ProjectionLab
Modern financial and retirement planning software for FIRE
I'm still processing that this is real.
We reached $1,000,000 in annual recurring revenue. 🥹
No AI hype. No VC money. Just 4 years of hard work building good software to solve a real problem we had ourselves.
When I started ProjectionLab as a side project in 2021, I was just a normal engineer working solo on nights & weekends after my day job, because I wanted a better financial planning tool.
I couldn't imagine my little app ever making 5 figures... let alone 7! 🤯
But today, we're a 3 FTE team helping 100k+ households plan for a better financial future.
The chart looks nice when you zoom out, but the journey to $1M ARR had ups, downs, and moments I wanted to quit. I've been documenting it along the way, and you can read the full story here.
One thing I was shocked to discover is that success in this arena indexes less on IQ and more on consistency. Once you've validated your idea, keep showing up to make it a little better every day. Even when there are distractions. Even when growth is flat. Even when it feels pointless.
And even when that voice in your head says you’re not a “real entrepreneur.”
It said that to me too. A lot.
So you know what? Do what most people can't: actually show up every day. And prove it wrong.
Also, you don't necessarily need to grow a huge following like on indie hacker Twitter (or X, whatever). I literally don't understand how all those guys are posting constantly. Deep technical work on a complex product takes time and focus -- I would never be able to get anything serious done replying to stuff 100x a day.
I think the main thing is: find a real problem you understand deeply where the market isn't completely saturated. And solve it really damn well.
We hit $1M in total revenue and closed out January at $70k MRR! 🔥
In the early days, I never imagined ProjectionLab would help 100,000+ people plan for a better life.
There were lean months, late nights, and moments of doubt.
Showing up every day was not always easy. And $1M in 4 years may not be rocketship numbers.
But creating a bootstrapped business that's profitable, efficient, and fully aligned with our customers is more than enough for me 😊
4 years ago, this seemed literally impossible.
If you asked what my odds were of ever making a living building indie software...
I would have said: 1-5%
Back then:
❌ $0 MRR
❌ No marketing experience
❌ Graveyard of side projects I never tried to monetize
💡 An idea for a new one
4 years later:
🧑💻 150,000+ lines of original code
👥 25,000+ MAUs
🤑 $52,000+ / mo revenue
👨💼 A growing team
🥾 Fully bootstrapped!
https://projectionlab.com has changed my life. And it's a real honor to hear how it's already made a small impact in the lives of so many others.
But when I was first getting started, seeing famous #indiehackers like @levelsio, @dannypostmaa, etc., was kind of intimidating.
Don't get me wrong. It was inspiring to see people take a leap of faith, chase their dreams, build a business, grow an audience, and make a living doing what they love.
But to me, that just felt soooo far out of reach.
Like... that wasn't something I could actually do... was it?
What about the risks? The uncertainty? Survivorship bias? The emotional rollercoaster?
There are always a million reasons to doubt yourself. To not take that bold step into the unknown.
But in life, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take.
And no matter the outcome, it's always more fun to chat with someone who gave it their all, than with someone who never dared to venture off the safest path.
Looking ahead, I'm excited to see what the next 4 years will bring.
I may not have fully executed the "growing an audience" part above, or posting regularly on social platforms. But you know what? Maybe that's fine.
I'm incredibly grateful that such a supportive community of users, partners, and friends has organically sprung up around ProjectionLab.
And I'm going to keep spending the lion's share of my time making the platform better and better, a little every day! 😊
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So inspiring for new indie hackers 🙌
Just launched my first product: aiselfi.es
Not sure what will come out of it but I’m definitely having a good time building and connecting.
$40k per month?!! 🤯
When I started https://projectionlab.com as a side project three years ago, I didn't think I'd make $40k PERIOD!
I was a normal engineer with a day job, who didn't know the first thing about entrepreneurship.
I loved making things since I was a kid. But I never actually BELIEVED one of those things could grow into a real bootstrapped business.
And in some ways, that makes this journey extra fun!
Like Charlie Munger once said, "the first rule of a happy life is low expectations" 🤪
I am incredibly grateful for all of you who have supported PL over the past few years. It's thrilling to wake up every day now, legitimately excited to work full-time on a project I love.
I have more energy than ever to continue making PL a little better, every single day!
And if things keep heading in the right direction, it could be fun to start building out more of a team. So stay tuned!
A month ago, I left my corporate job to go all-in on my side project! 🎉
And today, https://projectionlab.com is doing $24k+ MRR.
But something I struggle with is giving myself permission to ever relax or take a break.
Solopreneurship feels a little bit like the movie It Follows. 👻
The focus and clarity from going full-time is incredible... but whenever you are not moving forward, you know "It" is slowly and relentlessly catching up to you.
Do you finally have the freedom and flexibility to take a morning off and enjoy a hobby? Sure! .... or maybe that's when It will finally strike 😳
My hope was that going full-time on PL would restore some of the work/life balance that has been absent for the past 2.5 years. But I see that will only be possible if I actually allow it to happen.
In 2024, I think I'd like to work on that.
So here's a question:
How many of you are successful at carving out guilt-free relaxation time?
And how would you describe your approach to balancing growing (and worrying about) a business with the other things in life you care about?
2.5 years ago, I never would have dreamed this was possible.
From my first internet dollar to $200k+ ARR, there has been no hockey stick growth chart, no AI hype involved, and no singular catalyst.
Just a quarter decade of hard work and persistence, bootstrapping as a solo dev on nights and weekends and gradually building up to this point.
This jump to full-time is earlier than my personal financial modeling in https://projectionlab.com showed a stellar chance of success for... so for the worrier in me, this is a chilling step out over the abyss 😳
But I have realized that even in the worst case, I would much rather fail pursuing a dream than let a promising business die on the vine and always wonder what might have been!
Looking back, it took me:
→ 14 months to reach 500 customers
→ 7 months to reach 1,000
→ 5 months to reach 1,500
→ 2 months to reach 2,000
→ 2 months to reach 2,500
Recently, my W2 was gracious enough to accommodate a part-time arrangement for a while. But it is abundantly clear that what PL really needs is my full and uninterrupted focus.
So with the past 2.5 years of risk mitigation, a year's expenses set aside, and current earnings level around 2.5x my personal annual spend... it is officially time to put the rest of my skin in the game!
I would never have gotten here without all the support and inspiration from my new friends in the financial independence community, the PL user base, and the IndieHackers scene 🥹
So thanks again to everyone, and here's to an exciting year ahead!
After 2 years of obsession and consistency, I've officially bootstrapped https://projectionlab.com to $16.7k MRR as a solo dev and side project.
→ 9 months to get to $1,000
→ 4 months to get to $2,000
→ 7 months to get to $5,000
→ 6 months to get to $10,000
→ 2 months to get to $16,7142
Even though I'm shocked and elated it could ever get this far, there is still an insecure voice in my head that reminds me it could all go to zero overnight 😬
When I was just starting out, that voice would say things like "no one would buy this", or "you don't have enough skill."
Then later, "this won't actually scale" and "you'll never get real traction."
At each stage, there were fun new things to fuel the paranoia! 😅
But zooming out, I wonder if it is beginning to look silly that PL is just a side project.
When is the right time to finally throw caution to the wind?
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Your site and design look awesome. Can you give some insight on what technologies you used. How did you do the design? What technologies you used to build front and back end. The reason i'm asking is that I'm on the same boat trying to do a side project but I don't know where to start. Should I do the design myself, or something like webflow. etc... Really appreciate your insight here.
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I'm using Vue.js, Vuetify, Chart.js, Firebase, Paddle, and GCP. That stack has been fairly efficient for me so far, though in retrospect it might have been faster to build the marketing site portion using something like framer/webflow rather than coding it all from scratch and trying to figure out how to make Vue SEO friendly.
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I also use Vue in my stack and I feel your pain when it comes to making it SEO friendly. On the other hand, now that I've done it I'm very happy how it turned out.
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Ah nice, what was your approach for improving SEO compatibility?
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Well, first I tried Nuxt but it came with a lot of baggage that made porting my project over kinda difficult.
Then I basically got it working by reading through the Vue SSR documentation and implementing the server side stuff myself. Their documentation focuses on using a Node backend but I typically use .NET so once I got the gist of it down I came up with my own approach.
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So you didn't have any qualms about stability/scalability with hosting yourself?
My approach so far for the marketing site is to use vite-plugin-ssr for static site generation and host the built pages via Firebase Hosting
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Congratulations, Kyle! Looks like you've built a really useful and very comprehensive software. I love your humility about the whole thing.
Any plans to go beyond the US?
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Thanks! And actually, PL already includes some international account types and tax config presets. If there are more you'd like to see added, feel free to make some suggestions on the public roadmap.
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NICE... I am looking for financial projects for our audience... and I see you have an affiliate program, will join!
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This is so nice to see! Your product is awesome (I'm a lifetime paid user), and it's inspiring to see your results.
Maybe steady, low churn for a few months could be the signal to go full time? Are you willing to share your churn rate?
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hey thanks! glad to hear you've gotten that kind of value out of the tool :)
ProfitWell reports monthly churn ranging from 3-6%. not sure exactly how that stacks up to other SaaS products in this space, but if I'm not mistaken that would equate to losing 40+% of the existing user base annually... which feels intimidating...
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Kyle - Love the look of your site. Do you have a designer that you work with?
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Couldn’t be happier for you Kyle 🔥
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Thanks! 😊
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Congratulations! Fantastic news :)
Do you recall any obviously pivotal moments when you realized you had product market fit?
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Honestly, I'm still not sure I know what that term means! I've heard so many conflicting definitions at this point, that I'm losing confidence it has precise meaning 😅
Which definition do you go by?
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Ha. That's a good point. I think it's just one of those things you know you have when you have it.
You seem to have found a market in the FI community. The fact that people are paying you seems to indicate you're clearly solving a problem for them. So yeah, you've got a product, a market and they fit together. You have it.
The trajectory of your numbers looks great. I guess I was just curious if you did anything in particular that moved the needle.
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You posted in February about reaching 6k MRR, and now in September you’re at 16.7k MRR. That’s a big jump! What do you think contributed to the large increase in the relatively short amount of time?
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It's been a combination of word of mouth spread, posting updates to places like HN, Reddit, Twitter, and writing a few guest posts for bloggers/influencers in the personal finance + financial independence space.
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Thanks to Brandon for inviting me to write a guest post for the Mad Fientist!
https://www.madfientist.com/projection-lab/
It was fun to walk through some planning scenarios for the FI community and reflect on the history of the project and how far it's come over the past two years.
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Hi there!
I've clicked around your tool, and I really liked the look.
Great job!I would definitely use that, but the price in my opinion is too high.
For example, I pay around 9 bucks a year as a fee for buying stocks, and paying as much monthly for tracking this (I know, this is not the only functionality, but still), is more than I expect.Also, there is a chance you are missing some potential customers who are just starting the investment journey.
In my opinion, providing some plan that allows saving data, and is limited with the total net worth may be useful.
One more feature I haven't found - multi currencies. I have assets in several ones so that also may be useful (if it is not presented).
Maybe that's just me, but the name is hard to remember (I had to come back to the IH projects list and scroll it each time I would like to visit your website).
Wish you good luck with your project!
After 22 months, I just reached $6k MRR with ProjectionLab (https://projectionlab.com) 🥳
→ 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
Growth may not be looking much like a hockey stick, but I'm having fun anyway 😀
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This is super cool! I've always been so underwhelmed by Fidelity / my bank's forecasting tools. Also appreciate not needing to programatically connect my bank accounts.
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Cg! What are you doing for growth?
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Spending all my time building new features 🤪.... but kinda, actually:
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Wow, that's actually super cool.
If WoM is so strong for you it might be worth it to explore Reddit more and see if there are people driving that further for you.
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Could be; I have been meaning to try posting there again. The product has evolved a ton since the last time I did. Still a couple things to check off the list first though, e.g. looking into the possibility of creating a self-hostable version.
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Have you thought about incorporating benchmarks? E.g. a common question I think about when doing my own personal finance planning is 'how does my cash as a % of net worth compare to others?'
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If you are starting again now, what 3 things you will do first?
Just released the new Tax Analytics mode for ProjectionLab! You can now see detailed breakdowns of projected income, taxes, rates, and brackets 🚀
Want to better understand how different tax types apply to each kind of income?
The new Effective Brackets chart fuses applicable taxes into a single set of effective brackets per income type, with deductions factored in.
This was the most upvoted request on the roadmap for quite a while. Hope you enjoy it 😀
1 Comment
Huge congrats Kyle! $1M ARR bootstrapped is no joke. This is truly inspiring. btw I’m curious, when you went from a solo dev to a whole real team. what’s been the hardest part about scaling the product? I would love to learn more about your company and how you scale in the US