ProjectionLab
Simulate your financial future and chart a course to FI/FIRE
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Kyle Nolan

ProjectionLab - The personal finance simulator you've been waiting for

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ProjectionLab
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Create beautiful and nuanced financial plans that truly represent you, your loved ones, and the paths you choose. Run Monte Carlo simulations, backtest on historical data, and figure out how to live your best life and reduce anxiety around your finances.

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Ryan Hoover
Very cool. I currently use Compound for tracking my assets and forecasting, although it's powerful, its planning features are a bit hard to use. The biggest friction point in trying something new like Projection Lab is the amount of effort it takes to upload all my details (startup equities, crypto, fund positions, etc.). Integrations (via Plaid, for example) help but even that is a bit time-consuming.
Kyle Nolan
Maker
@rrhoover Thanks Ryan! I appreciate you taking a look! I'm hoping the sandbox mode reduces one kind of friction, i.e. for the folks who initially just want to hop in and see how things work using an example persona. You're right though that fully tailoring any long-term planning tool to your circumstances will involve some input and configuration eventually. For that path, I've done my best to make it easy to jot down the big-ticket items and then circle back to make refinements at your leisure. If you end up playing around with it, I'll be curious to hear what you think of the planning UI and Monte Carlo mode!
Ryan Hoover
@knolan I didn't realize there was an example persona. Smart. Will play around with it.
Ashley Antkowiak
@rrhoover while the input stage is definitely time consuming, it’s no more so than it would be if you were working with a financial professional. You’d still have to gather all of that information. The difference is that with Projection Lab you get to manipulate it yourself as much as you want, and for so much less than paying a finance pro. Totally worth the effort!
Kyle Nolan
Maker
👋 Hey everyone! I couldn't find a good long-term financial planning app that felt modern, fluid, detailed, and actually fun to use... so fast-forward several hundred cups of coffee and over a year of work, and let me introduce ProjectionLab! ✅ The free version has a lot of features, there's a sandbox mode if you just want to quickly see how it works, it does not ask to link your financial accounts, and you don't have to create an account to try it. Here is a quick preview of just a few of the things you can do: - Build detailed and flexible plans for your future that go beyond the standard online retirement calculators - Plan separately or as a couple - Model international scenarios, with various account types and tax estimation presets - Plan for goals like achieving financial independence, taking time off for travel, home ownership, or starting a rental empire - Backtest on historical data and run Monte Carlo simulations - Create custom plots to visualize the metrics you care about - Experiment rapidly with a fast + fluid simulation engine and modern UI - Create granular models for how accounts/income/expenses/inflation/etc change over time using interactive plots - Track your progress over time and see it overlaid on top of your projections - Quickly compare between different plans or analyze multiple changes within a single plan - Build dynamic configurations using milestones that support multiple criteria and conditional logic - Choose your own icons to personalize just about everything - And a lot more! If you check it out, I'd love to hear what you think. The free version is pretty robust, but if you'd like to upgrade to Premium feel free to use code PH-10 for 10% off 😃 👇👇👇👇👇 ProjectionLab: https://projectionlab.com Discord: https://discord.gg/dZQ5DDEmT7 Roadmap: https://changemap.co/projectifi/projectifi Twitter: https://twitter.com/_knolan PL Twitter: https://twitter.com/Projection_Lab Email: kyle@projectionlab.com 💜💜💜💜💜 For now, I'm building ProjectionLab as a solo developer on nights and weekends. It's already been quite a journey bringing PL to the point it is today; and I'm still energized and full of ideas for how to continue making it better, in part thanks to the feedback and support from communities of early adopters like you! 🙏 Looking forward to hearing your feedback!
Kyle Nolan
Maker
@victoria_wu 🙏 Thanks Victoria! If you end up playing around with the tool, I'll be curious to hear what you think!
Kate Pettit
@knolan 🏆
Kyle Nolan
Maker
@katepettit 🎉 Thanks Kate!
Great tool, congrats on the launch! 📈 Do you have any plans to expand to financial projections for startups?
Kyle Nolan
Maker
@ming_xu1 Good question! Just updated my comment above to include a link to the public roadmap. It's not a feature set that I would say is imminent, but I do think it's an interesting idea and I hope to find the bandwidth soon to flesh out what more of the details would look like. Are there specific features you'd like to see in a version tailored towards startups? Perhaps a view oriented more towards near-term events (as opposed to the current focus on long-term planning), e.g. next X years of runway?
@knolan Whenever I meet the same investor for the second or third time, they always ask a same question, what about your financial forecast? For a early stage starups like us, we dont really have much data to do the math. So a better way is to do the analysis based on financial projections and to see what would happend on sales forecast, buring rate and other finanical KPIs if we do very different way. But now the only tool I have is a bunch of Excel templates from my business school professor. When the first time I use ProjectionLab, I suddenly realized this might be what the tool I need looks like.
Kyle Nolan
Maker
@ming_xu1 Makes a ton of sense! In some ways, I think the current tool is already pretty close to being usable for scenarios like this.. but I bet one thing you'd want right away though is a month-by-month view rather than just year-by-year, right? And maybe also the ability to schedule events down to the day? (e.g. employee X starts on Y date) Sounds like a trivial add from the outside I know, but the way the whole milestone system and event timing system is set up, it's currently optimized for a simulation engine that reports results with yearly granularity. So, there will be a few things to think through there if I decide to take it in this direction.
@knolan Indeed, need a month-by-month view. And the ability to schedule events by month would already nice. If you have any further plan later, please let us know :)
Kyle Nolan
Maker
@ming_xu1 Definitely! It's something I've been planning to look into for a while. Just need to find the most performant way to support more granular views and scheduling without compromising the speed of full-life simulations. Keeping those fast and fluid is a high priority; experimentation needs to be fun 🧪 😁
Andrew Mackross
Projection Lab is fantastic! Probably the best money I’ve spent in the last year from an ROI perspective. Kyle must be one of the elusive 10x developers to have made such a solid bit of software on the side. Very inspirational.
Kyle Nolan
Maker
@mackross 🙏 Thanks so much Andrew! I'll try to remember this comment on the days where I feel more like a 0.1x developer 😅
Mayank Jain
@knolan, this looks amazing. You are right. There are no good solutions to plan personal finances. At best, google sheets and excels :). Going to try this out over the weekend. Congratulations on the launch.
Kyle Nolan
Maker
@mjain_mayank Thanks Mayank, let me know how it goes! In fact, when I started building ProjectionLab over a year ago, it began as me tinkering around with an excel spreadsheet that (at first) was easy enough to share and explain to friends and family who wanted a better retirement plan. But as they asked for more flexibility and new features, it quickly spiraled out of control into a complex web of advanced excel features that became opaque and unmaintainable. I knew there had to be a better way... and now there is! 🎉 😀
Mayank Jain
@knolan so true. Excited to dig in :)
Sina Shahandeh
Kyle, when are you going to leave your day job and turn this into a billion dollar company?!
Kyle Nolan
Maker
@sina_shahandeh1 Maybe after a very auspicious Product Hunt launch? 😉 jk, for now I actually quite like building this on the side; keeps it in the category of "passion project", and keeps the pressure down at a reasonable level. We'll see what the future holds though 😀
Moeen Mahmud
Looks cool. Tried it, and play around. Love the local currency options and the overall look. Congratulations on the launch!
Kyle Nolan
Maker
@moeen_mahmud 🙏 Thanks Moeen! Any additional features you'd like to see?
Moeen Mahmud
@knolan It has pretty much everything essential though. I will let you know if it requires.
Hugo Hamel
Great tool! Not much negative to say about it, would only recommend it :)
Kyle Nolan
Maker
@hugohamelcom Thanks so much Hugo! 🙏
Scott Kosmach
Look very interesting. I’ll be checking it out more in-depth once I get out of bed and have some coffee. Early morning finances is my kryptonite.
Kyle Nolan
Maker
@skosmach 🙏 Thanks Scott! Let me know what you think once you get a chance to dig in. Coffee actually sounds amazing right now; 12am PDT launches are a little rough on the east coast!☕
Lee Booy
I’d played around with other tools before but they were clunky and ugly. It seems like many finance tools are stuck in the UX dark ages. I’ve really enjoyed setting up and playing with PL and it’s made financial decisions and chats easier. Excited to see where it goes.
Kyle Nolan
Maker
@lee_booy 🙏 Thanks Lee! Glad to hear you appreciate the UX. It's been a fun challenge figuring out how to build in so much advanced functionality and make it all discoverable without completely overwhelming new users. That can be a fine line to walk at times, but hopefully PL strikes a decent balance so far 🤞⚖️
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