The Story
Lucas Herman built Stage Timer, a simple countdown timer app for live events and video production, into a $25,000/month business. He runs it as a family business with his wife in Germany.
As Lucas explains: "I turned a simple idea into a SaaS business and eventually was able to quit my job and work full-time. We have reached $25,000 revenue per month and we have a total of 20,000 users."
The Origin Story
"It was a bit of an accident. I was in my friend's studio and he used this very old flash app on an old laptop and he remote controls everything from his nice table. And then to start a timer, he has to get up, walk into the other room and hit a button and walk back."
"My web developer mind immediately says surely there's a better way."
What Stage Timer Does
"Imagine you are on a TED talk and you have the speaker on stage and they want to know how much time do I have left in my presentation. So you put this in front of them and on my computer I have the control interface for this very timer."
"You're holding your microphone too far away. It's not loud enough. So I show you this message like 'hey hold your microphone closer.' It's much easier like this to communicate with your person on stage than holding up a paper sign."
Validation on Reddit
"I did it on Reddit. I'm building something for people that I don't know. I'm building it for people that are in a video production industry. Where are they? Where do they hang out? I'm looking for a subreddit."
"I put a link in here and I say, 'Hey, try it out. Give me some feedback. What do you think? Is this useful to you?' And people make literally lists that they tell me, 'No, do this. Do this. I've been waiting for such an app.'"
"Because there's no price attached to it on the website, it's also not 'he just wants to have our money.' It works really well. And then the other thing is I don't spam it. One post per subreddit."
Building the MVP
"My first MVP had basically just one feature which was click on a button here and a timer starts counting over there."
"I use all the technologies I already know. I use JavaScript, I use Vue.js, I use Node.js. If I would have used new unknown technologies, I would have had to learn them, understand them, find out they have limitations I didn't know before."
"I could ship my MVP in 3 days and then build upon it slowly and comfortably in the 1 hour that I had in the evening instead of building on it for 3 months just to have something that is usable."
"Because it was a side project, it took me 224 days to actually get my first dollar. And that's totally okay. It grew from there."
The Family Business
"After I earned the first dollar and we had our first customers, I thought, well, there's also marketing we need to do and we need to answer these customer service emails."
"My wife was at a point that she didn't want to do her old job anymore teaching. And I said, why don't you join me? Why don't you learn marketing and take over these parts of the business?"
"She does Google ads, she does all the sales emails, she does all the customer support emails and we have an amazing support. I do the product, the finances, the development and kind of the overall direction."
"Sometimes we walk over the street and talk about how we grow Stage Timer or sometimes we just look at any business like how would you grow this shoe business over there. We think about these business terms together which is really fun."
Growth Strategy
SEO and Niche Keywords
"We have about 50% of our traffic comes from Google and then a third of our traffic really comes from people recommending our tool to others."
"We have a niche tool, right? Very niche, a niche small enough that most big companies wouldn't really bother with it. But for us as solopreneurs, perfect."
"If you look for 'countdown timer stream deck companions', we created a documentation page that shows very precisely how you use our tool together with this integration for this physical device."
"The trick is the people that do search for this on YouTube, they want to have their question answered. They have a concrete problem and they want to have a solution for it. So they find you and they're so much more likely to purchase."
Product-Led Growth
"From the beginning I wanted to be like Dropbox. I just made sure every single link that people share, my logo is on it. And not only is my logo just like a picture, it has the name stagetimer.io in the logo. It's literally written there."
"We make it a freemium model. By doing this we capture a lot of freelancers that work in this space and they bring it along to the events that they're invited to."
Business Numbers
- •$25,000 MRR
- •20,000 total users
- •4,400 paying/have paid customers
- •86,000 unique visitors per month
- •80-90% profit margin
Timeline
- •November 2020: First commit (during COVID)
- •224 days later: First dollar
- •2022: Wife encouraged him to quit ($3K/month)
- •September 2023: Hit $10K MRR
Tech Stack & Costs
- •JavaScript, Vue.js, Node.js
- •Sublime Text and Sublime Merge (development)
- •Airtable (CRM)
- •Postmark (email sending)
- •Server/infrastructure: $280/month
- •Tools/services: $250/month
- •Paid ads: $1,400/month
Who Uses Stage Timer
"We had TV broadcasts that do broadcast for elections and they need to time every speaker. We had horse races buy it. Turns out almost everybody needs a timer and the iPhone timer won't cut it because it's just on your little iPhone screen and you need something that one person clicks start and five other people can see it."
Key Lessons
"There's more opportunities out there than we think. There's so many solutions that still have interfaces from 1999. Ugly as heck to use. People complain about it all the time, especially if you go outside the developer bubble."
"I believe there's so many like $1 million niches with little apps that you can build. The only hard thing is to find them. Once you found them, it's just this great opportunity that's open before you to build a simple app."
Advice for Beginners
"Just get started. There's a way even in this country to build a simple business, to scale it up and to understand how it works. Everybody is just like getting by somewhere and you can do it too."
Resources
- •Stage Timer: https://stagetimer.io/
- •Follow Lucas Herman on Twitter