Chasing passion (over profit) to $34k MRR

Jen Yip focuses on passion over profit, but she's got plenty of both. Her product, Lunch Money, recently hit $34k MRR and her growth has been almost entirely organic.

I caught up with her to learn how she did it. 👇

Not a startup founder

James: You’re a bootstrapper, but that’s not where you started.

Jen: While in university, I worked as an intern at a seed-funded company where I was one of five on the team. That was my first exposure to the startup world.

After graduation, I spent four years at Twitter, going from "startup employee" to “cog in the machine” at a publicly traded company.

James: That was a heck of a start to your career.

Jen: Yeah, but I got burnt out and jaded by the corporate engineering life and I eventually quit to become a cofounder of a startup that went through both YC Fellowship and 500 Startups.

James: Was that a better fit?

Jen: I got burnt out 4x faster — it took less than a year!

James: Ouch. So what did you do?

Jen: I quickly (and sadly) realized that the startup life was not for me.

I took 1.5 years off from coding and traveled the world.

James: Nice. Then what?

Jen: When I got back, I taught myself the latest and greatest technologies that had developed while I was away and I started freelancing.

After a year of transactional development work, I dearly missed coding for fun and decided to start working on a side project which would later become Lunch Money.

Set small goals

James: Where's Lunch Money at today?

Jen: It’s at $34k MRR.

James: And it all started from a side project.

Jen: Yeah, I didn't think it would amount to anything more than a side project that perhaps a few friends would use.

After my disastrous burnout episode, I had no plans or interest in venturing back to the entrepreneurial world. I just wanted to code something for fun for myself and not have to worry about monetization, marketing, growth, and all the other stuff that comes with starting a company.

James: How did you get started?

Jen: I set small, attainable goals for myself. The first one was to build out a version of the product that would move me away from using a manual spreadsheet for tracking finances.

Once I had that done, I decided I would make it usable by other people, so my goal was adding authentication and user account functionalities.

From there, I invited my friends and my mom to use the app.

Small, deliberate, and consequent steps. That works much better for me than solely aiming for some distant, overarching goal (1 million users! $1M ARR!) without a clear strategy.

James: Smart. What happened next?

Jen: After a few weeks of positive feedback, I decided to share Lunch Money on Hacker News as a "Show HN" post.

James: How did it do?

Jen: It reached the front page for the entire day and I received well over 1,000 signups during that time. I knew right away I was going to quit freelancing to work on Lunch Money full time.

James: Sounds like a pretty sudden shift in goals.

Jen: I never would have guessed I'd become an entrepreneur again, but here I am: 12 years after my first software engineering job, I'm proud to say that I have finally found my calling and passion in this industry as "bootstrapped solo founder".

Ebb and flow

James: How is your life different than it was at those fast-paced startups?

Jen: My lifestyle these days is a lot more sustainable. Because I'm both bootstrapped and a solo founder, I have ultimate control over my entire work schedule.

James: So what does that look like?

Jen: I generally create a weekly plan on Sunday night and then I make a daily decision on what to prioritize.

James: How do you make that decision each day?

Jen: My mental wellness and how I'm feeling that day dictate how my day goes.

If I wake up feeling off, it would be more beneficial for me to rest and be ready for tomorrow instead of slogging through a work day.

Sometimes, I feel really energized about what I'm working on and can work for hours and days at a time.

James: So this increases your productivity?

Jen: Yep, it allows me to ebb and flow and I’ve gotten really good at listening to my mental state — I can always hit those periods of high productivity.

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Chase passion over profit

James: So small goals and listening to your body. Love that. What else has led to your success?

Jen: Moving fast!

James: How?

Jen: I believe the foundation for moving fast is that there has to be a deep motivation.

James: Where does your motivation come from?

Jen: Passion. Passion is like nitro for work, you would be really surprised at how fast you can move!

That’s why I find it's best to operate from a point of chasing passion over profit.

James: Tell me more.

Jen: When you chase passion, the work and discipline you put forth is immediately rewarded as you solve every little problem and tick off every little task along the way.

Chasing profits only gives you that gratification when you see the needle move directly from your work, which can take a few weeks.

James: How do you handle the tasks you aren't passionate about?

Jen: These days, there are lots of tasks that I might not necessarily enjoy.

I've been working more on outsourcing these parts so I can focus more on what I do enjoy — mostly coding and product design. Doing that allows me to keep up my momentum.

James: What do indie hackers need to know about moving fast?

Jen: First of all, if you're moving fast, make sure you're moving in the right direction.

If you find that it's not working, hone your ability to reassess and move away from a current project. It's entirely possible to move fast in something that is not worth that velocity of work.

Secondly, be well-organized! It's very easy to haphazardly work on the first thing that excites you but doesn't necessarily contribute to the bigger picture. An efficient note-taking and personal knowledge management system can help keep you in line.

Do the things that don't push the needle

James: Were you able to maintain the passion-over-profit focus after going from side hustle to full-time hustle?

Jen: To an extent. But more so once I reached a level of sustainability with Lunch Money where I was confident we could take a few risks.

At that point, I realized I wasn't going to derive proportionately more happiness from putting in more effort to make more money.

Once you hit that sweet spot of sustainability (plus a safe buffer if you're risk-averse like me!), I believe there's room to ease up on the profit chase to shift focus to things that like good or fun ideas — the ideas that often get sidelined because they are not immediately profitable or because they might even decelerate growth.

James: What’s a good example?

Jen: I enjoyed the idea of Lunch Money being a truly internationally-offered app with far reaches, helping folks from all walks of life with their finances and uniting them in our community.

So I changed our pricing structure to lower our annual subscription cost from $100 to as low as $40. And I did that at the height of inflation!

James: "As low as"?

Jen: Our new pricing structure is on a pay-what-you-want scale with $10 increments between $40 and $150.

James: Scary move.

Jen: I was able to invite more users from different economic backgrounds to use the software I created.

So I went from offering a premium product that fewer users would pay a high price for, to offering the same premium product to a wider audience and trusting that the initial user base wouldn't all flock to the lowest tier.

James: Did it work?

Jen: In the end, I was right. Only 15% of legacy users switched their plans to a lower pricing point. About 25% of users on our new pricing plan pay above $100 annually, and they account for over 40% of revenue generated.

Of course, the first few months, we saw a slowdown in revenue growth, but my hunch is that we will be able to retain users for much longer if they feel they are getting a good deal by being able to choose what they pay.

Organic B2C growth

James: Let’s talk about how you grew to $34k MRR.

Jen: For the first 2 years, Lunch Money grew organically, mostly through blog posts and personal Tweets (@lunchbag).

I was building in public by leveraging my love of writing to share my experiences and tell the story of Lunch Money in real time. Articles such as "My biggest mistakes with Lunch Money... so far" and "Optimizations as a company of one" gained a lot of traction on forums like Hacker News and Indie Hackers.

James: What was special about those pieces of content?

Jen: They didn't just focus on how great building a business was or on some hand-wavey blueprint of what to do to get successful. I think being real and transparent about my journey inspired a lot of folks.

Along the way, they find that it's a solution that would work for them or people in their circles, and they would talk about Lunch Money. We have mostly grown by word of mouth and have spent very little on marketing in the past five years.

James: Why not explore paid channels?

Jen: Paid marketing never seemed to work for us. Ads never performed well and I didn't like how once we stopped paying for them, all our efforts essentially disappeared.

Affiliate marketing and paid content haven't yielded great results either, which I suspect is because we're not a big enough name and we don't pay as much as the other venture-backed and cash-rich solutions on the market.

James: You’re B2C. Is that harder than B2B?

Jen: I really enjoy working on a B2C product for a multitude of reasons, the biggest one being that I find it to be more chill than B2B.

James: How so?

Jen: When selling to businesses, you always have to be "on", whether through some sort of support SLA or promise of uptime. Entire businesses may depend on your service and that's a lot of pressure for a bootstrapped and solo founder.

Also, while B2B can charge higher prices, it tends to be more difficult to get those first few sales.

James: Makes sense.

Jen: With B2C, I love that I can connect more personally with our users as I'm building a product that I'm also using every day to manage my own finances. It makes me feel much more dedicated to the product rather than the profits.

Surfing a wave to 5x growth

James: You're growing faster than ever now.

Jen: Late last year, Mint, by far the most popular player in the field, announced they would be shutting down their service permanently.

James: Why?

Jen: Essentially because they couldn't monetize users enough from their free product. Even though they had the largest market share and biggest name recognition in personal finance management apps, and they were selling data and showing ads, it wasn't making enough money to justify the time and efforts to maintain the software.

James: So they’re sunsetting it?

Jen: Intuit's decision was to ultimately merge Mint into CreditKarma, a recent acquisition that had a clearer path to monetization. However, CreditKarma was never going to reach feature parity with Mint so lots of essential features are being culled.

It's a very unfortunate thing for consumers, and it highlights the danger of having a free offering for a venture-backed/publicly-traded company where the ultimate incentives are not aligned.

James: Sounds like you’re happy to be a bootstrapper.

Jen: Being bootstrapped is a deliberate decision that I made based on my personal history with startups.

We don't have investors to appease; instead, we have a strong community of passionate users to whom we love providing a valuable service. And we are already financially sustainable which takes a ton of pressure off.

James: So what happened to Lunch Money when they announced this?

Jen: We saw new users from the day they made the announcement! Daily signups were more than 5x for the first few weeks while churn stayed constant, and we saw a $10k+ MRR increase!

James: Wow.

Jen: As a bootstrapped founder, I don't need a piece of the pie; a crumb will more than suffice.

A crumb of 4 million users is a lot of users.

James: And it hasn’t even shut down yet. When is it set to happen?

Jen: The official shutdown is supposed to happen this week!

James: You obviously positioned yourself really well. What have you been doing to make sure Mint’s users come to you?

Jen: To be honest, I'm not doing too much.

We did some SEO in early 2021 which has been fairly evergreen. We have been mentioned in a few listicles here and there over the years.

Mainly, we saw the biggest growth from Reddit. There has been a lot of chatter on the Mint subreddit from folks looking for alternatives and lots of users are mentioning Lunch Money and posting their referral links.

James: Referral links?

Jen: We have a referral program that credits 10% of every recurring invoice paid by a referred member.

I'm not doing more than that because ex-Minters have flocked to Lunch Money in volumes that did not necessarily leave me wanting more.

James: Why's that?

Jen: Don't get me wrong – I was thrilled for the influx of new users, but we are a small operation that can only handle so much. The increased load on our infrastructure and support channels was proving to be too much to handle while continuously welcoming large numbers of new users every day.

Can you believe that at one point, we even stopped new registrations for a week and put up a waitlist for folks who wanted to sign up?

James: Why?

Jen: As a profitable bootstrapped company, I'm all about sustainability even if that means slower growth. I want every user to have a great experience. And if there are massive bugs, I won't feel good about pushing more people through the door!

I'm proud of my product and I would rather less folks use a great working version than everyone trying out a buggy version.

James: Passion over profit.

Jen: Exactly.

James: Where can people find you?

Jen: I'm on X. You can also check out my blog or try Lunch Money.

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