Five Years to 100K Users: The Bamboo Tree Story for Side Project Growth
Discover how a bamboo tree can inspire solopreneurs to stay motivated on side projects. Learn the value of delayed gratification on the journey to success.
From Seed to Success: The Bamboo Tree Lesson for Solopreneurs
Have you ever heard of the tale of the Chinese bamboo tree? In my eyes, it is one of the best metaphors for patience, perseverance, and long-term growth I have heard.
The most powerful outcomes are delayed. —James Clear
The story of the bamboo tree has inspired me a lot during my five years of working on my side project, so I decided to share it with you.
The Tale of the Chinese Bamboo Tree
The legend says that once, a Chinese farmer planted a bamboo seed and watered it every day without fail.
For the first year, nothing happened. His neighbors saw him go to the same patch of dirt day after day and began to whisper behind his back.
By the second year, there was still no sign of growth. The whispers turned to laughter. “Why waste your time?” they’d say, shaking their heads.
But the farmer didn’t stop. He kept watering that spot of earth, believing in the potential beneath the surface.
By the third and fourth years, the mockery only got louder. Yet, the farmer kept going, putting all his energy into what everyone else thought was a hopeless effort.
And then, after five years, something incredible happened. In only six weeks, the bamboo shot up nearly 24 meters (80 feet) into the air.
The once-laughing neighbors were stunned.
How is this possible? How could this tree grow 24 meters tall in six weeks?
The point is, shouldn’t the questions rather be:
Did that bamboo tree grow 24 meters tall in six weeks, or did it grow 24 meters tall in five years and six weeks?
What the neighbors didn’t realize was that during those five years of seemingly no growth, the bamboo tree was developing a massive root system underground.
Thanks to the strong root system that developed underground over the past 5 years, the tree was ready for the rapid growth ahead.
What We Can Learn From the Bamboo Tree
The bamboo tree teaches us a vital lesson about success: it doesn’t happen overnight.
Delayed Gratification
We live in a world with a delayed-return environment.
Many of the choices we make today won’t pay off right away. For example, if you do a great job, you’ll get paid in a few weeks and maybe even promoted next year. If you exercise today, you might start seeing results next year.
The ability to delay gratification is a great predictor of success because it teaches discipline, patience, and long-term thinking.”
— James Clear in Atomic Habits
On the other hand, eating a chocolate bar or scrolling through social media gives you “instant gratification,” but it pulls you away from your long-term goals.
Staying focused on long-term goals can be challenging in a world where instant gratification is just a TikTok scroll away.
At some point, success in nearly every field requires you to ignore an immediate reward in favor of a delayed reward.
— James Clear
A good rule of thumb is to avoid things with “instant gratification” where the immediate outcome feels good (like smoking 🚬), but the long-term outcome feels bad (like lung cancer 🏥).
Instead, focus on things where the immediate outcome feels hard (e.g., eating broccoli 🥦), but the long-term outcome feels good (e.g., being fit & healthy 💪).
Most people will spend all day chasing quick hits of satisfaction. The road less traveled is the road of delayed gratification. If you’re willing to wait for the rewards, you’ll face less competition and often get a bigger payoff. — James Clear in Atomic Habits
Then, if you stay focused for years, you could experience exponential growth — just like a bamboo tree that grows 24 meters in just six weeks.
You’ll realize that your success didn’t just come from those final six weeks, but from all the hard work you invested over the years.
“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”
— Jacob A. Riis
Overnight Success Entrepreneurs
How often do we see super successful people and think: How did this person make millions overnight?
What we often don’t see is the work that was done before.
Take Steve Jobs, for example. He built Apple into a tech powerhouse, but it took many years of innovation, setbacks, and hard work. He was even fired from Apple, only to return and lead its transformation into a tech giant.
Another famous example is J.K. Rowling. Before becoming the world’s first billionaire author, she spent years living in poverty, writing Harry Potter in cafés, and facing rejection from publishers before her work became a global phenomenon.
Many successful entrepreneurs face early struggles that often go unnoticed, as people tend to focus only on their “sudden success.”
While I’m not anywhere close to being the next Steve Jobs, I feel like the work I’ve put in over the past five years is finally paying off.
Next, I want to share with you my personal bamboo story.
My Personal Bamboo Sideproject Story
Both the bamboo tree and my journey with Web Highlights are stories about patience.
First Year
I remember when I first published my PDF & Web Highlighter Chrome Extension in the Chrome Web Store in 2019.
After half a year, I had eight users: myself, my brother, my mum, and five friends. And it took almost a full year until I reached a humble 100 users.
I hadn’t made a single cent from the application at that point. Still, I continued because I enjoyed the work and believed in the idea.
Years 1–4
In the following years, I continued improving my online highlighter.
Growth was still very slow, but I worked consistently on my extension. I probably spent thousands of hours building this tool and working weekends to get the application to a state where I was actually happy with it (I will never be there 😅)
Even though I am making good money with the extension today, my hourly rate would still be far below minimum wage.
Luckily, after the third year, my hard work was finally beginning to pay off. At the end of the fourth year, I had almost 20,000 users, and that was only the start.
The application finally took off in the next year 🚀
Year 5
In the fifth year, I finally felt that my hard work was paying off. After spending four years getting the extension to about 20,000 users, it jumped to over 100,000 active users in the fifth year.
It might not have grown in just six weeks like the bamboo tree, but I couldn’t help but show the similarities in a graph! 😄
Just like the growth of the bamboo tree, we can ask:
Did Web Highlights gain 100,000 users in one year, or did it reach over 100K users in five years?
Of course, it’s the latter. All the hard work — like building an awesome product, creating great content for SEO, and sharing on social media — finally paid off.
Your work was not wasted; it is just being stored. — James Clear
Setting up the blog on my website and regularly publishing articles there and on my Medium blog is finally paying off, providing a solid foundation for my extension’s organic traffic today. It all just takes time!
Final Thoughts
Exponential growth can be misleading. Many successes look like they happened overnight, like a bamboo tree growing 26 meters in six weeks.
What we often overlook is the hard work behind that success, leading us to expect immediate results from our efforts. We need to remember that sometimes it takes years of hard work and patience to achieve great success.
I hope my story encourages you to stay focused on your personal side project. Don’t give up — just be patient and give it time.
I’m sharing my journey on Twitter and LinkedIn. If you enjoyed this story, be sure to follow me there!
Oh, and if you’re interested in a great extension for highlighting websites and PDFs, check out my extension! It’s free, easy to use, and you don’t need an account to get started:
