0 - $5k MRR in 19 months, and a tip on avoiding burnout 🔥
After 19 months, ProjectionLab (https://projectionlab.com) finally reached $5k MRR! 🥳
Recently I've seen a lot of posts about people who strike gold on viral ideas and scale to the moon in a matter of weeks; and it's clear why those stories catch our eye: there isn't one of us who wouldn't dream of hitting escape velocity that quickly and blasting off on a hype rocket into the furthest reaches of unmitigated success 🚀
I think celebrating the ones who make it is great, but sometimes it's also good to remind yourself not to set the bar so high that you'll end up discouraged when you're not purchasing a tropical island 6 months after launch 🏝
If your project doesn't see exponential growth right away, that's not cause for despair. Remember how to celebrate the small wins, and that if you can string enough of those together, it can still add up to something good 😊
For me, nothing specific happens at $5k MRR. But it's a milestone I've been working towards for a while, and it's been a long road to get here. I've devoted nights and weekends to building PL as a side project for over a year and a half now, and bootstrapping a full-featured personal finance simulator as a solo developer has been a lot to take on.
Along the way there have been times where it felt like I'd been overclocking for too long, and that stress was rising to unsustainable levels... but so far I've managed to avoid burnout, and one of the things I'd attribute that to is: exercise 🔥
We all live in brain-body systems, and we can't expect peak performance from the mind without also taking care of the body. This may be something you've heard a hundred times before, but I think it bears repeating. So for any of you who are contemplating skipping that workout again today so you can keep banging your head against a problem you're stuck on... personally, I would recommend the workout 😉
Congrats on reaching this important milestone. Could you tell us a bit about your marketing strategy, what worked and what didn't. Thanks
Thanks man! I had some good luck with a Show HN post last year, and a couple reddit posts as well. Other than that, it's mainly been word-of-mouth.
More recently, a personal finance author unexpectedly created a review of the tool, Mr. Money Mustache tweeted about it as well, and the guys that run The FI Show asked me to come on their podcast. Those three things helped to close some of the remaining distance to this milestone.
Thanks for sharing this!
Thanks for sharing! And it must be a great product if you've grown like this only from word of mouth, with authors and podcasters picking it up organically.
I'm not going to tell you how to run your business, but have you considered scaling marketing operations? I think it could help it grow much faster.
Because it definitely seems like the demand is already there!
Great, thanks for sharing.
Congratulations on reaching this milestone. Thanks a lot for sharing these tips. I guess now I need to do more workouts 😊
Congratulations Kyle on reaching 5K MRR!
I completely agree, you can even make yourself a better content writer by working out. Being physically fit allows you to think more clearly and write better. Another useful thing you can do is to take breaks. You'll be more productive if you take frequent 10-20 minute breaks where you walk around, stretch and get a glass of water then go back to work.
In one of the comments I read that you used reddit, can you share some details about what to keep in mind while engaging on that platform? we are thinking of promoting our feedback tool ruttl there.
Yeah taking short breaks and making sure you get some walking time in every day are helpful too.
One thing to keep in mind with reddit is that you need to read the rules for any subreddit you're thinking about posting to. A lot of them don't like self-promotion, so when in doubt it's a good idea to message the moderators first.
Got it, Thank you for sharing :)
I have additional advice. Most subreddits that don't allow self promotion don't care if you self promote in the comments
And that's actually where the magic happens.
Because even subreddits that allow self promo will not yield great results when you make a self promo post.
Comments allow you to be more targeted.
Find a comment with a person experiencing a pain point, reply by giving them some advice, then make a short gentle suggestion for them to try your product and link it.
I've grown my discord from 0 to 600+ members in a few weeks with this strategy, and I don't have a website OR product out yet.
FYI, I'm developing an AI API that lets users run our AI models on the cloud through an API, and the pain point I'm leveraging right now is censorship in a lot of LLMs like ChatGPT and GPT-3. So I've been leaving comments at people upset with OpenAI censorship and getting wonderful results.
This method can actually be employed anywhere, including indiehackers. In fact, this reply you're seeing right now is an example :)
If you're curious about following my product or how I promote things, feel free to follow on twitter: https://twitter.com/TheRealEtch
Great man! thanks for the advice, you're right engaging with people in the comments work far better than just a self promo, saw that from IH itself. I'll keep these things in mind.
Great tip! I've noticed a great correlation between working out and feeling energized enough to work too. It's totally unintuitive, but spending so much energy on body tasks will recharge your brain energy, true.
Congrats, seems like a legit story.
🙏 Thanks Alex, I've seen a few of your posts before actually! Congrats on your revenue growth this year 🎉
Well said, I always feel that not being able to "celebrate wins" is the biggest curse of high ambitions.
Inspiring, looks like a good product.
Thanks for sharing your story.
I'm just starting out, have been building my product for about a month at this point, all day everyday. I needed to hear your story, thanks for writing this out.
Thanks Sumit, good luck with your product!
Congrats!! Thank you for writing this post out. I agree, regular exercise is absolutely life-changing.
I say regular exercise, because for me, whenever I'd start a new exercise regimen, I'd actually feel worse for like a week as my body gets used to the new exercise regimen. In the past that would discourage me, but lately I've been sticking to an exercise routine regularly and man...after that initial week of adaptation passes, it's like I suddenly get superpowers. I'm much calmer, much more focused, and seemingly immune to burnout.
Lately I've been getting up and running first thing in the morning, and it's such a great feeling. Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist from Stanford, has a lot of great content online about how scientifically exercise boosts our overall mental capabilities and baseline energy levels. I've also started eating low carb in the mornings, and reserve my carbs for the evening. This has had a tremendous impact on my overall productivity especially in the afternoon, as it prevents my post-morning crash.
Congrats again, and thank you for writing this out! I love it when people share lifestyle specifics about what helps them perform.
hey thanks! I'm very far from a morning workout person, but other than that we're on the same page 😉. Any time I go more than a couple days without a solid workout, I start to notice the cognitive effects, and my stress tolerance really plummets.
Congratulations on reaching the $5k MRR milestone! Building a project from the ground up is no easy feat, and it's clear that you've put in a lot of hard work and dedication to get to this point. It's also good to see that you prioritize taking care of your physical and mental well-being, as it's important to maintain a healthy balance in order to sustain long-term success. Keep up the great work!
Thanks Matt! Definitely agree. Once an idea is validated, persistence is often the difference between a mediocre outcome and a good outcome; but to be persistent, you need a sustainable development rhythm.
"...who are contemplating skipping that workout " WOW! how did you know :-)
Congratulations on reaching 5k milrstone. I liked your website too. I will probably copy its style for the landing page of my product.
Evidently today I also need to remind myself to take this advice 🤣
Its inspiring, especially for someone like me who is just starting out !
Happy to hear it! That was me less than two years ago 😃
Totally agree with this post. It's sometimes smarter to optimize for workout and some alone time than to keep slogging mindlessly.
The trap I'll sometimes fall into is the feeling that I have to solve the problem / finish the algorithm while it's still top-of-mind... and at first that's actually true. But once you're mentally fatigued enough, you hit an inflection point where you start to get diminishing returns. Recognizing when I've reached that point and it would be better to disengage and come back later with fresh eyes is often the challenge for me.
Congratulations on reaching $5k MRR with ProjectionLab! It's great to see that your hard work and dedication have paid off, and it's inspiring to hear about your journey to get to this milestone.
Sometimes it can indeed feel like the stories we hear about rapid success are the norm, but it's important to remember that success can take many different forms and happen at different rates. It's great to celebrate the small wins along the way and recognize that they can add to something significant.
Congrats on reaching 5K MRR!! Love the workout recommendation, go blow off some steam and come back with a new perspective of the problem.
Thanks Francis! Sometimes a mental reset is exactly what's needed 🏋️
Congrats, that's a fantastic milestone!
I was looking at your features for pricing. Do you find your users want to know these types of technical details? Seems in the weeds saying Monte Carlo or san-key diagrams instead of something like "Advanced Modeling" and "Expanded Reporting".
Keep up the great work!
Thanks Bryan! So far, PL tends to resonate well with the tech-savvy / DIY finance types who want a lot of fine-grained control, and many of those are the kind of people who are sensitive to anything that looks like marketing speak, e.g. "enough of the buzzwords... what does this thing actually do?!"
Or perhaps that's just me making excuses for not writing better landing page copy 😅 🤷♂️
Haha, very well could. Have you considered reaching out to those who don't convert? My thinking is you might be attracting the nerds and alienating the larger market.
My background is a company that uses monte carlo for modeling (different field entirely), and this was a lesson learned. As we talked about benefits, then how we provide them, it helped sales move forward considerably,
It's niched down a little by design, and the conversion to paid is typically a much longer funnel than just getting past the landing page, but I bet you're right to think there are some opportunities to improve CR overall.
The fact that I haven't spent much time trying to optimize it makes that quite a good bet 😅
I was actually thinking more about people who land on your site, look around, and need your software, but don't get Monte Carlo and Sankey diagrams.
There are so many who are financially illiterate who just need to be shown the benefits to pull them in. I was giving this space a serious thought to do something similar a year ago and that was one of my big findings during market research. Tons of needs, tons of desire, lots of peole scared off by not understanding tech concepts those who are financially literate take for granted.
Hi Kyle! First of all congratulations, this is awesome!
I was just wondering if you were working solely on your own or with someone? I'm currently working with someone on a mobile app that we see might make a bit of revenue and would love to learn more about how you structured your entity and taxes? Did you do a sole or dual proprietorship, an inc, an llc etc? And why? Thank you so much! :)
Hey Alex, just me :)
I like to keep things simple unless there's a real need for complexity, so this is just a single-member LLC for now. The separation between personal and business stuff seemed prudent after validating the initial idea.
Got it, thank you for the response! If I'm working with my friend on the app, do you recommend doing a dual LLC then? Thanks!
As with most things, I think the answer is: it depends 🤷♂️.... on a lot of stuff, probably.
How deeply have you researched the other kinds of entities you can form and built an understanding of the trade-offs? I'm no expert, and it's been a while since I looked at all this stuff, but from what I recall, there are some pretty great articles and reddit threads out there that can help to break down the different paths and pros/cons.
I'd also ask yourself: to what extent have you validated the idea? If you're still pre-launch and pre-revenue, is it actually worth jumping through all the business formation hoops and costs yet? Also might not hurt to set up an initial consult with a startup lawyer -- those are free most of the time, and I'm sure they could point you in the right direction a lot better than I could.
Congrats!!
You wrote "Recently I've seen a lot of posts about people who strike gold on viral ideas and scale to the moon in a matter of weeks; " can you point me please at least one? I saw many "success stories" and some of them had "...in 3 weeks" or so but it always turned out it wasn't about the whole process which usually took 18 months or so.
If you check out @levelsio or @DannyPostma on twitter, they're always up to no good creating much more high-octane indie businesses than me 😅
Oh, it's totally different story. Peter has 200+K subscribers and a very long story of creating projects. Not all of his projects were a success. But when you compare, do not forget take into account a social capital ;-)
Yeah for sure, if you lack an audience that's one of the many reasons you can't walk in and expect to replicate those kind of results. Also, even those guys don't have a 100% hit rate.
Bravo 👏🏼 .
Can you tell us more how you come up with the idea ?
How u validated the idea ?
How u found your first subscriber ?
@IndieJames asked if I would do a text interview for IH covering some of those topics, so keep your eyes peeled for that 👀
Great Work! Even though it took you 19 months it's good that you didn't give up. Best of luck on future growth. Congratulations!
I appreciate the writeup, and congrats on the milestone.
I wanted to talk about your product, and commend you on creating an amazing user experience with the sandbox, and the simple instructional flow within it.
Really nice to dive into a product without having to register, and the flow instructions are simple and intuitive while looking slick.
Well done.
Thanks man, glad you agree it's a pretty low-friction workflow to try out the sandbox!
Yes. Frictionless.
I don't know what it does to your engagement metrics, but 2 points right off the bat for no signup required to see and use the product.
Curious, do you allow free-tier to just go wild without ever registering? Because it appeared that way, but then I got caught up in something else. I may have just misread something on the pricing page.
The catch with free tier is lack of data persistence. So you can use the tool for free from time to time to get a handle on your long-term projections, but you'll have to recreate them each time. There are also a couple other premium features (e.g. tax estimation)
Oof. I wonder how that will play out for you. That seems more treacherous than the typical full-nerf on the free account.
I'm not trying to take up your whole day with product and UX opinions that you didn't ask for, but there's always something that catches my eye early and I'll spend like half a morning on it; a mini case study. And chatting with founders async in comments is the best.
I free trial literally anything that looks cool. My favorites are free forever that allow me to get acclimated at my own pace (could be a week, could be a year), and after that time if I find it useful (especially if I've communicated with the product team or somebody responsible for roadmap), and they've shipped some interesting stuff during my "trial" - then I usually pony up because I've grown into it.
Below those are the 2-week or 1-month full-blown pro-plus-max trial, where I'm trying to figure out what the experience would be with a free account versus what I'm flung into from day 1. I obviously like this less.
And then there's the services that neuter the free-forever to a point that it almost appears useful, but quickly becomes a dark pattern minefield of CTAs to upgrade while trying to complete a basic task. Some are obvious right away so you don't waste too much time.
I do have to say though... for the amount of webapps I play around with (for my consulting and also just to stay abreast), your "data persistence" is relatively new, at least in my sample-size. I want to like the idea as a product manager, but I think as a user I'd be disappointed.
That said - you saw how jazzed I was at not having to create an account, and in 2022 the amount of email marketing coming from everywhere is exhausting. So maybe people would convert higher knowing they need to "sign up AND buy" a plan before their data drops, rather than just being pounded over the head with a weekly email trying to make every bugfix and small enhancement seem like a major release.
This is all very interesting to me and I wish I had some sort of identical competing product where I could take my preferred approach (although I am anti weekly email) and then after a certain time period we could compare conversion rates.
But, if you're still reading this comment 30 lines later, I love pretend-managing other people's products in hypothetical scenarios when I've only logged 5 minutes in the app. I realized that giving unsolicited feedback to people who's products I find interesting is a net benefit for me, because I'm taking notes for myself and you can listen to me or ignore me, doesn't matter.
I do need to try to be less long-winded though. Once my fingers start moving it's a whole thought dump and I don't have time to prune.
Not sure if you saw this yet, but there is also a free trial of all the premium features -- you just have to create an account and add a payment method in Paddle for that (it is free though, and you don't get charged if you cancel during the trial).
So, there's the zero-friction option with no data persistence, or alternatively a higher friction option that gives you a free trial of all functionality.
I did notice that. I suppose that's a good combination of different discovery points. Attack from both sides.
But the trial is only 7 days, which gets a boo from me. Seems like a company doesn't care for my time anything less than 14. I've literally missed entire weeks straight at certain points in my life. (Not really, but you know...)
However I haven't spun up a SaaS app in a decent while; maybe your research shows that's the best span for a trial?
Seriously, if there is quantitative data from a huge swath of SaaS startup apps and the numbers say "7 days converts", then I will just shut my mouth. As a PM. As a customer I will continue to complain forever...
Thanks for humoring me with all this. Whenever I see something I like I try to get at least a few exchanges in to see the mindset behind the product, and what the potential is, etc.
Congratulations on this milestone. Great achievement.
Thanks for sharing. I recently started working on my SaaS and will be launching in a days. I would be building it as a side project while in school. Hoping to come back to share my success story here also
Best of luck! I'll keep an eye out for your post in the future 🙂
Congratz!
thx for sharing, my goal is to reach $2k MRR incha allah, I'm working on building a demo and then putting it out there
Congratulations ...
Huge congratulations on such an amazing milestone! Love how short and sweet this post was- plenty of takeaways. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks Andrew, glad you think so!
This is a great inspiration, Kyle! Thank you so much for sharing! and I like how your UI looks; sleek and looks easy to use
Thanks Fabio. Sometimes it can be a little deflating to put a ton of work into a new feature and then look at the end result in the UI and say ".... that's it?" But I try to remind myself that a clean and approachable-looking interface is often a sign that more work has gone in, rather than less.
nice
tx for your saying!!! helps me lot
Congrats Kyle!
Congratulations. For me, it is the opposite. I can not recover for days when I work out or am physically active. I need a lot of sleep and rest afterward, which does not go very well with productivity...
Sounds interesting, this milestone is a huge step.
I presume that if your MRR is 5k you number of paying customers is about 500, isn't it?
Just crossed the 1k mark recently. When I launched initially, I had pricing way too low; and then there's also discounts to factor in here and there.
congrats! it must be inspiration for others. also check my website is it possible to make handsome amount of money on it https://kisanstatus.com
@knolan Nice i have checked your ProjectionLab you have done a great job!
Everyone does not get fast result,s as some people mention in their posts, but there is a chance and good strategy which makes their project successful fast.
Everyone does their best to keep their project successful!
We got our first paying customer 3 months later.
We are working on the project churnfree which is helping the business like your's to reduce your customer's high churn rate because getting a new customer is very difficult as compared to keeping existing on the platform.
Mostly membership businesses are facing this issue and losing most of their valuable customers.
You can check out Churnfree this tool can save up to 46% of customer churn requests. This tool also helps you to reduce your customer churn and increase MRR.
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