Hitting $10k MRR on autopilot and buying a house with cold hard cash: A peek at an indie hacker's finances

Angus Cheng recently hit $10K MRR with Bank Statement Converter, and what he said in his milestone took me aback.

💰 "Once again I did not do much... You see, I am living the dream. More and more money goes into my bank account while I do whatever the hell I feel like doing." —Angus

Obviously, I had to learn more about this guy's mentality and finances. So let's take a peek. 👇

Rage-quitting with no safety net

Back in November 2020, Angus "rage-quit" his job as backend developer at a crypto exchange. It wasn't that he had some uber-successful side-hustle to fall back on. He was just super annoyed with the company and gave his notice.

That's not to say he didn't have a side-hustle, though. He did. He was releasing games as Baller Industries. But the games didn't bring in enough to get by.

A few months later, Angus wanted to figure out how much money he was spending, so he asked for a CSV from his bank. They could only give him PDFs, so he wrote some code to extract the transaction data. He says it was really difficult and he realized others might want to do the same thing.

So he turned it into a web app, bought some Google search ads, and people used it. He saw this as validation and started charging money for it. And since then, he's just been improving the algorithm to make it work with more banks. That, and a little customer support.

Which brings me back to the quote that I mentioned above.

Angus didn't have to do much to get from $8,000-$9,000 MRR. And he didn't do much to get from $9,000 to $10,000 MRR either. He's basically on easy street right now.

💰 "That's the nice thing about running a subscription-based SaaS — if you keep customers happy, your monthly recurring revenue should go up." —Angus

Up and to the right

And that's exactly what's happening. Let's take a look at his revenue:

• Revenue: $10,000 MRR
• Revenue from Baller Industries: $500-$1,000/mo
• Business bank account: $10,000
• Founder pay: ~$10,000/mo

Here are his business expenses:

• Total: ~$770/mo
• AWS: $738/mo — $100 for EC2 instances and $638 to Amazon Textract
• Netlify: $20/mo
• FastMail: $50/yr
• IntelliJ IDEA: $101/yr

And here are his personal expenses:

• Total: ~$5,300/mo
• Apartment rent: $2620/mo
• Hotdesk rent: $486/mo
• Food/drinks: $1000/mo
• Transportation: $200/mo

Interest (and why you shouldn't get a mortgage)

Angus uses a high-interest savings account from an Australian bank called Westpac. He gets 4.75%, which is pretty great considering that he sets aside thousands every month so that he can buy a house with cash.

Yep, you read that right. He wants to buy a house without a mortgage. It's mostly because interest rates are so high right now, but it's also because he doesn't currently have debt and he wants to keep it that way.

💰 "Don't get a mortgage. Having a mortgage adds pressure on you to make money. If I had a mortgage I probably would have stayed at my job instead of becoming an indie hacker." —Angus*

He's been putting money away all year and he thinks he'll be able to buy a place after another year or so.

Investments and regret

He's not big on investing, but he says a lot of his friends who work in tech put a portion of their salaries in S&P 500 index funds, and he regrets not following their examples.

Now that his business is doing okay, he's considering buying US treasury bills.

Investments that pay more than money

You might have noticed that his rent is pretty expensive. He sees it as an investment.

When he had a job, he had a smaller place. But when he started working from home, he couldn't tolerate his "depressingly small" apartment anymore. So he upgraded. It's still not a big place — Hong Kong has some of the highest rental prices in the world — but it's bigger.

And here's another investment he likes to make:

💰 "This is a weird one, but I like buying my friends lunch/dinner. For some reason, whenever I do this I get big sales for my applications." —Angus

Personally, I think that's awesome. Angus thinks it's just "superstitious bullshit, there's no logic behind it." But obviously, he does it for a reason.

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Avoid CPC ads

Angus advises indie hackers not to dump all their money into cost-per-click advertising. He says it's a really common pitfall: People make a product, buy CPC ads, and run them at a loss, thinking that they just need to keep tweaking the ads.

That's what he did, anyway. He spent $1000 a month on ads and brought in about $200. He never managed to run them profitably and eventually started focusing on content marketing.

Write off your business expenses

Bank Statement Converter is an LLC in Hong Kong. This allows him to write off a lot of expenses — something that everyone should do whenever possible. Here's what he writes off:

• Apartment rent
• Hotdesk rent
• Flights
• Meals
• Electronic purchases
• AWS, Netlify, Fastmail
• Groceries
• Video games

His accountant tells him that as long as he has a receipt for something, he can offset it. That may not apply everywhere, though.

Canned tuna and conflicting money mentalities

And if you're curious where he gets his money mentality from, it's his parents.

His dad saves money. He buys the cheapest toilet paper and canned tuna that he can find. But he'll splurge on dinner out.

His mom doesn't really care about money. If she goes into a store, she'll probably come out with some random thing.

And somehow it works, though... probably because they keep their finances separate.

Angus identifies more with his dad's spending habits, as there isn't much that he wants to buy. And he's no stranger to cheap canned tuna.

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You can find Angus on Twitter and check out Bank Statement Converter.

And if you'd like to be featured as a guest in a future interview for this series, let me know in the comments!