Bootstrapping a side project into a profitable seven-figure business

Great post and congratulations.

Similar approach and story to myself, in that I started a side project for my own use and interest, and then released it to great feedback as a side hustle, went part-time and over the last 2.5 years managed to go full time.

I've yet to reach your $1M ARR though.. but hopefully getting there one day!

Recently wrote up a Year in Review which touches on similar learnings as you've written over the last year:

https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/ad-blocker-year-in-review...

Have also had a keen interest in FIRE over the years and hadn't heard of your product... personally I've just kept my own spreadsheet which runs through scenarios, progress etc.

Congrats on 350k downloads, sounds like you had a good year! You mentioned SEO finally kicking in. Do you attribute that to anything in particular? Any strategic changes you made? Also curious how you incorporate AI tools into your workflow, if at all.

> 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 helpful to users; such as:

Safari Extensions Guide - https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/safari-extensions-guide/

Best Web Browser - https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/best-web-browser-2025/

> Also curious how you incorporate AI tools into your workflow, if at all.

Not a lot myself, except for sometimes helping with polishing and checking of writing and sometimes coming up with options etc.

In my experience AI tools are like having a junior assistant – they can be helpful but you always need to check and polish everything they do.

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.

It's not a lot of articles in total - only 35, with the first being published over 7 years ago.

You can see the full list here: https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/

Perhaps the age of the content helps, though I haven't done a deep dive into SEO practices myself. In the last year, when search traffic increased, I've increased the output to almost 1 article per month.