Transcript: Making $8k/mo Targeting $100M/yr with Lukas and Liz Hermann of stagetimer.io

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.

Courtland: What’s up, dude?

Channing: Yo, what’s going on, man? Who do we got today?

Courtland: Liz and Lukas Hermann. I’m excited about the Hermanns. You know what I’m excited about? Lukas and his wife Liz — they’re sort of a team running this company together. Their app — I think they make eight thousand dollars a month. That was back in January, so maybe it’s more now. They have like this very simple tool that I think anybody would look at and be like, “I could build this in like a weekend.” You know, “I could build this very easily by myself,” but they’re making like a hundred K a year from it. And also, like — he was working as a software engineer. I think he went to college, software engineers making like 80K a year at a startup, you know, getting underpaid by a startup, and he quit that. And now he’s making more than that as an indie hacker from something very simple that he bootstrapped with his wife, and he doesn’t owe anybody any money. He’s basically free — he’s living the indie hacker dream.

Channing: Yeah, yeah. By the way, I feel like that detail of like, “it looks really simple on the surface” — I’ve been seeing that everywhere lately. We’ve posted a couple of stories of people that are building AI companies, and every single comment section has one or two people going, “Wait a minute, this is just two API calls, that’s it?”

Courtland: Yeah, it’s super simple. Well, AI is like next level. I was posting about AI, I think a couple days ago, because I’ve got this new bot — our Anderson Coop bot — who basically is like an AI journalist who sends us little reviews of people’s submissions and tells us how…

Channing: What ratio of your time are you spending figuring out the names of these bots versus actually building the bots?

Courtland: Yeah, it’s like 50/50, I would say. It’s hard to come up with good bot names.

Channing: But why don’t you use the bots to name the bots?

Courtland: I should! I’ve tried it, I swear to God, I put names into GPT-4, it sucks. I mean, you’ve tried to use it for creative writing — it’s not that good at coming up with like creative writing. It’s not that good at being funny. It’s partially in the prompt, but yeah, creative writing — it’ll get your creative juices flowing. It’s good for brainstorming. But anyway, I posted about this bot and people keep asking me like, “Oh, open source it, write a guide.” I’m like, no, no, no. It’s like not that much code. Like the vast majority of the work is done by OpenAI. So there’s a lot of cool stuff you could build nowadays that’s super simple. You know what also is cool about Lukas and his wife is not just that they’re building something really simple, but that they are incredibly ambitious. So — let me send you this thread. I think you’ve seen this thread. It’s like his Twitter thread. The very first tweet of this thread is: “Yeah, I’m going to get rich and this is how I’m gonna do it.” He’s not, like, “Oh, I hope to make some money.” He’s like, “No, I’m gonna get like insanely wealthy.” He’s like Babe Ruth pointing to the outfield exactly where he’s gonna hit the ball.

Channing: He’s not like, “Hey guys, I made something, hashtag building in public.” Oh, here he is. What’s up, Lukas?

Lukas: Hi!

Liz: Hey guys!

Courtland: We were just talking about your Twitter thread, Lukas, and I think it’s amazing. The vast majority of indie hackers are not that ambitious. Like, Sean Puri from My First Million came on our show like very recently, and he was kind of like, “You guys are doing small-boy stuff. We’re all about big-boy stuff on My First Million.” And I look at your tweet and you’ve got this same attitude. You’ve got this app, it’s very cool, you’re just getting started though. I mean, even your Twitter background — you’ve got like these three mountains, and the first mountain is like a little stick figure walking up it, and it’s like “a million dollars a year in revenue,” and there’s another mountain after that that’s a little bigger and it’s like “a hundred million dollars a year in revenue,” and the third mountain is like something crazy. And then even like your progress bar — like every indie hacker has like the same progress bar under their Twitter profile where you’ve got like the boxes, and on the left it’s like zero dollars and on the right it’s your goal, and you color the boxes green the further you get, and most of us are like, “Yeah, ten thousand dollars a month is like my goal,” or you know, twenty thousand. And yours is like a million dollars, so just sitting there with like one box colored in.

Channing: And by the way, we can’t let them off the hook. I want to read a couple of highlights from this sick thread. So number one, you’re like, “All right, I canceled my interviews, I stopped looking for work,” because you had gotten laid off, and you’re like, “But I’m going to be rich. First I’m going to stop selling my time for money. Then I’ll bootstrap a product. I’ll scratch my itch.” You kind of go through, “I’m going to make a lot of money, then I’m going to start my second company.” And then you do something that’s so funny, which is you predict a point that happens in a lot of people’s journey that always blindsides them. You specifically go: “Then I’ll have a midlife crisis. What am I even doing? I reached my money goals, I’m living the life, my parents’ retirement is secured. What’s next? Then I remember — now I have my financial freedom, I’m excited about my SpaceX.” Like, you completely draw this thing out in a way that even the people who do reach these goals don’t see all the steps coming the way you’ve laid it out.

Lukas: Yeah, it’s pretty cool. The funny thing here is we are big fans of My First Million, and then one day out of the blue Sam started following me. I’m a big Sam fan, and he is a big Sean fan. And then I was like, “Ah, Sam follows me!” I even tweeted — oh, I think it was by mistake — but then he answered, Sam answered, and said, “No, no, I like what you’re doing and that’s why I followed you.” And then a few weeks later he tweeted something, and actually — then I started following him, and I was like, “Okay, we are on the path here.” Yes, I just — I made this killer tweet. I even looked up the Disney story spine, that’s like “you know, things, all the time, and then this happens, and then this happens, but one day, and then, and it’s like…” Okay, I’m gonna write a tweet exactly like the Pixar story spine.

Courtland: Yeah, the Pixar story spine.

Lukas: And it totally worked. So let’s clue people into what you guys are doing here. Your app — as I mentioned earlier, it’s very simple but it’s very good. It’s called Stagetimer.io. So let’s say I’m running a conference or an event where I’ve got speakers. I want my speakers to all know — pretty simple — how much time do they have left in their talk? Is it 10 minutes? Is it 30 minutes? And I want it to be like on some sort of laptop or screen or iPad that they can see while they’re talking, so they don’t go over time. But I want to also be able to control pretty much everything about that timer from the comfort of my seat. I don’t want to have to be running up to the stage telling them how much time is left or pressing pause on the screen. And so that’s basically what Stagetimer.io is. You basically sign on to their website, you create a timer, and you get this whole dashboard with all these cool controls to control a timer. I can add time to it, reset it, make it flash, I can have multiple timers, I can show messages — whatever I want I can do. And then there’s another link I can give people — it’s like a special view to the timer that I set up for my speakers, and it will just show them the timer and any messages I send to it, that I can control. And that’s, as far as I can tell, pretty much it. And I think you’re charging like 20 bucks a month, 30 bucks a month for this, and you are at — last I saw — eight thousand dollars a month in revenue.

Lukas: Yeah, a bit more already.

Courtland: Yeah, I mean, this is the dream. Channing and I were talking before we came on — like, everybody wants to build something that’s simple, that’s easy to understand, but that like makes you a living. I mean, you’re making more from this than you’re making at your startup job, Lukas.

Lukas: Yeah, it’s actually a bit wild if you think — if you think that a countdown timer, like the most unlikely thing that anybody would pay money for, makes more money than a startup. It’s great. It’s interesting.

Courtland: Yeah. I saw a post actually where you guys talked about coming up with your idea, and I think it’s really funny how you came up with it. Because this is like the most generic startup advice ever, which is: “Keep your eyes open for problems in the world and one day you’ll find a problem that’s worth solving, and then solve it.” And like almost nobody does that. It’s so hard to do that. It’s incredibly hard to just stumble across an idea. But that’s exactly what you did. You were at — I think, Lukas — a friend’s recording studio?

Lukas: Yeah, and then I saw them start a timer on their iPad and then run to the control area to start controlling it. Like, he didn’t have a remote. He had to literally sprint across the studio to do his timer.

Courtland: Exactly.

Lukas: Yeah, it’s like — I see him running in, you know, clicking this one button on a laptop, running back out, seeing — there must be a better solution for this. You know, many people say on Twitter: “Scratch your own itch, build a business that you yourself like.” And I looked around like, “I want to scratch somebody else’s itch.” I see this guy — can I build something that’s a solution for him? First of all, I thought surely somebody else has made something. I feel like whenever you look at the world and it’s like there’s such an obvious solution to this problem — that maybe you see because you have the background, and everybody else just doesn’t know — that’s the perfect business. And I was like, “I’m gonna build this in one weekend.” And of course, like, free, you know. Just very simple, put on the internet, put on Reddit. Like, who cares? Let’s see if people want this, if people want to use it. I just did it.

Courtland: I get skeptical when I see things that are obvious. I’m like, “I could build this on a weekend,” and I’m like, “Somebody has to have already solved this problem. Like, it must be my friend who doesn’t understand — he’s running from the timer to the control like he doesn’t understand, he’s never Googled this. But there’s no way, you know, it’s 2023 and nobody’s built like a timer.” Did you do any research? Did you go back and try to find out like, “Hey, does this exist?”

Lukas: Yeah, so on the very spot I tried to find this solution and I couldn’t. Just a simple website that you open, have a timer, that is remote controlled. So I built it, and afterwards I find like two or three solutions that are old Windows apps.

Courtland: What’s interesting is you did something that’s the opposite of what Paul Graham said just a couple of days ago. He tweeted: “When young founders build something that they don’t want themselves but that they believe some group of other people want, 90 percent of the time they’re building something that nobody wants.” And even Elon Musk responded.

Liz: Yeah, it was like, true. But I would say — also, this is the thing about percentages, right? There is still the 10 percent. He said 90, so there is still 10 percent. And I’m not saying that other people should do it. But I’m just saying that the smart thing — in Lukas’s case — is that he always summarizes. Of course, so the story goes fast, but the truth is that he went on Reddit and he asked, you know, “If I could build a countdown timer that would be controlled remotely, what would it need to have?” And from that feedback he actually created the first version, and then afterwards went back to Reddit and told people that he had created that. So that’s how he got the first users. So I want to shine a bit of a different light on this. Paul Graham is right, right? But I feel like in our tech bubble everybody knows about these tech things. All the tech problems have been solved with open source code five times already. But then you look at other industries — especially old industries, metal manufacturing, and in this case like event organizing and media recording — there’s so much low-hanging fruit. That you, as a developer coming from a startup background, look at it and it’s like, “I would automate this, I would change this, I would make this better.” There’s so much low-hanging fruit. I feel there are a lot of problems to be solved by developers in other industries.

Lukas: That’s spot on. Until today we see that all the time — that people actually write us because they love Stagetimer so much. They write and say, “Okay, do you have something like Stagetimer but for this in the industry?” So we get emails all the time — people asking like, “Okay, but do you have something like Stagetimer but for a teleprompter? Do you have something like Stagetimer…” you know? And they are always mentioning things, and we’re like, “Oh man, there are so many things that we could do in this industry.” Again, these low-hanging fruits that are still there to be taken.

Courtland: It’s fascinating because it’s like — in the world of technology, if you’re a developer building tools for other developers, you go on GitHub and there’s like millions of products. Programmers are solving every single little thing about every single thing, and somebody builds a library, then somebody comes and builds another library to solve the problems with that library. It’s just tons and tons of stuff. So even if software engineers and indie hackers have already gotten to some other industry, like let’s say insurance, and they’ve already built some tools there, they haven’t built anything near what they built for software engineers. So there’s like guaranteed to be something you can build. And sometimes it’s as obvious as, like, “Hey, you should be able to control this timer with a remote and this old shitty Windows app is not good enough.” But sometimes it’s a little bit deeper, and I think that people can explore a little bit more here and try to figure out what’s going on in other industries.

Liz: Absolutely. And there’s of course the big industry problems that probably are being worked on, but there’s always these little niches for indie hackers — little problems that nobody really wants to solve because there’s just not enough money in it. But for a single person, like me, like us — it’s just perfect and enough to grow a good business.

Courtland: What was it — patio11 had a really simple app for teachers. I forget what it’s called.

Channing: Bingo Card Creator.

Courtland: Bingo Card Creator! Back in 2007. And it was the exact same story where, you know, it’s not a super sophisticated product, and when he’s talking to developers or coders, like, you know, eyebrows would go up — like, “Really? You’re making a product out of that?” And the thing that he hammered the drum about all the time is, “Look, to us this is just a simple app, but to teachers or people who are not technical, this is magic.” They’re literally creating bingo cards by hand for these kids. It’s taking them hours. We could use code to do this in a minute, and like no one’s doing it for them because programmers are only making apps for other programmers.

You mentioned that you launched on Reddit. This wasn’t just like a singular moment — boom, you have an app. It was like a six-month process. And I found the post where you launched on Reddit. I thought it was so smart how you did it. Because the vast majority of indie hackers are like, “Oh, you can’t launch on Reddit, you can’t advertise on Reddit, you’re gonna get banned, I’ve been kicked out of so many subreddits, blah blah blah.” But I think they’re just doing it wrong. And I think Lukas, the way you did it was the right way. So you went to — there’s a subreddit called r/CommercialAV — and he made this post called “Advice for presentation timer app in the making.” And just with your title, I think you killed it. Because you’re not like, “Hey everybody, come use my thing, I’m advertising, spam spam spam.” You’re like, “Hey, I need some advice — all of you smart genius people out there, I could really use some tips.” So it’s like disarming in a way. And then in your post you kept it real short and simple. You’re like, “Hey everybody, I’m building a presentation timer app that runs in the browser, blah blah blah, can you give me some feedback about the features necessary for an app? Here’s the current version.” And then you literally put a link to your app. So you’ve done like all the things you need to do — you put a link to your app, you tell people you’re building it, and now you get all this free feedback from people and probably like some of your first users, just from that one post.

Lukas: So I actually — first of all, I had to look for the subreddit. It’s so hard to find the subreddit if you’re not knowledgeable. So I found this tool where you put one subreddit and it gives you all the connections to the other ones, like a network graph thing.

Courtland: I think I’ve seen that — like a visualization, yeah, like a network. It’s so cool. It’s like a map of Reddit.

Lukas: It’s amazing! And so I go there, and exactly — I thought, “Okay, how do you post this so people actually want to read it and want to respond?” Reddit, you can exhaust very quickly. And funny — there’s another timer that launched like a year later in the same subreddit. I read these posts and it was an open source tool. He posted the first one, everybody was excited, and then he posted like every single week, and it petered out. You can’t do that on Reddit. It’s like: you’ve got one post, you make it short, you make it to the point, you ask for questions, you don’t advertise. You got it. And then like six months later I was like, “Okay, now I did it.” Like, “Hey, with your help I did it — check it out, what do you think?”

Courtland: Oh, that’s smart.

Lukas: And it was when we launched the paid version. That’s when we launched the paid version. But I didn’t mention the paid version. I just said like, “Hey, thanks to your help I built this thing and now it’s a thing, and it’s awesome.”

Courtland: There’s a hilarious comment on your first Reddit post that I liked. It was someone basically talking about a different timer trick that they found where a speaker might have 10 minutes, but you can actually speed up the timer so really only nine minutes go by but the countdown looks like it’s counting to 10. It’s like the most amazing trick for basically making sure your speakers don’t go over time and everything runs smoothly. Do you guys have that? Did you end up adding that feature to your app?

Liz: This is literally the oldest feature in our backlog, and we have not built it yet, because it’s such a mind-bogglingly hard task on a distributed server.

Courtland: True.

Liz: We get some very funny requests, actually. But we also get some ultimatums. I mean, not anymore, but in the beginning it was really funny building Stagetimer — really listening to the users — because we didn’t know any better, right? We didn’t know how the industry works. So I remember the first time I got an email and the person said, “Oh, can you add this and this so I can build a rundown with Stagetimer?” And I was like, “What is a rundown?” And then I asked. So it was really funny entering an industry with no prior knowledge. But then also the user base teaching us and educating us. There was this one guy that was really funny. I think it was one of our first yearly subscriptions. He wrote very straightforwardly — he said, “I love Stagetimer, and here are the things that I would like to see on Stagetimer, because if you don’t have these things by next year then I’m not going to renew my subscription.”

Courtland: Like, “I just gave you money, you better have this next year.” This guy’s like the mafia.

Liz: He was awesome! Because then we had exactly what a producer needs, you know? He was really organized and he mentioned the most important things. And we are very thankful for the input from this guy and many other people that wrote us, because we didn’t know what they needed for the event production space. Sometimes we just hopped on a call — like, “Hey, can we have a call with you? Can you tell us what you’re actually doing? Just show us.” And of course the cool thing is that when you’re dealing with early adopters they’re super excited, right? So they were actually thanking us for the time. They were feeling so good, you know, for talking to people that work for Stagetimer. And until today we get messages — and even people saying, “Please send my thanks to the team.” And then I just turned blue and was like, “Yeah, thank you, and that’s it.” Because people actually believe that we are a larger team. And recently you even met a person and the person said, “Oh, you were one of the engineers.”

Lukas: And I was like, “Yeah… well, a bit more than that.”

Courtland: It’s cool because what you’re doing is basically proving — you don’t have to solve your own problem, right? And I think solving your own problem is a little bit overrated. Because at the end of the day, like, you’re trying to find other customers, and they’re going to be different than you no matter what. Even if you know an area inside and out, other people are going to be different than you. And if you don’t keep your ears and eyes open to listen to what they have as problems and what they want, you’re going to be dead. So you might as well get in the habit of doing that from day one by solving other people’s problems. And I like that you posted on the subreddit, and like you said, you posted like again — so you later came back and you’re like, “Okay, hey, it’s been six months, here’s a link to my old post, thank you.” And you were super smart again with how you did it. Like, “Thank you so much for the advice, it was so great, it was so helpful.” You know? “Here’s what the new product is with all your advice added.” So you’re not advertising, you’re just participating as a community member.

I’ve tried to get people to do this for Indie Hackers for so long. It’s so hard. You get a group of indie hackers or founders together, put them on a forum — everybody just wants to advertise. And I think everybody cares about what they’re doing, and it’s like nobody cares about what you’re doing, they care about themselves. They want to feel smart, they want to feel important, they want to feel helpful. And I feel like you’re one of the few people who did that right.

And so I think after that second Reddit post is when you — is that when you got your very first paying customer?

Lukas: Yeah, so I pushed it out on Twitter and I had like 300 followers at that time. Like, “Okay, nobody’s gonna read it,” but you know that’s what you do — build in public, push it out, tweet it out. And just that same night somebody purchased it. I was like, “This is incredible.” You know, your first dollar online is some magical moment. I contacted the guy, wrote him on Twitter — “Hey, like, why did you buy my thing?” He’s like, “I know you from this first Reddit post, and I just followed you, and I love it. I love new things, I love what you’re doing. I bought it right away.” And it just knocked me off that it’s from this first Reddit post — actually somebody purchased it.

Courtland: You guys — how much do you tweet? I know we were reading that one Twitter thread that you have, but I haven’t really — I just followed both of you. How big is Twitter in your marketing and growth strategies?

Lukas: Nothing, yeah. Because all the people on Twitter — there’s a Venn diagram between the people on Twitter and people that do video recording and events, and it’s like the two circles don’t touch.

Liz: Exactly. Yeah, we just created actually now a Twitter for Stagetimer, but it is not at all — it’s not even a customer acquisition channel for us. So it’s not a focus at all for us. And then as Lukas said, the first users came from Reddit. And then the coolest part is that it grew mainly through word of mouth in the beginning, because this industry is so tightly knit. It’s just the way it is for them — as soon as they find something they tell others. And the most amazing part about this industry is, as you can imagine, they are great with video. So I think 90% of these people are actually YouTubers. So what happened is that people started making videos about Stagetimer, and then we have these really cool videos made about Stagetimer that we didn’t even commission. It’s just because they’re excited and they want to share with other people. So every now and then we get an email from a user saying, “Oh, I just saw that so-and-so mentioned you,” and then they send the video with the minute already marked so I know where to watch. And it’s becoming this tool in the space where people even reference it already as if it’s like a house brand. And then for example the other day I saw that a big creator in the space mentioned Stagetimer — actually, he was using Stagetimer — and then he mentioned that he wanted to do something related to a timer. And two people in the comments on his live on YouTube said, “Yeah, but you should check because Stagetimer actually allows you to do that.” It was such a moment for me, because I was like, “Look at that, they actually mentioned it.” It’s like Nike, you know? It’s like the Nike of the space. You don’t have to say anything else. It’s just Stagetimer. It’s really cool to see it developing like this in the industry.

Courtland: That’s awesome. And word of mouth — I mean, I think it’s the best type of marketing because your customers aren’t being marketed at. The downside of it is that it’s relatively slow. So you had your first Reddit customer, but what were you doing while your revenue grew by word of mouth? And Lukas, I know that at first you were working at a startup. Liz, what were you doing?

Liz: So actually I only joined a few months after he created the paid version. Before that I was working in humanitarian work and social development. And when I joined Lukas in September 2021, I started helping him to grow the tool. One thing that Lukas did that was quite genius — and this again comes from the way he functions — is that he called the thing “Stagetimer,” right? It’s just like calling a clock a clock. So because he called Stagetimer “Stagetimer,” SEO came by default. So when people were searching “stage timer,” we were already on the first page pretty fast because of that. So this was already SEO. Then word of mouth became the second largest growth channel. And then since we saw that SEO would be the way for us, we started tackling SEO more intentionally and found out that the best way — because it’s such a technical industry — is to just do technical blog posts, or documentation even better. Because those top-of-funnel fluffy blogs that you can do for other projects don’t work in this case, because if I make those we bring the wrong traffic. These are the people that won’t convert because they don’t need such a complex timer. So funnily enough, one of the things that brings us the most paying customers is documentation about how to use a countdown timer with OBS. So we started to realize, “Okay, we have to go very technical,” which is hard because we don’t know the technicalities of the industry so well. But that’s how we started growing. And of course then ads, and we keep expanding to get more and more customers.

Lukas: So stepping back a little bit — you asked what do you do with your time, and I was in the same position. Probably many people are in the same position: “Oh, first dollar, what do you do? What do you do?” So as one does, I go on Twitter and I ask, “How do I do marketing for this tool? What do I write? What articles do I publish?” No idea. And somebody said something very genius. They said, “You know, some products are so simple — like if you sell a horse, just say ‘horse for sale.’ Just say what it is.” And I was like, “Yeah, I think mine is so simple.” So I just created blog posts of kind of documentation that say, “Here’s how you use my tool. First step, this step, this step, click this button, do this thing.” And these are today the most clicked and converting articles that we have.

Courtland: Yeah, yeah. I run an Airbnb and it’s kind of in the same bucket. It’s like the easiest thing I’ve ever sold. I’m just like, “Hey, I got a place, you can sleep in it, it costs this much per night, here it is,” put on Airbnb, and it’s like, I’m just making like five thousand dollars a month like instantly. And it’s so much easier than selling the vast majority of like super complicated tech products that everybody’s addicted to making. Like, you sell Stagetimer — it’s like, “Yeah, you want to time your events? Here it is.” It’s literally called Stagetimer.

You said you’re killing it at SEO. I Googled “stage timer” — you guys are the number one result, which is a pretty good place to be.

Lukas: That’s also one of the benefits of moving into a niche that doesn’t have a lot of competition, right? You actually can get that — you know, for example, that domain name — exactly. And I mean, the flip side is you go on Ahrefs, you look for your keywords, and there’s like zero traffic. But it’s just that almost nobody’s ranking for it. And then you kind of start doing content and you realize, “Okay, there are 100, 200, 300 people coming.” And they have really high purchasing intent. So these are enough for us.

Courtland: So what’s it like working together? Because you two are — you’re married, right?

Lukas: Yeah.

Channing: Channing and I aren’t married but we’re related, and sometimes we want to kill each other. Sometimes it works out really well. I think the most stereotypical advice is like, “Don’t get into business with your friends and your family.” We’re all four of us doing literally the exact opposite. You two seem pretty happy — you’re both smiling, you’re mutually complimentary, you haven’t killed each other yet. How’s it going?

Liz: Well, I think I can say more about that. And because of the following — Lukas is laughing — the other day I even made fun on Twitter and said, “That is awesome, you know, being married to your co-founder, because you can have meetings as you go for a walk or as you go out to eat.” And then some very patronizing guy comes to me and says, “Yeah, once the rose-colored glasses fall, you’re going to be hot.” And I’m like, “We have been together for 10 years, married for seven, have worked together since day one, because we met while volunteering.” So as soon as we met we started working together, and we did a ton of projects together while we were working in humanitarian aid. Lukas came to Brazil, we worked together. So this is not our first thing. And I think it works so well exactly because of that — because we tested the waters in like low-risk environments before, and we knew that we work well together. And then when Lukas invited me to join Stagetimer, I was like, “Yeah, this is tried and tested.”

Lukas: I mean, I had to do a calculation, right? Because I invited her eventually and I was like, “Is this a wise idea? Is this a good idea?” You know, you can’t step back from that.

Channing: Yeah, it’s like having a kid — I’m co-founder, you’re my wife.

Lukas: So I thought — you know, when you look at families, most of them they kind of build up in different jobs, and then they lose the things that they talk about. And then they end up talking about the series they watch, and then they get kids and then talk about the kids. And I thought, you know, if we do work together, we have some common interest and common topics — a world that overlaps — that we can use for dinner conversations. And it works great. Just as an example: one exercise that we do — when we walk, we take a walk outside and we see businesses, like a you know, an old shop selling cheese or selling meat or something, and we think, “How would we revitalize this? How would we grow this business?” It gives this challenge to each other. And because we’re both in this world, the other one can be like, “Okay, I will do this, I will do this. No, I will do this.” Smart.

I don’t even know what other couples talk about. But we do talk about series — okay, we just finished our favorite series, Succession, and we talk about it all the time.

Liz: Love it!

Lukas: But the truth is that because we have the same interest in growing this one business, we have way more things to talk about, and it’s more fun to be in each other’s company. And this game that we do, we have been doing that for quite a while already — this game of just looking around and seeing how we would improve things, how we could… sometimes we see a business fail and we’re like, “What could we have done? Or how could we actually take advantage of this network effect here?” And we are all the time playing this game. And I see that this is also what makes us — because we have side projects to Stagetimer, and we usually get these ideas from these exercises and these conversations. So it’s pretty cool.

Channing: One thing you said that’s really underrated is it’s not merely that both of you had a 10-year relationship — that you knew what it was like to live together and to just be together — it’s that you also specifically did volunteering work together. And I think that one of the things when it comes to working with friends, working with family, and there being tension that sometimes arises is because you have totally different types of relationships with people. And so you might be like — actually, speaking of friends, Courtland, Vincent Wu, a friend of the pod and a friend of both of ours — used to run this company called Coder Pad where he taught people how to code, and he taught his girlfriend how to code. And according to him — I don’t know if I’m supposed to share this — but that ended up being like this huge transition in their relationship. They ended up not working out well. And I asked him for advice. I said, “Hey, my girlfriend wants to learn how to code. Should I teach her? Do you have any advice for me?” And he just looked at me across the table and was like, “Yeah. Don’t. Don’t do it.”

Courtland: You did it anyway.

Channing: And I did it anyway! And I — what I said was that was a useful conversation because I was like, “Hey Natalie, here’s what Vincent told me. We’re gonna put like a three-month window on this.” And I kind of created all of these caveats. Ended up working out well.

Liz: I gotta say the other thing also is that it’s not like I was employed and then Lukas convinced me to become an entrepreneur. I think that’s the other part. Sometimes when I tweet about how cool it is to be married to your co-founder, people say, “Oh, how can I convince my girlfriend?” And I think this is the problem. I think it was Elon Musk in an interview recently — when people say, “Oh, what would you say to incentivize or encourage a person to become an entrepreneur?” — he was like, “No. If you need encouragement, don’t. Don’t become one, because it doesn’t work.” And I think if you need to convince your partner to do it, then it doesn’t work. I have businesses of my own — I’m from Brazil, so my businesses were in Brazil in the past. So I’m not coming like, “Oh, let me give this a try and my husband convinced me.” And I think that’s another important point here — is just that we already had prior experiences working together, we already had started things of our own and together. So we have been testing this concept for quite a while.

And what happened — and I’m gonna give credit here — is that I was working for a startup and they kind of wound down, stopped a project that I was working on, and they gave me a few months’ extra pay to find a new job. All fine. And Liz was kind of the one that convinced me: “Hey, you have this perfect opportunity now to go full time on your own tool.”

Lukas: Right. It was very small, I didn’t make a lot of money back then, but I thought, “You know what, I have a few paid months now. Let’s use it, let’s do it.” And she was the one — without her encouragement, I might not have done it, and we might… so this is good.

Courtland: How long until you guys have a bunch of kids and you’re basically the family on Succession? And you’ve got kids fighting for your empire?

Lukas: That’s what we’ve talked so much about! Funnily enough, the things that I never wanted — to actually have kids of my own. So we had to talk a lot about even having kids of our own. I always wanted to adopt. And we keep postponing. So we’ve been married, as I said, for seven years, and I always say, “Yeah, I think in two years we can have kids.” And we were supposed to start talking seriously now, and we just talked last week, and we were like, “Let’s give it another two years.” We keep postponing!

Liz: We do want to approach it like a business, to be honest. I think it wouldn’t be any different for us.

Courtland: I really hope that you don’t end up having four kids like in Succession, because —

Liz: I love that show, honestly!

Courtland: Loving the show and emulating it — two wildly different things, I think.

Channing: Yeah, I really love the idea of working with the people that you like. I mean, I work with my brother, our mom’s always in our Telegram chat with the two of us. I just like surrounding myself with the people that I care about, you know? And like one of the biggest reasons that companies fail is because co-founders don’t get along — they’re not compatible, they’re not good at problem resolution. But it’s like the two of you guys had practice, right? Channing and I had practice. We fought for years and resolved everything. I’m like, “Oh, actually, you know, we get along pretty well no matter what happens.” We’re not gonna break up over money. We’re always gonna be brothers.

And so I watch Succession — and I’m not as far as you guys. You said you finished the show. I’m taking my sweet time. I don’t want to be where you are — I don’t want to be done. But I watched this whole family and it’s like they’re terribly dysfunctional. It’s awful. It’s really like a show about bad people. But also I’m like, “It’d be so cool if I had all these people around me who I don’t have to convince to join my stuff — they all want to be a part of the thing that I created because it’s so badass.”

Liz: I don’t want to spoil how it goes, but I think you’re going to rethink that.

Courtland: Like, everybody dies?

Channing: I haven’t seen a single episode of that show, Courtland. You’ve convinced me. I think you’ve got good TV show taste, so I’ll check it out. But one thing I do know is that I think probably mom hasn’t seen it either, but she probably loves the idea of that show. Because until you watch that show I was convinced that you never wanted to have kids, and now this bug of “I just want to run my own family empire” has — that’s literally the worst reason to have kids, because of that show. Like, you brought up all the reasons. Like, multiple times out of the 10 worst reasons to have kids, it was like written at number 11 at the bottom of the list. “To hold me when I watched Succession and it was great.”

Courtland: So I think you have another property — another attribute — that I think is similar to the family from Succession, which is just your raw ambition. Channing was reading parts of your tweet earlier, but I’m going to read actual tweets that you wrote in more detail, because I almost want to just read your whole Twitter thread. So you said: “I’m going to get rich and this is how I’m going to do it. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not rich yet.” And you tweeted this last March, about a year ago. “So I did my CS degree, I worked as a software developer just like my parents expected. Every day I worked for my 80K a year startup job. Then last month I was laid off. Because of that I started looking for another job, but I don’t want to have another job. Working for someone else makes me miserable. So I canceled my interviews.” And you started talking about your finances — like you don’t have a ton of money in the bank, it’s not enough to make you rich. He said, “But I’m going to become rich, and first I’m going to stop selling my time for money. I’m going to bootstrap a product. I’m going to scratch my own itch. It’ll make a little money at first, so I’ll do some freelancing, but only some, so I have enough energy to improve my product. There are better ways to make more money more quickly but I’m not going to do it this way. This product will teach me about how to run a company, how to build a product, and how to do marketing. It’s a long-term game and I’m going to learn the rules. After two years making enough money to get by because of that, I’ll stop freelancing. I’m living cheap — no car, no frills.” So I guess the two of you are living cheap. “And then I’m going to start my second company. I’ll look for a good market, I’ll think about distribution, I’ll scratch somebody else’s itch” — which we talked about, you’re scratching somebody else’s itch, not your own — “and I’ll do the thing that a founder is supposed to do. I’ll build a marketable product. There are more lucrative businesses I could build. I don’t care. I want to learn how to manage people, how VC money works, and how to exit. I’m going to grow this business to 10 million dollars a year.” So that’s ambitious. “I’ll take the VC money. Once I find a way to grow reliably I’ll hire people who hire people until I finally have a big exit. I am now rich. Sean and Sam from My First Million will invite me to the pod. Life is great.” Then, as Channing mentioned earlier: “I’ll have a midlife crisis. What am I even doing? I reached my money goals, I’m living the life, my parents’ retirement is secure. What’s next? Then I remember — now I have financial freedom, I have experience, I have a bank account. It’s time for the final step — to build my company.” And I think this is the third mountain in your Twitter profile, the one that’s like the moon shot. “A company I’m excited about. My own SpaceX. This company will build a product I think should exist but nobody’s willing to build or invest in — the 3D food printer, the atmospheric carbon scrubber, the photosynthesis crypto miner. Then I am really truly wealthy. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t care for riches. I just can’t work for somebody else. New challenges will get me out of bed in the morning. Getting rich is just a side effect. Follow me if you want to see me succeed or fail.”

I love that! That’s like the most badass tweet. I read it out loud on the show, every single part of it is hilarious, fun, and insightful. And you’re kind of doing it — I mean, you’re on the path. Do you think Stagetimer is the one that gets you to 10 million dollars a year?

Lukas: No, one million. I think one million is possible. And I have the next one in the works. I mean, now with AI there’s a whole new thing — oh, should we do AI? Could be potential. But I also believe in the industry that we know now, and I believe we can build a product in this industry that makes that kind of money.

Courtland: How do you get Stagetimer to a million? Right now you’re at — you know — a little over 8K a month. I think a million is like the magic number every indie hacker knows: eighty-three thousand, three hundred, thirty-three dollars a month. That’s a million. So basically you need 10x, which is — I don’t know — not crazy, right? That’s a realistic goal. One order of magnitude. You got a plan to get there?

Lukas: So this might — we have a projection in our Google Sheet and we say, “Okay, what was kind of the growth rate per month?” And we apply it into the future, and we basically hit the mark this month by like 50 dollars. And we keep hitting and actually passing the mark. So we have quite predictable growth right now. So yeah, we shouldn’t be too far from that, actually.

So yes, there is of course a ceiling when you do MRR, right? You have your churn rate, and eventually because the churn rate applies on the entirety of your customers, eventually your churn rate will cancel out your new customers and your growth. So we thought, “What can we do?” And one approach we will take is to go into like add-on, enterprise style. So instead of you just having it for yourself, you say, “Okay, you want to share it with your team,” so you make an enterprise plan, do like a team plan — get more from one person than from having a cheap plan and trying to get more and more customers. Get more money from one customer. This is kind of the approach.

Liz: Yeah, we have a few enterprise deals already, but we’ve already had deals fall through because we don’t have all the legal stuff that is needed. So that’s why we are just giving a few more months for us to finish some other features and some other things that are important for the industry, and then we want to actually work on that side of the business so we can do more enterprise deals. So that would be another way.

Lukas: Also — so that was a serious talk — now let’s go back to this tweet from the very beginning. I always said this is going to be a game. Like every game — Monopoly — you have to learn the rules. There’s probabilities, there’s like better properties, there’s right moves. Once you learn, once you hack the rules, you’ll be objectively better than others. And life is the same. Life has a lot of rules, they’re very hard to learn, but you can learn them. So I said I want to learn the rules of business: how does a SaaS business work, how does an online business with a productized service work? And that’s what we are doing with Stagetimer. So sometimes you just throw a bit of spaghetti against the wall and see if it sticks with marketing, and this and that, and I think this is kind of part of it — say, “Okay, we’ve done self-service, now let’s try enterprise.” We don’t know if it works, it could fail, it could be terrible. There’s only one way to find out.

Courtland: One way to find out.

Lukas: It will teach us a lot about our next product.

Liz: Yeah. The thing that we are very big on is trying stuff and just seeing how far we can grow it. So for me right now it is like — everything we have been doing, all the side projects, everything is just to test a bunch of things and see what can we do, you know? What can be accomplished? How far can we go with something? So I recently started a side project, and I told Lukas, “I want to hack social media marketing. I just want to know it and do it so well that I can do whatever I want.” So I started my project and I grew my D2C Instagram account — I started a D2C business and then I grew my Instagram account from zero followers to 6,000 in less than six months. And then I was like, “You see, I can do it. I’m going to now explore this thing.”

Lukas: I have to say — there’s no pictures of her. It’s a brand account, it’s a brand logo.

Liz: Yeah, I never showed my face, I never danced in front of the camera, nothing like that. And this is really how we work, you know? That’s how we function. We try things just because we like to excel at things. We like to push as far as it can get, you know? So that’s certainly what we are going to do with Stagetimer. But from the beginning — not the very beginning beginning, we didn’t even think this would go anywhere — but as soon as we noticed that this could go somewhere, we said, “Okay, we just want to make a comfortable living with Stagetimer, so it allows us to pursue other interests and things that we want to try.” So this is what we are doing already, because it pays for our life — it even paid for our world trip these past six months. And now that it pays for our lifestyle, we can try other stuff. So Lukas is already starting a new business with his friends, and I have this other side project, and so on. So we are constantly pushing the limits, trying to see how far we can go with things.

Courtland: Lukas, I saw you made a tweet where you’re like, “Look, we glorify the solopreneur life, right? Everyone who’s getting started, they’re like, ‘Man, I just want to live that dream where it’s just me and my computer and my business and every day is just going to be the best day of my life.’” And you’re like, “Well, but you know, most days are crickets, right? Most days, if you do something good, there’s no one to pat you on the back. You don’t have this big team. You’re working in silence.” And it’s funny — what you just mentioned is almost like a reaction to that, a way to solve that problem. It’s almost like you find ways to turn it into a game. I almost call it “gameful design” — where you’re always finding something new to learn, or something new to master.

And then to bring it back to Rupert Murdoch — so I haven’t watched Succession, I haven’t seen that show, but I do have a book, kind of like a biography. I recommend it. It’s called “The Murdoch Method.” One of his 20-years-long advisors or consultants kept enough of a distance from the relationship that he didn’t have to ask permission to write down everything that he knew. And one of the things he says about Rupert Murdoch is: the way that he’s reached that third mountain of being this massive billionaire with this huge media empire is that he just loves what he does. Number one, he’s super competitive — they said that he stalked the Wall Street Journal for many years, he wanted the New York Post, so he was like, “I want to beat the New York Times,” and that was a game in and of itself to him. He’s also just really, really curious. One of his friends says, “You’ll never get the same topic with him twice,” and that’s key to running a news empire. And so I think the sort of funny catch-22 is that if you want to do something where it’s a sustained run and you’re gonna climb this huge mountain, it almost has to be the case that you’re not doing it so that you can get to the top of the mountain — you’re doing it because you just really love these weird turnoffs and sort of experiments and small things that you master.

That’s step one. And then step two is you have to have absolutely no succession planning for who your successor is going to be, and then encourage your children to fight and compete with each other to be your successor — which is exactly what Rupert Murdoch has done.

Channing: And you know who also did that? Genghis Khan, and like a whole group of other crazy people throughout history. I don’t know why that’s so common. I don’t know why people do that.

Lukas: And this is true for many inventors. If you like Edison — if you read a biography of him — he loves inventing. He just sleeps in his workshop. He’s never at home. His wife hates him for that. But he just loves inventing. And I’m reading right now a book about Leonardo da Vinci. Just finding out things — how does the human body work? How does cloth flow? How do you paint something? And so far, once he figured something out, he doesn’t want to finish his painting. There are so many unfinished paintings of Leonardo da Vinci, because as soon as he figured out the method, as soon as he figured out the painting, it gets boring and he wants to do something new.

Channing: The original indie hacker who just kept starting side projects and never launching them.

Courtland: You mentioned that Liz didn’t convince you, and you can’t convince someone to do something like this. And interestingly — it’s the Isaacson, Walter Isaacson biography of Da Vinci, right? So I’m reading that too. And it’s so funny when you look at these — pretty much anyone who’s done things that people consider them great for. I put people into three buckets in terms of their relationship to their work. You have — and it’s by numbers — you have the 110s, the 80/20s, and the 50/50s. 50/50 is like, “Oh, we’ll see how I feel about this thing.” 80/20 is the Pareto principle — it’s like, “Ah, how do I be efficient? What’s my ROI? How do I do the 20% of the work that gets 80% of the result?” But all these other people — the Murdochs, the da Vincis, pretty much anyone that you know who’s doing something great — they’re the 110s. The funny thing about da Vinci is he’d paint landscapes and go and learn about a certain bird. He would always travel to the location — like, go cross-country and go visit the thing — when they had atlases and they had images. There was a way he could study it. And he very specifically, when someone questioned him, they were like, “Why don’t you just look at the encyclopedia on the thing?” And he’s like, “You should never read an encyclopedia when you can go and see the thing in real life.” And almost certainly that’s highly inefficient — the return on investment. He had tons of wasted journeys. But he was all in.

Lukas: We actually appreciate a lot this kind of mentality. And I think it’s this curiosity, you know. One thing that we always try to emulate is being curious. When I read about the people that I now admire, after reading about their lives and so on, it’s always these very curious people. They never stop asking questions. And we have been trying to really become more and more like this.

Courtland: You two seem naturally curious, you seem naturally interested, you seem naturally really excited to be entrepreneurs. You’re launching side projects, you’re growing your main thing. Hopefully we’ll have you two back on when you hit your million-dollar-a-year goal, when you hit 10 million, 100 million, and then when you’ve got your own SpaceX. You’ve got two believers right here — I think you’re going to get there.

Can you tell listeners where they can go to find out more about what you’re up to with Stagetimer and your other projects as well?

Lukas: So I think the best way is to follow us on Twitter.

Liz: Yeah, come on Twitter! I am at @liz_m_herman — also perfect, thanks again guys!

Lukas: At @_lhermann — one R, two Ns. Terrible name, but you’ll find it. Probably put in the show notes.

Courtland: Thanks again, guys!