Huge update!!! I just quit my job and I am going all-in on projectionlab.com! 🥳🔥 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. The jump to full-time is earlier than my own financial modeling in @projection_lab 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! And I am extremely grateful for all of you whose encouragement has helped me build up the confidence to take this leap, e.g. @madfientist, @Shpigford, @hutchins, @mrmoneymustache, @arvidkahl, @dr, @MrNick_Buzz, @agazdecki, @dvassallo, @levelsio, @seanfgates, @markluck, @ptmoney, @WalletHacks, to name a few. 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 per @dannypostma's suggestion, 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 / #buildinpublic scene 🥹 So thanks again to everyone, and here's to an exciting year ahead!

Just shipped a tax strategy optimizer that saves the median household $300,000 in lifetime taxes. Really exciting to make powerful tools like this accessible to everyone. And kinda crazy to realize I've been working on @projection_lab for half a decade now. #buildinpublic

productive year so far! how's your commit history looking?

ProjectionLab is bootstrapped, profitable, and hiring! We're looking for a Senior Full-Stack Engineer to join the team as our second dev. You'd be working directly with me on a large Vue 3 TypeScript codebase, shipping features used by thousands of households. This is hard work with a high quality bar. But also the most fun I've ever had building software :) Full story how to apply: projectionlab.com/blog/hirin…

no longer catfishing with a pic from 2016! 🙌 was kinda fun stitching this new one together with @GeminiApp and @canva (sorry for the cut @traveling_olive 😂)

Here's what getting married this summer taught me about B2B SaaS... Absolutely nothing. Not everything in life has to be about business 🙂 For 5 years, I've struggled to give myself permission to disconnect. When you build something from nothing, it becomes part of you. What if there's an outage? Should I have my laptop on-site? How many things still rely on me? At some point, you have to tell yourself to shut up and get a grip. If you waste this kind of day worrying about work, you're not getting it back. Sometimes you've got to trust your team, and yourself, enough to fully disconnect. So yeah. I left the laptop at home. Didn't think about work. Wrote zero lines of code. And it was a perfect day, rain and all.

had fun catching up with friends, partners, and creators at @FinCon 25 this year! ... and stayed a few more days to enjoy the outdoors! ⛰️ 🎣 on the river, it hit me how lucky we are to be building a calm and independent business, not chasing unicorn valuations or racing to investor meetings. no one to say we can't go fishing on a tuesday morning 😊

Working for yourself is amazing, but also addicting. You blink, and years have passed. This weekend I took a day to reset on Katahdin (Cathedral → Knife Edge → Helon Taylor) with @traveling_olive. First time in a long while I went an hour without thinking about work!

24 hrs on the front-page of hacker news?! Replying to comments till 2am was not on the agenda this week 😂 Glad the HN hug of death is no problem for @Firebase Hosting! Here's a peak at the analytics: x.com/_knolan/status/1942688…

The challenge is: how do we shift focus away from false credentials and vanity metrics, and toward the kind of real success stories you’re highlighting? There’s clearly appetite for it. Just look at the response here: news.ycombinator.com/item?id…

Well that's more real-time visitors than usual! Cool to see this story picked up on HN: x.com/_knolan/status/1939672…

We did it!! $1,000,000 in annual recurring revenue. With zero funding. 🥹 And I'm still processing that this is real. No AI hype. No VC money. Just 4 years of hard work building good software to solve a real problem we had ourselves. And never giving up. 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. 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 may look smooth, but the journey to $1M ARR had ups, downs, and moments I wanted to quit. Here's the full story: projectionlab.com/blog/we-re… #buildinpublic

Kinda neat to be able to do this with an email

Weeknights from 8pm to midnight. 20 hrs every weekend. 14 months to 500 customers. That's what it took to bootstrap @projection_lab from a side project into a real business. Grateful to see the story get a small mention in @sabatier's new book Inner Entrepreneur this year. His original book Financial Freedom helped spark my FI journey, and played a big role in why I started building PL in the first place. I never expect an email reply, let alone a future shoutout in a book! As always, Grant's writing is grounded, thoughtful, and accessible. If you haven't checked out Inner Entrepreneur, it's worth a read.

Code is stable. Tests are passing. Confidence is high. Let’s ship 80,000 lines to prod this morning and find out which of those was... optimistic 😅 #buildinpublic

Just hit 4M search impressions this year! 🔥 Want to know the secret to how I did it? ... I didn't! Last year I brought on @jonkuipers to lead growth & marketing for @projection_lab. And he's been crushing it. I'm focused on building. He's focused on growth. No hacks or secrets. We're just staying focused on our strengths, and trusting each other with theirs. Hiring the wrong person can kill your business. But hiring the RIGHT person? That's how you keep coding and 10x TTM search impressions at the same time. #buildinpublic