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 Charlieās 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.
+1 from someone who also bootstrapped a side project into a 7 figure business, and just happens to be absorbing some lessons from Poor Charlieās 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?
> 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.
> 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 canāt clearly attribute the survivorās survival, thereās 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.
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.
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.
I love how these stories always start with āI just wanted to scratch my own itchā and end with ā...and now Iām running a company with a payroll bigger than my old day job.ā Itās inspiring, but also a little bit intimidating. Makes you wonder how many potential seven-figure ideas are just sitting in peopleās āmaybe somedayā folders. The real lesson here? Ship something, even if itās ugly. You canāt optimize what doesnāt 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).
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, itās probably more interesting than most of the stuff shared.
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.
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.
Exactly! If you can get some exposure as a Ā« specialist Ā», build a network or just learn a ton of new skills (marketing, accounting, PR, devops) it tends to be a win/win.
Thatās what Iām currently doing and by no mean would I have better myself as much in any other way.
If you enjoy Charlieās, you will definitely enjoy Kahnemanās Thinking Fast and Slow, especially the part about being an Ā« expert Ā»: a few talks in empty classrooms in a famous Uni, a radio show nobody knows and voila, you get some cred!
I donāt really like golf but Iād imagine that if I did, I might stop liking it once I had to do it professionally every day even when I didnāt feel like it.
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.
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.
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 wasnāt 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 itās not in our scope.
She thinks Iām 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. Itās not a choice, itās market pressure.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
Congratulations! But Iām 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.
Thereās 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.
It is interesting how most comments talk about āthe right way to do itā but the post mostly seems to say persisting and just developing more is the important thing
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.)
Congrats! Iāve 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 Iāve changed jobs, gotten married, and now as we consider children and purchasing a home.
Iāve 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 youāve 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
> Back in 2021, I was inspired by the financial independence movement and wanted a better way to plan my own life. I couldnāt 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!! 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
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!
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.
During the first few years, I was approached by dozens of potential āpartners.ā 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.
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. :)
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.
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.
> 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 āsuperfluouslyā instead of āoverlyā).
> 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 āI'm better than them because I wouldn't post something like thatā (yes, as some may be wondering, I am self-aware enough to acknowledge the strong touch of hypocrisy in that comment!).
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?
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 āwe stuck at it and eventually pushed through and/or got luckyā.
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.
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 Charlieās 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.
+1 from someone who also bootstrapped a side project into a 7 figure business, and just happens to be absorbing some lessons from Poor Charlieās 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!
> 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.
> 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 canāt clearly attribute the survivorās survival, thereās 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.
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.
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.
I love how these stories always start with āI just wanted to scratch my own itchā and end with ā...and now Iām running a company with a payroll bigger than my old day job.ā Itās inspiring, but also a little bit intimidating. Makes you wonder how many potential seven-figure ideas are just sitting in peopleās āmaybe somedayā folders. The real lesson here? Ship something, even if itās ugly. You canāt optimize what doesnāt 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).
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, itās probably more interesting than most of the stuff shared.
Well, you are at least guaranteed to not get this kind of success.
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.
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.
Exactly! If you can get some exposure as a Ā« specialist Ā», build a network or just learn a ton of new skills (marketing, accounting, PR, devops) it tends to be a win/win. Thatās what Iām currently doing and by no mean would I have better myself as much in any other way.
If you enjoy Charlieās, you will definitely enjoy Kahnemanās Thinking Fast and Slow, especially the part about being an Ā« expert Ā»: a few talks in empty classrooms in a famous Uni, a radio show nobody knows and voila, you get some cred!
I donāt really like golf but Iād imagine that if I did, I might stop liking it once I had to do it professionally every day even when I didnāt feel like it.
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 ā 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!
Not the OP, but a quick look at the /sitemap.xml shows about 55 pages, the oldest of which seem to be dated 2018.
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.
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 wasnāt 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 itās not in our scope.
She thinks Iām 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. Itās not a choice, itās market pressure.
What ecosystem was she in before?
Aw shit.
*drawing-board
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
The parrot on the OGs shoulder is the goal (besides raising the ARR lol)
Congratulations! But Iām 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.
Thereās 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.
It is interesting how most comments talk about āthe right way to do itā but the post mostly seems to say persisting and just developing more is the important thing
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.
I like to think a portion of your success came from having such great OMSCS SDP group project partners ;)
Congrats on what youāve accomplished. Always fun to read the updates.
haha yep it all traces back to designing that android app for solving cryptograms XD
Congrats! Iāve 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 Iāve changed jobs, gotten married, and now as we consider children and purchasing a home.
Iāve 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 youāve 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 ;)
What attracted you so much to the project at that time?
The first sign of a good marketer :)
Wicked PMF there. Getting to 150 MMR right away is a good sign. Especially for a HN post.
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!
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 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?
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?
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.
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.
Theyāre complex, especially with the thirty percent ruling and constant box three changes, but itās still better than some US only tool
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! 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.
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.
Congratulations!
> Back in 2021, I was inspired by the financial independence movement and wanted a better way to plan my own life. I couldnāt 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!! 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?
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!
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.
Congrats! Great to see you succeed through perseverance and just-not-giving-up!
it is like some bias where everyone is talking about it but no one actually did it except for very few people
Amazing, this is super cool!
During the first few years, I was approached by dozens of potential āpartners.ā 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.
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!
Wow congratulations!
Congratulations!!
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.
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.
And now heās 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
> 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.
>Iām 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.
Wow, that whole thing was completely devoid of useful content. Does it even say what the product or service is?
"Weāve 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 āsuperfluouslyā instead of āoverlyā).
> 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 āI'm better than them because I wouldn't post something like thatā (yes, as some may be wondering, I am self-aware enough to acknowledge the strong touch of hypocrisy in that comment!).
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?
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 āwe stuck at it and eventually pushed through and/or got luckyā.
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.