Building > Marketing: Kyle Nolan of ProjectionLab ($5k/mo) on focusing on product over marketing

@knolan built ProjectionLab to $5k/mo as a side-project within two years. And he barely spends any time on marketing. I wanted to know how he did it so I caught up with him. Here’s what he had to say on his product-first approach.

Building vs marketing

Kyle: I have a bad habit of spending 99% of my time building new features, 0.9% of my time worrying about the fact that I'm not doing marketing, and then 0.1% of the time actually doing marketing. 🤣

But I think this may be one of those rare cases where a laser-focus on product first before marketing has been a good thing overall. By scaling up the user base gradually, I've been able to avoid drowning in support requests, and it has allowed me to preserve the free time I've needed to re-architect the product several times before arriving at the more polished solution it is today.

I know "if you build it, they will come" can be a seductive and dangerous mantra for solo developers (and especially first-time founders). But even so, after validating the idea with version 1.0, the main thrust of my efforts has simply been to make the product so dang good that eventually people in this space can't help but take notice. Maybe that's finally working a little bit.

To play devil's advocate though: should the app already be doing better and seeing broader adoption if I was actually competent at marketing and spent any time on that? Umm, maybe? laughs nervously... But on the journey so far, the paths I've chosen have been the ones that felt the most authentic and the most like "me", and I think the energy and persistence that can help you maintain often pays some big dividends when you compound it over the long term (pardon the finance pun 😅).

Side-projects require sacrifices

He recently hit that $5k/mo while working on ProjectionLab as a side-project. That’s no small feat. And it didn’t come without sacrifices.

Kyle: I'm bootstrapping ProjectionLab as a side project on top of a full-time software engineering job. I've been pulling 80+ hr weeks for the better part of two years to build it from zero to the full-featured personal finance planning tool it is today. The hard truth is that burning the candle at both ends means you're not going to have time for all the things you want to do in life; something has to give.

For me, that was playing video games. I still carve out the time to see friends in person, but I used to also have a group that would play games regularly. It was my favorite way to stay in touch over longer distances. But the math on that just didn't work while trying to bootstrap a complex project on the side. Some day in the future, though, maybe I will come out of retirement.

So how does he keep going when sacrificing his nights and weekends?

Kyle: Having a growing and supportive community of users is really energizing, and even though my work is scoped to nights and weekends, I'm more than happy to devote those hours because it really doesn't feel like work.

Side-projects are cool

Despite the sacrifices, Kyle would take a side-project over a leap of faith any day.

Kyle: There's nothing that matches that feeling of taking something that's just an idea in your head and manifesting it in the real world. It will always feel a little like magic. And with side projects, it's refreshing and liberating to have full creative control, no stand-up meetings, no sprint retrospectives, no changing requirements, and no funding to worry about. Just pure creation, uninhibited. ProjectionLab started as one of these creative outlets. The business angle came later.

And in my opinion, one of the best things about side-projects is the risk reduction. If you take the leap to full-time right away instead, I bet that liberating feeling I mentioned above evaporates pretty quickly when it hits you that "this better work". 😬

Finding your problem

What about coming up with an idea in the first place?

Kyle: Try to find a problem you understand deeply and truly care about solving, and build something that you'll actually be a user of. There are often more hurdles on the path to finishing and launching a project than you can predict going in; but if you really have that desire to see and enjoy the final product yourself, you can use that to help power through some of the obstacles. It's a lot easier to pursue an idea with persistence when you're working on something you love and that you personally can't wait to use.

And don’t be discouraged if some of them don’t work!

Kyle: Over the past 20 years, I've accumulated a pretty colossal graveyard of poorly crafted video games and personal projects. 💀

Growing to a few hundred

And then there’s the inevitable question of how he hit $5k/mo and 1000+ users. Let’s start with the first few hundred.

Kyle: As a solo dev building a fairly complex software solution as a side-project, I've had a product-first approach by necessity, and it took several months just to create the MVP. In fact, at the beginning I wasn't even building with monetization in mind.

There were a grand total of 0 paid users when I posted it to Hacker News on a whim. I closed the tab — expecting that to go nowhere — and then came back an hour later to discover my email inbox blowing up. I was astonished to see that the post had made the front page and more than a dozen people immediately signed up for Premium.

Everyone always talks about how incredible it feels to make your first dollar on the internet... and in my experience, they're right! The fact that the MVP was actually a hit with the famously critical HN community lit a fire under me, and I doubled down on building out the app and adding everything people wanted to see.

The price was wayyy too low because I knew nothing about pricing... in fact, maybe it still is, and I still don't. 😅 At launch I was just trying to answer the question: would anyone out there pay anything for this?

Sometime in the following weeks it reached 100 paid users. Word of mouth, coupled with the occasional post to places like r/SideProject, gradually propelled it into the low hundreds.

Growing to 1000

Then comes the 1K mark.

Kyle: Since then, my pattern has been to spend nearly all my time with my head in the sand developing cool new features, occasionally creating a post to somewhere like Reddit or HN, and also nurturing a community of users who love the tool.

Over the past few months, I was lucky enough to have some unexpected developments help to spread the word even more and close the remaining distance from ~750 paid users to the 1000 mark:

• Pete Adeney (a.k.a. Mr. Money Mustache) gave PL a shout-out on Twitter.
• Rob Berger (author of Retire Before Mom and Dad) created a video review
• Cody Berman and Justin Taylor, who run The FI Show, asked me to come on their podcast and talk about it there.

These happened from word of mouth, intros from users, and from the few posts I made. With that in mind, what does everyone think:

• Is the fact that a lot of PL's exposure comes from luck and fortuitous circumstance a scathing condemnation of my marketing abilities and lack of growth strategy? 😬
• Or is it more that I'm investing my limited time in a way that manufactures luck as a byproduct of creating a better app? 🤔

Treating users like royalty

“Nurturing a community of users” — I think he touched on something important there. If you aren’t going to spend much time marketing, you can still push the needle by giving stellar support. Nothing makes people advocate for a product better than building that connection.

Kyle: 18 months ago, I listened to a podcast where the guest emphasized the importance of treating your first 100 users like royalty. At the time, PL had maybe a dozen users. A hundred seemed so out of reach that trying to implement that advice felt like over-dignifying something probably destined for the side-project graveyard. But as people started signing up and feedback came pouring in, it became clear that this project would have a much different fate!

I've always done my best to be responsive, helpful, and understanding when people reach out with questions and feedback, and engaging with users has been one of my favorite things! I also feel lucky that the vast majority of them turn out to be smart and reasonable people who are genuinely fun to interact with.

It’s a good way to learn about how to make your design and information architecture more intuitive and human-centered. And you may just gain a loyal customer while you're at it. 😁

Make sense, but I was curious about how he created a culture where users actually wanted to provide that feedback.

Kyle: This is something that building in public helps a lot with, and there are some simple things you can do to make the process more friendly, structured, and efficient than a rudimentary contact email address or support/feedback form.

For PL, I used Changemap to create a free public roadmap where anyone can suggest new features and vote. And I also set up a [Discord server]((https://discord.com/invite/dZQ5DDEmT7) which has gradually been growing into a thriving community where people can ask questions, give feedback on the latest features in early access, and chat about personal finance and other topics with folks who share similar interests.

And then when the feedback is coming in, there’s figuring out what to build and what not to build (and in what order).

Kyle: I always have a notional roadmap in my head, and it's always being revised and rearranged based on:

• What is the community asking for right now? What topics keep coming up again and again in Discord / email?
• What are the most upvoted features on the public roadmap?
• What did I originally think I would be doing next?
• What do I actually feel like doing next? What would I be most energized and inspired to work on?

As I toss all the ideas around in my head, I'll usually try to add weights to them based on:

• Estimated level of effort or time required
• Chance to delight existing users and keep them around
• Prospect of spurring new growth
• Opportunity to reduce technical debt
• "Coolness factor"
• Chance to further differentiate from other products
• Opportunity to build new skills and knowledge

Subscribe for more case studies, tips, and how-tos 👇

The Boot's Trap 🪤

Learn from indie hackers who are in the thick of it

Subscribe