevated blood pressure. but you're right that I probably wouldn't have gotten here without burning the candle at both ends like that.
at the time, I was too risk-averse to go all-in right away, and this was the best de-risking strategy I came up with. luckily, my schedule is now more balanced again. (a little lol)
I remember seeing this on HN years ago. Congrats on the growth! I think this is still an underserved field (shockingly, considering how many people it impacts).
I really wish just saving a basic plan to refer back to didn't cost $100/yr. The one-off 'Basic' plans never made sense to me, considering it takes hours to set up a relatively complete model -- might not even have time to do it all in one sitting.
Thanks! Supporting Basic users comes at a real cost, but we want planning to stay accessible for everyone. To us, one-off planning feels like a better alternative than stripping down the product or selling user data.
The parrot on the OGs shoulder is the goal (besides raising the ARR lol)
Funny thing is he's my fiancé's bird, which she's had for 20 years, but somehow the only person he likes now is me. Kind of a bummer for her. But he's happy I guess haha
ProjectionLab offers a lifetime plan. How does this factor into profitability - as they'll never be able to bill this subset of customers again (for the same product)? At what point does this group of users start to degrade the performance of the business - simply because there is no more input for their required output?
The lifetime plan is priced higher than expected LTV, so it's profitable upfront.
We wanted to offer an option for early adopters with subscription fatigue. From the start, it has been a way to reinvest in the project: initially to support Kyle’s time, and now to fund growth that drives recurring subscriptions.
We may sunset new lifetime sales in the future, since a one-time payment model doesn’t align as well with our goal of building and maintaining PL over the long term.
Great job on this webapp, it's a really easy-to-use platform. I've toyed with the same startup idea myself, having tracked my personal finances and life projection for years now using Google Sheets, Grafana and other tools.
Just an annecdotal bit of feedback: I would like to continue using ProjectionLab but $109/year is beyond what I'm willing to spend, especially given ProjectionLab doesn't integrate with any live tracking of property prices / investment portfolio valuation etc.
If it were $40/year I probably would subscribe. But $109 is too much to justify (and I am reasonably well off).
Have you A/B tested different pricing levels to find the sweet spot that maximises revenue?
We've done some pricing experimentation over the years, and it's possible we're actually still positioned too cheap right now for the value the platform provides.
Personal finance is a pretty broad space, and it's common for different people to come to this with varying desires and expectations.
In our experience, the people who see the value in a good long-term DIY financial plan view our current pricing as extremely affordable, especially compared to traditional financial planning services which often charge $3-5k for a PDF and a pat on the back.
Anyway, if automated tracking is the piece that's most important to you, it might be worth noting that we do plan to add more options for that. But that work -- and all the other controversial implications of it that I mentioned in another comment -- just needs to be prioritized against all the other highly requested things on the product roadmap, based on what the community really wants the most.
I tend to agree with the sentiment. The only reason I subscribed to ProjectionLab was to appreciate the hard work of Kyle. Otherwise, "New Retirement" (now called Boldin) serves my purpose. It provides similar features and it provides automatic updates too.
Thanks for the recommendation. I just tried Boldin and it looks good, but seems to be US-centric? I'm in the UK and it didn't model my situation very accurately unfortunately
The validation piece I don't understand. From first sale to first dip to each peak and fall when was the validation reached? First sale, 1k revenue?
You can find 5 users who will pay but that doesn't validate a million a month.
What does product validation mean here.
I think it can vary from person to person depending on your goals. For me, an important signal was that complete strangers were willing to pay. That first Show HN post made all the difference. Without that, this could have ended up in my side project graveyard with 100 other projects.
Curious to how many projects you launched you personally resonated with before this one
I've only published a small handful of things with a buy button, and all of them were things I used myself. I got into coding in middle school learning how to make simple 2D games to play with friends, and the vast majority of my personal projects over the years have just been for fun.
Maybe validation isn't one big moment, but maybe validation could be many small moments. So, those first 5 users: small validation. First 1K MRR: small validation. Etc. I think the point of the article is to be persistent and if you're getting small validations along the way, then those are indicators to keep going. At least, that's my take.
I only have a product that makes $6k per month, but from my point of view, the validation is how many paying users sign up per day. Even one per day can add up. Hope this helps.
If you can make 6k per month. You can probably get to 60k per month.
Could you share what worked for you? Is it B2B/b2c? I guess that matters too for the type of marketing to focus on?
What is being validated though? I'd say it's your marketing efforts more so than your product
Congratulations on your progress! I’ve been in website development for almost half a year now, but I haven’t earned a single cent yet. Do you have any advice for beginners like us?
Congratulations. I will be checking it out as I am a big fan of FIRE. Also my daughter has 2 cockatiels one for each shoulder. But they usually end up on one as they like to hang out together.
oh neat! I was surprised how long their lifespan is -- my fiancé has had ours for over 20 years... although for some reason his allegiance flipped a few years ago, and now he only flies to me, not her.
Yes bird ownership can be a multi decade responsibility.
so can a great bootstrapped business ;)
It is interesting how most comments talk about “the right way to do it” but the post mostly seems to say persisting and just developing more is the important thing
I like to think a portion of your success came from having such great OMSCS SDP group project partners ;)
Congrats on what you’ve accomplished. Always fun to read the updates.
haha yep it all traces back to designing that android app for solving cryptograms XD
Small steps daily, big rewards personally and financially in the long-term.
Well-written and speaks for every struggling entrepreneur out there.
Congratulations, Kyle and his wonderful team!
thanks! I'm not a fast blog post writer, and sometimes feel guilty taking time away from building to draft updates like this (took me a couple days to write and rewrite this one). glad to hear it turned out to be a decent read.
Those who can write code, can write articles as well. I am not a fast writer either, hopefully we will get better over time.
> Bootstrapping a side project into a profitable seven-figure business in four years.
Good. But I think this is the most important piece of advice that one should follow:
> Actually show up every day.
It is the easiest thing anyone can do, however, it is the hardest for anyone to do every. single. day. nonstop.
Congratulations man, it makes me so happy to read this and I can relate to that dopamine rollercoaster phenomenon you are talking about.
aww thanks, glad to hear it resonates.
it seems like every founder has their own version of that rollercoaster.
which moments from yours do you feel you learned the most from?
Looks good!
Am a potential customer.
I would like to understand what all market data is built in for the historical simulations and future predictions. I currently do financial projections in Excel, the critical missing part for my own calculations being the market data.
How long is the free trial for premium version? (I could not find on the website.)
Thanks.
great timing. In fact, I was just looking for somethin like this. Was going to vibe-code this into life, but your price point is spot on and frankly I prefer supporting other fellow entrepreneurs.
The struggle is real, thank you for being a positive light to all who are on this path. Best to you!
thanks, that means a lot. wishing you the best on your journey too!
Great success story. Congratulations
Also, thank you for sharing the ups and downs. Seeing the details of the monthly bars chart was super enlightening. I usually only see the nice looking overall positive growth chart without any nuance, so I really appreciate the transparency
Hope you keep going and growing
Thanks! Seeing indie hackers building in public transparently about the ups and downs like pieter levels, danny postma, jon yongfook, etc, really inspired me early on. So I decided to try to emulate that. (Well, partly: idk how some of those guys post 100x a day)
Congratulations and happy to have contributed to reach that milestone !
This product has so much potential.
It would be just as interesting to hear what mistakes you have made and what you would do differently.
One thing I'd do differently is quit my day job earlier. It shouldn't have taken 2.5 years to work up the courage to do that.
Partly I was scared of putting my own projections at risk. But eventually I realized I'd have way more regret if I passed up the opportunity to go all-in on something I loved.
Congratulations!
> Back in 2021, I was inspired by the financial independence movement and wanted a better way to plan my own life. I couldn’t find the right tool, so I started building.
That sounds a bit like selling shovels to the miners. Which is not a, uh, dig at the project, just an observation.
Everything can be modeled as selling shovels to the miners.
We're all building tools for other people. As long the users like a product, I think it's moot to call it shovel selling.
I think it depends on what the people are hoping to accomplish with the shovels and how realistic it is.
In this case it seems legit.
Congrats on building a business that is both profitable and has over $1M in ARR.
Do you share any info on margins/profit, which could vary widely for a business like this (depending, for example, on how much is spent on customer acquisition)
To OP, does this focus on US customers or covers the context for international customers too?
We noticed a lot of tools neglect international use cases, so from the beginning we've focused on building with global flexibility in mind. About 80% of our customers are US-based, but we have users all over the world and offer international tax presets and account types.
I saw this, thought "wow this is great, I sure miss living in the US where good tools like this are available, everything in Europe is crap" but lo and behold, there's the Netherlands tax preset. Fantastic.
I think there may be a few wrinkles in the nl tax code that are tricky to capture with the current framework, but it has been a goal from the beginning to be as inclusive as possible for international scenario modeling. I'm continually making refinements there, and always open to ideas and suggestions if you have some.
They’re complex, especially with the thirty percent ruling and constant box three changes, but it’s still better than some US only tool
I haven’t used the tool, but what’s the most against AI/LLM models? I ask, because I’ve used ChatGPT for similar, and it spits out decent answers. More so, the more data you feed to it.
GPT is not bad at high-level guesstimates, but there's a LOT that goes on under the hood to make a detailed, accurate, responsive, and tax-aware long-term planning system with a good UX for nuanced scenario comparisons and what-ifs. At current capability levels, AI tools aren't a great replacement for that in my experience. But we'll see if that changes as they continue to evolve...
>I’m still processing that this is real.
>that only counts recurring revenue.
>monthly revenue has consistently been 20 to 50 percent higher.
That's the way to do it.
Where you virtually have to go back and figure how much earlier you had actually reached a major milestone.
Congrats!! I can definitely relate to that roller coaster feeling of first internet money -> "its so over feeling" though definitely not as successful as you yet :D
I hope the roller coaster takes you to a similar destination in the end :)
What's your journey been like so far?
It looks really good. Would it make much difference that I'm not USA based, (live in the UK). I.e. in terms of tax pensions pensions etc.
I noticed most tools neglect international scenarios because the US market is big and it's easier to focus on that. So I decided to be different and try to build with as much international flexibility as possible. We have a bunch of international account types and tax preseta, including some for the UK.
Amazing. Thanks. :)
I really like the ability to skip setup and go for sandbox presets with premium features paywalled - this seems like an obvious choice.
Most SaaS products like these require you to go through their complicated setup just to see what they are about.
Also, highly recommend "The Mom Test" by Rob Fitzpatrick - https://www.momtestbook.com.
It is so revealing, especially to people like me who naturally tend to think that just automation of processes is going to make something people want. This book is, by far, the best resource I found to get out of that mindset and learn how to get real feedback.
Congratulations! It always helps if you start with solving it for yourself. A marketer like Jon is every side project strength
Thanks! Kyle solved it for me too, which is how I found him. He lit the fire and I'm just tossing on more logs.
I've been following their journey for a while and love hearing about their success
Thanks for sharing your impressive journey. It's always refreshing to see a story that promotes grit and resilience, rather than the instant exponential growth often glorified by wannabe millionaires online.
Glad to hear it resonated. And also glad I didn't start this project with the expectation of quick success, hype, or exponential growth. If I had, there's no way I would have made it through the slower early years.
During the first few years, I was approached by dozens of potential “partners.” Several wanted an outsize equity stake to essentially just make suggestions.
A warning to others starting new ventures: once you get a whiff of traction, and sometimes even before then, the parasites will ooze out of various nooks and crannies, attempting to latch onto a fresh new host.
HN loves to pound on MBAs weaseling their way into startups, but opportunists may come from unexpected quarters.
I experienced a classmate sidling up to offer "translation services" for 2% of outstanding shares. Then there was a startup that proposed a "merger" which would basically allow them to walk away from failure in exchange for equity.
Wicked PMF there. Getting to 150 MMR right away is a good sign. Especially for a HN post.
how do you define PMF? I keep hearing conflicting definitions. Seems like any time someone declares they've found it, there's another who jumps in to explain why they technically haven't yet.
The question is really just how big of a market does this serve? You've made it to the point where anyone entering the FIRE market will likely stumble upon your product as a top recommended tool (just judging by the praise here). Maybe it can tap into the larger, but more generic, financial/retirement planning market. To me, it seems well on it's path to be a YNAB which has a high amount of word of mouth recommendations, but perhaps covers a larger market.
one of the nice things about being lean and bootstrapped is there's less pressure to chase the mass market.
so we need to worry less than a venture-backed company probably would about just how far outside of the FIRE community this has a lot of appeal.
that being said, there are certainly a lot of people who would benefit from having a long-term financial plan. here's to hoping your ynab comparison turns out to be apt!
To me this is a wild success story but to someone else this may be meh that isn't much.
I think 1M ARR shows you are on to something and getting sales off the bat is a good indicator.
Not an expert but I feel PMF is a rear view mirror thing.
lol so have we gone from "wicked PMF" to just being "onto something"?
the rear-view thing sounds kinda like "you'll know it when you see it"... which I'm sure is true for some people, but idk if I would know when to declare PMF without a more precise definition.
Yes. I'm saying the first HN post was a great signal, but a probability. It could have flopped from there. But sales from a cold HN post to me is good pot odds, so stay in the game!
The rear view mirror thing is of course true: you can only know the market by testing it by trying to sell your thing to it. Anything forward looking is a prediction.
You are always making decisions that are like bets.
Definitely agree on thinking in bets and probabilities.
Is your sense that we're officially at PMF now? Or maybe last year even?
Or do you think the question is fundamentally subjective and depends on who you ask and what numbers seem compelling to them, like you kind of alluded to before?
"We"? Are you the owner? If so you know much more than me!
Yep, I wrote the post!
I'd say we reached PMF a couple years ago the way I define it (solid customer acquisition from organic sources & word-of-mouth, strong retention, sustainable growth).
I was just curious if others might look at it differently, since I know definitions can vary. And like you said, some people might look at this update and dismiss it as still really small-time.
Congrats! Great to see you succeed through perseverance and just-not-giving-up!
So happy to hear about your story! Congratulations rooting for you! :D
Glad to hear of your success! Projection Lab is such a great product.
Thanks! It's interesting how easy it is to move the goalposts on product vision. It has come such a long way since the beginning, but I still wake up every day thinking about how much more I feel compelled to build.
It's amazing and gives me energy to do the same
Congrats!
Wondering if you have any tips for what worked well with marketing?
after that first Show HN back in 2021, the majority of our growth has been product-led and word-of-mouth.
some bloggers and thought leaders in the financial independence space also found the tool and shared it in the early years, which helped get some momentum going.
we're finally starting to make a little headway now with SEO, and we're beginning to reinvest/experiment with some paid channels for the first time this year.
Wow congratulations!
Congratulations!!
it is like some bias where everyone is talking about it but no one actually did it except for very few people
Kyle and I talked when he wasn't full time on this yet, I wanted to invest in it, well, anyway we talked about it a lot. Sufficed to say: I am SOOO proud of him! Genuinely awesome and brilliant dude. :)
Those conversations got me thinking about a lot of the right things early on. Really appreciate your encouragement and belief back then!
Not really the point of the post, but it was nice to see a pic of Kyle working with his bird on his shoulder instead of a stock photo or some AI slop generated image.
Thanks! He's a fun little copilot when he's not chewing my cables and mousepad.
Amazing, this is super cool!
How has your experience been running a discord server? I imagine it's useful for feedback but time consuming to manage? I'm reluctant to start one as I'm concerned about the time consumption.
Also, how did you find Jon and what was their skillset when you met? Did they come on as a contractor in the beginning?
I think managing any community is time consuming, but I like that discord feels real-time and efficient, with fun emojis, easy media sharing, and a mix of text channels and forum channels.
For the first few years, I was up at all hours answering questions. It feels amazing to offload some of that now that we have more of a team.
Like he mentioned in another comment here, Jon actually found me.
And now he’s definitely gonna break 100k in MRR with this viral post keep going! :-)
Wonder what the equity split ended up being with the growth partner probable 60/40 at best for Jon
kudos!
Survivor bias
Failures don't get on HN front page
Hey, btw congrats :-)
People do post their failure stories, or "post mortems", on HN and elsewhere. We should be able to make space for both as both offer valuable lessons.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37903489
Not true. This post made the front page (in the distant past):
https://successfulsoftware.net/2010/05/27/learning-lessons-f...
failure posts are way less interesting than the authors think they are.
They can be very interesting, both in the now and historically. They often aren't, when the problems were blindingly obvious and any mistakes ones that have been made countless times already, but the same can be said of success stories: without novel specifics there are only so many ways to say “we stuck at it and eventually pushed through and/or got lucky”.
Failure stories frequently aren't posted by the authors, they don't think it is interesting enough but someone else did. Such stories are often written as a post-mortem for those originally invested (in terms of intellectual interest, being a user of [thing-or-service], or financial investment) or even just as a therapy exercise before moving on, and not pushed to a wider audience by the author.
> failure posts are way less interesting than the authors think they are.
It depends; you can learn a lot more from a failure than from a success. Every success has some element of good luck in it but that element is difficult to identify.
Every failure has a number of non-luck related reasons for failing, which are usually easily identified.
Wow, that whole thing was completely devoid of useful content. Does it even say what the product or service is?
"We’ve also added a few contractors to the team. And these guys are legends. They come straight from the ProjectionLab user community"
So... the product was obviously built, because it had a "user community;" so now they've added contractors? Whoop dee doo.
Is there some advice or playbook we're supposed to take away from this? Or is it self-congratulatory spam?
> Does it even say what the product or service is?
Do you really need spoon-feeding that directly?
The whole site is about the product. Much more information about it is literally a click-or-two away. Describing it specifically on that page, given how much information is already around it on directly linked pages, would seem superfluously wordy (even to me, someone who just used “superfluously” instead of “overly”).
> Or is it self-congratulatory spam?
Largely, yes. But no more than so people having anniversary parties are showing off, do you begrudge that sort of thing too?
I much prefer that to a self-aggrandising comment essentially stating “I'm better than them because I wouldn't post something like that” (yes, as some may be wondering, I am self-aware enough to acknowledge the strong touch of hypocrisy in that comment!).
"Spoon-feeding?" Saying WTF the product is isn't spoon-feeding. Expecting people to run around and do Web searches (or even roam around other pages at the domain) because posters are too lazy to add three descriptive words is douchey as hell, and way too often accepted (and even actively promoted) here.
"I much prefer that to a self-aggrandising comment essentially stating 'I'm better than them because I wouldn't post something like that'"
I don't see anyone saying that. What I said was, why waste our time with empty blather masquerading as a how-to?
> Expecting people to run around and do Web searches (or even roam around other pages at the domain)
One. Single. Click.
Two if you go via one of the menus not clicking the main logo.
> because posters are too lazy to add three descriptive words
As far as the writer is concerned, if you are looking at the blog you are already interested and know what you are looking at. Is it their fault that someone deep-ish linked without providing extra context for you?
> why waste our time with empty blather masquerading as a how-to?
You could have just moved on and read something else, accepting that not everything is written for everyone, and not wasted more time moaning about it…
Why are you being such a stick-in-the-mud? It's an interesting and inspiration post on HN about a successfull bootstrapped indie startup. HN is primarily a startup & tech-driven community, so obviously we're all interested in stories like this. In fact, I miss the days where HN was almost solely startup post-mortems or success stories. How is the post even remotely self-congratulatory spam?
Because it doesn't provide insightful guidelines on how to avoid pitfalls or how to work around this or that impediment or, or, or.
Whatever, man. I guess we have different standards for what constitutes "informative."
Doesn't fucking matter even if you reach a billion dollars with a boring ass business of drawing financial charts. Those charts are manipulated by HFTs, hedge funds and what not. It is naive to think you, a retail investor, stand a chance
you might enjoy The Simple Path to Wealth by JL Collins.