My side project just reached $100k ARR 🔥
Two years ago, I was one day away from halting work on my new side project.
I had built an event-based finance simulator to replace one of my convoluted spreadsheets. I was satisfied that it did most of what I needed for my own planning, and a few shares to places like Reddit were met with little (i.e. no) fanfare. So I thought, "mission accomplished, time to move on."
I posted the link to HN just for kicks, but didn't bother checking back in... then an hour later I found my email inbox blowing up 🚀
Since that day, I have worked nights and weekends bootstrapping ProjectionLab (https://projectionlab.com) as a side project from $0 to $8500 MRR.
→ 9 months to get to $1,000
→ 4 months to get to $2,000
→ 7 months to get to $5,000
→ 2 months to get to $6,000
→ 2 months to get to $8,500
It has been a long and challenging road to get here, and contrary to my own advice (https://www.indiehackers.com/post/reached-6k-mrr-as-a-solo-dev-71decd3025), I have been burning the candle at both ends pretty often.
Would my own financial plans be looking a lot rosier if I had just grinded leetcode to go work for FAANG instead? Probably... but I still wouldn't trade this experience of building and growing a passion project for just about anything 😁
The process of materializing a creative idea in the real world and growing a user community around it has been energizing and fulfilling in a whole different way than corporate engineering could ever be. But I think all you fellow indiehackers already know about that feeling!
I suppose the next question is: when should PL become more than just a side project? If only there was a personal finance simulator that could help explore the different scenarios and trade-offs... 😉
If you have an opinion, story, rule of thumb, or thoughts on personal risk calculus to share, let me know in the comments below!
Congrats on the achievement, Kyle! This is a feature rich app! I'm curious which charting library you use to achieve the multiple filter options as well as the split screen views. Is there charting library out there that allows all of this or is this purely custom built?
It's mostly custom built -- I'm using Vue.js, Chart.js, Firebase, Paddle, and GCP.
How do you like Paddle so far? I'm on the fence between Stripe and Paddle.
Stripe seems like more fun, but I wanted a merchant of record solution and (last I checked) Stripe is not that. I hope Paddle adds more flexibility/configurability in some places eventually, but overall it's been good.
Yeah, everyone says that Stripe is a better developer experience, but I'm definitely interested in avoiding tax complexity and hence considering paddle as MOR. Thanks!
In other post as you mentioned in the comments, the
"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."
was a <3.
Congrats! I'm in a similar spot - sorry if you covered this already but, aside from HN, I'm wondering what your growth channels are to get to this point? I've had a lot of luck with App Stores but am wondering how you get your product out there "in the wild".
Thanks! Talked about my approach here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/building-marketing-kyle-nolan-of-projectionlab-5k-mo-on-focusing-on-product-over-marketing-3b38edfe22
Hey Kyle, congrats! I've always been interested in personal finance, but had no idea that planning/forecasting could be a good market. Your growth curve looks amazing!
To answer your question on when to go all-in, obviously it's a combination of your risk tolerance, personal financial position (savings, assets, expense profile, family to support etc.) and also how confident you are your business -- particularly growth and churn. If you have moderate churn, I would be more wary. If high churn, then I wouldn't even bother.
I know a lot of people say having a 1 year runway is a good rule of thumb. I prefer longer runways of 18-24 months, but you could probably opt for a shorter runway given that your business already has demonstrated traction.
Another factor is potentially having to pay for your own health insurance, which could be expensive depending on where you live.
Good luck and keep up the good work!
Thanks Steven! You're right that there is no one-size-fits-all answer.
If (hypothetically) your day job would let you drop down to 50% part-time and keep benefits, how might that influence your thinking?
I'd say that would be a really nice option. Also depends on how much you like your job, and how much your company/bosses like you. If they like you and really want to keep you, then there's potentially a very low risk scenario where you can go 50%, and if PL doesn't work out, you can possibly go back full time. For me, I definitely wanted to leave my job (and industry for that matter), but I also felt confident to do so because I had enough savings and I also felt that if things didn't work out, I believed I could find another job down the road. Benefits can be key, especially if you have family to support.
You should also consider how that 50% would be structured. Is it half-day every day? Or full-day every other day? I'm bad at context switching and prefer to work for long uninterrupted periods on one thing. And if you do half-day, do you do your job first or PL first? Because I definitely get tired and less productive as the day goes on.
Thanks Steven, really appreciate you sharing your story and perspective.
It's a multivariate problem and a lot to think about... but overall a good kind of problem to have 😁
It's a great problem to have!
But churn is the biggie to worry about. It creates a ceiling on growth. I worked on a business where we were growing and had moderate churn %. We felt good for a while because MRR kept increasing. But because churn % was constant, that meant that as we grew, churn $ kept growing until the point where churn $ was equal to new growth $, which meant growth just stopped. We worked for a long time to increase new growth $ or decrease churn % but ultimately could not figure out how to do either, and so the business just flatlined. Hard lesson learned.
Increase new growth, decrease churn. Simple right? 😜 /s
In your experience, is there a specific monthly churn rate threshold that pops out as a red flag? Or do you view ANY ~constant monthly churn % as a problem?
If you google it, articles will give you a wild variety of answers anywhere from less than 1% month to 5% monthly. I like to think about it on an annualized basis. So 1% monthly churn is 11% annual, 2% is 22%, 3% is 31% etc.
To me, 1% is good, 2% is ok, and 3% is the upper limit of what I like to see. It depends on a lot of factors like how big is the market, how fast is growth, etc. At the end of the day, you just have to look at your numbers and decide if you're happy with them.
We had 5% monthly churn which mean 46% annual churn. Replacing half your revenue every year is a huge headwind. I guess it's possible, but it was just too damn hard to grow. Rough numbers: we were adding 10K MRR every month, and thought we were doing great. But that meant after a while, we hit 240k MRR where we were adding 10k in revenue and losing 10k in churn and just stopped growing. That's what I mean by a growth "ceiling".
Also, keep in mind that I'm talking about long-term churn here, looking at monthly cohorts. It's not uncommon to see 50%+ churn in the first month, then 20% in month 2 and 10% in month 3. But by the time you get to month 4 or 5+, you want to see that monthly cohort churn number getting into low single digits. So your blended churn might be high, but if your long-term churn is low, eventually your blended churn will also be low.
Good point on looking at long-term churn with monthly cohorts. I wish my saas metrics platform did that kind of analysis automatically!
We were selling subscriptions on iOS, and Apple did provide cohort analysis which was nice. I'm sure there are analytics tools that do it automatically though I haven't researched or tried any yet. I think it's a pretty critical piece of data.
Good luck and I hope to see more updates on your future success!
Congrats this is awesome! Hope to be you one day!
Thanks Evan! I remember commenting something similar just a couple years ago 😁
Congrats Kyle. A huge accomplishment and a testament to you building something users actually need. Which distribution channels worked the best for you? Have you found most folks gravitate to the lifetime membership vs. monthly/annual?
Curious to see if there was a point where growth started accelerating more than other times in your journey.
Thanks Joseph! Covered most of those here I think: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/building-marketing-kyle-nolan-of-projectionlab-5k-mo-on-focusing-on-product-over-marketing-3b38edfe22
But if that doesn't answer your questions, just let me know :)
Congratulations, Awesome achievement!
How long did it take you to build the product including the thought about the idea,
and how do you manage your time around your side project while maintaining life and sanity 😅
Thanks :)
Thanks! Shared a few more insights here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/building-marketing-kyle-nolan-of-projectionlab-5k-mo-on-focusing-on-product-over-marketing-3b38edfe22
Congratulations on your achievement. Startup founder path is full of uncertainties and possibilities. Quit and you will fail, stick to it and you shall succeed
Hey thanks @Procureit!
So glad for you. And nice niche for this kinda product. I recently analyzed financial advisors landscape. Huge market in US, I definetly need to discover a little bit more. Maybe launch smth similar too. But good for you and thanks for sharing!
Hello
Congratulations on this success. Your UI skills are really impressive!
What also surprises me is that there are so many users who pay money for it. Really cool thing!
Among other things, I have a platform for stock portfolio tracking (www.folishare.com - German), where I find it somewhat difficult to find paying users, so I'm really surprised that things are going so well for you. But I'm so happy for you!
Think its because maybe you targeting a small audience ... from the look of it ... your site is in german not open to the rest of the world. try that and you might be able to see a difference
Congrats!
Congratulations and
I've reached $3,000+ MRR by providing legal documents to Indian customers using Wordpress and crove.app.
Wish me luck for future, Now I'm working on building network of lawyers who can handle the leads I get.
Congratulations! It's great when people take interest in one of your side projects...
Hey @knolan, congrats on your success with PL. I love how transparent you've been with your journey and the fact that you've documented it. (I enjoyed this post: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/building-marketing-kyle-nolan-of-projectionlab-5k-mo-on-focusing-on-product-over-marketing-3b38edfe22)
I co-run Founderoo.co and our mission is to help side hustlers transition to a full-time business by sharing the learnings of founders who are doing it or have done it. Your journey is a perfect fit for our audience.
Would you be interested in sharing your story with our Website, Newsletter and Linkedin Audience?
🌐 Website: Founderoo.co
📩 Newsletter: https://www.founderoo.co/newsletter
🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/founderoo (my co-founder and I have a few thousand followers between us, and we promote each founder story ourselves heavily)
thanks for this, do you have the HN link?
found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26969173
thanks kyle, i appreciate it 🙏. All the best for PL and may you achieve higher success than it is today. 🙏
Congrats! Tracking your project for a while at https://microsaasdb.com/
do you have to follow any specific rules around the storage and security of user data since it is related to people's financial information?
My understanding is that compliance requirements vary a bit depending on your niche and feature set, but following best practices around secure coding, encryption, and data privacy is always important. In this case, PL has no link to actual financial accounts, does not deal with account numbers or transaction data, and has multiple data persistence options that put the user in control of what happens with the data they enter (e.g. cloud sync via Google Firebase, or localStorage only, or manual file import/export). There's also a self-hosted option for Lifetime users, so you can spin up your independent deployment and run offline if you like.
It's good to see that you have included self-hosted option for lifetime users. I just wonder what percentage of them choose to self host? Does the user support require a lot of attention?
So far it's only a small percentage that self-host, and support burden for that has been low. Fingers crossed it stays low 🤞
inspiring story, how did you get to handle the 9 first month of the project, and what did you make to have clients as marketing channels ?
Thanks! Sorry to keep re-posting this link, but a lot of those general questions about the early stages are answered here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/building-marketing-kyle-nolan-of-projectionlab-5k-mo-on-focusing-on-product-over-marketing-3b38edfe22
Congrats Kyle! What would you say your main acquisition channels have been? (if you don't mind sharing)
Mainly posts to hn, reddit, word-of-mouth, and a few guest posts to FIRE-related blogs
Congrats!!
This comment was deleted 3 years ago.