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 watch it on YouTube or read it below
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.
