Kyle Nolan finally turned his side hustle into his main hustle at $200k ARR (but kept his job)

Kyle Nolan recently hit $200k ARR with ProjectionLab. That's an impressive feat for any product, but it's pretty much unheard of for a side hustle.

Which is why he just announced that he's dropping his employment to part-time and shifting more of his focus to the product.

I caught up with Kyle to find out how he's making the transition... and why the heck he waited so long. 👇

Derisk with a full-time job, then scale it back

James: You just dropped your employment to part-time so that you can focus more on ProjectionLab. Congrats! How did you pull that off?

Kyle: Thanks! I'm lucky to work at a company that's flexible and supportive, and I've been transparent with them about my side project from the beginning. So it was actually just a normal conversation, and the switch to part-time was essentially the push of a button.

James: How did that affect your salary?

Kyle: That's scaled down proportionally based on scheduled hours.

James: Fair enough. How does it feel?

Kyle: So far, part-time feels like a healthier balance that should enable me to take some much-needed weekends again.

James: You kept your full-time employment for a couple of years and all the way to $200k ARR. Why?

Kyle: I was being a chicken!

At first it was a de-risking tactic. Having a safety net took some pressure off, enabling me to think creatively and explore solutions methodically without worrying about survival.

James: What was so scary about going all-in?

Kyle: I was scared of messing up my own projections in PL, I suppose. 😂

My fiancé and I have been working hard for the better part of a decade now to try to build a sound financial foundation for the life we hope to live together. If a business failure compromised those goals, it would be a disheartening setback. Especially when we can see that the stable W2 route would have worked out fine.

James: Makes sense. So it was the right call?

Kyle: Having the safety net of a day job is nice, but one thing I currently worry about is if my recent shift to part-time is still too conservative. If it turns out I let a promising business die on the vine because I was scared to take the full leap and give it my all, that's something I'll regret.

James: So what would you recommend to fellow indie hackers?

Kyle: For folks just starting out, it's a decision that always depends on personal circumstances and risk tolerance. In my case, maybe I'm on the risk-averse end of the spectrum... but I'm gradually learning to get more comfortable with calculated risks.

How he almost stopped before he started

James: So how did all this start?

Kyle: 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.

James: That must've been a nice feeling.

Kyle: That unexpected surge of interest and enthusiasm from a notoriously critical community gave me the push I needed to really believe in the project's potential.

James: Did you do anything special in your HN post to get that kind of response?

Kyle: I only wrote a couple sentences in the submission. [I was lucky], the community loved the product and I went from 0 to 50 customers in no time.

James: Crazy to think about how different your life would be if you hadn't written those two sentences.

Kyle: I was one day away from halting work on it.

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Obsession creates consistency

James: And from there, it was easy street, right?

Kyle: I've been working on ProjectionLab pretty relentlessly for the past 2.5 years, putting in at least several hours every night after work, and all day + night on most weekends and holidays.

James: How did you do that consistently?

Kyle: A lot of the time, it feels like my real expertise is in being persistent!

While corporate engineering has been rewarding in its own way, for me it has never offered anything close to the thrill and fulfillment of bringing a personal vision to life and sharing it with the world.

Realizing it might be possible to grow my passion project into an actual business lit a fire under me, and it became the singular focus of nearly all my free time.

James: Did you always want to build your own business?

Kyle: Building a company was never a serious ambition of mine. But I sure do love making stuff!

James: You must've had a passion for finance, right?

Kyle: A few years back, I started reading/listening to a bunch of the books, blogs, and podcasts from the financial independence community. I dove head-first down the FI rabbit hole. I learned about leanFIRE, fatFIRE, regular FIRE, coastFI, Barista FIRE, and everything in between.

James: FIRE being "Financial Independence, Retire Early". Ok, then what?

Kyle: Theory was nice, but I wanted to really see how those concepts could work. I wanted a hands-on and visual way to map out all the options and explore the trade-offs between different life plans. So, I went looking for a long-term planning and forecasting tool. Something modern, fluid, nuanced, and actually fun to use.

I didn't find what I was looking for, so I decided to take a crack at building it instead!

You don't need a vision

James: So what was your vision?

Kyle: At the outset, I just wanted a tool to address my own comparatively narrow planning needs. Over time, the vision has expanded based on all the ideas and suggestions from the community.

Businesses don’t always need to start with a grand vision/ambition. Sometimes they can evolve from personal needs or pet projects.

Even if it's modest in scope, if you can target a real problem that you understand fully and are passionate about solving, that's going to boost your actual chance of success a lot higher than a fancy pitch deck for a pie-in-the-sky idea.

James: What's your vision now, nearly three years in?

Kyle: Someday, I would love to see PL as a widely used financial planning tool helping people all over the world figure out how to live life on their own terms and reduce anxiety around their finances.

Building > growing

James: Ok, so how did you get from a few users to $200k ARR?

Kyle: As a solo developer with significant time-constraints, the main thrust of my efforts has simply been to make the product so dang good that eventually people in this space started to take notice.

So far, I've spent nearly all my time on development, while also nurturing a community of users who love the tool, with occasional posts to places like Twitter, HN, and Reddit.

James: So, mostly word of mouth?

Kyle: Over the past year, I have been lucky to see some solid growth from word-of-mouth and a few shoutouts from prominent members of the financial independence community. And I also introduced a referral partnership / revenue share program which has been modestly helpful as well.

James: Yeah, referral tactics would help. How else can a person get so much WOM growth?

Kyle: Other than providing stellar customer support, building a community, and (of course) creating a great product, I think word-of-mouth would be a hard channel to engineer. I just feel fortunate that people liked my work enough to share it with others!

James: Why not shift some of that dev time to marketing time?

Kyle: This project was pretty massive in scope to take on as one person. And despite all the features I've added over the last couple years, the public roadmap is still growing faster than I can keep up.

Right now there are over 250 more features people have requested, and many of those would be significant expansions requiring weeks or months of work.

James: And those are all necessary?

Kyle: Most of those are not barriers to scaling per se, but a lot of them really would be great improvements that could alter usage patterns or help connect with a wider audience.

So yeah... it's hard not to wonder if part-time is still a bit of a half-measure here.

Imposter syndrome can help you

James: Did you have imposter syndrome?

Kyle: [Yeah, it's been an] emotional rollercoaster of trying to bootstrap a complex software product on nights and weekends while battling that inner voice of self-doubt.

James: What did that voice say?

Kyle: At first [it] 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."

James: So when you prove yourself in one way, the voice finds another insecurity.

Kyle: At each stage of growth, there are new things to worry about. Churn, platform risk, support burden, should you bring someone on to help, what if you pick the wrong person, etc.

James: How did you keep going?

Kyle: Building an engaged and supportive community of users is one thing that can help. If there are people cheering you on, it's easier to keep that voice at bay.

James: Do you think it'll ever go away?

Kyle: I imagine over time it often fades, but rarely disappears... and I'm not sure I would want it to.

It's good to maintain a healthy level of skepticism about your own ideas, and remember that no matter the degree of your success in life, luck is always a component.

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You can find Kyle on Twitter or check out ProjectionLab.