Transcript: Exploring Growth Challenges and Customer-Centric Strategies in SaaS with Lukas Hermann of Stagetimer
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.
Carl: Hello and welcome again to the SaaS Growth Podcast. This week we are here with Lukas Hermann, the founder of Stagetimer.io. This episode covers Lukas’s experience growing Stagetimer, some of the struggles he had with marketing in the beginning, and the importance of knowing and talking to your customers. Enjoy.
Hi Lukas, how are you today?
Lukas: I’m doing fine. For me it’s the morning, so I’m fresh.
Carl: Yeah, great. So Stagetimer is a really interesting app where it’s super simple, but it seems to fill this niche inside the broadcasting industry that was completely undiscovered. And it’s been really successful — it’s going to like a thousand customers. Everything I see about it is raving and raving, an amazing product. But Lukas, how did you come up with the idea? What was the driving force behind Stagetimer?
Lukas: Yeah, maybe I’ll just say what it is so people kind of understand how the idea came about — in a funny way. I usually say: if you have ever seen a TED Talk, you see the person on stage and then there’s like this red display of a time in front of them that says, you know, “you have five minutes left,” because they’re always 20-minute blocks or so. And we are making not this timer, but a timer like this. So that’s the product.
What happened to me — how I discovered it — a friend had like a studio setting here in the city that I live, and he would have one room where he would do the recording. You know, there was the person standing in front of the screen speaking to the camera, and then he would sit in the other room, do the cuts and the recording and everything, and everything was remote-controlled except for this timer that he had on an old, outdated laptop sitting on a chair. And in order to start it, he had to get up, run into the room, you know, hit the button, run back — and then everything else would be remote-controlled and automated. And I thought: this cannot be the solution to this problem.
Carl: So did you just like whip out the laptop and start coding straight away?
Lukas: I was on my laptop because I was doing something else. I thought somebody has coded this solution — I just click a button here on the other computer, it starts a timer. Somebody has done it, right? It’s such an obvious, easy thing to code. And I didn’t find it. I found like stuff you can download, but nothing that’s just a web app — open a website, do it.
Because I was kind of looking for ideas at the same time, right? Everybody wants to start a SaaS business, looking for ideas. So what is the hot trend? Right now it’s AI, and back then I was like: instead of looking for the most interesting idea, I thought, what is the easiest, stupidest, simplest thing I can do, just so I get my hands dirty and see how it works? That’s the idea, you know — a timer. Coded it up in the weekend, put it online.
And I was like, okay, who’s gonna use this now? Like, I don’t need it — I feel this — I coded it for somebody else. So I look on Reddit. Okay, surely there’s some kind of subreddit where these people hang out. It takes me like hours to find the subreddit. It’s really surprisingly hard to find — if you’re not part of the industry. I find it, I post it there, and I get some really moderate response, but people like, “Oh, this is amazing, this is what I’ve been looking for all these years, I’m gonna try this for my next event,” and, “Oh, you should add this and this feature.” Not the Reddit response I would have expected from scrolling the front page.
Carl: Well, you did that thing where you actually asked for advice though, right? Which I think —
Lukas: I made this thing over the weekend, you know, check it out — do you think it’s useful?
Carl: And people are really helpful. Reddit’s a real hostile environment if they feel like they’re being marketed to — they’re just awful. But as long as you’re asking their opinion and engaging with the community, they seem to really love it. So you seem to do a really good job of that, at least at the initial stages.
Lukas: So I only made two posts on Reddit — this one initial one and then like one six months later. I said, “Hey, thank you for your feedback back then, you know, you helped me and now I’ve added all these features and made it into a real business.” It’s kind of like a thank-you post, and I felt like this does not sound like marketing speak. And then people responded to it well.
Funnily enough, there was another tool a few months afterwards — somebody built an open-source version of, kind of, my timer — and they posted on the same subreddit. Their first post got a really good response. And then I observed it, and he posted like every week with updates, and after a while people just didn’t care anymore.
Carl: So yeah, on Reddit you get like one shot — maybe two.
Lukas: Yeah, and that’s it. The patience is very thin. You can do the old “a year or two later” like I’m doing it again, but yeah, you’re right, attention spans are really, really thin.
Carl: And how did that Reddit post convert, especially the second one, when you sort of had more of a fully fleshed-out product?
Lukas: So the first one — I would say it was really surprising because it got way more eyeballs than I expected. Like, compared to the comments, you get a lot of eyeballs. What really made Stagetimer into a product is that these people kept coming back, right? I looked into the statistics — like, okay, one or two weeks later there’s still activity and people are coming back and using it. That was really encouraging.
And then when I launched the paid integration — right, because I was working at the time; it took me evenings and weekends to build all that — when I launched the paid integration eight months later, there was actually somebody who signed up the very day, based off like a tweet that I posted. And I asked the person — I literally wrote him on Twitter — like, “Hey, why did you buy this?” And he said, “Yeah, I saw it — I saw your Reddit post and I’ve been using it ever since and I love the software and I want to support it.” It’s just mind-boggling to me how this one Reddit post carried over into the first customer.
Carl: Did that sort of have quite a few customers coming through at that point, or was it a really quick burst and then trailed off?
Lukas: So the attribution is actually quite hard — how do you know that somebody comes from Reddit? I asked that first person. He told me. We only added this kind of checkbox way later. But from the questions that we did ask individual people, they really mostly heard it from others, because I found this industry subreddit where people who really use this tool are — they shared it among each other, which was great for us in the beginning.
Carl: Did you do anything to encourage the word of mouth, or were you just happy to take the free marketing?
Lukas: Literally nothing. Like, we thought: how do we do a referral program or something? And then we looked into it — like, how does this all work? We didn’t have the time to implement it. So yeah, all we really did is make sure — like, when I built it, right, I thought: what kind of built-in marketing can I use here? And I love the Dropbox story, you know, where you set up an account but then if you share a link with somebody and they sign up, you get more space; or if you share a file with somebody, you know, they see the credit and can use it and then you get like two gigs or something.
Carl: Exactly, exactly.
Lukas: And I thought: is there something where, if people use the product naturally, they share it — it’s built in? Right, you get a link and you open this link on another computer in front of your talent, or it’s in front of whatever backstage people or audio people that look at the same screen. And I just want to make sure that every one of those screens has my logo on it. And my logo is literally the domain name, right — I’m not making some fancy stuff. Like, “Stagetimer.io” — that’s the logo. So somebody sees it and hopefully remembers it and goes from there.
Carl: So what have you done — what do you do now to sort of get customers? Is it still mainly word of mouth, or is there some more active marketing?
Lukas: There’s way more active marketing. So word of mouth is still a very big part — I would say up to 40 percent of our customers come through that. We have done a lot of Google Ads now, search engine optimization — the organic side of people finding us on Google — and then also the paid side. We gave them around a thousand to fifteen hundred dollars per month to put our page up front, you know, up and center. It helped, to be honest, less than we expected. And we’re not quite sure why — maybe because it’s very niche. People looking for timers can be like people looking for egg timers and countdowns to the end of the year, and the ones that are really relevant for us are a subset that is more in video production, event production, live environments.
Carl: People have a lot of problems with Google AdWords for similar reasons, right? Where it’s that signal-to-noise ratio just gets out of kilter. You can end up paying a lot of money on noise — like, it amplifies your natural SEO, but if it wouldn’t have converted those people anyway, then you’re just throwing money after nothing.
Lukas: Exactly, exactly. Like, how do you know if your articles really convert? You know, it’s really hard to find out. And then yeah, ads go in the same direction — like, do they really convert? And we’re observing right now that the quality coming from ads is actually way lower. Like, the people spend way less money with us and churn much earlier than people that we get through the organic way.
Carl: So other than AdWords and word of mouth, I’ve seen you show up at some conferences. How’s that worked out for you?
Lukas: It’s like a way of connecting with the industry. Yeah, we thought, let’s go to a trade show, let’s find out.
Carl: Did you set up a booth?
Lukas: No, we didn’t set up a booth because it was 5,000 bucks — like, a tiny booth in some corner between like five booths, behind a pillar. We’re like, we’re not doing this. Let’s just walk around and see what we find.
And it’s totally overwhelming because this industry is really big. There’s people there that have like the whole center of the conference hall and they’re having a camera — each camera costs half a million — and then we’re there, you know, with a tiny, tiny timer. But to our surprise, some people actually recognized us. We had our T-shirts on and someone came over like, “Oh, I’m using Stagetimer, so awesome!” Thank you. And then, you know, handing out our merch.
So you’re asking what do we do now for marketing, and I think something that is completely underrated among almost all indie hackers, bootstrappers, and general SaaS people in the beginning is: understanding your customer. You get your first customer and you talk to a few of them — you know nothing about your customer. Like, we have a thousand customers, we still don’t know enough about them.
So we have this big problem where some of the people using our tool are individual contractors who do it on a very small-scale basis. And they go and they look for a timer and they say, “All right, it’s 20 bucks, that’s fine, I can use it — no problem.” Above that it’s like, “I have to think twice.” And we want to be below this “think twice” limit.
But then we have two extremes here. The one is like the non-profits, and they write us and say, “20 dollars? It’s so expensive, can you make a special deal for us?” — and they expect us to give it essentially for free. And then on the other extreme we have the bigger corporations, the really big event companies, and they look at everything below 5,000 dollars for the event — it doesn’t even go on the list.
And now our question is: how do you capture both markets? We know that the individual, the small guy, is the one that introduces our tool to the big guys, right? He comes to the event, he’s like, “Oh, I’m using this awesome tool,” and that’s how we get into the big companies. So we need them to be able to use it. But how do you make the cut between the package that they use and the package that we want the large corporation to use — which is maybe ten times more expensive? It’s not easy to do. How do you justify ten times more value in a product with marginal features?
Carl: That’s exactly the problem, right? Where you’ve got these two massively different spending habits and you’re anchoring yourself to this $19 price point — it’s like, that is what it costs to address this other one, and now we’re anchored to 19 dollars. I’m sure there are tools out there that could happily charge thousands even a month on these sorts of things.
Lukas: Absolutely, yeah. We made a decision very early on: we don’t want to have a few large customers, we want to have many small customers. It gives us stability. It kind of avoids doing this like custom-build tool for very large companies where you’re then locked into this kind of sales process — we didn’t want that.
Carl: So a lot of businesses fail for exactly that reason, right? Where they just have one or two massive customers who are like 30 to 50 percent of the revenue, and that company pulls out and suddenly they’re sitting on all these developers and all these expenses and can’t afford them anymore.
Lukas: It’s a great idea to diversify. It takes much longer to grow, but otherwise you have this problem — if you have three customers and one pulls out, 30 percent of your revenue just went away overnight. And you can go bankrupt from that.
Carl: Is this your main source of income at the moment?
Lukas: It is my main source of income, but I’m already working kind of 50 percent of my time on the next project. Because for me, in the beginning, right, I thought: stupid timer — how much money can you earn from this timer? A thousand per month maybe? Right now, two months ago, we crossed ten thousand per month. But in my mind I thought, you know, at least I need to work on the next project — the next project that has more potential to be bigger.
Carl: If I look back over your journey, is there anything you would have changed or done differently between your first customer and where you are now?
Lukas: If I would start over again, I’d probably make the same mistakes again.
Carl: Perfect information though — like now you’ve got information that you didn’t have.
Lukas: I think it is completely underestimated how important it is to stay simple. Every complexity introduced just makes it so much slower later on. Here’s a practical example. We have very typical SaaS pricing — monthly, yearly, yearly a bit cheaper, right, so we encourage people — and then the two-tier plan: tier one, tier two — one has a bit fewer features, cheaper; more features, more expensive. But then we found out people have like one event and then they don’t have something for two months and then they have an event again, or maybe only one a year, and they don’t want to pay for the whole year. So we had crazy churn because people would purchase the monthly and then churn right away, just saying, “Yeah, I don’t need it.”
So why don’t we make a package just for them? Like, it’s one event, you pay, no subscription. Fine. Okay, now we already have six payment plans — monthly, yearly, and one-time purchase for two different tiers.
And then we said: well, here’s the problem — you’re in Europe, and then we are in the US, and then we are in Australia, and then we are in Japan. We have customers everywhere. Let’s make prices that kind of work for everybody. So we manually set prices that look good in dollars and look good in euros and look good in Australian dollars and in Brazilian reais and in Japanese yen.
Fast forward two years later and we say, “Ah, we really need team billing” — right, that’s invite team members, they pay per seat. And I’m literally in this situation right now, thinking: okay, now there’s seats, and there’s two plans, and there’s three payment modalities per plan, and there’s like manually set prices for each of them. You can imagine there’s like this matrix of options that you have to set just to get everything right.
I was just sitting here with my wife a few days ago and we said, “You know what, let’s just simplify it. Let’s get rid of the monthly plan. Let’s extend our one-time license to 30 days so it covers all these people that just need it once. Let’s get rid of this, let’s get rid of that — simplify pricing, simplify this, simplify that.” However, it’s always harder to simplify than to make it easy in the first place.
So next time I would definitely say: keep it simple. If there’s no reason to have two tiers in your pricing, don’t have two tiers — just have one tier. If there’s no reason to have custom currency amounts for every country, don’t have it.
Carl: We’re going to talk about the challenges you’re facing now. You’re talking about going to hit the second stage of your business. What is that looking like for you at the moment? What do you think you need to do to sort of move into that new phase?
Lukas: So I think in order to understand the second phase, you have to understand what the first phase of a business is. So when you start your SaaS business, I call it like the “throw the spaghetti at the wall” phase — any direction, see what sticks. You say: what product can I do? You know, you build a product one week, you build one the next week, you build one the third week, you try to validate them. And then the next question is: what marketing works? And I said that’s what we did, right? We said, okay, let’s do Facebook ads, let’s do LinkedIn ads, let’s do YouTube ads, let’s do Google Ads. What works? Nine out of ten of these don’t work, or are too expensive, or too complicated, and then one of them is like, “Okay, I feel comfortable with that, let’s do this.”
And you repeat this process for everything, right? I just explained the pricing — you just throw spaghetti. What works? Try this, try this, try this. You increase your prices and you get nervous and you lower them again and you try around, you make packages and features and stuff. And then you do landing pages and use-case pages and compare pages and search engines — every single thing you do is just, “Okay, let me try out what works,” and you iterate, iterate, and change it all the time.
And that’s the first phase of the business. It will bring you your early adopters, it will bring you your first 100 customers, your first 500 customers — depending on, you know, B2B, B2C, how big — but eventually you come to the point where you say: okay, I know my landing page works, I know more or less what kind of channels convert, I know where my customers come from, I know who my customers are, I know what features they actually use and need on a daily basis. And now you’re thinking: okay, how can I take all this firing in all directions that I did before and focus it in a single direction? What is my one plan, the straight path that I walk?
Carl: Yeah, let me start spinning this flywheel — let me put energy into this one thing that I know works, and the more energy I put into this one thing the faster, faster, faster it gets.
Lukas: And this is the phase that we are just entering now. I said before, right, you don’t really know your customer — and that’s really true. We don’t even know it until today. So we are really planning to interview people and say: what features are you actually using? What is the most important for you? What is the happy path that you use every single time you use our app?
So it’s also filtering out customers. In the beginning it’s like, “My app is for teachers, my app is for nurses, my app is for financial analysts.” And then you understand eventually: okay, the ones that are really most happy — the ones that buy my app and never complain — are those people. The other ones, they all complain. “It’s too expensive, it doesn’t have this, it doesn’t have that.” That’s the noise. Filter out the noise, look for the people that don’t complain, that are just happy and paying. Basically ignore — quote-unquote — all the other ones. Like, don’t put all the energy into those. Put all your energy into the happy ones. Understand your happy ones, put all your energy here, build a tool that works best for them.
Carl: It’s definitely something I’ve said in my professional life before — in my web design and web developer side of things — just like, you really want to make one group just ecstatic. You want to make them so unbelievably happy with your tool. And then anyone, any other spheres you happen to get at the same time — it’s gravy. But you want to find one group and just nail it for that one group.
I suppose it’s another challenge of simplifying and being like: what does this one group really need, and how would I make it the best possible experience for them?
Lukas: Absolutely. And we know every now and then someone says, “Oh, I’m using your tool for like horse racing.” Perfect — yeah, yeah. And the danger here, as I said before, is that the people that are unhappy with your tool are louder than the people that are happy with your tool. So throughout this time of throwing spaghetti at the wall, you always have this temptation of making the unhappy people happy, and that’s why your tool can get very complex — because it adds features that the happy people don’t need. And that’s why this process is so important.
Carl: What do you track in your business to make sure you’re on the right path?
Lukas: So that’s actually — it’s surprisingly hard. We thought: you know, eventually your business is one year old, you’ve got your customers, and you’re like, “I should be measuring things. I should be knowing things about my business. What do I need to know?” Like, you have no clue. What do I need to know?
And the first and obvious ones are your revenue — like, how much money do I earn, how much money do I spend, how much profit is there, how much money do I spend per customer? Those statistics are easy. Now comes the hard part: how many people that come to my website actually buy, and why do they buy? Like, how in the world do you measure this? I tried Google Analytics, I tried other analytics software, doing all kinds of handstands, and I said no — no clue. Like, it’s just these graphs, they go up and down, they don’t really tell you anything. “Ah, it’s nice if they go up,” but why do they go up? And is it good if they go up?
What we decided is: let’s go to the other extreme — we just ask people. The first thing we wanted to know is: why do you use our tool in the first place? How do you know about our tool? Where do you come from? So when people have just purchased, they come to this page that says, “Thank you for purchasing your new plan, blah blah,” and then right there it’s like, “How did you hear from us?” And then people can select. I made sure it’s only like four or five options, just to make sure people are not overwhelmed and then ignore it entirely. It’s like a very no-brainer click.
Okay, so then we found out a lot of people come through Google, a lot of people come through recommendation, nobody comes through Facebook. And then we also got to know some more, because we have like a wildcard field — people can just write in — so we know, “Okay, this podcast mentioned us,” or “this Discord community talks about us.”
And then the next thing you want to know is: why do people not want to use us anymore? In the beginning we literally just wrote a manual email to everybody who canceled. We just wrote them an email like, “Hey, is anything wrong with our app? Do you need a refund? Did something not work?” This was the magic email. Because, like, everybody wrote back — “No, no, everything was perfect, we don’t need a refund, we just — our event is over” or “I’m not working at a company anymore” or something. We wrote out all the reasons, understanding what our customers need, and that’s where we kind of said, “Okay, let’s make a one-time package for them, because they just need it once.”
And now the next step is kind of understanding: how do you use it? And instead of going in and logging every single click on our website — because the hard thing about tracking clicks is there are features you need to click ten times to use properly and there’s a feature you only need once a day. Like, I don’t know — you have an export feature that creates a PDF; people click on it once per week maybe, but this is the optimal usage. But another feature you need to click every four minutes, you know, advance to the next thing. In your statistics the one shows up as this big curve and the other one doesn’t show up at all, and it doesn’t really give you an idea of whether people use it or not.
That’s a problem we had. So we decided: let’s just ask them. “Do you use this? Do you use this? Is this helpful to you?” And really work with anecdotal evidence. And what you find out is: if you ask four, five, six people you already get an incredibly good picture of the usefulness of a feature. Even better, you can ask, “What could make this even better? How would you like it?” And people — people love to complain. They say, “Ah, you know, if I could select two of them at the same time, or if I could have another button that does this and this.” And suddenly you understand: okay, they use it in this way, but they use it in a more advanced way than I actually thought, so I need to give them a bit more capabilities with this tool.
Carl: So for you, like, direct customer feedback was the most important?
Lukas: It’s the easiest to understand, it’s the most helpful. Yeah, that’s what we observed.
Carl: Yeah. I mean, in my professional career any time we talked to users it was always so eye-opening. We learned how wrong we were too — like, we’re wrong all the time.
Lukas: Your entire work as a founder and product owner is really making your tool less wrong.
Carl: Yeah. This has been an absolute pleasure, Lukas. I’ve loved this chat. Thank you for your time.
Lukas: Yeah, it was awesome.
Carl: So that was Lukas Hermann, the founder of Stagetimer.io. You can contact Lukas at @_lhermann on Twitter. You can also reach him at lukashermann.dev. Lukas loves chatting to founders in the European area especially, so feel free to reach out and ask for advice or tips.
So thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this podcast and want to be notified of all future episodes, you can sign up to the newsletter on carlanderson.xyz, where I’ll also send you some helpful tips on how to grow your SaaS business.