Transcript: This Indie Life: Lukas and Dago talk about burnout and therapy
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.
[00:00]
Dago: Hey guys, it’s finally time for a new episode of This Indie Life. As you can see, if you’re watching this in video, I look like [bleep] and the reason is I just finished the edit last night at 1:00 a.m. and I realized this morning I need an intro to give you a bit more context and I haven’t recorded it. But since I really want to post the episode today, I’m like, you know what, [bleep] this. I haven’t even showered, my hair looks like [bleep], but let’s record this quick intro.
And actually, that’s what I wanted to talk about in this intro. The reason why I haven’t published episodes in a month since my interview with Nico is not that I didn’t want to do this podcast. I was thinking about it every day and I actually recorded five more interviews with other entrepreneurs that are awesome and that you’re going to love. But the problem is I was struggling to edit this podcast. Editing the episode with Moo took me three days, and so I was procrastinating on it because it was so painful for me, and so boring and not enjoyable to edit an episode.
But thankfully I talked about it on Twitter a couple days ago and people helped me see that I don’t need to do such a perfect job. I can just, you know, do a clean edit, publish the episode, and move on. The value of this podcast is the content and the original and unique conversations that I’m having with founders, you know, talking about the deep and the dark stuff. I don’t need to make this a perfect podcast. That’s one of the big reasons I failed my previous startup — I was always trying to do everything perfectly and spending months on things that could have taken weeks or even days sometimes.
So thankfully this time, even though I wasted one month procrastinating because of this, I noticed it and now hopefully I will be better. And now I can edit one episode per week because it’s only taking me four hours instead of three days. So stay tuned for more episodes — now they’re going to come quicker, I hope, if I can manage to fix my perfectionistic tendencies.
[02:00]
And for this episode, let me give you just a little bit of context. The entrepreneur I invited for this episode is Lukas Hermann and I’ve known him from Twitter for a couple years. He’s an entrepreneur who’s building a startup called Stagetimer with his wife as a co-founder for the last three years. The reason why I invited him on the show is that when I tweeted about my burnout, like let’s say one year ago, he reached out to me to tell me that he was having a weird sound in his ear — like a beeping sound in his ear at all times — and it was caused by the stress and anxiety he felt about his startup.
So once I realized I was going to have guests on this show, I really wanted to talk with him because, you know, he’s been through some [bleep]. And in the conversation you’re about to see, we’re talking about all the deep stuff: from feeling like [bleep] when opening Twitter and seeing other founders succeed while you’re failing, to being betrayed by his previous co-founder and having to deal with super stressful tax issues with the government on his own without having any idea how to fix it. And as always on this podcast, we also try to look at the bright side and how we can make fun and laugh out of these obstacles to try to overcome them and grow out of it.
So I really hope you’re going to appreciate this episode. Please forgive me for still being a shitty interviewer — I didn’t really care about knowing what he was building, I wanted to know about what he’s been through. So please forgive me for that, and please also leave me your feedback on Twitter or wherever you can reach me so I can make this podcast better. But I think all in all the content is high quality and that’s what matters the most. So let’s get into it.
Dago: Recording — working? Seems like it says recording. Yeah, it’s going. Okay, it’s going to figure it out I guess.
Man, so yeah — I’m about 15 minutes late. I guess, uh, you know, typical French guy meets typical German guy — this is what happens, I guess.
[04:02]
How are you, man?
Lukas: I’m doing actually really fine this day.
Dago: Great — work?
Lukas: Yeah, just because I just hired a like an engineer for our team.
Dago: Okay.
Lukas: So suddenly I feel like I don’t have to do everything myself anymore and it’s like this huge pressure off my shoulders.
Dago: So I guess things are good because it can be also very challenging to find someone that you can rely on, and like it’s always so hard to hire.
Lukas: It was super hard. I did interviews, I talked to people, I was unsure about it. I tested with somebody — I was like, okay, let’s do, I’m choosing you, let’s do a test period, two weeks — wrong person, was not a right fit. And I couldn’t sleep for days trying, like, how do I tell this person that he’s not the right fit? How do you fire somebody? It’s super hard.
And then Americans do it well — they just say, you know, get the [bleep] out. But like, yeah, I guess I feel like Americans have to — not in a negative sense — but they just kind of like, you’re my worker, you are my labor, just do whatever I say. We Europeans are more like, you know, thank you for working with me, how can I make this experience great for you?
Dago: Yeah. Okay, so that was challenging for you to do that.
Lukas: Yeah, totally. Like, literally, the whole hiring process is so stressful — so much work — and then this happening, and then kind of finding the next person and handling everything, I was completely done. But then last week I found the second candidate that I tried — really good, really cool, like a good engineer, engaged — and I kind of feel comfortable with him in a call. And so now I feel much more relaxed.
Dago: You know, I want to talk about it but I realized we haven’t even introduced you.
[06:05]
So like, in a couple of words, how would you introduce yourself?
Lukas: So my name is Lukas, I am active on Twitter — that’s how we know each other — and I kind of, you know, see myself as an indie hacker, like probably most of the people that come on your show.
Dago: Well, you’re the second one, so yes.
Lukas: But an entrepreneur — like I think I love building products, I love building a good solution. That’s really in my heart. And then the whole business side I basically learned along the way with all the ups and downs.
Dago: And what are you working on?
Lukas: So right now I’m working on my own product called Stagetimer, and it has been around for three years now. It grows much slower than other products you might see on Twitter, but it is steady and I’m really happy with it, and it does finance our lives. So that’s a big plus.
Dago: Okay, and your wife works on it with you, right?
Lukas: Yeah, yeah, she does marketing. Later on I got her on board — she does a good job.
Dago: You better say that. I’m going to write down to ask you about it. But it’s funny — I just wanted to pick up on something you said. You said that on Twitter, compared to Twitter, you’re not growing that fast or something. I feel like it’s because we only see the success stories. But I mean, from the people I know on Twitter, I think a lot of people aren’t, like, making much, you know?
Lukas: It’s like — actually, this is actually the point. From the beginning I always compared myself a little bit to the guy from Testimonial — Damon.
Dago: Yeah, Damon Chen.
Lukas: Yeah. And he — I don’t know how he does it — he has like success after success. He skyrocketed his Testimonial and then he made the AI… when was it? The PDF thing?
Dago: I think yeah, literally he bought a pdf.ai domain for
[08:05]
like thousands of dollars and got like TikTok success. And I don’t even know how he does it. But you cannot help but compare yourself to those people.
Lukas: And his growth is like a rocket ship.
Dago: I need to get him on the show and dig to see if there’s some [bleep] in the closet, like something he’s not talking about. You know, it would make us all losers feel better. But no, I’m kidding. But you know, I don’t know — do you know this guy who does Jenny AI? David Park?
Lukas: Yeah, exactly, David Park.
Dago: And he — what was it, a few months ago — he said, oh, I had cancer and I went through this really hard time.
Lukas: Yeah, yeah. I felt so bad for him.
Dago: And then he was like, oh, but Jenny AI just cracked a million dollars per year revenue.
Lukas: I felt bad for myself, because dude, he has cancer and he’s more successful than me!
Dago: But this is like — unwittingly you just compare yourself to these kinds of people on Twitter, right? And no disrespect to David, I love him, obviously amazing person, but wow, you know, compare yourself to this person — to somebody who has cancer and still runs a startup.
Lukas: Yeah, [bleep] this, I mean yeah.
Dago: It’s like the most difficult thing, man. I feel like opening — and not just Twitter, I think LinkedIn is probably even worse — but it’s similar, and I started trying TikTok and it’s even worse. TikTok is so crazy. You know, it’s always the same [bleep]. It’s cool like whenever somebody makes their first like $20 from something, it’s really cool, you know, or somebody launches a project — you want to support them and it’s nice, I’m all in for it. I’m all in for people sharing their first successes. But you’re right, especially when you have been in this area for some time, you see the same patterns over and over and over — the same new people coming with the same, you know, same [bleep], really.
Lukas: Some people, yeah, kind of making it look like they are super successful and know everything. And yeah, TikTok is even worse because the hype cycle is even more.
Dago: Right, right.
[10:06]
Twitter in the past — I feel like Twitter was people just sharing “I did this, I did that,” you know, kind of weekly updates, and we liked it. And then they really changed it into a more “go go go, hype or go bust.” I feel like maybe that’s good for Twitter as a whole, but for our kind of indie hacker circle, I felt like you have to show off more and more to get any engagement.
Lukas: I actually think — I don’t think so. I think now it’s a healthier algorithm, but you have to give more. Like, for example, my kind of authentic posts where I share my struggles, they do very well. And I think it’s because it’s just engaging — it seems like people are like, oh wow, this is a real story. I think basically you can’t just say, hey, you know, I took a piss today, look at it, kind of, you know. You can’t. You have to put a bit more effort. And I feel like the easy way is to just be like, hey, I made a lot of money, because it’s like the go-to way, right? But I’m noticing you can go viral with other stuff — and also like, types of content, even video, audio, spaces and stuff. Because like even if you look at Instagram, and I spend a lot of time on Instagram these days — if you look at Instagram you can see a lot of very cool content. You know, with this type of algorithm, I feel like it’s more human, it’s more like the normal way that humans like stuff. So usually the stupid and funny stuff will win, but if you do emotional, real stuff it can win as well. But it’s not the same game as before. So I think a big problem we’ve had is that we were all used to sharing one type of content for years and it doesn’t work with this new kind of algorithm. But to me, I see it as — I think it can actually be better. I’m actually enjoying the new algorithm. I still need to figure it out but yeah.
Dago: You actually — I mean, I probably
[12:06]
have to check myself a little bit, right? Because I was crying like those old people: “Oh, in the past everything was better, how we did it.” But you’re right — it does force you to reinvent yourself. And when you don’t want to go the click-baity way, it’s true, you become more raw, you become more “this is me, this is authentic,” and that works.
Lukas: Yeah, you know, to be honest, even after a while doing a few authentic posts I’m turning them into clickbait, because I’m starting to figure out how to make people cry. And that’s terrible — that’s just my mind.
Dago: You’re so good at that too. Like, you’re analyzing, okay, how does this work, you really go deep down and I’m just posting. I think everything can become clickbait, even authenticity. That is a trap, man. So yeah, I’m trying to be mindful of that.
[12:54]
Dago: So the reason why I invited you on this show originally is because I think about a year ago you told me about — you had a weird sound in your ear. Like I had tweeted about my burnout and you told me about it. So can you tell us about that?
Lukas: Yeah. So my wife and I, we traveled in Asia a little bit, tried the real indie life — probably a bit too old. Came back after half a year, settled down. But it also was because I felt like I was really anxious. I was really anxious at the time.
Dago: Okay, so you were building Stagetimer already?
Lukas: Yes, I was building already, I was completely 100% in already. And I was still very anxious from stuff that happened in the past — stuff that I’d recently gone through — and I couldn’t sleep some nights. I had panic attacks, and I don’t really share this openly. I can share a story if you want but it’s not — I don’t want to make it a big thing.
Dago: Okay, okay.
Lukas: But things had happened. And then suddenly we are here — we’re back for two months or so in Germany — and suddenly I hear like this beeping in my ear. I can hear it actually now, you know, talking about it, it comes back. Okay yeah.
[14:07]
In my left ear. And I know because my father has this — it’s called tinnitus, or I don’t know how to pronounce it in English. So I went to the doctor and he measured it and he said, yeah, it’s physically there — he could measure it essentially. Yeah. And he said right away, there’s no cure, we don’t know a cure, there’s some stuff we can try. And we tried it and it didn’t help. And there is this theory that it comes from stress — apparently not everybody shares it, but it definitely comes from some behavioral patterns, some mental thing, something with your head that changes something. Maybe it’s something you were predisposed to have.
Dago: Yeah, it was like — it triggered because of the stress. Because like my now ex-wife, you know, with whom I was building my startup too — she’s been having that. You know, after two or three years of building her startup and being very stressed, she started having that almost constantly also. And I think it’s somewhat scary when you realize that the pressure you’re under has effects on your life. You know, like — if you get fat you can train it away, if you have a toothache you go to the doctor, but this — it stays forever. I’m going to have it the rest of my life. It’s a bit of a profound thought that I had.
Lukas: Yeah, was not easy to work through it.
Dago: Yeah, you know, I feel exactly the same with my eyes. Because basically I think I probably had some sensitivity and the burnout and the stress triggered it. Yeah, and now I literally have to spend hours a day consciously blinking so my eyes don’t
[16:07]
hurt too much. This is [bleep] up. Just because of looking at screens — I looked at screens for too long without, you know, and being too focused. And it’s interesting what you said, that it can really impact your body and then it’s there. Yes.
Lukas: Because I used to think it’s all in my head, like it’s only mindset and stuff, and as long as I can push through it with my mindset it’s okay. But then eventually you can’t really push through it and it kind of breaks something in your body. And then it’s broken.
Dago: Yeah, and now you have that with your thing in your ear, I have that with my eyes. I still hope it goes away but I’m kind of losing hope it will go away. I’m getting used to it. And also, you know, getting old kind of. Like the body — when I was 18 or 20 my body didn’t give a [bleep], now I’m 35 my body starts to be like, “No, [bleep] you,” you know?
Lukas: Same. Yeah. So like, I would play computer games all night long with my friends — no problems. Yeah. And now it’s this. And it’s really subtle. Especially, I think you had the same — like, you build your own business, you build your own startup, you don’t make a lot of money, you feel this constant pressure of “I need to build, build, build, ship, ship, ship.” Right? It’s like the typical indie hacker thing that people say: ship, ship, ship. And you just use every minute of the day. And maybe you know this as well — suddenly your friends are not as important anymore and you lose a little bit of contact. You don’t schedule your dentist. Things just get pushed aside, they’re not as important anymore. You just build, build, build, and sit in front of the computer. And eventually, you know, your body can take six hours, seven hours of concentrated work — and then it’s tired. And if you push that, if you stretch that rubber band every day, every day, at one point it just snaps.
[18:07]
And then your body says — like you with the eye, like me with the ears — “Oh yeah, something’s broken now.” And it’s because you pulled too strong for too long.
Dago: It kind of feels like a scar, like a scar that you earned in battle, kind of. And that reminds you of your mistake. Like imagine a warrior, you know, sword and [bleep], and he got a scar there — that means he messed it up and he almost died. And so now the sad thing is there’s nothing sexy about shitty eyes or a sound in your ear, so you can’t turn this scar into something cool, I mean, you know. But yeah. It’s really — someone, one of my former CTOs in a startup I was working in, he took me aside in private and told me once: “Man, when I did the early startup work, I didn’t go to the dentist for like years and all my teeth got all messed up. And once I went again — once I had the energy, or the presence of mind again, to go — it was crazy hard to get everything repaired.” And this really scared me because at that very moment I also hadn’t gone to a dentist for two years, you know, and I started feeling the toothaches. The bad weather tooth coming in. Man, maybe I should stop now instead of in three years when it gets even more intense.
Lukas: Yeah, because you’re always thinking it’s never the priority because you only have one priority. So is that something that you started to manage a bit better now?
Dago: Yes, yeah. I actually consciously said to myself: what is this? I don’t really have friends physically here. I don’t really —
Lukas: When did you realize this? When did you feel like you had to change
[20:07]
something?
Dago: Honestly, it was basically my wife. And this is a bit shameful to say, but she was telling me for years: “You have this anxiety — it’s not normal, you should do something about it, you have to see somebody.”
[20:07]
Lukas: So this happened six years ago and I had to fix a lot of tax stuff — you know, Germany’s very strict on taxes so you cannot mess up. And everything kind of came crushing down. Yeah, and I had to take care of all of this. And this really set it into motion. And I always thought, it’s okay, I’m going to manage it, I’m going to get over this. I was really depressed for that time. I even thought, man, you know, if you would die today it’s all over, you wouldn’t have to worry about it. I never really planned like suicide or something like this, but I had these thoughts of, you know, if it would be over, if you get hit by a bus, it wouldn’t be the worst. And it did scare me. But I always thought, you know, you’re almost done, you’re almost over the hill here, and it will get better, it will get better.
Dago: And that was with your previous business, right?
Lukas: That was — I got together with two co-founders and it kind of turned sour. And the one threw the other one out, and then he escaped to the US essentially, leaving me hanging — being the minority owner but still having all the liability — because I’m the only one left.
Dago: What do you mean “escaped”? Like he just left?
Lukas: He just left. And that was enough for him to not be liable.
Dago: Yeah, what should you do — he’s in the US, you know? What should the German government do, send him a letter? Who cares? He doesn’t care. They don’t even have his address; they have mine.
Lukas: So this co-founder left you in the [bleep]. Yeah. And then you spend the next few years kind of like cleaning it up, working your ass off.
Dago: Yeah okay. Why didn’t you just leave or give up?
[22:09]
Lukas: Yeah, that’s the question, right? I felt like I didn’t want to leave the country for good. You know, I just couldn’t — like, just declare bankruptcy or something and give up?
Dago: I tried. I tried to go to my tax advisor: can I get out of this? And he said, the problem is you are a kind of board member, you know, you’re in the registry, there’s your name — so you cannot get out of responsibility. And what was the problem, like the main problem?
Lukas: The main problem was that we chose an accountant that was basically the cheapest we could find, and the accountant somehow didn’t do the job. Okay. And then two years later the government sent all these letters and said, “Hey, where — you have to pay your taxes, where are your taxes, where’s your annual reports?” Yeah. And like, man, you’re responsible for that, you are the CEO, what’s happening? And he was doing [bleep]. And then to make matters small — all the letters went to this other guy that he kicked out of the business. So it was just this huge pain even to get this information.
Dago: And then I had to find, yeah — I see what you mean.
Lukas: Find an accountant and tell them: I have a deadline of four weeks and I need to do taxes for two years in the past — can you help me? The government coming: “Hey, we’re going to charge you 22,000 euros if you don’t do this.” And I’m thinking, what do I do? I don’t have that money at that time.
Dago: So this experience kind of like traumatized you or something?
Lukas: It did — almost the same as it did to you. It threw me into a depression. I quit everything entrepreneurial — freelancing, everything I did with business, I quit all of it. And I looked for a job and I started working in a startup and I worked there for two years. Had this stable — you know,
[24:09]
going to the office, getting my tasks, being an engineer. And it was a nice startup. And then after two years I felt like, kind of, this itch again. Okay, now I feel recovered enough to start the next project.
Dago: Yeah, I see what you mean. Yeah. And the worst of this depressive state was over, and you thought, I’m over the hill, I’m getting out of this, a bit more time, anxiety will go away, I will be able to sleep again normally and get my life back together.
Lukas: And that part didn’t happen. I didn’t get my life back together. I like — so did it get worse than when you had your job, or did you just stop getting better?
Dago: It just kept — like it was. I didn’t really have friends. I wasn’t able to, like — I was concentrating on my job and I couldn’t get other things done. Taking care of other things was such a burden for me and I pushed everything aside, you know — scheduling the dentist appointment, getting a haircut, getting new glasses. Which every normal person would say, you know, just go to the city and get yourself new glasses.
Lukas: Yeah, I see what you mean. But it’s — everything seems like too much.
Dago: Yeah, you know. Just getting groceries — you want to get them delivered, or like you’re always kind of in a rush, you’re always in a hurry.
Lukas: Yeah. That’s how it feels — you’re always in a hurry, you’re never quiet, you’re never calm. And you don’t allow yourself to relax, you don’t allow yourself to just sit back and do nothing. It’s always — you feel like, oh, I have to do something tonight, I still have to work a little bit, I still have to do a little bit. And you never get anything done. So that stayed — that literally stayed behind and I couldn’t get rid of it. And
[26:09]
then beginning of last year when we came back to Germany from our Asia trip — it was amazing by the way, love it, amazing — but I had these episodes where I just couldn’t sleep the whole night. Or once, we went to the cinema and we stood in line and my wife asked me, “What do you want to drink?” And I panicked. I don’t know — you have to make the decision for me. I literally cannot make this decision right now.
Dago: Too many decisions in your head all the time, too many things to think about. What to drink, you know — just give me a Coke, just give me a Sprite, who cares?
Lukas: And I couldn’t make the decision. And this is when I was like, okay, I’m going to look for help.
[26:53]
Dago: So what did you do to look for help?
Lukas: I Googled for therapy. Yeah. And then I just went there. I literally went there, I said I’m going to go there and talk to this person and see what happens. And I talked to the person and she said, “Yeah, there’s going to be some positions free, I’ll get in contact with you.” And they did. And I had 12 sessions with a therapist.
Dago: Yeah. And — so this was very interesting. I don’t know, you know, if you’ve never taken therapy, you think, what’s happening? You sit on the couch and they kind of talk about your parents and your childhood. This is not so much what happened.
Lukas: I told her what symptoms I have and she said, “Yeah, this sounds like” — she said — “light depression,” you know, essentially saying you still kind of suffer from this depressive state. It’s not hard, but it’s there. Yeah. And then she explained to me how depression works. We literally just — almost like in school, there’s a workbook — and she went through it with me. “Here, these are the symptoms of depression. Do you have this problem, and this problem, and that problem? And like, easy things that should be simple — like getting new glasses — is
[28:09]
suddenly hard.” And I read all of that and I thought this fits so well to my situation. And I hadn’t connected all these individual points together to one sickness, quote unquote.
Dago: Yeah, okay.
Lukas: And suddenly in my head I was like, yeah, this is all connected. All these problems, all these little tiny problems that I thought I can ignore, they’re not that important, they’re not that big in my life — they all came together. Ah, this is all because of this one problem. It’s all the same.
Dago: Okay. So you had the 12 sessions with her. Yeah, so what happened because you did that?
Lukas: I think the good part was I went in and I said, “I want to get healthy, I want to get healthy fast, and I’m ready to make all the changes.” Like, it doesn’t matter — I’m ready.
Dago: And she said like most people they don’t want to do any changes.
Lukas: I was like, I’m ready to do all the changes, no matter what.
Dago: I hear you.
Lukas: And she was like — first thing she said: you need stability. You need to eat breakfast at the same time, lunch at the same time, and dinner at the same time. Just get a rhythm into your life. Do certain things on the same day of the week. Get a rhythm.
Dago: Helped incredibly — get a routine.
Lukas: Yeah, get a routine. Helped a lot. Just — it sounds so silly, right? As indie hackers we like — we all actively work whenever, you know. Work on the beach, work in the evening, in the morning, at midnight. And suddenly I’m like, no, I’m going to get up at 8, I’m going to start my workday at 9:30 and I’m going to work until 5. Yeah. Really structuring my life helped much.
Dago: That’s really helpful. Yeah. And then eventually — I don’t know how it was for you — but I think eventually you also realize that you accomplished quite a lot in this time. Like, maybe not everything, but you accomplished almost everything, and you feel so much better. So it’s worth
[30:10]
getting just 80% of what you thought you could have done, but feeling way better and being able to keep going. I don’t know how it was for you.
Lukas: Absolutely. She gave me this mindset shift. I always had this feeling of “I have my task, I need to finish it today, I need to crunch through until I finish the task, commit, push it to GitHub.” And she said, “There’s always going to be a tomorrow, there’s always going to be more work tomorrow, the list is always going to get longer — do what you do, and then tomorrow is another day to do the next thing.” And just this kind of calms you down. It’s okay, I get done what I get done, and tomorrow I continue. And in the beginning you think you get less done but in fact you actually get more done.
Dago: Yeah, it’s very interesting. Because, you know, I’m going to a co-working space for a few months and it’s helping me so much with having a rhythm — also having friends. And when I go there, I have lunch with them, and sometimes I’m like, no, I’m going to keep working. I’m like, we’re all having lunch. I’m like, okay I’m going to come. And I feel bad about it because I’m like, no, I want to work at noon — it’s France so the break is two hours — but it’s so good to have this break, you know? It feels so good.
And actually, just before this podcast I was feeling like [bleep] because I was there today. I had some bad news — they’re going to shut the co-working space down in a couple months. It made me so sad because it was so important for me. That was tough for me emotionally. But anyway, I kept through the day. And just before this recording, I posted the last episode — the interview I did with Nico — and [bleep] Twitter wouldn’t allow me to upload the video. I just spent one week fighting with it and so I hadn’t uploaded it when I wanted to. That’s my big thing. And I was so mad about it. And then it was almost 6 p.m. and we
[32:10]
had our meeting one hour later, and I just went home. And actually the fact of switching locations — also walking home, because my work is like 20 minutes away — I put some music on, I literally sing now in the street. I don’t give a [bleep] about people. Like, I have my AirPods Pro, I put it in kind of isolation mode and I literally sing. I’m passing through like tens of people, I’m like, [bleep] you guys, I don’t give a [bleep], I’m having my break.
Lukas: Yeah, I think if you get older you’ve given so many [bleep] in your life there’s just no more [bleep] to give.
Dago: I’m like, nobody’s listening anyway — everybody’s stuck on their phones. And it’s not worse than like a homeless guy shouting. At least it’s positive. Who gives a [bleep]? And so just doing that — I literally do that all the time. I go there and I do it twice a day: a 20-minute walk from my home to there, and from there to my home. And I’m literally singing. And when I do this, man — I came home and I was like, oh, it’s okay, I’ll figure it out tomorrow. You know, I’ll figure out this [bleep] tomorrow, it’s okay.
In the past, if I had just stayed home and not thought about it, I would probably have been fighting with it until the last minute before we recorded this episode. I would have been in a hurry this whole recording. I wouldn’t have been present. I would have been thinking about it — maybe even multitasking while you tell me your life. I wouldn’t even have listened. I would have been like trying to fix it on another laptop. And that would have been such a shitty experience, and I would probably not have fixed it and maybe even made mistakes. Maybe done something stupid, posted in a bad format because I was so stressed about it. So yeah, man, like we need more quiet and more calm in our lives because it gets so mental and so crazy.
And your point is very good — you make the wrong priorities. And you said that you’re going to this co-working space.
[34:13]
What I told my therapist is — she asked me, “What do you want? What is your goal?” And I said, “I really would wish that I had just a friend here in the city that I live in that I can meet with. And I wish I would go to the gym and have a training program that’s really nice, that somebody tells me — do this, train this way, today is lower body, tomorrow is upper body.” And she said, “Here’s what you do: you make this a priority. And tomorrow — it’s not that tomorrow you go there, you may not have the energy, you may not get out of bed or something, which happened to me — but you at least make a call, make an appointment, make the first step.
Lukas: Yeah, make a move — call a friend and tell them let’s meet next week. Yeah.
Dago: Do the things that follow these goals. Don’t ignore them because you think you have to work and finish everything and do this task and do the next thing and look good on Twitter.
Lukas: And yeah, man — you know, I’ve been going to therapy too now for the past six months or so.
Dago: Yeah.
Lukas: And I was always thinking I wouldn’t need it, and everybody told me you should do it, and I’m like, no, but I know what’s happening. I know — because I really did know that something was wrong and I could journal about it, meditate, and identify stuff. But there’s just something about somebody else telling you — somebody who you can trust and who’s a professional — telling you. It’s like when it’s you, it’s yeah, I know, you know? But when somebody tells you — no, you’re like, this is the mistake you’re making — just this, it changes everything. And just telling you “this is normal, this is not normal.”
Dago: Yeah, that’s it. Because it’s yeah, it’s so helpful. And I’m so grateful I found this therapist. Actually she’s really amazing because she’s from
[36:14]
Argentina. Oh, somehow she decided to move to the north part of France, you know — cool, good for me. So I go to see her and she’s a psychotherapist, so that’s what she’s trained in. But she also took on a new discipline of kind of energetic work, like with the body. And so basically a session with her is mind-blowing. And you can’t go more than twice a month because it’s too intense — you can’t go every week. It’s an hour and a half: the first 40 minutes is normal therapy, you just talk about your stuff, she helps you see things, you figure things out. And then after 40 minutes she tells you, “Where do you feel that in your body? Where is this located?” — you know, this fear, this pain, whatever. Usually for me it’s like my chest or my neck, like something is stuck there. And then for the next 30 to 40 minutes she’s going to do like crazy, kind of like massage — but not to make you feel good, really to heal you and remove the things that are blocking you in your body. And then after that you have 10 minutes of debriefing, how you felt and stuff. And this has been, man, the most useful thing. Because the body part is kind of like the magic part to me — for the next two weeks I can feel my body literally heal and change. Like my posture changes, just without doing anything. So I’m so grateful I met her.
And now, I mean, first of all, I think just in life in general, having therapy — basically constantly having someone you can talk to, to be sure you’re not [bleep]ing up — I feel like there’s no reason not to do it. It’s kind of like going to the gym. Like it’s mental health. I feel like so many mistakes I made — the problem isn’t we don’t know that we should do marketing.
[38:14]
We know what we need to do. But we don’t really want to do it, or we have our ego, or we have our pride, and we don’t do it. And I feel like when you’re building or doing something and you have a therapist and you can just tell them about how you feel about your startup or whatever you’re building — and if they can just tell you why you feel this way, this is real, just make you notice that maybe you’re in your ego, you’re protecting something — I wasted six months building useless features. It’s not because of the useless features, it’s because I had my pride — I wanted this product to be perfect because I was scared of failing. That’s what was happening. If I had a therapist by my side, I probably could have saved six months, man.
Lukas: And just being forced to explain to somebody who is not in your bubble, who is not in the indie hacker bubble, who’s not an entrepreneur — yeah, that’s good.
Dago: And you have to explain to them what you do and why you do it and what it is and what is your goal. And you’re like — it’s such a real reality check to yourself.
Lukas: Oh yeah. And it’s good also because we live in such a bubble. If you’re on X, on social media, everybody’s kind of like repeating the same [bleep] to support each other. It’s good, but at the same time it can become — you have blinders and you don’t see [bleep]. And they take you out of this bubble. And what is really so important as you make it to be? And you suddenly realize it’s actually not such a big deal. Why do I make it such a big deal? It’s not such a big deal.
Dago: Yeah. And then to tie it back to this story before — I was in this place for five years, always thinking, just like you said before, “I’m going to get over this, I know I have this problem, it’s just time, I’m going to manage it.” And then comes the moment where I realize: seems like I cannot do it alone. I actually should look for help. And that was the turning point — in the end, that was the point where I got better. It’s such a relief to feel
[40:16]
like no, I can’t do it alone.
Lukas: Yeah. Like for me it was like, I can’t feel good if I don’t have friends locally. And then I started going to the co-working space, or you know. And for me that was also — with my ex-wife we had some problems that I wasn’t looking at, and it helped me to see, oh no, I can’t keep doing this. But you need to take a step back to be able to see this, you know. A therapist can be really helpful in helping you see that.
Dago: It’s so funny — I went to the therapist and like the second session she told me I should leave my wife. It’s obvious. Crazy. I was like, holy [bleep].
Lukas: I mean, she didn’t tell me — but she basically — I was not sure what I should do and she just showed me what I had said in the session. And yeah, the answer is right there sometimes. You know the answer and the answer feels a bit too scary to speak out. And then you get somebody who is not interested in any other thing of your life, who doesn’t care about anything, and you can just tell them stuff.
Dago: Yeah, yeah. And you speak it out loud and suddenly you realize.
Lukas: You know, that’s the point. For me it was the opposite almost — my wife really put up with me, and I credit her a lot for that. I mean, she could have left me. She saw what was happening and she very slowly moved me in the direction of, “Hey, you should — I think you do need help, you cannot solve it yourself.” And when I was in therapy and telling my therapist kind of what was going on, she was like, “Did you ever think to just tell your wife, ‘Hey, I’m grateful for what you do and I’m grateful for your patience’?” So I went home and said that, and it was like night and day.
Dago: He almost cried?
Lukas: Oh yeah.
Dago: I bet. Yeah. I told that to my wife after leaving her, but that still counts. But yeah no, yeah, it does. Because like, man — my ex, she put up with so much of my [bleep], so much of my ego, like wanting to be the CEO and not
[42:18]
letting her do things. And it’s not that — I told myself it was to make life easier for her, but it’s also because I was so [bleep]ing scared of losing control. Yeah. And she was so mad towards the end because basically everything was on my shoulders and I had made it that way. Yeah. And so when I burnt out and I collapsed, everything collapsed with me because she wasn’t responsible for much, because I had put everything on my side. It was really, you know, a bad time for her. She was really mad at this. And she’s right — I mean, I totally understand. And yeah, tying it up to therapy — literally right now, if tomorrow I start a new startup and I have a co-founder, I will do couples therapy with them.
Lukas: Yes.
Dago: It’s the same relationship. Like, therapy between every co-founder, at least once a month. Because when you have a co-founder — I feel like even for us, it wasn’t the reason for our failure, but that was a big problem: having a startup together, like having a kid together, like at least a big project together.
[42:18]
Dago: So how is it going with your wife being your co-founder and stuff? How is it working together?
Lukas: So that part is actually really working well. This is where I kind of won in life, I would say. This is where I made good decisions versus other areas. I think the reason she stayed with me is because I always felt like I want to learn and improve. I don’t have all the answers, I’m not perfect, I don’t know better. And if somebody tells me, “This is not good what you do, we should change that,” I at least give it a really good thought and say, okay, objectively looking at this, how does this look? And then often finding
[44:18]
out, yeah, the other person is actually not wrong. You get rid of your anger, you get rid of your frustration, and then you think of it logically and you say, okay, there’s a point here, I think we can find ourselves in the middle. And I think this held us together. We have a really good relationship.
And also, yeah — I’m learning this a little bit now too. You have this perfectionism, you want to do everything perfect, you want everything exactly how you think it. But then saying, “Okay, but you do this part and I trust you. I trust you that you do it right, I trust you that you have your ways and your own experience, your own conclusions that are maybe better than mine because you’ve done it longer.” And that’s for her — it’s marketing, right? She does marketing, she does customer service, and I think she does it really well. And whenever I come with a crazy marketing idea, she often tells me, “Yeah, I did this experiment and this experiment in the past, and this happened like this, and we should do it differently.” And I’m like, all right, okay, I see — I was wrong.
Dago: So do you have any challenges that came up? Because you’ve been doing this together for a few years now. Are there things that kind of challenged, not necessarily the relationship, but, you know, the startup?
Lukas: Or something? In this particular case, nothing that goes beyond the typical things you have as a couple, right? You always eventually have a fight and the question is how do you resolve a fight. And often resolving the fight means heading into it — you know, it’s there, the elephant is in the room, talk about the elephant. That’s how you resolve it. And it’s the same in marriage. And this has been working very well for us and I think it has actually grown better over time, instead of us growing apart or hating each other more. No, it has grown better. So I’m really blessed in this area.
Dago: So do you have time to do [bleep] together, go to the movies?
Lukas: Good question, right?
[46:19]
Because when I was in this depressive state we didn’t — I always felt too busy, I always felt like I had to work and finish this and do this. And now after the therapy, we take every month one day that is date day, right? We go to the cinema, we go eating, we go brunching, we do something like this every month. And one month I organize it, one month she organizes it. And then we — I allow myself to say, “I’m just taking this afternoon free. I feel a bit tired, I think tomorrow I will have more energy, I’ll take it free.” I allow myself to take free time. I just — just hearing you say that made me feel better.
Dago: Like I just — oh [bleep], yeah, that sounds good. Two months ago I bought a Lego set — like a big Lego set — and I built it and I was like, this is amazing, I love it. And then — what Lego set, what was it?
Lukas: It was the — sorry, it was the Mars Rover Curiosity.
Dago: And I was like, this is amazing, I love building Lego. I haven’t allowed myself to do this. And suddenly I’m building it. And then I found this website called Rebrickable where people take Lego sets and make alternative models, and you can purchase the instructions for a few euros. Oh! And build yourself — same pieces, same pieces, you make something else. I was like, I don’t want to buy more stuff because then you have to put it somewhere, I don’t have so much space. Oh, you know what I can do — I’ll buy like one car, a big car, for 100 to 150 bucks. And then just download new instructions and build different cars out of it.
Lukas: But you bought it — did you buy it because you knew you could do so many things with it already? Like you picked the one with the most variety?
Dago: Oh wow, exactly! That is so awesome. And it just gives me so much joy because it’s so useless but it’s also so just nice.
[48:19]
I enjoy it. Oh yeah. And the same is — sometimes we, I just say I take off for this day and I’m going to play. Or we’re going to go to the mall and drink a bubble tea and sit on a chair and observe people and make fun of all the kids that are running around. This makes life, you know.
Lukas: You know, it’s funny — you talk about doing something useless. I had a thought a couple days ago and it’s going to sound weird. But when I started coding I was — I’m 35 soon, but I mean, I’ll say 34 while I still can. I am 34. And when I was like 15, that’s when I learned to code, and it was always so fun to me. I was making cool [bleep], I was making video game websites, I was trying to learn 3D modeling at the time, trying to do an actual game — you know, really having fun. Then it became a job. I mean it became — it’s something I always did freelance, almost never had a job, but you know, freelancing is kind of like a job. So I was doing that for a long, long time. And the past couple years I really lost interest in coding because it had become so complex. Especially now with all this front-end [bleep], and I had become — years ago I became kind of like an expert at React because it was the thing to be in if you wanted to make more money. So I did that and I enjoyed it. But now I don’t want to build anything because it’s so complex.
And something switched a couple days ago. I had this kind of realization that coding is going to be useless now because of AI. And at the moment I really started believing that
[50:20]
— yeah, coding is useless now — I was like, I want to code again! I was like, now there’s no pressure! I don’t
need to find the best library, I don’t need to think of the most complex [bleep], I can just do something I love. I love Ruby. Ruby and Ruby on Rails — I [bleep]ing love it. I love coding with that. I learned it and I think it’s so sweet and so enjoyable. And it’s useless to do an app with that right now because — I mean, just the joy of coding with that. I mean, it’s going to probably trigger a ton of people listening to this — it’s going to be useless soon, like it’s over, like at least it seems. And so being a coder is going to become — and it was my whole career for 15 years, doing the building blocks. Like, this kind of “Oh yeah, I’m going to set up a form, I’m going to do authentication, create routing between the pages, membership and stuff.” This is going to be automated or very easy to do with AI. And I was like, I want to code again! I just want to build a small app now that is completely useless and that could be done in 10 seconds by AI, but I would spend like a month doing. And I was so good, man — it’s been 20 years I haven’t felt like this.
Dago: And it doesn’t have to earn any money, it can just be —
Lukas: Yeah, that is so scary though because I had this thought but then I still haven’t done it because I’m like, but it’s not going to make money, you know? But I’m getting there. But it’s so hard, man, to be like — because initially it’s a hobby and when you learn to turn a hobby into making money, then it becomes hard to just have a hobby.
Dago: So hard. Because every thought — you think, but you know, this could be a project, this could be on the internet, this could be a template. Yeah! This could be a [bleep] template! Like all these boilerplates, man. And you know, I appreciate it, it’s awesome. But we all thought of doing a boilerplate at some point. We all thought at some point, “Oh wow, I had to do this twice in my life so it means it can become a boilerplate, let’s [bleep]ing go,” you know. And we do this
[52:20]
and it’s cool, you know, it’s useful. But oh yeah, man, I just want to be coding the most useless app. I want to code — I have a friend who actually builds an app like this, so he’s going to get mad. But in my mind, the most useless app is going to be like a movie ranking app. Something like a tutorial app — not a real app. To learn something I’m going to do. Like a movie ranking app or something just for me — scratch my own itch, but really like an itch that I’m the only one to have. Really something that’s not going to be anything. And wow, that would be so — or maybe not even Rails, maybe just [bleep]ing PHP. And not brag about it, you know. Just be like, yeah, I’m just going to do something basic.
Lukas: It’s beautiful. I bought, you know, this Lego car. And because this — you know there was this like very cheap small set, I was like, ah let me just buy this one as well, may as well. And it has like — few pieces, maybe 20 or so.
Dago: Oh, 20 pieces? That’s nothing, super small. I have it here. It’s very, very tiny, right? Maybe more than 20. Yeah, more —
Lukas: Sorry, I’m exaggerating.
Dago: Sorry about that for you, man. Did you just — it’s two pieces? Okay, cool.
Lukas: And I’m like — man, all these people, they build these alternative models, they make the instructions and the 3D model and put it up on this website. I want to try this as well. So I literally take this model, I take it apart, and I think, what can I build out of this? And I build a little — I build a little space shuttle. I just look around: okay, this piece could go there and this piece — and then ah, this one is not perfect, we do it a bit different. But now —
Dago: Now you’re going to put it on GitHub, man. You’re going to sell it for two —
Lukas: No, here’s the point. I finished it, right? It’s like this, now it looks really good. It
[54:21]
looks really good. Okay. Then I — I literally went to this website, I downloaded the kind of 3D modeler where you can put Lego pieces together in 3D. I spent my whole Sunday just reconstructing this thing in 3D. And then I spent another three hours doing this manual where you, like, step by step — this piece goes here, this piece goes here. And I just loved it. I just loved it. And then I put it up on this website. Yeah, let me share — let me put it in, for free, obviously, I’m not going to charge money for something like this. And it was just so — it’s so useless but it’s also so joyful. And then other people started building it and they uploaded pictures of how they built my thing.
Dago: Oh, they did! I should — let me share — let me put it in the show notes for everyone to see.
Lukas: Sure, go ahead. And you can see, like, the picture I made, and then you scroll down and you see the pictures that other people uploaded.
Dago: Oh, the shuttle is nice. Yeah, looks nice. Yeah, I would have wanted to do it. Oh yeah. So 30, 31 people liked it, 11 pictures of people who did it. Wow. It’s such a cool community. I feel almost like in the past, you know, when we were all hacking and building stuff and sharing it. And even the website design — it looks so dated, it reminds me of my teenage years. And that’s part of it, that’s part of the fun. It’s not some fancy thing — it’s an old-looking website.
Lukas: That’s better! The usability is probably not —
Dago: It’s responsive! I’m
[56:22]
disappointed. But anyway. I uploaded this stuff — like this instruction — and you can even download the instruction, and it takes you 50 clicks to get anything done. It’s awful. But it just has to be like that — it cannot be perfect, otherwise it’s — part of it.
Lukas: It’s a part of it. It looks like a Pets levels website, man. I’m being a dick but — you know what I mean. And I think that might explain his success as well because he’s found something and he’s focusing on what matters.
Dago: Man, this is so joyful to see. Wow. So yeah, I loved it. I love it. And you can buy this Lego set for like nine or ten dollars. And then you can download all these alternative builds and just have fun for days. It’s really the website that’s getting me though — this old UI, I’m like, holy [bleep], I want to build an old UI again. This looks so fun. Like they didn’t give a [bleep], they didn’t try to do branding — I mean, even the brand is not that bad, actually. No, it’s really good. But yeah.
Lukas: Wow, man. I miss — it’s almost making me sad. Because I remember probably 18 years ago or something, when I was like 16, I did a website about Windows XP custom visual themes. You know, because back then you could actually change the styling of the windows. Yeah. And not just the bar — you could have entire themes: the icons, the cursor, the icon — everything. And basically the most successful thing was trying to replicate macOS. So that was actually what I remember. I had built this website where I had put all of the best themes, you could download them, and that was it — that was a similar kind of UI as this one you just showed me. Yeah, more dated, but you know,
[58:22]
kind of the same style. And I love — I remember spending two days doing the logo in like a 3D design program. A shitty 3D logo but I was so happy about it.
Dago: I bet I was on this website because I downloaded that same macOS style for Windows XP.
Lukas: Yeah, probably. It was called the Aqua theme.
Dago: Yeah, I remember that. But I didn’t make the theme, I just made the website about the themes. But yeah, man, it’s making me so sad right now because like the internet 20 years ago — it was more open, it was all about creating websites. And now it’s kind of like more walled gardens of apps and big companies like Facebook, Amazon — all these big companies capturing the value. And it used to be like you could just create a website, kind of like hippie mindset, everybody’s you know free, open source, and a lot of illegal downloads and [bleep] also back then. A stupid repeating GIF background.
Lukas: Yeah!
Dago: And you didn’t have to spam content and you didn’t have to have a newsletter and you didn’t have to have people sign up to your stuff. And you know, I burnt out also partially because this has become such a job and such a chore to do every day. And I’m kind of finding my joy again with this podcast, man. You know, for example, doing this interview — I didn’t plan anything, I just, you know, asked you a few questions. In the end I had nothing. I was late — I’m sorry about that again. And I just want to have a nice conversation. And I feel like it’s fun, I think it’s valuable, I think people are going to love it. And for example we have a sponsor, and like this week — you know what, I’m not going to do it. [bleep] this. And I love him, you know, I love you, Chad, thanks for sponsoring us — I’m not going to make you pay this week because this week I’m not feeling it. And
[60:22]
you know, this is it, man. Like we don’t have to. And I want to go back to being [bleep]ing 16. I mean, that’s because I’m getting old, man. I want to go back to building Lego sets and just having fun. And how can we bring that into this indie life? Because I think it’s the stress of having to make money, and also comparing yourself with others on Twitter and [bleep] — everything is making us insane. We’re losing kind of the joy about it. Even the young kids — you see them on Twitter and they’re like 15, 16, they’re already hustling. And in a way it’s awesome, and in a way it’s like — ah, [bleep], you know. We know where this ends. Already burning out.
Lukas: You know, I heard somebody saying: what is the sense in having “[bleep] you” money if you never say “[bleep] you”?
Dago: Oh yeah! Oh, I love this.
Lukas: I felt like when Elon Musk bought Twitter — for me it was the worst decision, I hated it. Like, why don’t you concentrate on SpaceX? We know we need your genius there. But to a certain extent I respected him because I felt like he just said, “I’m going to buy Twitter,” and he just bought it. He just did it. And I care, I’m not a fan of him, but I respect that about him. Like it’s something I kind of want to do — just take a huge risk and let’s see what happens. And [bleep] you. Like when he said [bleep] you to the advertisers — that was so cool.
Dago: Exact! And people make it a big deal, and I understand why people make it a big deal, but it’s just — the doing it. Yeah.
Lukas: Yeah, exactly.
Dago: And I feel you know — that’s really the path I’m on right now. I’m noticing I’m really starting to follow my instincts more. And man, it’s weird — right now I’m taking big risks because
[62:22]
I didn’t have much money on the side when I left my job. Just enough to kind of give it a shot. I just left my wife — I don’t have a support system much. And even then, now I’m starting the indie life again. And people are offering me good [bleep] — like, I don’t know if I can say this, but Daniel Vassallo just offered me 4K per month to be like an ambassador. Dude, that’s so good, you know? That’s good. But at the same time I’m like, do I want to do it? I don’t know. And I’ve had opportunities like this come up — people offering me a lot of money just to do a few memes — and I’m like, yeah, you know, I’m not into memes right now anymore. For a while. And I’m trying to feel like where my heart wants to take me.
And I think I’m trying to find a balance basically between where my heart wants to take me and having the stability financially. Because I feel like just saying yes to money is the easy way — you basically can’t go wrong. In my brain it’s: if I say yes to money I can’t fail. Kind of. But in a way you fail, because if it’s not what your heart wants you end up not in the right life. And then you burn out and you’re unhappy. So I’m trying to find kind of this balance. And I think because of the burnout I’m not willing to compromise on it anymore.
Lukas: Yeah. This reminds me of something I just heard in a My First Million podcast — with Jason Fried, you know, one of the founders of Basecamp?
Dago: Oh, I love him! Huge fan. Original bootstrapper guy. He is.
Lukas: And he said — if you say no to something, it’s like a scalpel. It’s a very precise instrument. It’s one option and you decline it. But if you say yes to something, it’s almost like a nuclear bomb. It’s collateral damage. You say no
[64:22]
to everything else if you say yes to something.
Dago: That is so true.
Lukas: You spend time with that and you say no to so many other things. So “no” is a small impact and “yes” is big impact. And it made me think so much because it really puts FOMO into perspective. Because if you get the freedom of saying just “no” to things without being afraid — because you know “no” is a very precise instrument, it’s just this one thing —
Dago: I get chills when the German guy says “precise instrument.” Sorry, man.
Lukas: But if you say yes to something and then it turns out not so good, then you’ve washed away all these other opportunities and all these other things you could spend your time with. And yeah, think about it.
Dago: Yeah, no, it’s exactly that. Basically when you say yes to one thing it’s going to bring a thousand things in your life. It’s going to change everything. But if you say no, you’re just keeping it as is, kind of. And it’s so hard to design. So this is making me think that probably the good thing is to say no to most things.
Lukas: Yes. Because if you say yes to everything — and when I was burning out I was saying yes to everything. I was replying to everyone on Twitter, even at my peak when I was getting hundreds of replies a day. I was being nice to everyone, I was saying no to nobody because I was too scared of missing out on something. And people write me all — then eventually you get all these DMs and cold emails and people want to make free videos for you and they want to write free content for you and do whatever [bleep].
Dago: And everybody who offers me something for free, I’m like, [bleep] you. [bleep] your free [bleep]. I know — and it’s terrible because they mean well and sometimes they’re very nice.
Lukas: Yes. But [bleep] this — it’s not free. I have to spend time getting into it. Now I have to spend time just looking at it. You divert your focus away from what you wanted to actually do. And in the beginning I was answering to everything. And now I’m like, no, this
[66:23]
is not my agenda, this is not what I want to do right now. Just ignore it. And the funny thing is, when you do that, you notice you don’t lose as much as you thought. At least for me, that’s what it was. I was so scared of losing my momentum on Twitter, losing engagement, losing [bleep]. And eventually you realize you don’t lose that much. I mean, I’m lucky — I didn’t lose as much engagement as some others because I have a really strong community of people who really give a [bleep] about me. So I’m so grateful for that. So it’s definitely a plus. But it’s not just that — I don’t know, it’s okay. You can let go sometimes. You can let go of trying to control everything and saying yes to everything. And being like — I think it’s also probably like fear of being abandoned or something. At least for me. Like fear of, “people are going to stop giving a [bleep] if I don’t give a [bleep] first.” You know — if you’re not always active, people are going to stop thinking about you or they’re going to forget you.
Dago: You know, that’s why it’s good to go to therapy, because for me it ties up to like childhood things.
Lukas: But yeah.
Dago: Yeah. I mean, often — the nerd in the classroom. I was a nerd in the classroom, you know. You barely get invited to the party and then you have to bring your best self otherwise nobody will invite you ever again. And just laying it down and saying, you know what, I can just be myself, I can just play Lego tonight and I’m still going to be okay tomorrow.
Lukas: Yeah. And even if they do a Lego party, you can still say no. Like, no, I want to do Lego alone. You’re free, man.
Dago: Yeah, man. Awesome. Yeah. Did you have anything else you wanted to bring up? You know, about all of this?
Lukas: You’re good. I think you know, I think we talked about good points.
Dago: Any other point? Yeah, me too. I think it seems perfect. It seems like yeah, it seems awesome.
[68:23]
Dago: So, well, where can people find more about you? Is there anything on top of your mind you wanted to like promote or anything?
Lukas: I don’t — so I’m on Twitter and I love sharing stuff. I love posting stupid things and posting serious things at times. But I don’t really care for Twitter, because my customers are not on Twitter. My customers are somewhere else.
Dago: Oh yeah, because it’s like kind of B2B, like a specific industry — event industry, video production industry.
Lukas: So we have a really cool relationship with our customers. We find them and they share us. So I can just be myself on Twitter. I do share like behind-the-scenes things for my business — kind of the one-to-100 stage that you might not get so often.
Dago: And your wife, she used to be on Twitter and she’s not that active anymore. Is that —
Lukas: So yeah, she just said, “Who cares?” Literally like this. Our customers are not on Twitter and it’s too much for me. And she has her Instagram that she does for her own project. So she just took that priority. And I respect her for it.
Dago: Wow. You know, when the marketing girl says “[bleep] Twitter,” you know something’s up. That’s awesome. Yeah, but it’s not your audience, no point in going there. And actually I noticed something when trying to diversify — because what burned me last time was going all in on Twitter instead of diversifying. So when Elon took over, so many things changed. It was so stressful to me because I was depending on it so much for traffic
[70:23]
and sales. So I started diversifying this time and I try different platforms. And at first I thought, you know, Instagram would be great because memes would perform well on Instagram. And I realized it doesn’t, at least for now. And what I learned is that — and TikTok is the same — it doesn’t so much matter the platform in terms of content, but what matters is who uses it. So like, my people — people who are interested in what I say — are going to be founders, small entrepreneurs, startup founders and indie hackers. And these people, they’re not on Instagram. I mean, they are, but not in that way. And so I found success with Threads, which — out of all the platforms, I literally didn’t think it would work. But I tried it and literally now I have, like, only 100 followers and a couple days ago I had 60 likes on one of my memes.
Lukas: Huge at this level!
Dago: And I enjoy it so much! So yeah, this has just made me think of one small tip for people: it’s about who uses — who cares about what you say. What’s the topic you want to talk about? It’s not about the type of content, it’s about who you’re talking to and where are they hanging out. And probably, for example, Stagetimer people are probably not hanging out on TikTok.
Lukas: No, you know. So you don’t need to go on TikTok. What actually works the best is LinkedIn. And we literally just share “hey, this is what we built, this is what we launched, a new feature” — people love it.
Dago: Yeah, well, you know, that’s actually an interesting thing. Because a lot of people are trying to be viral on social media and they can’t. And maybe it’s because of that — maybe it’s because it’s not the right platform where their audience is. Because even me — I have 85K followers on Twitter, I’m posting memes on Instagram, I get two [bleep]ing likes, you know? Like literally my best memes, my best archive memes that were the most successful on Twitter — they’re completely failing. So yeah, exactly. Like memes that had hundreds of thousands of views and they’re completely failing. So just telling people: if you’re failing on one platform, maybe it’s just because the people you’re talking to are not on this one. Maybe you should try TikTok, or whatever, wherever they can be. So yeah, I always tell people:
[72:24]
stop building for indie hackers, stop building for other developers. All their problems have been solved, all their itches have been scratched. I mean, some will be successful obviously, but I feel like just go out on other platforms, learn, get to know other industries, other people with problems that nobody has fixed yet, and build for them.
[72:24]
Dago: And actually this is making me curious, man. We’re making this podcast so backwards — but like, why did you go into building Stagetimer then? Like, did you have a thing? Why did you build it? It’s like such a weird thing. Because like, for people who don’t know, it’s basically an app where you can see the time for an event when you’re on stage, and you put it on an iPad or on the screen and you see the time. That’s the app that you built. How did you come about building this?
Lukas: Yeah, so it was really an accident. A friend of mine had a studio and he was doing recording, and he had this old laptop with a timer. And he was running into his room, clicking on a button to start it, running back out of the room — and all his other tech, you know, cameras, switching cameras, recording — all remote, all like super new tech. Okay. And then this stupid old timer where you had to get up and walk over. How can this be? There must be a web solution for this, so easy to build. So I put it on my list. You know, everybody has the idea list — thousands of ideas, projects. I put it on my list. And the day when I decided “today I’m going to start a project,” I looked at my list and — people would say, what is the best idea, the most awesome idea? And I was like, what is the stupidest idea, what is the simplest idea I can build on this list? And it was this timer. I was like, makes sense, it’s a problem somebody has, and it is super simple. And I built it. And the magic of it is it is so
[74:26]
simple, so easy to understand, especially for people of the video production scene. The [bleep] timer, man — they’re like, “This is exactly what we need, we have been waiting for it.” They told me: “We have been waiting for this, I’ve been looking for this.”
Dago: Yeah, that’s how — that’s the SaaS for plumbers thing. That’s the thing we’re trying to build. But like, how much work do you do? Because I mean, it’s going to sound insulting, but what the [bleep] do you need to build the timer for three years?
Lukas: Unfortunately I always call it a simple timer but it’s crazy complex. Because it’s in the cloud and then suddenly — how do you make sure that if you click a button it has to start on somebody else’s computer really fast? Like within a few milliseconds. Advanced video and event production where they have all this complex setup. Like, it’s been used for auctions, it’s been used for news broadcasts, for political debates, all kinds of stuff. And it has to work. And then it’s a live tour, right? So you have your show, you depend on it, it has to work. It cannot even stop for two seconds. Like, if our server drops, if our server drops 20 minutes in, we get three emails from people.
Dago: Wow. Can this happen?
Lukas: Yeah, it once happened. When I was asleep — you know, worst case. I was asleep, server goes down, five hours later I wake up and just everything is burning.
Dago: How did it feel?
Lukas: I just panicked. Fortunately our customers are really kind and they kind of forgave us. And what we did is we just openly said, “This is what happened, we made a mistake, we fixed it, sorry about it.” And there was one time when one person wrote me, “I have this — this is not working,” and I literally spent until midnight just to fix it and get it deployed. But lately we hadn’t had that — quite stable.
Dago: Awesome. Does it stress you out, like this kind of pressure that it cannot go down?
Lukas: In the beginning, like crazy. But now that we have a load balancer and several servers it kind of works. So now you know that basically something goes down, there’s some backup that’s going to fire up or something.
Dago: You don’t feel — you feel like the system is solid.
Lukas: Yeah, I have — you know, three servers have to go down and then there’s still one more backup. And then only will it start burning.
Dago: Okay, cool. Did people start copying you? Did you have people who thought, “This is the dumbest best idea, I need to do it too”? Did you have that?
Lukas: Yeah, we have — we have an open source project that copied us more or less.
Dago: Oh, now I hate them suddenly! Even though I love open source — no, they’re actually okay.
Lukas: They did a good job. I first thought maybe they’d stop because open source and maybe they’d lose. But they kept at it and I respect them for it. And I think we have very different customers because, you know, somebody who’s technically minded and just wants to use open source is somebody else than who comes to us and says, “Hey, I just want to open a website and it works. I don’t want to download code, I don’t want to set it up. I don’t want to mess with IPs and firewalls and servers. I just want it to work.”
Dago: So it’s not a big deal. You could probably even open source it and just sell the cloud version — you know, get rid of the competition even in open source.
Lukas: But no, I don’t have to. So that’s enough. And just for the question: how much work can there possibly be with a simple app? I think you said it before, right? You fix the problem of the plumber. If you fix a problem for the plumber, you suddenly find out how big the problem actually is and how much he wants it to be solved. And then the plumber falls in love with your product and he says, “Man, if I could do these other two things it would be amazing — it would solve all my
[78:26]
problems.” And so your list just grows and grows. And you see how many edge cases and complexities and things people do with your product that you never thought of. Like, one guy uses it for a horse race, another guy uses it for a workout session, this one uses it for a political debate. And it has to work in all these contexts. Wow.
Dago: Anyway, awesome, dude! That was so cool. That was so cool to talk to you. Thanks for the call, thanks for the talk. I hope people take something along from it.
Lukas: I think so. I think we had some really good moments. I think it will be worth it.
Dago: Yeah, man. So yeah, people will check out your Twitter to see your real thoughts. Good news is your customers aren’t on Twitter so you can be real. So that’s cool.
Lukas: No Twitter [bleep], so yeah.
Dago: Yeah. Cheers, man. Say hi to your wife.
Lukas: Will do. And that was good — having you. See you again.
Dago: Yeah, cheers.