Reached 1,000 customers! 🤯

Thanks Stan! And yep, only counting paid users here. 10k is now the new unattainable-feeling thing. Isn't it amazing how reliably the goalposts just keep shifting? 😅

Thanks so much! 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, because 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 🤣.

More recently, a finance author/youtuber unexpectedly reviewed 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 to talk about it there too. Those last three together really helped close the remaining distance toward reaching this milestone.

Thanks for trying it out, Sofus! I haven't had a chance yet to research the tax situation in Denmark, but if you can come up with a custom configuration that you think is a close approximation, just send over a JSON export and I'd be happy to use that as the starting point.

That was me not too long ago :)

Thanks Dave! Bootstrapping on nights/weekends is definitely a grind, but keeping the business structure simple and maintaining full creative control has been a good fit for me so far.

Thanks Karsten! What pricing tweaks would you recommend for the Pro version?

I agree it could be super useful in an educational setting. I know of at least one case where a college prof used it as an assignment in an economics for engineers type course. Sounds like it was the students' favorite part of the class, so I bet it could be a hit at other schools as well. Not sure if stripping down the tool would even be necessary; maybe just something along the lines of a discount on the Pro version for educational use? That way a professor could maintain N client accounts to be used by students, and would have visibility into the plans they create for their assignments.

Nope! I've been enjoying bootstrapping this as a side project too much. It is a grind working nights/weekends, but keeping it simple and maintaining full creative control is more my style for now.

Thanks Mathias. On the technology side, I try to think about scalability early on; but on the customer interaction side, it can make a real difference when you show that there's a real, responsive human on the other end.

That still feels like a hell of a goal, but it's good to aim high I guess!

Not sure I'm the right person to go to for sales shortcuts 😅. I've always spent 99% of my time just making the tool as good as I possibly can, and hoping that will eventually engineer some luck on the traction/growth side.

Thanks! And yep, only counting paid users here. Was searching for a word to communicate that more succinctly, but "customers" is the closest I could think of.

Thanks! And ah yes, the next "unreachable" goal on the horizon 🌅.... actually, even as I write that in quotes to try to be a little motivational about the shifting goalposts and limits of possibility, I can't help but notice that I still haven't actually escaped that little voice in my head that goes "well, but you know it probably is unreachable though" 🤣

Thanks Dhroov! Here's a podcast I went on recently covering my background and journey with PL so far: https://thefishow.com/kyle. Public speaking has never been my favorite thing, but I'm glad I made myself do it anyway :)

You may 🙃. I'm using Chart.js for pretty much all of the plots (including a few bits where I wrote custom extensions as needed). The app in general is built with Vue.js, Vuetify, and Firebase.

Thanks for checking it out! Assuming you didn't stick around to be one of the 1,003 from above, is there anything you felt it's missing?

I use Paddle for payments/subscriptions, and this is one of the widgets from ProfitWell, a metrics service that Paddle recently acquired.

Thanks Eric!

Thanks for checking it out, Tom! Anything you felt it's missing?

Thanks man!

🙏 Thanks Ruben!

True, although the past couple months include a finance author/youtuber unexpectedly reviewing the tool, Mr. Money Mustache tweeting about it, and the guys that run The FI Show asked me to come on their podcast to talk about it there. I don't think I can count on those kinds of fortuitous events continuing indefinitely without me stepping up my marketing game at some point here.

One thing I did was set up a Discord server for PL and make that one of the most prominent options for customer support. Growing that community has been a lot of fun: https://discord.com/invite/dZQ5DDEmT7

Thanks Binu. Dunno about sales hacks, but it's always good to validate your ideas early and get an MVP out there as fast as you can and start building an audience around that. I was actually pretty late to the audience building game myself (didn't even put a newsletter subscribe option on there until a few months ago). It's much better to bake that stuff in from day one if you can.

Recently churn rate has been somewhere around 3-7% per month. Not actually sure where that stands in the grand scheme of things -- what's a good benchmark in your opinion?

Thanks Manuel!

Thanks Maciej. It's been a long road to reach this milestone, but there's nothing I'd rather be doing 😊

Thanks Bret! 🙏