Lukas is making over $10,000 a month just from a timer app. It's totally bootstrapped and there are no investors. I talked him about having really ambitious goals, business ideas to avoid and how he's building his app into $1 million a year business, as well as spicy topics like doing business in Germany versus going overseas.
You can listen to it here:
Or watch it on YouTube here:
Below is a transcript of our conversation. It's been lightly edited for brevity.
Lukas can you just tell us what StageTimer is really briefly?
I often explain it as if you have seen a TED talk, personal stage, and there's a screen in front of them that shows a countdown, like, you know, you have five minutes left or you have 10 minutes left. And even though it sounds really simple, you know, somebody has to control this, somebody has to kind of send this information, has to react to something that also happens during the show.
We are, I'm building such a tool that allows you to not only show a countdown, but also say, Hey, you know, "Please hold your microphone closer to your mouth" or "hey, there's an audience question" or you can even say like, "oh, on Twitter, we had this request", you know and you can communicate to the person on stage, which is quite hard, honestly, because they don't really have a microphone something in their ear when you have to concentrate.
So historically, we'll just, you know, hold up the paper sign, but do they see it, right? Do you wave it around?
So, what led you to create StageTimer in the first place?
So I was, I kind of saw this problem at a friend's studio and he was, you know, had like a lot of tech and cameras and then he had like everything remotely controlled except for this time away to get up, click on it. It was like an old laptop. they are like hardware devices for this, but I looked like I was like looking on the internet seeing him doing this.
And I was sure, surely there's a solution where you click start on one computer and on the other one it starts, right? They're both connected to the internet. And I couldn't really find a good one. So I thought, well, this is very easy to build. And I was kind of collecting startup ideas back then, right?
Project ideas that I can do. And I had this long list and I put it on my list and I thought, you know what? I could start with. This is so simple. It sounds so easy, right? All the other ones, the ideas were either like really bad, really bad ideas. Or they were just like really complex. It would have taken a long time to accomplish it.
So I thought this one is like super easy. I did never expect that somebody really pays money for it. However, I did expect that it, it would be useful, that it's very easy to build. So I did it more as a, as a practice.
So I think we've covered the simplicity. In what way is it complicated?
Yeah. So it sounds very simple. And it is in fact, if you just show a countdown, super simple to implement. However very quickly we got a request, Hey, I want to kind of program my show in your tool, right? I don't want to just put one countdown. I want to put a series of countdowns because I know like that my opening, you know, it's like, you know.
And then I have like a keynote address and then I have a Q and a session and so on and so forth. And I want to kind of build this in your tool and then one by one, just be able to start these countdowns. And, you know, eventually it grew, it grew further that you can say you know, once the, once one countdown stops, it automatically goes to the next one because.
We have quite a number of gyms and like CrossFit stuff where, where people have like these sets and they want to, you know, they have like the the set, the break.
Hmm. Yeah.
And they don't want to just click start all the time. So they just say, Hey, let me just, you know, automate it so it automatically runs through all these 20 countdowns every day. And it turns out that if you do this, you run into a lot of trouble with time zones and dates.Time zones are like the enemy of the Sass founders, I think.
It's crazy every, you know, every half a year you have like daylight saving change in half of the world. I tell you like every, every time there was daylight saving change, there was like weird bugs coming up that I've never seen before. And it took me years to really understand like what's going on and how do I have to deal with this?
And you know, to make sure that your schedule doesn't, you know, start one hour early, or your interface doesn't show the wrong time. We had one show happening in Berlin. They even, you know, invited me to kind of take a look behind the scenes, how they use it. And they had the camera, like the camera production team was in Berlin, but the kind of live stream digital production team was in Ireland.
So they were live broadcasting an e sports event.
In with two different like with teams in two different time zones, and they had to have like everything on the screen had to reflect the correct thing, right? So I just I learned a ton. Okay, so this like everything that you see has to be in the time zone of the event.
And that is surprisingly hard to accomplish.
You've got an amazing pinned tweet on Twitter where it's basically like this is how I'm going to get rich.
Can you talk us through like your thinking when you made that?
So, I mean, to, to get somewhere, you have to have a plan, right? Every project you need to, you need a goal, some kind of goal, otherwise you cannot, you cannot work towards it. And very early on, before I even started my first like product, I thought, what, what is actually my goal? What do I want to accomplish?
And I think. Often you kind of have the idea of the lifestyle business. Oh, I want to reach my 10, 000 per month revenue and then I'm happy. And then I'm like, I have all these problems that I don't have right now. I don't have any, but I found this very simplistic. Because I thought nobody stops at 10, like very few people stop there, right?
Very few people for them. This is really the motivation. And you see this often when people, you know, started like whatever back then, you know, the crypto and the stuff and you realize what I really want is make a quick buck. So I thought, you know, what do I really want? And I really wanted to, I really wanted to build companies actually.
I really wanted to build a company with an interesting product. And I kind of backwards engineered it and thought, how do I get there? Well, if I want to build a big company, I need capital. I need a funding to do it. And I need to know how to lead employees. I don't want to start a big company and not knowing these skills beforehand, how customers work, how employees work, how this whole game is played.
So I said, well, if I want to get there, eventually I have to learn all these things along the way. And I thought, let me put it into a nice tweet and, and, you know, headlining your tweet with, I want to learn how to lead employees. It's kind of boring. So I thought, you know. Here's how I'm going to get rich.
But the plan is really, you know, you, you start, I start with a small thing, which will allow me to do it myself and I can learn about customers and about payments and about, you know, authentication and about all these nitty gritty details that the business has, you know, compliance, big topic, taxes and I thought, well, one, 1 million is, let's say a realistic More or less realistic goal for a, for a SaaS.
It's hard to get there. I'm aware of this, but it's a realistic goal for, for yearly revenue. And that will give me enough capital, you know, enough, like kind of a foundation, a like passive income, quote unquote, famous passive income to, to look at something bigger, right? I'm aware that it's easier to build a small product in the niche, which I'm doing right now.
But the niche is only so big, right? Even at my best calculations, my stage time niche is maybe 2 million a year. So I said, if I, if I want to get really big, you need to work on a big problem to work on a big problem. You need a little bit more than just yourself to get started. Yeah. And you need a few, a few, even if it's just a few employees, a little bit of, you know, that's.
Let's, let's build for one year to get it off the ground. So I'm aware it takes a little bit. So that's, I thought, you know, you, you get the first step, you get the kind of financial foundation to get to the second step. And from there you can say, well, let's, let's do the moonshot, right? Let's, let's build a rocket.
Was there any part of you that was like, what if I do this tweet? And then you totally fail?
Dude, it's completely possible. I think, I mean, the likeliest outcome is to fail, right? The likely, like who, how many people do you know that actually created 100 million businesses? I mean, probably almost nobody only from podcasts. So the, the most likely outcome is not success. But you know, success is one possible outcome.
And. And I thought it's, it's interesting, you know, you have to, you know, eventually your life is going to be over, you know, I'm, I'm 35, you know, you, you get, you get older and you think, what have I accomplished? Well, have I even tried is the first question, right? If I've tried and I failed, at least I can say I've tried.
But if I, if I wouldn't have tried, I would have been kind of sad. I feel like everybody, you know, that is kind of unfulfilled in their lives. They never really tried to change anything about it. They never really tried to take agency. And, and leave their job and at least give it a shot. And I thought, well, I have to at least give it a shot.
And if I fail, you know, good, I'm not the material.
You've made a very good case for being confident. Can you tell us about how, like where's Stage Timer at the moment in terms of revenue?
So it's not completely exact because we, we don't entirely have like monthly recurring, but I would say we are, we are kind of in between the $10,000 and $20,000 per month in revenue.
I believe I saw on Twitter that you were laid off from a job. So can you talk us through like the layoff and deciding to start a company?
Yeah. So I think our generation is sensitive to, to like BS jobs, like jobs that don't really give you fulfillment. And I have done internships while I was studying in, in like these kind of big agency style software houses. And I felt like, you know, you do nothing, you know, you do, you, you work a lot, right?
You do a lot of work. And of course, you have colleagues and eyes and everything, but in the end, your work is not visible to anyone. You cannot point at something and say, I made this. And it always bugged me and I always kind of had this entrepreneurial kind of inkling very early. I don't have anybody in my family, so I failed miserably.
I even started a startup with two friends, which, you know, we, with funding and everything and we tried and we fail like spectacularly. Before we even got the money in the bank and it was mainly, you know, kind of human, human problems interrelationship. So that's why I kind of ended up, okay, you know, I'm working in a job in a startup and I got after like you get a honeymoon period that you get with new jobs and you learn a lot.
And then after two years you ask yourself, what am I doing here? And specifically I asked myself, right, I'm a developer, right? How did I get my tickets? Handed to me, but I feel like I can do a better job building a product than the people that tell me how to what to build. And if I have this thoughts, right, either I do it or I shut up about it.
So I said, I have to do it. So that's why I started working on the site, SageCharmer being the first product I was working on. And during that, I can't, you know, it doesn't really take away the dissatisfaction, but it also doesn't give you enough money yet to, to quit. So I, I was contacted by somebody on LinkedIn who, because of my Projects that, Hey, we need actually your skills in our company.
And then, then hired me someone from Switzerland. However, their project basically got cancelled. By the investors, they said, you know, this one makes money. This one doesn't, you know, shut this one down and concentrate on the one that does, which I completely understand, you know, investors need to, need to prioritize here.
So I was quote unquote "laid off" due to that. And I was about to search another job and, and I kind of have my wife really have to thank for that...she encouraged me to say, "Hey, we actually have enough to just get, get by now. Why don't you. Go full time?"
But it's like, I was like, I mean, you know, if I, in my head, I was like, if I get another job, chances are, I will stay for another two years, right?
That's kind of the length. So either I quit in two years and go full time or I do it now. Why not now? So, yeah. So I'm not, I'm not advocating for people to quit and then, and then build and try their luck. But I think there comes a time where you say, you know, I have foundation here, right? I have my $500, $1000 per month.
I think maybe StageTimer is used by Trump? Did you get any growth from that?
So one day I wake up and on, on Reddit, there's this post. Of it's like someone from backstage makes this picture of a Trump campaign Trump rally and somebody else is speaking. And they used my timer and you can see on the display very clearly, like, "please get off stage. Trump is waiting," which I thought is the perfect use case because that's exactly what my product is made for, right. To communicate stuff like this.
You know, I want to share it. Unfortunately, the picture is just too grainy that you don't see our logo, but even, even on Reddit people immediately recognized what it was. So like, even in the comments, like, "Oh yeah, I know this product." It has this effect. And we actually, the other day we got somebody who signed up, who specifically said, "You know, I saw this, I saw your product used with with with the Trump rally."
However, I think, I think our flight will effect comes a little bit from a different side because the way this industry works is that the, the organizer hires some kind of. crew company to run, to run the technical part of the event, right? Light, audio, camera stuff. And they usually bring the tools and they are the ones learning from one another, right?
Sometimes they bring in like independence, independence come with their own tools. And this is kind of my angle. My angle is like, we have this free version that allows you to basically get started. Basically the idea is if somebody says, Hey, we just, you know, we need a timer quickly. It's like, okay, let's pull it up.
You know, it's pull up stage time or let's put, it's so easy. Let's put it on stage. It's, it's super. And then people see it and say, Oh, this is useful. You know, let's, let's use this next time when we do our event. And this is a more reliable flywheel for, for how we kind of penetrate these, these events.
So did you ever explore raising VC or did you just know that you want me to bootstrap it and just have, have all the control?
Yes, yes, I did want, or want is the wrong word, but I did explore it. Actually twice. We even had one investor coming all the way to my city and we met in a hotel lobby and we talk like for two hours, you know, with pitch and everything and discussion. And we said, we decided not to do it from both sides.
So they kind of said, look we really like your product, but it's very likely that the market is Too small right now, the growth is too slow for us as investors to be interesting. You know, unless you really want to kind of super expand into other, you know, you know, with other products and this and that.
And, and from my side, I was thinking, do I really want funding? You know, I was like there, like on, in the spot and said, do I want to say yes or no? And, I decided that once I say yes to VC money, even if it's, you know, you know, not kind of cutthroat VC money, like very generous private individual VC money, which just was the case.
They still want to, they expect some growth, right? They expect, Hey, you know, 300 percent year over year should be, it should be there like 200 at least. So I would have to report to them, Hey, we're doing this, we're doing this, we're getting, we're growing forward. It adds a level of stress. And they would want me, you know, they come with, with knowledge.
They understand they have grown their own businesses. They say, Hey, you should, you know, build up a sales team. You should expand into this vertical. You should create a product that addresses this market that is similar to yours. And I say, even though these are all probably very good ideas and they will actually help me grow this business faster.
It will also put a lot of stress on me. And for example, I don't want to build a sales team. Not that I think it's useless. I think it's very useful. I think it could be a great benefit, but it's just not really my forte. I love building a product. Like I love product led growth. I love search engine optimization.
That's kind of where I feel more at home. And I say, well, if I really want to do a sales team, what I would do is, you know, grow it enough so that I can hire somebody who does it for me.
Is there any mistake that you see lots of bootstrappers or SaaS founders do over and over again?
I think conversely, if you are, especially in Twitter on the like bootstrap or an Indie Hacker space, you actually should listen to the people that post the least because they're usually the successful ones. That, and, and they're also the ones that don't have a lot of to show. So I don't want to like, kind of talk, talk bad about anybody because everybody, everybody eventually has some kind of legitimacy in what they are doing.
But I'm not a big fan of like courses and boilerplates and starting kits and stuff like this, because it's kind of like this info product thing, right? You need a certain clout on social media to launch it. And then people kind of really flock to it due to your name.
Right. But I feel like these are not representative businesses. Some people can pull them off, but most people can't. And I see a lot of people, you know, launching these info products, launching these boilerplates. And I think, Oh, this is amazing.
Look at how much they earn. Let me do the same. And then they launched their own boilerplate and you know, they get no sales. Why not? Because it, it, it requires a following to pull off and it requires a lot of work to keep alive like it's, you know, it's a one time purchase. It's something that's really tied to how you, how popular you are. These things, as soon as you kind of get out of popularity, stop posting, quote unquote, you lose your market.
And I admire these people because they, you know, they have learned that they're really good on social media. They can really draw a crowd. I can't do this. I'm not good at this. And, I kind of have to ask myself, I mean, really, everybody has to ask themselves, do I want to be this person?
If you want, you have to be, you know, consistent. You have to learn how to be popular on social media. It takes a while. It takes a while to understand how to kind of use the algorithm. Be popular. It's not easy. It's not an easy game. But you can learn it and it takes time and you can get there. Or do you tell yourself, and that's where I landed and say I actually really liked the business part more than the popularity part. And I want to build a good business.
I think you made a guide about doing business in Germany. That's where you're from. Can you tell us about what are the pros and cons?
I can talk about it. So I actually really liked this topic. So I want to be very honest and upfront. The best thing I could have done is move to another country and do business there, right? Singapore, Dubai etc. They're all like all better countries to get started.
However, to a certain degree, you know, you do want to live eventually where your family lives, you don't want to live too far away. Like there is things that really keep you in the place that you come from. And for us, this is that, and I wanted, I really, I liked the country. The country is beautiful.
I love the walkability here. And anyway, not getting into details, but business is really hard. So I actually tried doing registering a business in not the US but in Estonia because they have an e citizenship program. However, I found out that international tax law is really complex. And there are very few accountants that really understand it.
So it's already hard to find an accountant, but it's even hard to find one that that wants to deal with you having a company in a different country. And in most countries you can probably get by and just fly under the radar and have it and get your money on your account and nobody asks too many questions.
In Germany it's not the case, unfortunately. We love to kind of front load all the bureaucracy here, you know, which is, I find it interesting because I have talked to people from the U S and they told me. You really have this kind of, also a lot of bureaucracy there. It just hits you later, right? You have, you have this, this whole trouble with the state and federal laws being, you know, kind of like a whole mix of a whole new bag, bag of, of problems.
But they often only hit you once you're already big. And here they hit you right away. When you start. So I kind of got hit by this. Oh, you have a business in another country, but you're actually living here and it's sole proprietorship. So you actually have to kind of register a, like a, an offshoot of your business in this country.
So now you have like, you have to do taxes twice and then you have, you know, you have to make sure that you don't get double tax. And this it's, it's really, it's really a mess. And I said it just to work around it is so much more trouble than it's worth. So I closed it down. I said, okay, how can I do it the default way, right?
The intended way. And I found out that Germany has some intended ways to make it easier for people to start. But most people just don't know about it because everything else is so complex. So I thought, you know, why don't I write down these ways that exist in my normally awful country when it comes to business that actually make it more or less simple to get started.
And and the other side of the coin is that Germans, they love to make everything, you know, they love to cook everything very hot. It's the same, right? You cook it very hot, even though it's actually, you eat it cold. So GDPR is an example. Oh, you have to do this and this and follow all these rules. No, you actually don't have to, you know, like pull out your leg.
In fact, it's quite simple to get started. There's like a few one, two, three really important rules that you want to implement, but the rest is really very flexible. If somebody really complains to you and says, Oh, you know, delete me or whatever. You have three months time to do it. So you can just do this, all this stuff manually until you're quite big.
And having talked about it a bunch on Twitter, I find there's a lot of people that, and I think it's maybe it's a US thing. I don't want to impose on them or like stereotype that they think every, every, all the money that I give to the government is lost money. It's kind of like. I may, I may still burn it.
Like it's worse than burning the money is giving it to the government. And I feel like here over here in Europe, we don't really have this perception. We look at it more like, Hey, I know where my money goes. You know, I see that my city is beautiful and the public transport works and the cop, the streets don't have holes.
Yes, of course there's corruption and people, you know, misuse it and public sector, what yada yada. But I would say mostly. It kind of works. So I'm, I'm not unhappy, you know, pay my taxes
What are your plans for like the next few years?
Yeah. So I think first of all, I was kind of still carrying this fear of losing everything. It's very common among entrepreneurs. It's like, Oh, tomorrow is all gone. You know, what if all my users leave? So I diversified, I have I build this last year. I started a second product together with a, with a friend in the same, in the same space, very similar target audience, very similar task, and we are growing it in parallel.
So this already gives me. I would say like a second leg to stand on. Maybe I will build a third product, but I also realized that the more products you have, the more trouble you have. Like, it's quite stressful actually to have multiple things going.
Yeah. Well, what is the second product because I didn't know that you were doing
Yeah. It's called a rundown studio. So the other guy, he also works in this kind of life video production environment. And he really has experience and he built like a graphics tool for that. And we said, well, people really want to plan their shows and the software that is available is really expensive.
Right? If you're talking 6,000 per year that people told us that they pay for it. And we said, well, I think it should be easy to build basically the same, but cheaper. So we went, we went on ahead and build not just the same, but we really tried to improve upon it. A tool for show planning, right? Rundown.
creation. So it's similar, it's similar in stage timer that basically have kind of a list of things that happen in your show and then timestamps. It's different that it's more designed for the pre show and then the stage timer is really concentrating on the during event face.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I've seen that before with founders where they like really tackle like one niche and then it's like they mix successful products and then it's like they offer something to the same niche. So instead of like, yeah, in your case, you're not like, I'm gonna make an app for surfboard manufacturers or or something like completely like outta blue and unrelated to stage timer. So I think that's quite smart that you're kind of like compounding on your knowledge and your connections and you're like, reputation in this sector. To making something else that is like that is can be used by those people.
And then if you think of your business like a set of levers, right, you want to kind of pull them and see if it brings you forward. And one, one lever is, you know, marketing. Where can I go to find more people? Right? Where can I make ads? Right, right now, Google works, but maybe Facebook also works. Maybe YouTube also works.
You know, we haven't really explored it enough yet. Another level you can pull is your pricing, right? Do I make it more expensive? Do I make it do I structure differently? Do I, what do I actually charge for it? Right? Who, why does person a pay more than person B? And why do they, why does it make sense?
So this is really a really hard question to, to answer how to structure your pricing so that people that use it more actually pay more.
There's sort of a conventional wisdom in SaaS amongst bootstrappers not to offer a free plan. Do you want to talk about why you've done one?
It's a good piece of wisdom to charge. But when you charge immediately, you have one specific problem and that is, it's sometimes hard for your customer to understand what they get. What is the value they actually get? Some can communicate really well, but sometimes really hard because.
Your tool may not be immediately intuitive. And for me, there's a second level as well because from the beginning, I thought, how can I build in my, how can I build marketing into my tool? Right. I love the Dropbox example, Dropbox said we make it free. And if you share it, you get a little bit more space, which, you know, make, made it really grow fast.
And I thought, well, I don't have, I cannot offer this exact model, but. What I can do is I do have kind of this shareable component. And if I just make sure that my logo is there and you have this very limited free plan a lot of people see my logo, right? Because it's right there is right. Like it's literally what you look at.
To use the app has my logo in it. If you use the free version and I, it's very hard to measure. I don't really know how to measure if people know it like this, but with recommendation and kind of word of mouth being at least 40 percent of our marketing, I think it paid off.
Yeah. That's, that's awesome. I mean, I think like there's something to be sad for like following conventional advice, but also there's, there's an exception to every rule, right? You know, people say things like, you know, don't make a double sided marketplace, but then there's mark places like mentor crews, which like has made over a million dollars and, and, I think roughly maybe like five or six years and there's lots of things.
Is SEO your main marketing channel?
It's strong. It's very strong. It's, yeah, but much stronger than any other marketing channel. Yes.
Have there been any marketing experiments or any channels that you've done that have just like, just not been worth it?
Most of them didn't work. Yeah, we have tried YouTube and it didn't work. But I'm suspecting maybe our video wasn't kind of hitting the, the tooth. We have tried Facebook. We try Facebook right now, but it seems not to work. We are not getting purchases from it. Instagram, we've tried same thing.
We have tried like reaching out to podcasts and stuff, and we have found that nobody wants to get sponsored. Maybe it's a bit specific for my industry because they really somehow appreciate not being sponsored, like really having their own show and ownership of it, or maybe we just didn't approach in the right way.
I don't know. We have tried print magazines, which are ridiculously expensive. So we left that. We have tried like physical trade shows. We went to, we went to one, we didn't have a booth. We just said, let's try it out and see if, you know, let's just go there and see what happens if people do something.
And we found out that. On trade shows you don't really do business. It's more like a tool to announce stuff if you're already known in the industry or like, or if you do sales, you invite people for the sales talk to the, to the trade show, but it's not really a good tool for marketing. Yeah. It's very expensive.
Just to wrap things up, do you want to tell us about where people can find out more of you?
Yeah. Feel free to link to my blog and I'm most active on Twitter.
Awesome. Well, thanks a lot for telling us all about Stage Timer and good luck!
Thank you, Pete.
// pop-up with indie acquisitions offer