ProjectionLab: $1M ARR from 4–6 Hours a Night, Every Weeknight, for 4 Years — the Growth Curve of a Financial-Planning SaaS Raised by the FIRE Community

Someone spent four years building a tool that estimates “how many more years do I need to work before I can retire”, not in retirement, but alongside a day job, pouring in 4–6 hours every weeknight plus entire weekends. That someone is Kyle Nolan, the developer of ProjectionLab. In June 2025, the tool reached $1M in ARR (annual recurring revenue) with zero outside funding. Over 100,000 households use it. Nolan has published the numbers on his blog almost every period along the way.

ProjectionLab is a financial-planning simulator for people pursuing FIRE (financial independence, retire early). You line up hypotheticals (“what if I buy a house next year,” “what if I cut spending by $500 a month”) and it projects your asset curve and the date you reach financial independence. It is a tool for the US FIRE community: people unusually passionate about running the numbers on their own money.

MRR over time

One note matters alongside this table. Nolan discloses that non-recurring revenue (lifetime plans, training for advisors) lands on top of MRR at a rate of 20–50% in a given month. The headline figure of $1M ARR is close to a floor on actual revenue. A February 2025 X post separately reported that cumulative revenue had crossed $1M (MRR was $70K at the time), so the “$1M ARR” and “cumulative $1M” milestones sit just a few months apart.

The pace of the curve is worth attention too. $150 to $1K took 7 months; $1K to $10K a year and a half. $10K to $83K two years. This is less an exponential blow-up than a compound-interest curve that keeps stamping roughly the same multiple, nowhere in it is there a “month it suddenly went viral.” Even the Mr. Money Mustache mention (September 2022, $4K at the time) changed the slope overnight while leaving the level intact. The chart is a textbook curve showing that solo SaaS growth is a function of retention and word of mouth, not of exposure events.

Quitting late, as a strategy

What catches the eye in the table is the timing of the resignation. Even at $10K MRR in June 2023 he kept the day job. In September he first dropped to part-time. Only in November, at $23.3K MRR, did he finally quit. That works out to more than a year of double life after monthly revenue had passed his living costs.

He describes the stretch as “4–6 hours every night, all weekends,” and jokes about the absence of rest as “404 Day Off Not Found.” Whatever its sustainability for his health, as business risk design it is textbook. Subscription revenue is slow to stack up, but once stacked it does not vanish suddenly. By delaying the decision to quit from “the month it arrived” to “after it kept clearing the bar consistently,” this business never once faced a financial cliff. For where solo SaaS revenue tends to cross the “quittable line,” see the revenue distribution of solo and side projects.

Growth without cashing in the community’s trust

The acquisition channels: a May 2021 Hacker News post (the origin of the earliest users), the blog, and the September 2022 mention by Mr. Money Mustache. A single word from the most influential blogger in the FIRE world visibly changed the slope of the growth curve. From there, podcast appearances (ChooseFI among others), an 8,500-member Discord community, and word of mouth did the compounding. There is no mention of advertising anywhere.

This channel mix meshes with the nature of the niche. The FIRE community is itself a “verify it with numbers” culture: a tool whose math is transparent gets evangelized, while anything that smells of a sales pitch triggers allergies. The developer continuing to behave as a resident of the community was, in effect, the sales operation. The same “sell to the niche you belong to” structure overlaps with Lunch Money, the budgeting SaaS grown over seven years.

On the team side, he brought in Jon Kuipers, who had contributed for a year in a nearly unpaid capacity, as a growth and marketing partner, and added a few contractors from the user community for support. Founded and coded by one person, but the structure at the $1M mark reads accurately as “solo plus.” The hiring method is distinctive too: no job postings, only people who had actually contributed inside the community over a long period were brought in. The 8,500-member Discord functioned as the support front line and, at the same time, as the recruiting pool of proven collaborators.

On the product side, the winning edge is simulation freedom. Most existing budgeting and retirement tools fix their assumptions. ProjectionLab lets you freely combine life events (job changes, home purchases, market crashes, spending shifts) and run as many scenarios as you like. People chasing FIRE enjoy turning these “what ifs” for its own sake. A tool with entertainment value gets used frequently, and frequency lowers churn. The subscription’s base fitness comes not from features but from the design of the motivation to use it.

The months that stalled, the stretches that hurt

His record includes the flat patches alongside the up-and-to-the-right numbers. He writes frankly that in months when growth went sideways, doubt about his own judgment piled up, and that as users grew, support interruptions ate into development time. The latter in particular is a structural problem common to solo SaaS, Healthchecks.io, the SaaS one person keeps running, describes the same issue. In ProjectionLab’s case, the answer was to gradually bring trusted people in from the community.

What generalizes, and what doesn’t

The repeatable core is small: ① build a tool for a community you deeply belong to (validating that the problem is real and seeding initial distribution happen at the same time), ② for subscriptions, base the decision to quit your job on “sustained clearance,” not “first arrival”, ③ fill the troughs in MRR with non-recurring revenue (lifetime plans, training).

The limits are just as clear. FIRE, a niche in which spending time on money math is itself entertainment, has exceptionally high willingness to pay and LTV for tools. Carry the same playbook into a niche with low willingness to pay and $1M in 4 years is unlikely to follow. And the reproduction cost of 4–6 hours every weeknight for four years is higher than it looks. Nolan himself does not claim it was a sustainable way to work. The structure in which transparent publication of numbers doubles as the sales engine is shared with Post Bridge. More solo cases are in the solopreneur case list.