Hey guys, how’s it going? It’s me again, your favorite writer. Do you remember that saying about slow and steady winning the race? Well, here’s living proof. While the startup world was chasing AI hype and raising millions to build apps nobody wanted, one quiet engineer named Kyle Nolan was spending his nights and weekends crafting a financial planning tool for himself.
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That side project, born in 2021, is now called ProjectionLab, and today it’s a $1 million ARR bootstrapped SaaS helping over 100,000 households plan their financial futures. No funding, no hype, no shortcuts. Just consistency, compounding, and showing up every single day.
Back in 2021, Kyle was just a regular engineer. He had a corporate day job, a love for personal finance, and one problem: none of the existing tools for financial planning felt right. Some were too simple, others too complicated, but nothing quite fit the way he wanted to plan his own life.
So, he did what engineers do best: he started building. Nights, weekends, holidays, every spare hour went into developing a personal finance simulator. At first, ProjectionLab was just for him. But when he put it online, strangers started paying attention.
The first milestone came in May 2021, when a simple Show HN post brought in $150 MRR. By the end of that year, he was at $1K MRR while still grinding a full-time job. What started as a “little tool” was slowly proving it had real legs.
Now, let’s be real: hitting $1M ARR bootstrapped isn’t just rainbows and magical graphs. Kyle’s path looked smooth on the outside, but under the hood, it was messy, stressful, and filled with near-quits. In the beginning, his early posts about the tool landed with silence, and he nearly gave up before Hacker News gave him a lucky break. That initial traction helped, but imposter syndrome stayed with him for years, whispering that he wasn’t a “real entrepreneur.”
Balancing his corporate job with 4–6 hours of late-night coding was exhausting, and burnout was always lurking. Growth was not linear either; some months flatlined or dipped, each downturn making him question whether he was wasting his time. On top of that, Kyle had no marketing background. He was an engineer by training, and the world of growth tactics and acquisition channels felt foreign. For years, he also handled every support question himself, which interrupted both his development work and his sleep.
This wasn’t just “building an app.” It was a grind of doubts, sacrifices, and 404 Day Off Not Found.
Kyle pushed through with three main C’s: consistency, community, and complementary skills. Consistency became his superpower. He kept showing up every single day, even when growth was flat, even when cancellations rolled in, even when it felt pointless. Over time, he realized that success depended less on IQ and more on persistence.
He also built a real community around ProjectionLab. What started as an empty Discord server eventually grew into a space of more than 8,500 personal finance enthusiasts. Many of his best hires, from contractors to tutorial creators, came directly from that community. This gave users a sense of belonging and turned them into evangelists, not just customers.
Finally, Kyle found the right partner in Jon Kuipers. Unlike others who wanted equity before proving their value, Jon worked alongside Kyle, contributing real growth results before asking for anything. When it was time to expand, Jon became the natural choice to lead growth, marketing, and partnerships, allowing Kyle to focus on building. Together, they kept ProjectionLab lean, bootstrapped, and laser-focused on customer needs.
That mix of persistence, community, and smart partnership transformed a side project into a product trusted by tens of thousands.
And the results? Extraordinary.
From $150 MRR in 2021 to $83K+ MRR by mid-2025, ProjectionLab crossed the magical $1M ARR mark. And that doesn’t even include extras like lifetime subscriptions and 1-on-1 training, which push monthly revenue 20–50% higher.
ProjectionLab is now trusted by over 100,000 households, supported by a small but mighty team, and has grown into one of the most beloved financial planning tools online.
Kyle’s once-empty Discord server is thriving, his blog posts inspire fellow indie hackers, and his software has become a true alternative in a crowded market where incumbents either overcomplicated or oversimplified.
But perhaps the real result is this: Kyle proved that you don’t need venture capital or AI hype to build something lasting. You just need a real problem, the patience to keep showing up, and the humility to listen to users.
TL; DR
Kyle Nolan started ProjectionLab in 2021 as a side project. Nights, weekends, and four years of consistency later, it’s a bootstrapped SaaS at $1M ARR. He overcame crickets, self-doubt, and the grind by showing up every day, building community, and eventually partnering with the right people.
The big lesson? Success doesn’t always come from being the smartest in the room. It comes from persistence, solving a real problem deeply, and proving that slow and steady compounding really can win the race.
Makes me want to be an engineer :)