Kyle Nolan

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!

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/hiring-ou…

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 😂)

@Shpigford do you think any of your projects / future projects will be some of those instances? curious in which circumstances you see it as a net positive.

This. I believe there are very few instances where openly sharing revenue is beneficial.

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 😊

Working for yourself is amazing, but also addicting. You blink, and years have passed. This weekend I took a day to reset on Katahdin (Cathedral → Knife Edge → Helon Taylor) with @traveling_olive. First time in a long while I went an hour without thinking about work!

It's easy for running a business to become all-consuming. And it can be tough to give yourself permission to ever disconnect. But good friends + hard miles are restorative... even if my knees currently beg to differ 😂

@dannypostma I just finished the Lightbringer series by Brent Weeks, and that was great. Also would recommend The Name of the Wind if you haven't read it yet.

Woke up, walked the dog, made coffee. Time to read. But appenantly I finished all books from Game of Thrones (yeah not the official title) 😭 What series should I pick-up next? I’ve read Dune and Three Body Problem already.

is there any scenario where you'd want to bring on one or more engineers you could delegate some work to? IIRC you might have one infra guy or something? curious what your experiences have been like working in teams in the past, and if the reasons you love building solo are similar to mine. (speed, agility, no bs / overhead, huge efficiencies from having the whole codebase in one brain, etc)

Yes, just me and Cursor + Claude Code and vanilla PHP + jQuery!

@badlogicgames @mitsuhiko @KrauseFx no worries Mario! I bet if I was still in school, my writing would get flagged all the time. AI does write kinda like me :/

@_knolan @mitsuhiko @KrauseFx I am so sorry :(

Lots of AI generated blog spam on the orange site frontpage now. The future is cool but also sucks.

@mitsuhiko @badlogicgames @KrauseFx I spent several days writing and rewriting that 🥲

@badlogicgames Definitely AI slop but the app looks quite interesting. I did something like this by hand once when I was younger and I always wanted someone to make an app. Even talked with @KrauseFx about it.

@KrauseFx @mitsuhiko @badlogicgames thanks Felix! and fwiw I spent multiple days drafting, writing, and rewriting that post haha. people are so quick to whip out "written by AI" smh

@mitsuhiko @badlogicgames @_knolan has done an incredible job here! Takes some extra time to get it to work with Austrian tax rules, but very well worth setting up

@UncJesseBee glad to hear it reasonated! always takes me an embarrassing amount of time to write blog posts 🙈

I broke (and fixed 4 hours later) my fully functional and nearly shippable app earlier today. A buddy serendipitously sent me this post. This stuff really helps to keep me going. Hope it helps you, too. Keep going!

@LyalinDotCom @Firebase haha I'm sure this isn't even a blip on your dashboards

@_knolan @Firebase Good to know we did right for you here. Hosting is a beast . Also hi from the team 😅

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: x.com/_knolan/status…

@attacomsian @Firebase A long time trying to write a good blog post, and some luck! Probably more of the latter 😅

@_knolan @Firebase Wild! How did you do that?

@garrytan The challenge is: how do we shift focus away from false credentials and vanity metrics, and toward the kind of real success stories you’re highlighting? There’s clearly appetite for it. Just look at the response here: #44512064" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">news.ycombinator.com/item?id=444954…