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.com hosting!

Here's a peak at the analytics:

Well that's more real-time visitors than usual!

Cool to see this story picked up on HN: bsky.app/profile/kyle...

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.

Weeknights from 8pm to midnight.
20+ hrs every weekend.
14 months to 500 customers.

That's what it took to bootstrap projectionlab.com from a side project into a real business.

Grateful to see the story get a small mention in Grant Sabatier's new book Inner Entrepreneur this year.

Back in February, we mapped out which ambitious new features could accelerate growth.

But what did we do next? Something completely different! 🙈

We realized that to build those ambitious features sustainably, we needed to upgrade the foundation.

So by popular request, we focused on:

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 Jon Kuipers to lead growth & marketing for ProjectionLab.

And he's been crushing it.

I'm focused on building. He's focused on growth.

Google Cloud engineers right now:

In the next 3-5 years, will we see any platforms start to optimize for authenticity, not just engagement?

Or is the endgame engaging AI slop flooding all channels everywhere?

I finally turned off subscription notifications!

For 4 years, I watched every subscription created/cancelled like a hawk.

Spike in cancellations? Spike in anxiety 😅

I started projectionlab.com from zero, and worried I could end up back there in an instant...

We hit $1M in total revenue and closed out January at $70k MRR! 🔥

In the early days, I never imagined projectionlab.com would help 100,000+ people plan for a better life.

There were lean months, late nights, and moments of doubt.

You can see in the revenue chart: it's been a roller coaster.

Kind of wild people spent 2,500+ hours this week in projectionlab.com! That's like two weeks of time every single day 🤯

Back when I was working alone, I'd scramble to get the new tax/finance updates added before Jan 1.

But thanks to the team, everything went smoothly this year! 😊

#buildinpublic

Want to know how a financial choice would impact your future net worth?

We just made it more visual (and more fun!) to explore what-if scenarios in projectionlab.com

I've been excited to build this one for a while. If you check it out, I'd love to hear what you think!

#buildinpublic

✅ Achievement Unlocked: 1M organic search impressions this year!

Last year we had:

- No content strategy
- Only branded queries in search console
- Marketing site all tangled up in the same project as the core app 🙈