It's so, so , so hard to walk the line between persistence (which leads to glory) and stubbornness (which leads to more time following already wasted time.)
Congratulations for walking this line correctly.
I agree that some sort of market validation is necessary to at least pretend you are on the former not the latter. Those early usage spikes are helpful reminders that there is a business here somewhere.
I'll also make a note that you spent time on marketing from the early days. Writing blog posts, promoting said posts, having a Discord server, committing to answer emails, all of this is marketing and its likely lead to success more than the code.
I notice whenever there was a dip in revenue, marketing (in the form of more blog posts) was the response. I suspect that was intentional, and definitely a better approach than "let me go away and silently code more features."
So there are valuable lessons to others here. Congratulations not just on the current success but also on sharing the path that leads to success. Ultimately you can show the way, but you can't make people learn from it.
Oh, and I like the bootstrapping approach. I did the same, and I'm not sorry. It's longer and harder but also skips an enormous amount of extra work.
Thanks. For a while there, it wasn't clear to me which side of the line I was walking.
Something that stuck with me from Poor Charlie’s Almanack is that low expectations are a cornerstone of a happy life. I built this for myself first, so when people actually signed up and paid, it was incredibly motivating. I was thrilled to spend my free time treating those early customers like royalty and building more of what they wanted.
If I had instead come into this with the expectation of quick success, I doubt I would have made it through those early years.
And cheers from one bootstrapper to another. It's not easy, but I can't imagine a more rewarding way to build.
+1 from someone who also bootstrapped a side project into a 7 figure business, and just happens to be absorbing some lessons from Poor Charlie’s Almanac on Audible recently.
Another lesson here: you built for a specific community who is passionate, money-motivated, and concentrates in specific social spaces (forums, reddit, etc.) where you can promote your business. This isn't always a recipe for success, but it's a damn good starting point. You need to adjust to the sensitivities of the community to avoid overly self-promotional content, but you always have a clear channel to promote your very specific product that meets their needs.
It's an impressive accomplishment. I've always struggled to get through the valley of despair in a new project. I've decided that I can only build and sell things that I regularly use. Otherwise the signal is just too weak, and I eventually get burned out. But if I'm always a user of one, then at least it's validated for me.
Caring is kind of a superpower. And not just in terms of signal, but also the quality of work. I don't think this would have gone anywhere if I hadn't cared deeply about solving the problem in an elegant way.
Earlier in my career, I worked on some things as a corporate engineer that were hard to care about, and there's just no comparison.
I remember seeing this on HN years ago. Congrats on the growth! I think this is still an underserved field (shockingly, considering how many people it impacts).
I really wish just saving a basic plan to refer back to didn't cost $100/yr. The one-off 'Basic' plans never made sense to me, considering it takes hours to set up a relatively complete model -- might not even have time to do it all in one sitting.
Also, thank you for sharing the ups and downs. Seeing the details of the monthly bars chart was super enlightening. I usually only see the nice looking overall positive growth chart without any nuance, so I really appreciate the transparency
Thanks! Seeing indie hackers building in public transparently about the ups and downs like pieter levels, danny postma, jon yongfook, etc, really inspired me early on. So I decided to try to emulate that. (Well, partly: idk how some of those guys post 100x a day)
Congrats! I'm a customer. Haven't used it too much but so far I like having it to check in periodically. One wish list item: live securities prices to avoid having to copy/paste values all the time. For example, with that you can have a live snapshot of the values in most brokerages
Account linking for automated balance updates is our most upvoted and most controversial feature request.
I agree it would be really nice if it worked well, but my understanding from other founders is that aggregator reliability still leaves a lot to be desired in 2025, and is always a huge expense and support burden. As a small, bootstrapped team building a long-term planning tool where current balances are only a small piece of the picture, we need to be really careful about what we choose to take on. Currently there are still dozens of other high-priority feature requests that will also deliver real value but without those downsides.
I do go back-and-forth on this though. And I think eventually there will come a time for it.
Glad to hear you're enjoying the tool, and thanks so much for your support!
p.s. also might be worth noting that there is a plugin system, and community members have built integrations that can pull in balance updates automatically from some of the popular budgeting tools.
Congratulations! But I’m disappointed with no mention of profit level in this post or another one linked. My last business I scaled to 500K ARR in less than two years, with $20K in total annual profit including the $0 my cofounder and I paid ourselves for many hours of work. I shut it down a year later and strongly regret the amount of work I put into it.
There’s an ARR metric trap in the founder community where people focus on revenue rather than on reaching a level of take-home income comparable to what they could make at a normal job. The former is a lot easier than the latter (especially in the US for people who can take home $250K fairly easily working in tech) - as the saying goes, you can make infinite revenue by selling dollars for 99 cents.
Profit margin started out around 90% in the early years, but is looking more like 65% this year now that we're making a concerted effort to reinvest into growth, building a team, etc.
If ARR grows enough, there should be plenty of room in there to pay the founders.
For extreme examples of ARR growth at 0% profit paying off, look at Uber, Amazon, and ServiceNow. I know these are very much outliers. All three had rapid revenue growth but profits at (or far below) zero. But for all three, the founders are sitting pretty today.
I share your frustration with the endless focus on revenue, rather than profit (looking at you, indiehackers.com). I suspect in many cases it is because they are embarassed to disclose their profit.
But congrats to the OP. It is impressive growth for a bootstrapped business.
Congrats!! I can definitely relate to that roller coaster feeling of first internet money -> "its so over feeling" though definitely not as successful as you yet :D
I think it can vary from person to person depending on your goals. For me, an important signal was that complete strangers were willing to pay. That first Show HN post made all the difference. Without that, this could have ended up in my side project graveyard with 100 other projects.
Maybe validation isn't one big moment, but maybe validation could be many small moments. So, those first 5 users: small validation. First 1K MRR: small validation. Etc. I think the point of the article is to be persistent and if you're getting small validations along the way, then those are indicators to keep going. At least, that's my take.
I only have a product that makes $6k per month, but from my point of view, the validation is how many paying users sign up per day. Even one per day can add up. Hope this helps.
How has your experience been running a discord server? I imagine it's useful for feedback but time consuming to manage? I'm reluctant to start one as I'm concerned about the time consumption.
Also, how did you find Jon and what was their skillset when you met? Did they come on as a contractor in the beginning?
I think managing any community is time consuming, but I like that discord feels real-time and efficient, with fun emojis, easy media sharing, and a mix of text channels and forum channels.
For the first few years, I was up at all hours answering questions. It feels amazing to offload some of that now that we have more of a team.
Like he mentioned in another comment here, Jon actually found me.
great timing.
In fact, I was just looking for somethin like this.
Was going to vibe-code this into life, but your price point is spot on and frankly I prefer supporting other fellow entrepreneurs.
The struggle is real, thank you for being a positive light to all who are on this path. Best to you!
> Back in 2021, I was inspired by the financial independence movement and wanted a better way to plan my own life. I couldn’t find the right tool, so I started building.
That sounds a bit like selling shovels to the miners. Which is not a, uh, dig at the project, just an observation.
We noticed a lot of tools neglect international use cases, so from the beginning we've focused on building with global flexibility in mind. About 80% of our customers are US-based, but we have users all over the world and offer international tax presets and account types.
One thing I'd do differently is quit my day job earlier. It shouldn't have taken 2.5 years to work up the courage to do that.
Partly I was scared of putting my own projections at risk. But eventually I realized I'd have way more regret if I passed up the opportunity to go all-in on something I loved.
It's so, so , so hard to walk the line between persistence (which leads to glory) and stubbornness (which leads to more time following already wasted time.)
Congratulations for walking this line correctly.
I agree that some sort of market validation is necessary to at least pretend you are on the former not the latter. Those early usage spikes are helpful reminders that there is a business here somewhere.
I'll also make a note that you spent time on marketing from the early days. Writing blog posts, promoting said posts, having a Discord server, committing to answer emails, all of this is marketing and its likely lead to success more than the code.
I notice whenever there was a dip in revenue, marketing (in the form of more blog posts) was the response. I suspect that was intentional, and definitely a better approach than "let me go away and silently code more features."
So there are valuable lessons to others here. Congratulations not just on the current success but also on sharing the path that leads to success. Ultimately you can show the way, but you can't make people learn from it.
Oh, and I like the bootstrapping approach. I did the same, and I'm not sorry. It's longer and harder but also skips an enormous amount of extra work.
Thanks. For a while there, it wasn't clear to me which side of the line I was walking.
Something that stuck with me from Poor Charlie’s Almanack is that low expectations are a cornerstone of a happy life. I built this for myself first, so when people actually signed up and paid, it was incredibly motivating. I was thrilled to spend my free time treating those early customers like royalty and building more of what they wanted.
If I had instead come into this with the expectation of quick success, I doubt I would have made it through those early years.
And cheers from one bootstrapper to another. It's not easy, but I can't imagine a more rewarding way to build.
+1 from someone who also bootstrapped a side project into a 7 figure business, and just happens to be absorbing some lessons from Poor Charlie’s Almanac on Audible recently.
Another lesson here: you built for a specific community who is passionate, money-motivated, and concentrates in specific social spaces (forums, reddit, etc.) where you can promote your business. This isn't always a recipe for success, but it's a damn good starting point. You need to adjust to the sensitivities of the community to avoid overly self-promotional content, but you always have a clear channel to promote your very specific product that meets their needs.
Congratulations man, it makes me so happy to read this and I can relate to that dopamine rollercoaster phenomenon you are talking about.
It's an impressive accomplishment. I've always struggled to get through the valley of despair in a new project. I've decided that I can only build and sell things that I regularly use. Otherwise the signal is just too weak, and I eventually get burned out. But if I'm always a user of one, then at least it's validated for me.
Caring is kind of a superpower. And not just in terms of signal, but also the quality of work. I don't think this would have gone anywhere if I hadn't cared deeply about solving the problem in an elegant way.
Earlier in my career, I worked on some things as a corporate engineer that were hard to care about, and there's just no comparison.
>The willingness to doggedly show up every single day can take you to some really suprising and amazing places.
>Caring is kind of a superpower.
>the quality of work.
>I was thrilled to spend my free time treating those early customers like royalty
Well, the secret's out, thanks for that, now anybody can do it ;)
I remember seeing this on HN years ago. Congrats on the growth! I think this is still an underserved field (shockingly, considering how many people it impacts).
I really wish just saving a basic plan to refer back to didn't cost $100/yr. The one-off 'Basic' plans never made sense to me, considering it takes hours to set up a relatively complete model -- might not even have time to do it all in one sitting.
Great success story. Congratulations
Also, thank you for sharing the ups and downs. Seeing the details of the monthly bars chart was super enlightening. I usually only see the nice looking overall positive growth chart without any nuance, so I really appreciate the transparency
Hope you keep going and growing
Thanks! Seeing indie hackers building in public transparently about the ups and downs like pieter levels, danny postma, jon yongfook, etc, really inspired me early on. So I decided to try to emulate that. (Well, partly: idk how some of those guys post 100x a day)
Congrats! I'm a customer. Haven't used it too much but so far I like having it to check in periodically. One wish list item: live securities prices to avoid having to copy/paste values all the time. For example, with that you can have a live snapshot of the values in most brokerages
Account linking for automated balance updates is our most upvoted and most controversial feature request.
I agree it would be really nice if it worked well, but my understanding from other founders is that aggregator reliability still leaves a lot to be desired in 2025, and is always a huge expense and support burden. As a small, bootstrapped team building a long-term planning tool where current balances are only a small piece of the picture, we need to be really careful about what we choose to take on. Currently there are still dozens of other high-priority feature requests that will also deliver real value but without those downsides.
I do go back-and-forth on this though. And I think eventually there will come a time for it.
Glad to hear you're enjoying the tool, and thanks so much for your support!
p.s. also might be worth noting that there is a plugin system, and community members have built integrations that can pull in balance updates automatically from some of the popular budgeting tools.
Congrats! Great to see you succeed through perseverance and just-not-giving-up!
Congratulations! But I’m disappointed with no mention of profit level in this post or another one linked. My last business I scaled to 500K ARR in less than two years, with $20K in total annual profit including the $0 my cofounder and I paid ourselves for many hours of work. I shut it down a year later and strongly regret the amount of work I put into it.
There’s an ARR metric trap in the founder community where people focus on revenue rather than on reaching a level of take-home income comparable to what they could make at a normal job. The former is a lot easier than the latter (especially in the US for people who can take home $250K fairly easily working in tech) - as the saying goes, you can make infinite revenue by selling dollars for 99 cents.
Profit margin started out around 90% in the early years, but is looking more like 65% this year now that we're making a concerted effort to reinvest into growth, building a team, etc.
I don't think I'd call earning $250k "easy". Yes a significant % of us on HN are there, but we're still in the minority.
If ARR grows enough, there should be plenty of room in there to pay the founders.
For extreme examples of ARR growth at 0% profit paying off, look at Uber, Amazon, and ServiceNow. I know these are very much outliers. All three had rapid revenue growth but profits at (or far below) zero. But for all three, the founders are sitting pretty today.
https://valustox.com/NOW
https://valustox.com/UBER
https://valustox.com/AMZN
I share your frustration with the endless focus on revenue, rather than profit (looking at you, indiehackers.com). I suspect in many cases it is because they are embarassed to disclose their profit.
But congrats to the OP. It is impressive growth for a bootstrapped business.
Congrats!! I can definitely relate to that roller coaster feeling of first internet money -> "its so over feeling" though definitely not as successful as you yet :D
I hope the roller coaster takes you to a similar destination in the end :)
What's your journey been like so far?
The validation piece I don't understand. From first sale to first dip to each peak and fall when was the validation reached? First sale, 1k revenue?
You can find 5 users who will pay but that doesn't validate a million a month.
What does product validation mean here.
I think it can vary from person to person depending on your goals. For me, an important signal was that complete strangers were willing to pay. That first Show HN post made all the difference. Without that, this could have ended up in my side project graveyard with 100 other projects.
Maybe validation isn't one big moment, but maybe validation could be many small moments. So, those first 5 users: small validation. First 1K MRR: small validation. Etc. I think the point of the article is to be persistent and if you're getting small validations along the way, then those are indicators to keep going. At least, that's my take.
I only have a product that makes $6k per month, but from my point of view, the validation is how many paying users sign up per day. Even one per day can add up. Hope this helps.
If you can make 6k per month. You can probably get to 60k per month.
How has your experience been running a discord server? I imagine it's useful for feedback but time consuming to manage? I'm reluctant to start one as I'm concerned about the time consumption.
Also, how did you find Jon and what was their skillset when you met? Did they come on as a contractor in the beginning?
I think managing any community is time consuming, but I like that discord feels real-time and efficient, with fun emojis, easy media sharing, and a mix of text channels and forum channels.
For the first few years, I was up at all hours answering questions. It feels amazing to offload some of that now that we have more of a team.
Like he mentioned in another comment here, Jon actually found me.
Nice! How did you go about finding a growth marketer that was a good fit with your business?
I found him and he originally told me to get lost ;)
The first sign of a good marketer :)
great timing. In fact, I was just looking for somethin like this. Was going to vibe-code this into life, but your price point is spot on and frankly I prefer supporting other fellow entrepreneurs.
The struggle is real, thank you for being a positive light to all who are on this path. Best to you!
thanks, that means a lot. wishing you the best on your journey too!
Congratulations!
> Back in 2021, I was inspired by the financial independence movement and wanted a better way to plan my own life. I couldn’t find the right tool, so I started building.
That sounds a bit like selling shovels to the miners. Which is not a, uh, dig at the project, just an observation.
Everything can be modeled as selling shovels to the miners.
We're all building tools for other people. As long the users like a product, I think it's moot to call it shovel selling.
I think it depends on what the people are hoping to accomplish with the shovels and how realistic it is.
In this case it seems legit.
To OP, does this focus on US customers or covers the context for international customers too?
We noticed a lot of tools neglect international use cases, so from the beginning we've focused on building with global flexibility in mind. About 80% of our customers are US-based, but we have users all over the world and offer international tax presets and account types.
Wow congratulations!
Congratulations!!
It would be just as interesting to hear what mistakes you have made and what you would do differently.
One thing I'd do differently is quit my day job earlier. It shouldn't have taken 2.5 years to work up the courage to do that.
Partly I was scared of putting my own projections at risk. But eventually I realized I'd have way more regret if I passed up the opportunity to go all-in on something I loved.
> Bootstrapping a side project into a profitable seven-figure business in four years.
Good. But I think this is the most important piece of advice that one should follow:
> Actually show up every day.
It is the easiest thing anyone can do, however, it is the hardest for anyone to do every. single. day. nonstop.
kudos!
>I’m still processing that this is real.
>that only counts recurring revenue.
>monthly revenue has consistently been 20 to 50 percent higher.
That's the way to do it.
Where you virtually have to go back and figure how much earlier you had actually reached a major milestone.
Survivor bias
Failures don't get on HN front page
Hey, btw congrats :-)
People do post their failure stories, or "post mortems", on HN and elsewhere. We should be able to make space for both as both offer valuable lessons.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37903489
Not true. This post made the front page (in the distant past):
https://successfulsoftware.net/2010/05/27/learning-lessons-f...
failure posts are way less interesting than the authors think they are.