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!

We just crossed a quarter trillion dollars in assets on ProjectionLab. $250 billion 🤯 Financial companies often share AUM (Assets Under Management) as a signal of scale, trust, or business health. But we don't manage these assets. Our customers do. People use ProjectionLab to model their own financial lives: investments, career changes, starting a family, taxes, retirement, and all the other what-ifs that come with trying to make good financial decisions. That's what makes this milestone different. It represents hundreds of thousands of households using professional-grade planning tools that have traditionally been out of reach to make smarter money decisions. Thanks to everyone who has used PL, shared feedback, suggested a feature, or told a friend. You're the reason this thing keeps getting better ❤️ We'll keep building the way we always have: thoughtfully, independently, and for our customers.

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 😊

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: xitter.cf/_knolan/status/1942688…

Well that's more real-time visitors than usual! Cool to see this story picked up on HN: xitter.cf/_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.