Reached $6K MRR as a solo dev
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
I'm building PL as a side project on nights and weekends. Growth does not look like a hockey stick, but I'm having fun anyway 😀
For solo founders, time is often the biggest constraint. Especially with side projects. In my experience, here are a few things that are consistently worth it:
- Engage with users and grow a community
- Take the time to craft standout UI/UX
- Set realistic strategic goals and stick to them
- Post to relevant communities (HN, Reddit, Twitter)
- Prioritize ruthlessly and learn when to say "no"
- Celebrate the small wins along the way
- Take care of yourself
Pay special attention to the last one. Launching and growing a small startup requires consistency and persistence. And luck. And a bunch of other things.
But the point is: it's a marathon. So only burn the candle at both ends when there's a tactical reason. Not all the time.
And don't forget to exercise! What's the point of working towards a better future if you might not be around to enjoy it 🌅
After 19,314 lines of code, i'm shutting down my project
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Read the headline and through, whoa what am I doing wrong? Then read your timeline and realised I'm just at the beginning.
Really good to see stories that aren't crazy "X MRR in 3 months" etc.
Did you have a community before or at the time of your first dollar through Projection Lab?
Btw, Thanks for sharing this and inspiring us
Nope, started from zero 😁
Wow, that's awesome. 👏👏👏
From where did you got your first paying client?
Loved how easy the sandbox was to try it out! Do you have figures on how many people convert after using the sandbox vs not using the sandbox first?
Yes. And yes. And absolutely 💯
Dang - this is a very impressive "nights and weekends" build. Great work! Thanks for sharing your journey.
Thanks! At this point it's been almost two years straight of nearly every night and weekend, so I'm glad it's compounded into something meaningful 😅. Quite a bit of "balance" to sacrifice.
Totally. Well, your attention to detail in the product really shine through. Also, I've worked on enough stuff to know a good product isn't anywhere near sufficient - congrats on pulling all of the pieces together to make something (increasingly) real.
You're spot on about a good product being a necessary but not sufficient condition for growth. Arguably if I was more competent at -- or interested in -- marketing and outreach, PL could already be doing better. At least it's still trending in the right direction... for now... 👀
Honestly a good product is not even necessary for growth.
Take HubSpot when it was a startup - terrible product, massive growth.
It all comes down to good marketing.
And unfortunately, in nearly 20 years of building, marketing & selling software, services and products I've seen tons of great products flop because companies failed to market them correctly.
Really inspirational! Thanks for sharing :)
Congrats dude! Great idea and a well-done execution!
Out of curiosity, how long did it take you to make the first MVP of your app?
About 2-3 months if I recall correctly.
Nice! Thanks for replying and satisfying my curiosity, it sounds like a very reasonable duration for an MVP, not too short and certainly not too long :)
Very impressive site man, and a great success story - i'm yet to be more active on IH and glad this is something I saw today (having spent until 6am building a skeleton for MVP last night) 😂
Love to see it
Congratulations on your success with ProjectionLab! 🎉
Your journey is truly inspiring, and your UX/UI is impressive and so neat. I love it! 😍
Thanks for sharing valuable tips and details about your tech stack.
It's amazing that you were able to create such a feature-rich app alongside your daily job.
Keep up the good work. 🚀
ps: just added you on linkedin but missed click on the content message , sorry for that ;)
Hey thanks! It's been the result of two years of... obsession 😅. Don't think I could have dedicated all these nights and weekends if it wasn't.
It seems you've discovered the secret to adding extra hours to the day, but don't forget to take a break and recharge your super powers. Even Superman needs a vacation sometimes! 😂
It's always a pleasure to see a fellow developer succeed in his side project 🙌
But are you planning to take this project to the next level and make it your full-time occupation?
There's still a lot of daylight between here and there, but we'll see what the future holds 🤞
Amazing! Congrats on your success. I particularly appreciate your point about prioritizing ruthlessly and saying no. It's so easy to be distracted
Congrats on your success! All of your points are great advice and it’s so important to take care of yourself and find balance in your journey. Keep up the great work!
Really beautiful interface, awesome work! We've always had a financial advisor, and while they've had similar tools offered through the investing services they're tied to, the tools look horribly difficult to navigate compared to this one (and I'm not even sure we can independently access them).
Did you have any expertise in this field before starting your project? Was this solely a "scratch your own itch" sort of endeavor, or did you spend time with validation before setting out?
Thanks so much! Here are a few links with more of the backstory:
Lol I am old. Like truly a dinosaur, maybe whatever came before dinosaurs...
I am, therefore, ridiculously impressed.
Lol
I am more of a learner than a doer on my weekends.
Last few months have been focused on payment processing, pci and emv compliance. ( long story as to why)
It was a bit of a dance to find a "beginners" entry point that wasn't SELLING me processing..... but worth it.
2years of learning and exploring has gotten me very far, but I feel decades behind you!
Curiously, learning for the sake of learning has never worked for me. It rarely holds my attention for longer than a few hrs here or there. But if I'm building something with a distinct vision / end-state in mind, learning whatever is necessary to get there happens naturally.
I always start with a task completion goal but go beyond getting the task done because context is compulsively interesting. I also was behind the tech learning curve--i was a cook for 15 years ( i may have said that already) but barely knew how to use my phone for email. There was a lot of "wait what? that's a thing? " then I would have roll back to the origin of the thing -- and then see how a segment was using it ect.
my learning for learning sake was more about culture immersion, building a on-line business in general . Lately-I have been trying to learn some programming stuff and THAT needs a vision/ end-state, which I don't quite have yet.
and I was working for a fintech start-up and they are a little uhhh, let's delicately say-over their skiis - and the compliance, payments needed to be investigated. At first I just wanted to help improve things- then realized there were some real problems with the integrity, so went deeper to make sure I wasn't mistaken. If I was going to call them out, I didn't want to be wrong!
Good advice especially on the last one. Way too many people only focus on a side hustle and never pay attention to their health. I did this and got diabetes and high blood pressure. Now I focus on my side business and working out now and was able revererse my diabetes. 💪
Glad to hear you were able to turn it around, man! For a while, my blood pressure was starting to tick up as well. Putting an exercise bike in next to my desk helped level it back out.
Congratulations! Love your advice in the end. Do you have advice on how to engage/share your product in communities without sounding too salesy or spammy?
ngl, it can be tricky. Sometimes more of an art than a science 😅. For starters, look for communities that don't have an explicit ban on self-promotion. Beyond that, try to contribute and add real value to conversations; occasionally an opportunity to mention your solution may come up naturally.
Congratulations! It’s great to see how you have more than doubled your MRR each few months.
I really love your bullet points, specially those last ones that are so often overlooked when giving advice. In the end, we are all doing this because of love, for others but also for us.
This is awesome! That landing page is super clean. Mind If I ask what you used to build it?
I'm using Vue.js, Vuetify, Chart.js, Firebase, Paddle, and GCP. It's actually all one web app right now, with webpack code splitting.
How's your experience with Paddle been? From what I hear, it seems that the tax compliance is a huge benefit, but other than that, the developer experience and tooling seems to fall short of Stripe's.
Yep, that's spot on! The idea of dealing with sales and VAT compliance on my own sounded like a nightmare (do other indie hackers actually manage that effectively?), so Paddle seemed like the obvious choice.
Thanks for the reply! I think most indiehackers with Stripe just kick the can down the road b/c you don't have to worry about tax in most places until you reach a certain revenue threshold.
Congrats on your milestone! Hope the MRR keeps on climbing!
...but imagine having to track all those rules and thresholds separately for every location, and knowing that as soon as one pops you're in trouble 😬
To me, that just sounded untenable.
I believe that Stripe has the ability to keep track of state sales tax and VAT amounts owed and thresholds for you, but you are still responsible for registering and filing taxes yourself. (See step #2 and #4 here: https://stripe.com/tax) So probably not untenable, but still probably somewhat of a pain.
I looked into that briefly, but it seemed like each state had its own registration process and requirements to keep track of... and that's just the US! I could be wrong, but it seemed like a lot of work to do it right and be globally fully compliant.
Yeah I think you're right. The only other consideration I can think of is that by the time a business has to worry about sales tax, it will probably have enough revenue to pay an accountant to handle that stuff. For example, a bunch of states have a threshold of $100,000, so by the time a business is doing $100,000 in one state, they probably can hire someone to handle the taxes. Not saying this is a good solution. To be honest, I'm surprised that Stripe seems to be the de facto solution for indiehackers despite the tax implications.
Congrats!
The point about UX/UI is dead right, and I love PL's UI btw. Have you designed it yourself or hired a freelancer to do that?
Also, what tech stack have you used on the frontend, both the app the the landing page?
Thanks Tomasz! Haven't outsourced anything, it's just me 🙂.
I'm using Vue.js, Vuetify, Chart.js, Firebase, Paddle, and GCP. It's actually all one web app right now, with webpack code splitting.
Congrats Kyle! Love to see it can be done solo. Good luck going forward and growing even more. PL isn't up my alley, but I'm sure my girlfriend is going to love it haha
Thanks man! It's been a lot to take on, but it's a blast to work on and I've learned a lot. The world does need better long-term planning tools.
"The world needs long term planning tools."
In so many ways
Fully agree. I so far manage with spreadsheets but I think this is an interesting market.
Congratulations! I've been looking for the exact app recently. 🔥
Thanks! If you have any questions, suggestions, or new feature ideas, feel free to reach out any time.
Great work. I agree especially about your point with UI/UX. I’m kind of new to web app development. Do you have any shortcuts that you use to keep a quality UI/UX easy to adopt and maintain? I’m using a theme right now and that’s been a huge help. I’m wondering if there’s anything I’m missing out on though.
Using a modern web development framework with a good material UI library can be helpful. I use Vue.js and Vuetify.
That is one neat app! I can see why it has done well.
Thanks Jon! It's been a huge undertaking as a solo developer (and side project). The tool has come a long way since that first time I posted it to HN a couple years ago.
Congrats. Your product is insanely cool! It will help a lot of people.
The demo is a nice touch with pre baked scenarios. Shows the value straight away.
Hope it keeps growing...
hey, thanks Andrew! I always like when products have sandboxes you can hop into, so of course I had to build one 😁
I had a look at the landing page. Amazing work!
Great figures and encouraging insights. Would like to know how you built your community.
Is this your first project? :) btw. great progress, keep going
Great result what is your business customer churn rate?
How do you post to relevant communities without getting banned? I am constantly getting by the spam bot.
Well, you do still have to follow the rules of the communities you engage with 😛
Congratulations on achieving this milestone as well as thank you for sharing your experience
This is awesome! Love the dedication over that 22 month period, can't've been easy. Where you say,
Did you structure your time management at all, like once every two weeks on a strict schedule, or just whenever you had the motivation?
Congradulations! Your product looks great. It is very encouraging to see solo devs becoming successful with their products.
Thanks so much for posting. It really helps folks like me who are just getting started on this chapter of life and need to figure out what to prioritize.
The general wisdom is that consumer apps can be a difficult hill to climb. Is the bulk of your business with consumers, or does more revenue come from professional advisors.
Sure thing! And it's mostly B2C actually.
Congratulations - that's a great milestone
Congratulations. Persistent does pay off. It would be great if you can share your marketing plan.
Shared a few thoughts on that here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/building-marketing-kyle-nolan-of-projectionlab-5k-mo-on-focusing-on-product-over-marketing-3b38edfe22
The first 10K are the hardest! Wondering what you did between 2K and 5K to drive sales?
Mostly just kept building actually :)
Some of the early adopters have gradually helped spread the word within the FI community, and the occasional tweet/mention from bloggers/influencers in that space has helped a little as well.
I'm sure there's a lot more I should be doing, but there are a limited number of hours in the day 🥲
What kind of tech stack are you using in your project?
Looks awesome. Gr8 job sir! :)
I'm using Vue.js, Vuetify, Chart.js, Firebase, Paddle, and GCP.
Very cool How has your experience been with growth?
Congrats man! What communities do you engage with on Reddit?
How are you able to bring consistent traffic to your site & onboard new users every day? Do you run any paid ads?
So far haven't done any ads. Shared a bit on my (arguably imbalanced) approach to building vs marketing here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/building-marketing-kyle-nolan-of-projectionlab-5k-mo-on-focusing-on-product-over-marketing-3b38edfe22
I love this. Congratulations!
As a developer that spends most of their time on the Frontend I absolutely love the design of this, well done.
What were some of the biggest technical problems that you faced during development? How did you land on your current price points?
Really love this product! Congrats Kyle!!
Congratulations!
This is absolutely amazing!
Do you have a designer team to design this type of outstanding design?
Congrats, looks pretty cool. One question though, how did you validate this idea in the first place ?
I built the first version because I wanted a tool like this myself. After a couple months, I posted it to a few places, and was pleasantly surprised by some great feedback.
That's awesome! Congrats :)
What were some of your favorite small wins?
A couple meaningful ones from earlier in the journey:
Congratulations. Your post is so inspirational. And I could not agree more with everything you said.
Your product is actually interesting! Well done!
I used it and I liked it!
Great job ! I’m a solo dev too and will benefit from your advice.
I have a suite of iOS apps and my website is nothing special, since I rely on AppStore advertising and landing pages.
Congrats! Design is super clean and I feel convinced to try it out, by the placement of things like "No ads", "no calls", etc.
Very targeted, but executed well. Curious how many revisions you went thru on home page and how much design background you have? Looks great!
Thanks! No formal design background. I'm just not content making things that don't look good 😁. This is probably the 5th or 6th home page redesign. Might do it again in a month or two to try to improve web vitals score and create alternate landing pages each targeted a little differently.
Really inspiring!! Your landing page is really cool :)
Thanks Neel!
Congrats, Kyle! What has been your main/best marketing channel?
Mainly just posting to places like HN and Reddit occasionally, plus word-of-mouth.
Awesome job! Do you have any tips for the community part? Useful places, methods etc? Community is something I personally struggle with.
Creating a discord server is one easy way to get started. Direct people to it for support queries / feedback, create a variety of other channels, and with any luck you'll see membership grow over time as your project gets more exposure. Quite similar to collecting emails for a newsletter.
Done ✅ I've created a discord server and added a link to the page for https://roastd.io
Also received advice in a separate thread to start a mailing list and offer out a free guide to people so I've just set all that up too. Thanks!
Wow, congrats! What would be your advice for someone just starting out, with only ideas and 0$ revenue?
Focus on a problem you understand deeply and are passionate about solving, so that you'll have the persistence to really follow through. Also validate the idea as early as possible.
Congrats! That was way quicker then my project is going on. What is the HN community you were talking about?
Hacker News. They can be a tough crowd sometimes, but if you manage to reach the front page, be prepared for a massive traffic spike.
Nice, congrats!
Love that you're doing Reddit as well, it's still super underrated IMO. Just need to find relevant subreddits, threads and comments to engage in.
I've recently been using Surfkey.io by @JohanCutych for this, might be useful for you.
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Huh, this is the first time I've seen someone taking shots at WebP as a format. Any links to resources on what the established best practice is now?
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Based on my experience, the problem isn't the fact that he used WebP so much as that the quality for the WebP compression is set too low. I"m not sure what it's at, but 36kB for an 1160x940px image probably just isn't enough bytes to get the job done. Not sure what the quality is set to.
I really prefer to use stuff like imgix for this (Cloudfront I think also has a competitor) where you can simply tune the quality param as needed and also make a request to a single URL and have the correct image format (AVIF preferred) based on the iamge format rather than having to fuss with any of this stuff yourself.
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Same here 😎. If you have any questions/suggestions as you dig in, feel free to shoot me a message.