Co-founder of a somewhat complementary and somewhat competitive product. Just dropping in to say what Kyle has done with Projection Lab is nothing short of phenomenal. This is a tough space to build in, and he's built an amazing product.
Bootstrapping a side project into a profitable seven-figure business
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Re: Bootstrapping a side project into a profitable seven-figure business
#92I like to think a portion of your success came from having such great OMSCS SDP group project partners ;)
Congrats on what you’ve accomplished. Always fun to read the updates.
Re: Bootstrapping a side project into a profitable seven-figure business
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You mentioned SEO finally kicking in. Do you attribute that to anything in particular? Any strategic changes you made? I attribute the search traffic growth to: 1. A critical mass of content, after a number of years of writing - without a lot of search traffic for the first few years 2. Re-wrote and polished some of my earlier articles so that they were improved 3. Wrote more guides related to my app which were hel…
In terms of scale/footprint, roughly how many articles did it take to achieve that critical mass of content? And yeah, with the state of AI tooling, I think junior engineers, assistants, new grads, etc, may currently have the most to worry about.
Not the OP, but a quick look at the /sitemap.xml shows about 55 pages, the oldest of which seem to be dated 2018.
Re: Bootstrapping a side project into a profitable seven-figure business
#94Co-founder of a somewhat complementary and somewhat competitive product. Just dropping in to say what Kyle has done with Projection Lab is nothing short of phenomenal. This is a tough space to build in, and he's built an amazing product.
Thanks Ozzie, that means a lot coming from you. Building successfully in this space requires a passion for it, and that really comes through with the work you and your team are doing too.
Re: Bootstrapping a side project into a profitable seven-figure business
#95I like to think a portion of your success came from having such great OMSCS SDP group project partners ;) Congrats on what you’ve accomplished. Always fun to read the updates.
haha yep it all traces back to designing that android app for solving cryptograms XD
Re: Bootstrapping a side project into a profitable seven-figure business
#96It'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 m…
> 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.
As much as I like to agree with this message ... isn't there a big portion of luck involved here that makes the difference between the two sides of this line? In other words, aren't we seeing huge survivorship bias at play here?
That's what makes the line so hard to walk. Surely skill helps, but more than most like to admit it's the unpredictability of outside forces that makes the line really hard to walk.
Re: Bootstrapping a side project into a profitable seven-figure business
#97I really like the ability to skip setup and go for sandbox presets with premium features paywalled - this seems like an obvious choice.
Most SaaS products like these require you to go through their complicated setup just to see what they are about.
Also, highly recommend "The Mom Test" by Rob Fitzpatrick - https://www.momtestbook.com.
It is so revealing, especially to people like me who naturally tend to think that just automation of processes is going to make something people want. This book is, by far, the best resource I found to get out of that mindset and learn how to get real feedback.
Re: Bootstrapping a side project into a profitable seven-figure business
#98What I'd really appreciate is a demo/sandbox version where I can try out the functionality without having to enter anything personal.
I appreciate that you have a (generous looking) free tier and various screenshots - but it just seems like something I'd want to play around with before taking the time to create an account and start entering personal data into.
Re: Bootstrapping a side project into a profitable seven-figure business
#99Survivor bias Failures don't get on HN front page Hey, btw congrats :-)
failure posts are way less interesting than the authors think they are.
> failure posts are way less interesting than the authors think they are.
It depends; you can learn a lot more from a failure than from a success. Every success has some element of good luck in it but that element is difficult to identify.
Every failure has a number of non-luck related reasons for failing, which are usually easily identified.
Re: Bootstrapping a side project into a profitable seven-figure business
#100I saw this, thought "wow this is great, I sure miss living in the US where good tools like this are available, everything in Europe is crap" but lo and behold, there's the Netherlands tax preset. Fantastic.
I think there may be a few wrinkles in the nl tax code that are tricky to capture with the current framework, but it has been a goal from the beginning to be as inclusive as possible for international scenario modeling. I'm continually making refinements there, and always open to ideas and suggestions if you have some.
They’re complex, especially with the thirty percent ruling and constant box three changes, but it’s still better than some US only tool