Transcript: Building a Niche SaaS with your Spouse as Co-Founder
This transcript was auto-generated from the recording and lightly edited for readability. Speaker attribution is best-effort. It serves as an archival copy in case the original source becomes unavailable.
Host: Hey folks, with us today is Lukas Hermann from Stagetimer.io. Lukas, super happy to have you.
Lukas: Hey, hey! Nice to be here.
Host: Cool. So to get this out of the way, let’s dive into — what problem does Stagetimer actually solve for your customers?
Lukas: Yeah, so we’re jumping right in. My product is kind of interesting — let me contrast it to what many others do. Because I’m active on Twitter, I see what other people do in the SaaS space, and many people do like Twitter tools — a bit more unpopular now with the expensive API — but they do like growth tools. They basically do SaaS for either developers or other SaaS people, and that’s what you see a lot, or at least a lot advertised. So we stumbled into an industry that has nothing to do with coding and marketing at all. We stumbled into the event and video production industry, and there people kind of need to keep time of what’s happening. There’s this kind of production room where a lot of people sit in front of big screens and they have to say, you know, “camera one, go here,” “interview taking place in two minutes,” — there’s a lot of timing stuff happening. And we built a countdown timer for this purpose, so it counts down to these kind of keystones and these people can say, well, I don’t want to keep it so long — but that’s essentially what it is. It’s really a simple countdown timer: you can say this is two minutes long, it’s 10 seconds long, this is 30 seconds long. But there’s a lot of complexity behind it that I had never expected when I started out.
Host: So if I understand that right — it’s basically: if I am hosting a conference and I have keynote speakers and they all have like 15-minute slots, I can use Stagetimer.io to say “hey keynote speaker, you have two minutes for your intro, then 30 minutes for the actual talk, and maybe like a plus-two for buffer at the end.” And that’s basically it — I would use Stagetimer to guide them through that. And I control it, or how would that work?
[02:00]
Lukas: Right, so you sit in the control room, you have this overview with the list, and you click start/stop. And then you get a link that the person sees in front of them — a browser window that’s essentially in front of them on a monitor — that has the timer very big, so they can glance at it every now and then, see how much time they have left. It turns red when it gets close and it starts flashing when it’s over time, so they know where in their talk they are and how much time they have left, even if they just kind of glance in the corner where the screen is.
Host: It makes sense. And you mentioned in your intro that this is not the typical thing a SaaS founder does nowadays, especially what you see on Twitter. How did you stumble into that? Like, I kind of know that keynote speakers use timers, but I never even thought about what’s behind it. So how did you stumble into this?
Lukas: So I was in a friend’s studio — it’s like one room for recording and one room for cutting. There was a guy recording an e-learning course, and before he starts speaking he has to start a timer. So he runs into the room with the cameras, clicks start on an old laptop he has there, runs back out, and then kind of runs the show from there. Like everything is remote-controlled except for this countdown timer. And in my mind it’s like, this is the easiest thing to do — surely there’s a tool out there on the internet where you click start, get a link that you can open on the other side as well, and it syncs up. So I looked. I was sitting there co-working with him, he had invited me,
[04:00]
and I was looking through the internet, and 15 minutes later I still hadn’t found anything. And I thought, okay, if it takes 15 minutes to search for a solution on Google, there’s an opportunity here. But still at that point I thought, a countdown timer — it’s not a market, right? I had never done SaaS before. I already had it in my mind that I wanted to do that, I wanted to create my own SaaS product. I had been working as a freelancer in development, and I thought, you know what, this might be a very interesting test case, just trying it out. It’s so simple, a countdown timer — everybody can do it. I whipped it up in a weekend and put it online, and I thought, why don’t I just develop this into a SaaS product, just to learn the ropes? How does pricing work? How does this work? I never thought anything would really come out of it. I never thought people would actually buy it. It was just for me to learn the techniques behind it. So I whipped it up, put it online, put it on Reddit, and there was more response than I thought. That’s how it came to be.
Host: Interesting. So let’s jump to today — could you give us just an overview of your current scale? Either MRR if you’re open to share, or number of customers, just so we get a feel for where you’re at today.
Lukas: So we are at around $8,000 MRR. MRR doesn’t give the whole story for us because we also have one-time purchases that are only for a limited amount of time, and we have around 1,500 lifetime customers, plus or minus.
Host: And you started roughly two and a half years ago, right? Or when did you start the whole project?
Lukas: Yeah, what I just told you was like two and a half years ago, and then it took me another
[06:00]
five to six months to set up a pro feature and a payment integration, because I was still working full-time.
Host: I would love to double-click on the pricing, because you mentioned the one-time purchase, which is super unusual — yes, of course. But I would guess it’s highly industry-specific due to what you do. Pricing is always a massive issue. How did you learn that you need one-time purchases and can’t do all-subscription?
Lukas: So, like every good SaaS founder, you start with the $7 price, right? Like, $5 to $7 — everybody does that. So we did that as well: $7 per month, plus a yearly plan that’s a bit cheaper. And then people kept churning and canceling — really high churn rates, 20%. So we’re like, what is going on here? We started sending out emails to everybody who canceled: “Hey, is something wrong with the product? We will give you a refund if something didn’t work.” And remarkably, almost everybody answered and told us, “No, the product is great, it did exactly what it’s supposed to do — but I don’t have a show for another four months.” And we’re like, okay. So people buy it for a show, prepare it, run it, and then cancel because they only need it for that limited amount of time. So we said, why don’t we give them an option to just purchase a 10-day license that’s just a little bit cheaper than the monthly price, kind of to incentivize it — and then we don’t have churn, because
[08:00]
they just use it and it’s done. And in fact churn did go down once we introduced it. A lot of people use it — that’s why our MRR figure isn’t the whole story, because almost 50 percent of people use this one-time license. Some even go as far as purchasing like three of them per month. And the reason for that is so interesting: they are of course also freelancers working for some events, some shows, some bigger client. So they just put stuff on the expense account. If they have a subscription they have to kind of divide it up across everybody, but if they have a one-time purchase they just purchase it, get one invoice, put it on the expense account — very easy for them. So great for us.
Host: Makes sense. Understanding the buying behavior is super critical, because in the end if you cater to that it’s like half the battle. And then one interesting thing I found stalking you before this podcast — I just put Stagetimer in the search because you’re sharing a lot of things in public, so I knew you were doing SEO. And you went from basically zero in April 2022 to over 10K organic visits in basically 12 months. How did you do that? Is that good? Is it good?
Lukas: It sounds surprising. I think it’s very solid, like from zero to over 10K — I’ve never done this before so I have no comparison. Is this good? I don’t know, where is bad? How did we do it? When I started, I said, all right, do keyword research. I had never done it before, so I looked up keyword research. OK, Google Ads platform gives you this free tool. So I put in all the keywords I could think of — “event timer,” “video production timer” — and it’s just zeros everywhere.
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There’s no search volume for any of these things. The industry is just very small compared to, say, a marketing industry. It’s big, but it’s also small. So search volume is in the low hundreds — very, very calm, very timid search volume. And we’re thinking, what do we do? Well, we just have to start. So we started targeting these very low-volume keywords that fit best into our niche. And what we observed is that because nobody else was targeting these keywords, and they actually had a lot of buying intent — you know, you speak of top-of-funnel: just get people on your page and they’ll find it later. Bottom-of-funnel: a person who wants to have the tool you offer. There was almost no competition on these keywords. So we said, okay, let’s try to target them first. And it worked much better than I expected — even though when you do keyword research it was still showing very low volume, in reality there were more people coming through than was shown in the keyword tools.
Host: Got it. And in terms of how you executed that — did you just write articles yourself? Did you work with an agency? How did you execute on writing those articles, spinning those pages up? Because in the end you’re only you and your wife so far in the company, right — which is also an interesting fact, but let’s go there later maybe.
Lukas: So it was a mix. We did write our own content, we did hire an agency to write a few articles for us,
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and then we looked at those articles and thought they were really trash. As a developer you look at those articles and think, nobody will ever read this. We still put them on our page — turns out they were not bad at all. They were really good, even though I still think the article quality is really low. It doesn’t go into my mind sometimes. And then mostly we wrote it ourselves. And then also, kind of in the back of our mind, we knew we needed some links from third parties. Fortunately enough, in our industry there’s a lot of word of mouth, so people do talk about our tool, and then we went to the typical places — Product Hunt and such — where we placed strategic links. I guess that helped.
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Host: Then, besides SEO, what else did you do in terms of growth to get to this $8K MRR run rate?
Lukas: So when we ask people where they come from after they purchase — we ask, “Hey, how did you find us?” — 50% is Google, and then another 35 to 40% almost is word of mouth. So people finding it good and sharing it with others is almost half the cake. And then we said, okay, if Google works well, let’s do some search ads. We tried Facebook ads already — didn’t work as well — and then my wife got all into search ads and learned the ins and outs, and that’s how we get a lot of traffic as well.
Host: So you were basically able to make Google Ads ROI-positive, because I
[14:00]
heard from a lot of people it’s getting more expensive, but you were able to make it work for you — if you put $10 in, you get more out?
Lukas: Yeah, so first of all, again, there was almost no competition on our keywords. There’s kind of one competitor that we have and they don’t even do a good job with SEO and marketing. Usually you go to the competitor, put in the website, and see what they rank for — turns out they just don’t rank for anything valuable. So we had to come out on top. And then yeah, we were ROI-positive. I think we had like 200% return on investment from ads in the beginning. Last month was lower, but it depends how you calculate — you do the calculations with lifetime value, do you do immediate returns, or do you calculate three months of this customer being with me? If you calculate a bit more generously, we are very solidly ROI-positive.
Host: And then what’s your current plan to get to first $10K MRR and then $20K? Do you think SEO and Google Ads will scale? Word of mouth will grow with more customers, but besides building an amazing product there’s not too much you can do there. So how do you think about scaling those marketing channels, especially in such a niche where there aren’t infinite people searching?
Lukas: So I would love to give you the perfect answer here, but this is the big question. Let’s do the truth, because being a founder is like a weird journey where you don’t have a clue what you’re doing anyway. So let’s go for the truth, not the PR version.
Host: No, no, it’s fine — I actually would love that. Because you are in this niche, I’d love to bounce it back and forth with you a bit. Because
[16:00]
one thing is of course Google Ads, right? You can scale them, you can put more money in, but eventually the ROI will lower and there’s a kind of saturation you reach, where the pond is empty. So what would you do in our shoes? I mean, I’m no marketing expert here, but what we’re doing right now — the thing we’re actively trying to grow is the agency part of our business, ReactSquad. We’re basically using a bullseye framework — I’m stuck on the name of the book but I’ll link it below — where in the outer ring it’s all marketing things you can do: events, conferences, word of mouth, cold outreach, all of them. Then there’s the middle ring, which is guesstimating: for my product in my market what could potentially work, what’s working for others? And then there’s the bullseye in the middle: what is currently working, and doubling down on that. What historically always worked for the agency — which I guess for most agencies is true — is just meeting people, networking, going to conferences. So we said, okay, let’s double down on that with 70 to 80 percent of the time and energy we have. And then we have a couple of things in the middle ring where we think okay, that might work, so we’re currently testing those out. The goal is to take something from the middle ring, make it work, get it into the inner ring, do that until it caps out, and then search for new stuff. So we’re currently trying to see by the end of the year whether we’ve capped out networking — which is kind of a random thing anyway because it’s just like meeting people and then they DM you a year later when they need a developer. But that’s how we go for it. But for the SaaS tool we’re building, we basically just decided, okay, let’s start with one specific growth channel.
[18:00]
So right now for the SaaS tool we’re building we’re just going for SEO — we’ll see how far SEO can get us, and then if it doesn’t work, what’s the next thing? We just go sequentially through things, because in the end as a small team there’s not too much you can do in parallel anyway.
Lukas: Yeah, so what we did is — people who don’t know marketing — we just threw the kitchen sink at the wall. Everything, just everything. We went to a trade show, we tried to contact YouTubers, we tried to contact podcasts, we tried to contact print magazines to put our thing in. And the return… turns out: pretty much super expensive. YouTubers — they’re so funny in our space. YouTube is like, “No, we don’t do feature channels, we don’t do that, we keep our production value.” They have 50 followers, 100 viewers, and their production value is through the roof. It’s crazy. But there are some people who just made videos about us without us asking them — just “hey there’s a new tool, let’s make a video.” And these videos are top-notch, like great quality. And we ask them, “Can you put it on our website?” — “Yeah, sure, awesome.” So free marketing — nothing to complain about. So what did we end up with? Google Ads work, so we scaled those until they saturate. SEO works, and what we observed in our case is that the very deep technical content actually performs very well.
[20:00]
You know, usually you have these kind of typical “five things to do,” “five apps to use” — kind of superficial articles. In our case the documentation pages almost perform better in the long run than the articles. So we really want to double down on good documentation: how to use X with Y, how to use this tool you already have with our tool, how to use this kind of hardware device you already have with our tool and integrate it into your workflow. This doesn’t have as much search volume as those shiny articles, but there are a lot of people that find this and use our tool right away — so it’s almost bottom-of-the-funnel content. And as long as we don’t run out of those topics, it’s worth investing the time.
Host: Makes sense. And then I would like to switch gears a bit, because you’re doing — at least to me — two super interesting things. First, you decided to build in public, so if you go to your Twitter feed it’s like great insights, really honest truths about things you go through day to day, not just the “hurray, here’s another win” version. And second, you do the company with your wife, which I also find super interesting. But let’s start with: why did you decide to build in public? Was it like a conscious marketing move to get customers, which is super valid? Or just like an urge to write and share? Because you’re very open, to an extent where I would maybe even think, oh, if our competitor reads this, maybe I’m making them smarter and they’ll become harder competition.
[22:00]
Lukas: Yeah, so the truth is, I just did it because everybody else did it. I saw people doing it and thought, okay, that’s how you do it, I will do it. And then retroactively, as one does, I found a reason. In our case it’s not as critical because, as I said, we have one real competitor and they’re on a different level — so it doesn’t matter that much for us. And the other thing is I kind of like the feedback loop that you get from building in public. I don’t share as much “here’s my revenue every month, oh it goes up, goes up, goes up.” I like to share more like, “here’s a thing I tried out this last month, and here’s how it worked — and obviously it did not work out.” Here’s a challenge I tried to overcome — both technical and marketing and just business-related. And I like the feedback loop you get with other founders. I’ve talked to many of them and it’s really cool to have other founders you can talk to. They go through the same problems and you can share and say, okay, this is a problem everybody has, or this is a problem only I have. And I see this whole Stagetimer thing — as I said — as a test, just to get into it. It’s more successful than I ever thought it would be. And I definitely plan to do a next project. I believe Stagetimer will be, quote-unquote, finished soon — it will have its steady growth and there will not be as much that we can do about it. And I don’t want VC investment, but maybe I want to have a next project that does have all these things, where I do not build in public, because building in public also has its drawbacks.
Host: Yeah, absolutely. And then how did you come to work with your wife? There’s a lot of things you hear — “never work with your spouse,” never work with friends — and then for me, my girlfriend is a nurse, and sometimes I basically get on her nerves just by telling her about business stuff. So I sometimes think I romanticize working with my partner. What’s the story — how did you get there? And what is it like, if it’s not too private, to work with your spouse? Because in the end you still need to have a private life and can’t talk business all day. That could be a hard separation to make.
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Lukas: Let me know in case she listens — I can’t say anything bad! No, it’s all fine. So I had bad experiences with co-founders before, where we came together, we were kind of friends, and then it didn’t work out and everything turned sour. That is a thing that happens. I also currently have a co-founder for a new project who is a friend and it works really well — so it’s really good to have like a test period with people to see how well you work together. What we did with the new one was: we did a fun project, no stakes, just for fun, to see how it goes. And it went well. So this kind of beta testing your co-founder is really a good idea. With your spouse you have the advantage that you’re already better tested, right? You’ve been together for a while, so you know how the other person ticks. My wife was in the education area, and then she said, “I’m kind of tired of it, I don’t want to teach people anymore — they don’t want to learn.” And I said, “You know what? If you’re willing to learn something new, why don’t you work with me for a while and do marketing and customer support for Stagetimer?” And she was really excited to switch gears, learn something new. She’s really good at self-teaching, so she’s learned really well and does a
[26:00]
really good job with it. And it has been working out better than I expected. You have these things you wonder about — how is your private life? — and we do talk business. We probably should have more structured meetings, like you would have as co-founders: this is our stand-up time, this is our meeting time. We don’t really have that because we’re always together. So we sometimes almost miss out on talking about the next steps and the big-picture part. We are constantly in the details because we walk outside and think, “Oh, this detail and that detail,” and we sometimes lose the big picture. That’s a bit hard, I find. But then on the other hand, it’s really fun because you have more conversational topics besides what you’d talk about privately — movies you’re watching, whatever. We have this thing where when we walk outside and see some interesting business, we think, “How do they make money? How would you scale that? How would we make this better?” Because we now both have kind of the same background with the SaaS product, it is really interesting to talk about these business-related things. You sometimes can’t do that if maybe your wife is a nurse — it’s kind of hard to talk about big-picture business decisions because they’re just not interested in it, which is fine. But it is fun if both have the same interests.
Host: That’s really super interesting. And you’ve slightly mentioned it basically twice already — first, that you sometimes miss talking about the big vision, and also that you think Stagetimer will have a time when it ends — not for the customer, but for you as the developer or basically the CTO driving it forward. So what’s your current vision for the company, for the product Stagetimer — where do you want to go? Not only product-wise, but also: do you want to bring in someone to run it? How do you plan for the long term?
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Lukas: It’s a question I ask myself often. Right now it’s my wife and I, plus a part-time freelancer that helps me with coding. I say “finished” because from a product-idea standpoint, it is a small scope: it is a countdown timer. You can have presets and switch between them, and you can do a bit of styling, but that’s pretty much it. I didn’t want to explode the scope, because often with products — they get successful, they add more and more features that people request, they become complicated, and then they get superseded by the next one. I wanted to avoid that. So I said, this is my scope and I stay in it. What fits in the scope I will implement; what falls outside the scope I will not implement. That’s why I say there’s a stage when it is, quote-unquote, finished — because every extra feature I could add has no real marginal value and just makes the interface more complex, which I don’t want. I think it can actually just be run by us on the side, just keeping an eye on it, making sure it’s running, maybe having a freelancer who is also responsible in case the server goes down to bring it back up. But I think that’s pretty much it for that product. Through it, though, I learned a lot about the industry. I learned what they need. I learned about things that are very similar to the tool I’m building right now — things that fall outside my scope but are pretty important for people. So right now I’m working with two other friends slash co-founders on a very new project that’s similar to Stagetimer but has an expanded scope, so it can work with more high-
[30:00]
class pros in a broadcasting world where you just need a higher level of tech.
Host: Interesting. So when that’s live, we need to record another one and talk about that too.
Lukas: Sure, sure, awesome.
Host: Then the last one — because what I also want to achieve with this podcast or show is to show the honest side, because there are a lot of podcasts out there that take the super-official PR version where everything is rosy and perfect. In the end, being a founder — sure, it’s fun, it’s rewarding — but there’s also a downside. So what’s a war story you lived through? It doesn’t need to be a business challenge, could even be just that you were in a slump for a time. What was something you didn’t expect that you had to go through?
Lukas: Yeah. I think a big-picture honest thing that every founder encounters is: whatever product they go into, whether they’re selling Barbies or doing a server hosting environment, whatever they’re passionate about — in the end it’s almost always about marketing: how to get users, how to get customers, how to grow your business. And that’s hard. It’s a relearning for everybody. But that’s the big-picture thing you just go through every day. One specifically hard thing I had was with those co-founders I had before, when it kind of went sour and broke apart. It’s very hard to break apart a business because you still have to agree —everybody has to
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agree: okay, we have to dissolve it now. What do we do with the money that’s left? What do we do with the maybe-debt that’s left? How do we resolve that? And usually when you do it the first time, you didn’t know about taxes, you didn’t know about writing things down and making contracts about everything, so there’s not much written. You have to find the agreements after it went sour, which is really hard. When you go into a partnership, you do want to agree beforehand on how it turns out if you decide to stop — how you dissolve it — and you should agree to that before you start it. You should also know how taxes work, and I feel like there’s not enough talk about how SaaS companies get taxed and how to work with that. So we had this problem that not only did it turn sour, but we also had a bad accountant that eventually ghosted us. Then we hadn’t had the taxes done for the last two years, and it all fell on me — this burden to find an accountant and do this retroactively. This was probably the hardest time of my life — a really hard one-to-two years, still resolving part of it. And it brings you into these depression and almost suicidal-thoughts territories. And often you see founders who are successful — you see them on Twitter building in public — but if you dig in, talking to some of them in private, many of them have stories like this. Many of them have stories: “Five years ago I was in a really bad place because when I started I made these mistakes.” So you start and stop — you can never start early enough, but you will make mistakes, and they will be hard.
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And I think it’s just good to know that all other founders had equally difficult — maybe not the same, but equally difficult — mistakes that they went through and had to resolve.
Host: Hey man, yeah, I can totally understand that. And did you do anything specific to get through it, besides basically just keeping your eyes closed and keep walking? Anything specific that helped you get out of that state?
Lukas: I think taking responsibility. It sounds a bit cheesy, but it’s something very hard to learn when you grow up. School doesn’t really teach you how to take responsibility in life — it just teaches you to be a good employee, and then everything is taken care of. But once you have to do it yourself, when a problem comes, you tackle it right away. I came to this point where I said, “Okay, my co-founder said don’t do anything, and I cannot trust him, so I have to do it. I have to push through this.” And then also in my mind I just switched the switch: “I’m going to push through this. There has to be a way out.” Like, the option is hope, right? It’s kind of like in Star Wars — without hope, what is a rebellion built on? There has to be a way. So you just push through, you take responsibility, you tackle the hardest thing first, then the next, and the next, and the next. And it will help immensely because you learn a lot of things in the process. Now I know how to handle taxes. I know what administrative problems are ahead of a business, so when I create my next one, I know what to look for.
Host: Yeah, some things. That’s a perfect point to wrap up — thanks a ton for being so open. Love talking to you.
Lukas: Thanks, man. Love to talk as well. Hope you stay in contact. I will let you know when the next thing hits the market.
[36:00]
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