Transcript: Building a product to $100,000,000,000 ARR in degrowth Europe

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.

[00:01]

Sandra: Good morning! Good morning to everybody on the other side of the world — not here in Europe. Yeah, it seems like we have a special guest with us today: Lukas Hermann, the CEO, a founder, a pilot, and every indie maker’s B2B crush. Welcome, Lukas!

I have not been told anything about this show — don’t hold me accountable.

Lukas: You did sign the papers saying that it’s okay.

Sandra: Yeah, yeah. Welcome, Lukas! Welcome!

Lukas: Hey, thanks for having me.

Sandra: Sorry, was there a problem? Yeah, yeah. I’ll ask him. Yeah, yeah. Come — yeah, yeah. Lukas, I’m sorry, there are some gentlemen here. They claim — where are you from? They’re from BCST. Have you heard about that?

Lukas: From what? BCST?

Sandra: Yeah.

Lukas: I think — I think if yeah — I think they handle taxes, but I’m not sure in which… They just handed me some documents here. I’ll ask him — just one second here.

Sandra: One second. Yeah. Okay, okay. So Lukas, where were you on the morning of the 9th of July at 10:00 a.m. and 23 seconds?

Lukas: I don’t know. I cannot recall. I cannot recall.

[02:03]

Sandra: There is a report here saying that around 10 a.m. you have written — and I quote — “the tax officer came to my business address while I waited rather stupidly at my private address. We agreed to reschedule.” Do you recall this event?

Lukas: Yeah, very much so. Very much so.

Sandra: Follow up, and I quote: “I had to show in detail how a euro leaves my customer’s wallet, is taxed, goes through Paddle HQ, the tax is withheld.” Is that true?

Lukas: Yes.

Sandra: And finally ends up in your bank account. Now Lukas, just to confirm — how does each euro leave your bank account and where does it go?

Lukas: Once it leaves my bank account it goes into my pocket and we spend it.

Sandra: What do you surrender on? Is it on frivolous stuff?

Lukas: Yeah, like nonsense essentially.

Sandra: Do you pay VAT for said nonsense?

Lukas: Valid question. Yes. Yes, I do. I’m pretty thorough with my accounting because I live in Germany and I have to be.

Sandra: Do you have receipts to prove that?

Lukas: I have every single receipt — every single receipt — in an online platform, and I make sure that everything is correct, both paper and digital. Yes. Five years back — backed up, saved as per regulation.

Sandra: The gentleman here just nudged me and said seven years. Is that true?

Lukas: Seven years? Yeah, it’s seven years.

Sandra: You’re missing two years, man!

Lukas: Oh no. Oh no. You’re missing — this is all — Jesus.

[04:06]

Sandra: Welcome to the show! How’s life, man? How’s it been going? You have been recounting your painful experience with the tax office, when they called you like “yeah, I would like to check what’s going on with you.”

Lukas: Yeah, and it’s all okay — you’re good. You don’t have to close down your business, you don’t have to do anything like that. I’m literally good. I sat with him at the kitchen table, and in the end I was like, “so can I continue? Is everything okay?” And it’s like, “you continue until you hear from me — and you probably won’t.” So there’s still like a shadow of a doubt. There’s this tiny shadow of a doubt that one day he can come back to me and say, “you know what, it was all illegal all along.”

Sandra: Oh, you live in fear!

Lukas: I live in — it’s terrible.

Sandra: But Lukas, welcome to the show! I’m so happy that you’re still here. I mean, we are only three minutes in and there’s a lot of things happening. I was expecting Lukas just to leave and me to stay with taxes. But Lukas, thank you for coming and we’re super excited to have you here. I don’t know if you are aware of this, and I just want to mention this, but you have a 100% success rate and I can explain to you why.

Lukas: Okay. I was like, I doubt it, but yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sandra: So it seems like you had a bunch of ideas and then the first idea you decided to build — look at you, you already have a tax problem, so I think this is completely — Lukas, wait a second, is that it? I mean, I thought we were going to share like —

[06:06]

Lukas: Experience and just say it’s dumb luck. Well, thank you for the show, ladies and gentlemen! The next one — buy my Gumroad course on dumb luck.

Sandra: But you have to share with us, like, how did you know that this idea is cool? How did you persevere and decide to build something like this? I mean, people always say, “oh, I have like 10,000 ideas and only the three last ideas worked and I tried all of them.” And if you say your first idea worked —

Lukas: It’s not quite true. I have done business in the past, right? I have been freelancing and I even started a company together with a friend — two friends — and it did not work out at all. The partnership went sour, the thing never earned any money, and we completely did everything wrong that you can do wrong in a startup. We tried to raise money and it never came. It was a catastrophe that I have to deal with to this day — I’m still kind of tying up the loose ends.

So when I say my first idea worked, I came into it with, I would say, a fair amount of failed business knowledge — like how do taxes work, how does accounting work, how do you get a business started, what do you not do in order to ship a product. And even though everybody says, you know, “ship early” and “do this and do that,” and then you try to follow it — it’s one thing to hear it, it’s another thing to follow it and actually do it. I’ve done it — I’ve done probably most of it wrong. And then coming into this place where I was employed, because I kind of came out of this experience and I almost had this kind of burnout-slash-depression phase, and I said, I just need to be in an office with other people and work on a computer. I want no more

[08:07]

business stress. And then I came out of that period and I said, okay, now I want to do indie hacking — do my own business on the side. And I made this list of ideas, which is very long, like hundreds of ideas. Probably everybody has one of those lists. And I thought this time I’m not going to start with 20 unknowns. Let me just start with one or two unknowns. I said I want to know how pricing works — how I can integrate a sales service, pricing, right? Like “click here and put in your credit card and purchase” — which I’d never done before. And all the rest I said, let me find something that I feel like I can do. So I picked literally the easiest idea from the whole list and just implemented it, put it out there, mainly just for this one unknown. I wanted to learn how to integrate a pricing platform into a web app. So it was a learning experience — that was the whole point.

And the fact that somebody purchased it — I made this really stupid Twitter post, what was it, like three years ago — and I said, “oh, I just implemented a Pro feature with pricing into my app.” I was like, who cares about my Pro features? And bam, same evening somebody purchases. And that’s what I call dumb luck. And then I just went from there.

Sandra: Yeah, but that’s the thing — it’s not enough to get that one purchase. You figured out how to grow it. But this is a product that was kind of outside of your regular niche, right? It’s kind of — do you think that helped you, because you came with a fresh perspective and you didn’t really know all the complexities around it and you just said, “yeah, I can get this done”? How did you go into it?

Lukas: Honestly, I think this is completely undervalued.

[10:08]

Maybe two people don’t believe me, but when you come in — everybody always says “scratch your own itch, do something in a niche that you understand.” So honestly, doing something in a niche that you don’t understand is so cool, because you come in with your development knowledge, right? You’re automating things. I was working at a startup that was in the metal industry — metal industry is maybe the oldest industry you can think of. Laser cutting, bending, turning — all these mechanisms that people have done for hundreds of years. And I always observed all the other people. We were a software team, but then there was the sales team and the operations team, and I observed them and thought every day: “I could do your job like 10 times faster, because how do you spend three hours on this Excel sheet doing this one task?” I always felt like I could just write one script and your whole job is 50% easier.

So I knew that when you go into niches that are not developers, you will always find all these inefficiencies. I went into the video production and live events niche, which — to be fair — is very tech-heavy, but also not developers. So there’s a fair amount of missing software or even bad software. And you come in and you solve a simple problem and people love you for it. They’re excited. And then you just listen to them — “what do you need, what do you need?” And you don’t come with all this baggage of “I know how it’s always done, I know whatever — my 20-year-old machine that has these three buttons, I need these three buttons.” No — I have no idea. I just listen to the people. So okay, this is what you need — how can we

[12:08]

put this into a UI so it’s intuitive, it makes sense, it’s easy to use. People love it.

Sandra: Would you say you’re a pretty good developer?

Lukas: I would say I’m pretty good with user experience design.

Sandra: Okay. Because I have this printer here and I just can’t connect it — I just can’t figure out, man. And I figured, like you know timers and time zones — can I use your assistance with the printer after?

Lukas: Have you tried turning it off and on again though?

Sandra: Yeah, it’s on now but it doesn’t — it says my cartridge is misaligned. I mean, what is a cartridge even? I don’t know, but I thought like, you built this entire app, you must know how to connect a printer, right? So I’ll just give you a call if that’s okay.

Lukas: Yeah, please.

Sandra: I have also some wireless connectivity problems and internet connections — does that count? Can I jump on the call as well please?

Lukas: Sure, yeah.

Sandra: Okay, no — I’m sorry, I only do this for friends. But Lukas, it’s very interesting — I know there is a lot of discussion about B2B and B2C, but when you were building a product did you actually have in mind, “this product will be only for B2B,” or did it happen naturally?

Lukas: It was again a bit of dumb luck. When I built this I thought, “this is never going to — who is going to pay money for a countdown timer? Nobody.” So for me I was already thinking of the next idea that could come. And then I was thinking — I always wanted to do B2B because

[14:08]

I looked at pricing. Don’t you do the same? You look at pricing and you think, what price do you give your app? And then you look at a B2C product and immediately you look at Netflix, right — $4.99 per month — and you cannot go much higher, except if people really want it. Like some kind of “lose weight” pill or a luxury product, yeah. But not like your online tool that you use to track your habits.

Sandra: Yeah, no — you cannot go into the $20s with that, you’ve already lost most of the market.

Lukas: So yeah. And didn’t you make the calculation when you started: “I need like a thousand customers just to get to the money that I want,” and then you kind of become disappointed and say, “a thousand — where do I get a thousand customers?”

Sandra: Yeah, yeah. You either charge 10,000 people $5, or a thousand people $10, and then you say, “what if I charge 100 people $100? Wouldn’t that be better?” What about charging a million people?

Lukas: Yeah, but that’s also the problem. I think you said it very well — we in the community tend to build and sell products to developers. And then you went outside of this community and found your own niche. But then my question is: when you build this type of product and you have never been in this niche, how do you market it? How do you find the best ways to do your marketing?

Lukas: It’s complete chaos. I mean, you just try. It’s like — you just throw a bowl of spaghetti against the wall and the one that sticks is the one. Complete chaos.

[16:11]

Sandra: Noted. What was the first thing — when you had a product, what was the first thing — oh sorry. Okay, but let me just counter — how do you market your product? How did you know how to market your product?

Sandra: Oh, I did — question here, next question please.

Lukas: You kind of know the people you’re selling to!

Sandra: Hey, hey, wait — is he allowed to do that? Is he allowed to ask? I have no idea. Excuse me, let me talk to our producer. What’s going on?

Okay, please answer, Sandra. I guess you kind of know the people you’re selling to, but did the experience you previously had in a startup mean you went into building this product knowing that you’d have to figure out the marketing side as well? So you’re not that classical developer who tends to build apps — you had this business mindset as well?

Lukas: Yeah. I mean, every developer that builds a product and is not aware that they now have to learn marketing is probably — I mean, it’s just the thing, right? You go into product development and you have a business because you also want to do marketing. It’s part of the game.

And like you said — you have to know who you’re selling to. Well, it’s the same for me. I had the extra step where I first of all had to understand who I’m actually selling to — who are these people that actually buy this? And then I understood that, and then came the next step: where are these people that I’m

[18:12]

selling to? Where do they congregate? Where do they have their communities?

Sandra: Please tell me it was on Reddit.

Lukas: It was not. Reddit is hard. You do one post and people kind of forgive you for being a little bit markety, but if you do your second post and you’re very obviously selling something, people don’t like it. You have to be very careful — ask questions or kind of introduce yourself. But you definitely then hit the sweet spot with SEO. That’s something we would consider at this point as a main channel to the product?

Lukas: Yeah, absolutely. And I think this works basically in every niche, because what happens is it’s very technical content. My customers are very technical — they understand a lot of hardware and software things. And so you end up writing these articles and blog posts that really explain how do you go from point A to point B. How do you connect this device with this cable to this adapter to this device into my app.

Disadvantage: you can never outsource it. It’s very hard to just hire somebody on Fiverr and say, “write articles for me.” They don’t know — there’s no value. So you have to do it yourself. Advantage: nobody else bothered doing the work, so you immediately rank for these articles.

The volume is not really high — you look at the keyword search tool, you put in your keyword and it says zero, because it doesn’t even measure it, it’s so low. But just today I was actually checking our stats and I was looking at which blog posts actually earn us money, and the most

[20:13]

technical ones — “how do I combine OBS Studio with Stagetimer” — is one of the highest. Earned us like $4,000 this year.

Sandra: That’s where the quality content comes into the story. Imagine if you had one article that fixed all printers — imagine! But that’s not all you’ve done. You have both quality and quantity, because I remember you did a lot of programmatic SEO — for those that don’t know. Is that still going? Is that still bringing in some customers?

Lukas: Yeah. Let me explain what it actually is. Programmatic SEO means you autogenerate pages. One very good example is what Pieter Levels does on Nomad List, right? He has all this information about all these cities — who goes there, what is good, temperature, weather, beach, whatever. So he can create these long-tail keywords like “best city for surfing in the evening and drinking beer” or whatever, and then autogenerate a list of the best cities. That’s really cool.

And I thought, I want to do the same. So I thought, what do people look for? Well, people constantly search for countdowns — “5 minute countdown,” “10 minute countdown.” It’s crazy how often this is Googled. Now it’s also crazy how many pages actually offer content for that — there are literally YouTube videos that are just a countdown of 30 minutes.

So I thought, you know what, let’s try it. And it turns out people click. I just generated a timer that generates a link for each minute — there’s a one-minute countdown, a two-minute countdown, and so on. First of all, I

[22:13]

just put it online, but then I realized I have to limit it somehow, so I limited it to the first 5,000 minutes. And it ranks and people click — we get a lot of impressions and clicks from that. But I have to confess: we don’t get sales from that.

Sandra: Okay, so it’s just boosting your ego — is that what you’re saying?

Lukas: It’s mostly boosting my ego, yeah.

Sandra: When you use it as content to do real marketing on other platforms?

Lukas: I mean, it was a test, right? We tried it out and we didn’t know if it would help or work, and the data says it’s not really effective. But I think it just depends on the long-tail keywords you use.

Sandra: Sorry — do you track this over a period of time? Maybe the users that land on a page will become a paying customer in two or three months because they remember your product?

Lukas: Yeah, yeah. We kind of remember what is the first page a person came onto our website, and then later when they purchase we can connect the dots.

Sandra: So pretty deep into analytics and the data side. Do you use Posthog or what do you use?

Lukas: I use Airtable.

Sandra: Okay, so you have like — what do you use?

Lukas: I use kind of a custom analytics. We have Google Analytics hooked up, but I always feel like everybody just blocks that anyway, so I literally built my own very simplified analytics thing where I just remember the first page a person lands on, put it into local storage, eventually when they make an account upload it to my Airtable, and then later compare the data.

Sandra: Okay. Is that the next product or

[24:13]

what?

Lukas: I don’t know — it works really well, I really like it.

Sandra: I’m a bit surprised, because we preach about “use this, just pay the money, don’t spend time, don’t reinvent the wheel” and so on. And then all of a sudden you come in, you say you were lucky, you didn’t know what you were doing, and now you’re rebuilding everything as well — and yet you’re highly successful and I don’t get it, man.

Lukas: I’m admitting this sounds entirely stupid and crazy to say — I’m building my own analytics, it makes no sense. However, counterpoint: I feel like most people don’t understand how to read analytics. Okay, so you hook up whatever — Simple Analytics, Plausible, whatever you have — and then you look at the data and you see “okay, so many people hit this page and so many people hit that page.” But what does it tell you? What does the information actually tell you? I find it so hard. Okay, it tells you there are more people now than there were before — or less people. That’s a good piece of information. But it doesn’t really tell you which content is more successful, because some page can be clicked a lot but people really don’t care, and another page can be clicked very little but people care a lot.

And then you can make click funnels, right, where you say “okay, the person came here, did this, did this, did this” — and then it gets very complex, and you have all this tooling you have to understand. How does my tooling work? Where does this value actually come from? How many people actually give me this value? Do they click yes or do they click no on the cookie banner, and do I actually get their analytics? I don’t know — don’t you feel this sometimes when you look at analytics?

[26:14]

Sandra: I fully agree with you. Because if you go into any analytics tool you will be overwhelmed if you don’t know what you’re searching for. And then once you know what you’re searching for, there are multiple steps you need to take in order to build anything meaningful. So anytime I’m talking with someone who is just setting up Posthog, I always say to them that just having all these events can be super scary if you don’t know what you want to get from them.

Lukas: Exactly. So I turned it around — I said, what do I actually want to know? I want to know two things: the person that purchased — which was the first page they landed on, and did they click on any ad. Those are the two things I want to know. So I built a very custom solution for that.

Sandra: Do you also follow where they’re coming from, or are your channels very niched?

Lukas: We ask them. After they purchase we ask them, “hey, where did you hear about us?” And then we mostly trust that.

Sandra: Yeah. I saw that someone got a new onboarding flow.

Lukas: Yeah. I kind of love it. I mean, it never even crossed my mind that you could do this. I love that you even tried it — that you had the courage to say, “I’m going to build my own thing, how hard can it be?” And you went for it. And it seems to work for you. So maybe it doesn’t need to be 100% accurate.

Even because every time I think about this, I imagine that Google has a lot of indicators and a lot of tracking points to follow a user outside of your website as well — fingerprinting and all of that stuff. And yeah, maybe that stuff doesn’t really matter, at least not at our size.

Lukas: Yeah, no. We don’t care about personalization, we don’t care about user

[28:14]

— all we want to know is how many people clicked on this, and in the end which content is most successful.

Sandra: Yeah, makes total sense. But then I have to also ask — maybe it’s just my curiosity — how does it feel for you to work with these B2B companies? Because, you know, as we said, sometimes we think that it’s much easier just to do B2C — you have more control, kind of like the feedback loop, et cetera. But how does it feel from your side, because you just jumped into B2B?

Lukas: I think people always find it more scary than it is, because people immediately think of the sales call, the security questionnaire, the certificate questions — “do you have this, do you have that, can we go through this” — and then six months later you write a contract that you have to counter-sign with your lawyer and stuff. Not at all.

In fact, I made the opposite experience — that most businesses are very happy to just purchase and don’t do any of that stuff. And I think there’s a golden price point. What I found out is that many large companies have their departments, and they tell them: “everything below $5,000, just do it.” Some call it the R&D credit card. The other day we were at IKEA headquarters — they invited us — and I asked the guy that purchases our tool, “how do you make this decision?” And he’s like, “yeah, I have this R&D budget and I just use it.” And he said, “yeah, one

[30:16]

day if we want to roll out your tool to every single store worldwide, then we have to go through all those questionnaires and blah blah blah. But as long as we in the headquarters just use it — no problem.”

Sandra: And this is something very important to know.

Lukas: So if you stay under that $5,000 per year price point, most companies literally just put their credit card in and purchase and don’t bother. And if they do bother you, you just say no often enough and then they purchase anyway.

Sandra: Oh, you definitely figured this out. So for your product you don’t actually have these long sales cycles?

Lukas: No, very rarely. We have a few companies that really said, “oh, we want to have 60 seats and we’re purchasing for 3 years” — okay, then it gets really expensive, and then they want you to fill out data security stuff. And then we do it because it’s a big price point. But we always enter with, “we don’t do it.”

Sandra: Yeah. But you said a year ago that you were just starting to understand positioning and pricing and marketing, and now that you’ve been through all of that — what is the shortcut? Is there a shortcut?

Lukas: I feel like this is the shortcut: you price it below $5,000, and then price it high enough so people see the value. In a sense, you just look at your tool and you kind of know, “okay, this is how much it’s worth,” and then you find a point between the $5,000 and that point and you try.

Sandra: Is it $5,000 in Germany specifically?

Lukas: No, I didn’t ask specifically what it is, but that’s around the — some have $1,000, some have $10,000. Yeah.

There was this interesting stat regarding the people

[32:17]

purchasing indie products, and I think there was a strong bias towards the US — most people have a lot of purchases from the US. Do you see the same?

Lukas: Yeah, it’s the same. I find that quite interesting. And I wonder why — is it because jobs in tech in the US are so well paid and there’s just a lot of VC money around?

I mean, if you have a tech product that’s true. But I don’t have a tech product — I have an events industry and video production product. And I made an observation. I looked at who purchased from me in the US — you know, the US is the first big leap and then the next ones are kind of the European countries. However, I talked to an investor last year — we ended up not doing any deal, but he gave me a good hint after I kind of completely bungled the presentation of my company. And he said, “here’s how you can calculate your total addressable market.” I had no idea — how do you calculate the total addressable market if you don’t have a competitor who already publishes it in their stock report? So he said: look at all the countries that you have revenue from, then divide the revenue by the population, and then look at a country where you have the most revenue-to-population relationship. And then apply the same ratio to all the other countries.

So I did this, and I was expecting the US to be the one — because we get so much money from it. But there are also a lot of people in the US — almost 400 million. So for us it’s actually not the US. It’s actually Norway that has the highest purchases-to-population density. And if you then apply the same

[34:18]

ratio from Norway to all the other countries, suddenly you see, “oh, our market size is maybe $2 million per year,” instead of what I guessed — I don’t know, $50,000.

Sandra: That’s fascinating.

Lukas: Yeah. Of course, because you think of the US as a country, but Norway is probably 30 times smaller. So if you apply it across 30 countries, it can be misleading to just think “a lot of people in the US.”

Sandra: Super interesting. Well, Lukas, it’s time for a break. On this show we kind of try our favorite treat — I hope you have a treat around — and it’s a break. Our sponsor also has a break, and that is: when your code breaks, they can fix it faster. Hey — are you Sentry, by the way? Because that was my follow-up question. I wanted to ask if you’ve also made your own Sentry, and I know that’s what Pieter Levels actually did — but you use Sentry? That’s quite cool. It’s really useful.

Lukas: Yeah. Did you start with it or did you add it later?

Sandra: No, I started with it. I’ve used it before, and I think Sentry does one thing well, which is they managed to present the information in a way that you understand it. Even like — you get all these error messages all the time and they somehow tell you, “hey, this one is really important, look at this one, and these ones are not so important, forget about them.” This is super valuable.

You know what my thing was — I used it in various gigs and freelancing and so on, and I never thought this was a product for me. I thought, “yeah, this is for the Enterprise-type person.” And for some reason I added Sentry to a

[36:19]

couple of my products this year and then I thought, “wait a second, I had these bugs and I was completely unaware of them. Why didn’t I do this sooner?” I kind of realized — I don’t know why I had this mentality, but it’s pretty much free if you have any product that has an API or backend or something. It’s pretty useful.

Because what it did for me was that I was a little bit more relaxed when I pushed something, because I knew I was going to get that email if something breaks. And before, I basically needed a customer to tell me that something broke — which is a lot worse scenario. And then you know, you get an email and maybe the customer writes anyway, but you’re already on it. So you could have this smart reply where it’s like, “yeah, we’re on top of it, we know what’s going on, we’re professionals here.”

Sandra: So you show off! I have my favorite peanuts here, and they’re actually a mix — wait, is it still the sponsored section?

No, this is the break, we’re on the break. So this is my favorite snack. I think peanuts are underrated, to be honest — unless you’re allergic, and then please do not eat peanuts, they’re bad for you. But I really like peanuts. What do you have for us, Lukas?

Lukas: So I have to explain the backstory, because I have a belly and I’ve always struggled with it. It’s not easy for me to lose weight. And this year I said, you know, I have a baby, life is going to be turned around here. And

[38:19]

I learned a little bit about nutrition. What I understood — and I’m a complete noob and probably many people will tell me I’m wrong — is that with exercise you can only do so much, because most of your calories that you use per day is just resting calories, and then there’s a little bit of exercise on top. But what you can really control is your intake. It’s just a math problem, right? About 2,000 calories is what you need as a person per day. So if you eat less, you lose weight over time.

Sandra: We need to write this down.

Lukas: Now the problem with eating less is you’re hungry, right? I mean, that’s why we eat a lot — because you’re hungry. And so the second piece of information I learned is: if you eat more protein — which I always thought was for gym people with their protein farts — but in fact, it satisfies you.

Sandra: Excuse me — have you ever been to those gyms and gone to the changing room? Have you ever smelled, you know what I mean?

Lukas: Oh boy.

Sandra: Yeah, I stopped writing this down five minutes ago.

Lukas: But peanuts have a lot of protein — go on, go on! It helps you be satisfied. So I combined the two and said, okay, let me just eat less calories than 2,000 but eat more protein to feel full. But that thing tricked me once, I have to be honest. I bought this thing and never read the label, and then I was eating this chocolate and I read the label and it was like 500 calories or something. It was very delicious, I ate a bunch of them and I was like, “wait a minute, am I gaining — what’s happening right now?”

So here’s the third part of the puzzle. Because I tried to count

[40:20]

calories in the past and it’s terrible — you have to measure everything and I was like, “I’m never going to do this, I don’t even need to start.” But since AI came out I thought, “you know what, maybe I can just take pictures of everything and let AI calculate it for me.” It doesn’t have to be perfect — it can be off a little bit here and there, it doesn’t matter. I just need the guesstimation. I just need to know more or less which food is good and which food is bad.

So since then it’s really cool — I just make pictures of everything. And then I went on Amazon, you know, lowest calorie, highest protein — it’s like 50% protein — all right, purchased, as one would. You would go on Amazon and get a pack of 50 of these or something.

Sandra: Yeah, I literally got the sample pack. Just classic. Does it have a flavor?

Lukas: Yeah, this one — so this is funny. This one is vanilla chocolate. And my stupid developer brain read this and thought, “oh cool, like normal chocolate — the default chocolate — vanilla.” And then I get it and I taste — wait, this is like real vanilla? This doesn’t mean, you know, like we understand it: developers think “basic, default.”

Sandra: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, but that’s my problem with these — they sound too tasty, they sound too good to be true. Why are you eating, Sandra?

Sandra: I don’t know, I thought it was a break thing and we are eating at the moment. We’re professionals here. I just started.

I mean, Lukas can eat — he’s our guest. But what are you having there? It seems very chewy. All right, share it with us before we go to the next question, because we know that Finland is the best country in the world and all the products —

[42:22]

it’s a fact — yeah, and all the products first come to Finland and then we approve them for you guys. So now we got this new pineapple-taste gum. No one in the world has this, actually.

Sandra: I don’t know where my camera is. Is that also for losing weight?

Sandra: This is not medical advice, by the way. And whatever Lukas said — please don’t apply that, you’re probably going to get sick. Please.

Lukas: Okay, very good one. Well, I will not eat any of my peanuts because there is a problem — they have a pretty good amount of protein. I don’t know if you looked at the back of peanuts: there’s a pretty substantial — what does it say? 24 grams of protein.

Sandra: Where do you get 24 grams of protein? But how many calories?

Lukas: It’s a lot of protein, but then there’s 50% fat in this one — and that’s the combo, right? You cannot get just the protein, you also get the fat. And it’s a bit similar with meat-heavy diets, because then you get more protein from meat. Meat might be lower on average though, depending on the type.

Sandra: Yeah, but meat also has fat, but that also depends on the type of meat. So it’s usually the combo, but you cannot eat too many of these. I think almonds are kind of the best you could get as a healthy snack.

Did you guys notice that a lot of people in the community actually care about these things?

Lukas: Yeah. I mean, it’s a package. When you do any making you also need to take care of your lifestyle, because no one else does. No one else pays the health insurance — you’re on your own, you need to look out for yourself.

Sandra: Very true, very true. Yeah, it’s very complicated. I just make pictures of everything and send them to the AI, and the AI gives me a five-star rating for my food. And then I just say, “okay, what do I need to get five stars?” And it tells me, “add whatever — Greek yogurt, this and that.”

[44:23]

Sandra: Okay! Do you use ChatGPT or do you have some particular app?

Lukas: I use Claude. This is how I pronounce it, right?

Sandra: Nobody can pronounce it properly.

Lukas: It’s really good. I feel like ChatGPT — it kind of ignored a little bit what I wanted it to do, especially the new 4o — I don’t like it. So Claude really listens to me, which I like.

Sandra: Okay, okay, okay! Now we can move on.

Lukas: Good, good break.

Sandra: Good break. Thank you, and thanks to Sentry for sponsoring this break.

Lukas: Yeah, thank you Sentry. I’m a paying customer.

Sandra: Hey, I also — I will also take a headband if it’s okay. Excuse me — yes, yeah, it’s for Lukas. Yeah, yeah, it’s good. Yeah, it’s good.

But Lukas, you mentioned you were building and working in a startup before. How is that journey compared to bootstrapping now? And also — did you ever consider raising money for Stagetimer, or do you plan to do that at some point?

Lukas: I literally talked to investors before. Yeah.

Sandra: I’ve heard you say that. And twice! But here’s the thing — it’s often a sung song, I think. Investment money changes your company significantly, right? And you feel this even if you’re just an employee, because you get your stock options but then it’s like a

[46:23]

gamble. And you understand: okay, now the CEO is just running around the whole time looking for new investment. And if he’s not looking for new investment, he needs to make sure the old investors know that everything is going well. And then they expect that you grow 3x per year — 300% growth per year — it’s kind of the baseline they all expect. And it’s hard, especially if the economy is not really profitable.

So the bootstrapper says: let’s have profitability and let’s grow organically and let’s spend — what we don’t need for our own life — on ads and whatever. And the funded startup says: in 3 years, when we have our next round, we need to be like 9x bigger — actually more than 12x something, bigger than right now. So if we need to be 10x bigger, let’s already have 10x the people, 10x the ad spend, 10x the whatever. So you spend the money now as if you’re already 10 times as big, and then you’re in this rat race over and over.

And as soon as you can’t prove that you’re growing anymore, your investor says “what?” — shut down, give us the rest of your money back, let’s do a down round, let’s dilute it, let’s find people and make an unprofitable round. And then in the end you sit there as a founder and you have 5% left of a company, or 1%, and then you sell it for a gigantic amount of money and you sit there with like $2 million in the end, or $4 million. You get the cool stories where people get really rich, but most of the stories — people do not get rich. They just spend all this grey hair and burn

[48:25]

out and then get nothing.

Sandra: I don’t know, should I cry? You’re making Sandra cry right now.

Lukas: Why are you feeling bad for yourself?

Sandra: I mean, you can do it well too, right? You just have to —

Lukas: No, no, no — you cannot take it back. You said what you had to say. It’s too late. You messed it up, man.

Sandra: It’s just — you asked what I experienced in my startup, and it’s exactly what I experienced in the startup. Working very — you are very right. You didn’t say anything wrong. I think that amount of pressure is very hard to handle.

I think the startup success stories are more shared than the failure ones. So anytime you have like these ideas of building something — I was first time introduced to independent building, or bootstrapping, in this community. Before that, everything was like “startup” — we are having ideas but next to having ideas you are chasing money to build those ideas. So I totally get you.

But you said you were talking with investors?

Lukas: Yeah. Because I mean, if somebody comes to you who has whatever millions of dollars in their bank account and says, “I want to talk to you about your company” — I’m not going to say no. I want to hear them out. What do these people want? I don’t have people like this in my family or in my friends. I want to hear them. But I’m also going to be honest and say, “you know, my company right now is probably not a fit for funding.”

Sandra: But you would want an angel investor then, and not, you know —

Lukas: I thought really hard about it, and I would only want somebody who can help me with knowledge — a “smart money” investor, quote unquote — who does not want us to grow like crazy and have an exit in such-and-such amount of years. We did talk to someone like this, but they also saw that our market size and our growth

[50:26]

potential is probably not there. So yeah.

Sandra: So I got lucky with my product. You didn’t get that lucky, but — did you ever consider how to expand the market? Would that be possible — going outside of the current features you have on the product?

Lukas: Yeah, I’ve thought a lot about it. Can you translate the tool? Can you do something else? Can you include other people?

Here’s what I observe with software: you have a tool, it’s cool, people love it, it’s easy. And then you say, “let’s also get this other group of people to like our software” — so you add features. And then you get a third group of people and you add more features. And then the first group of people says, “it’s now complicated, I don’t like it anymore.” And it becomes enterprise software and they look for something else. And then you’re in this rut — you’re in this Photoshop mode, right? This thing can do everything and people don’t really like it anymore.

So I’m thinking: isn’t it better to just build a second product? Literally, that’s what I’m doing right now with Rundown Studio. And that came from — was it a customer request?

Lukas: Actually it was from a friend. I got into communities in the space. I got into a Discord community where people talk about live video production and made friends with the guy who owns the community. He’s also a developer who does his own product. And we were like, “you know what, people want this — let’s build it.” And it happened to be very similar to Stagetimer, which I already built, so the logical jump was very similar. I had a bit of fear — “do I build my own competition?” On the other hand, if people don’t want to use the one, they go to the other one and we still get the money.

[52:28]

Sandra: Sure. We’ve seen this a little bit. I think it’s a way to experiment without risking that much. If you followed Tibo Maker with Type Frames and then he made Revid from it — it’s basically the same product but different targeting — and probably new features in the meantime. But it turns out that the newer product is actually better. So he was thinking to shut down Type Frames, where it came from.

Lukas: I think that’s very interesting. The cool thing you can do is the experimental stuff first — you say, “I always thought if I do it this way it’s better,” and then you do it and try a new product, and you find out either it’s better or it’s not. That’d be cool.

Sandra: Yeah, but yeah. Is this group in Germany, the Discord, or is it just global?

Lukas: Global.

Sandra: Okay, yeah. So it’s quite — I keep asking about Germany because at some point you left for Asia, right? That was the thing everyone does. You look for a place where you can stretch your runway, and that seems like a brilliant idea. How did that work for you? Was it a good journey?

Lukas: I love it. People do it and you should — everybody should do this, like the hacker nomad thing. However, there are drawbacks. Like everything has drawbacks, this one has trade-offs. And the trade-off is: if you travel the whole time, it really wears you down a little bit. And that’s why most of these nomads end up staying in one place for six months — they say, “oh, I like this place and this place, I’m just going to go back and forth.”

So for me, I also felt like — how long did you stay?

We ended up staying six months and then we came back. And it also — you know, I’m 35 and we wanted to settle down and said, “you know what, we loved our life settling down — let’s do it.” And

[54:29]

then we decided to have kids.

Sandra: Well, that’s a kind of lifetime value deal you got there!

Lukas: Ah, it’s a good one!

Sandra: Come on, guys, it’s a good one! I had it there. The baby — yeah, hi hi LTV. Yes.

How — you know, we all work a lot and there’s no set hours. Did this slow you down? Building a family life next to building a business?

Lukas: I think as a bootstrapper it’s easier because you’re flexible and you can help each other easily, right? You don’t leave the house in the morning and come back in the evening and then the baby’s exhausted, the mother’s exhausted, you’re exhausted, and you still have to deal with everything. I think we’re handling it quite well. But it takes a lot of time — obviously it takes a chunk out of your day and you have to take that from somewhere else.

Sandra: You’ve adjusted very well. Because sometimes — I mean, I haven’t seen the behind the scenes of course — but a lot of people are saying “the sleep is gone, this is very difficult.” But you seem to be in a fairly comfortable spot.

Lukas: Maybe we got lucky, you know. He has a good rhythm and we can hand — Liz needs to do this in edit every time Lukas says “we got lucky.”

Sandra: You seem to be very — okay, listen, pretty crazy idea. Have you ever gone to the lottery and bought a lot of stuff?

Lukas: No. Here’s what I think, right? People say having a successful business is like a 1% chance. The thing is, you can do it over and over. So you can just increase your chances by trying again. And

[56:30]

I feel we kind of approach having kids almost like a business. We said, “okay, you know, it may work out, it may not work out — it’s kind of a project and we have to try. Just like marketing — you try this, you try that, this works, this doesn’t work.” Kids is the same. And you can kind of increase your luck by being smart, reading about it, trying a few things.

Sandra: Yeah, I have to stop you there. Because we’re approaching a very serious question.

If I were to show you this huge box of Legos — would you be my best friend? Because I really — you know what I need, I need someone to look at it and come up with a brand new idea from this set. Is that — are you familiar with that? I believe it’s incredibly hard to do, but I know that people do it and I love it.

Lukas: How much of your day do you spend on Legos?

Sandra: Right now I cut it out because of the baby. But I did like, you know, the no-screen-time hours — an hour and two hours.

Lukas: There you go. So that’s where the baby drama comes. Now you don’t have hobbies anymore.

Sandra: I’m getting a new one — build the Beans!

Lukas: Yeah, yeah, perfect life, Lukas, now it’s coming out. No hobbies. What else? I’m going to learn how to fly. I’m really excited.

Sandra: That’s cool. I saw that. So one of our common acquaintances, Dimma — he posted this selfie from the airplane

[58:31]

I think, and then you were like, “I’m just going to the airport and asking about it,” right? How? No, no —

Lukas: I was like, “I want to do the same.” But I know nobody, and he was like, “go to the airport and ask people.” Like what? What do you mean, go to the airport and ask people? What kind of stupid suggestion is that?

But turns out there are a lot of small airstrips and you can go there and just ask. And that’s what I did.

Sandra: And you actually flew on the first lesson?

Lukas: I literally get there — they have this info day. I was like, “info day, amazing, right? I will not have another chance.” I go there and I see four airplanes shown off, and I expect 100 people — nothing. Just a few people from the club. And I go there, somebody says, “hey, what can we help you with?” It’s like, “yeah, I’m interested in flying.” So they explain how it works, the lessons, how expensive it is, blah blah blah. And I was like — “do you have time? Do you want to go up?” I was like, “absolutely, I have time.”

Sandra: You are — can we say it again that you got lucky?

Lukas: Unbelievable. You go there and you literally fly the plane and you don’t crash the plane — which is kind of the key point.

Sandra: Yeah, I wasn’t — I wasn’t the one, right? There was a second person in it.

Lukas: Yeah, yeah, right, right.

Sandra: Well, you got lucky. Are you sure? Are you prepared for this?

Lukas: I’m ready. I’ve been ready for 10 years already. I’m so ready for this, I want to — yeah, yeah, let’s do it.

Sandra: Yeah. But that’s interesting — where is Lukas Hermann in 10 years? Is he flying a plane or is he running a 1,000-person company with all sorts of products? Where is this going? Have you even thought about that?

Lukas: I would like to — I mean, I have this on my Twitter profile. If you go to my profile there are these three hills and it says “bootstrapped, then funded, then moonshot project.” I always dreamed of having a bigger company with a

[60:32]

team, and I know this goes beyond the bootstrapper-indie hacker mindset, but I’m okay with it. I always saw my first project more as a passive income generator that allows me to put capital into something that needs a bit more.

Software is cool because you can literally start with a computer and nothing. But then there’s stuff that may need a bit more capital — where you may need a few thousand to get started because you need to do a prototype, something physical, you need some space. I’m looking at these things. I want to do that.

Sandra: You strike me as a person that would be a good leader in that sense — a good manager. You’re a people person. And you’ve actually hired, right, for Stagetimer?

Lukas: Yeah, yeah. Did that go well?

Sandra: It did. I posted on Twitter and I thought, “what good can come out of Twitter?” And then I got whatever — 40 people writing me and wanting this job. And then I had to boil it down to 10 and I had interviews. And then — nobody told me this — the really hard part of hiring is that you have to talk to 10 people and then tell nine of them no. In the best-case scenario, you still have to say no to nine people.

Sandra: What was the one trait that you were looking for when hiring those people?

Lukas: I have not much experience with hiring, so I thought, “I’m probably going to get the wrong person and I’m going to pay them too much and make everything wrong, so I may as well get over it and just start — and next time I know better.” Just fail fast.

And yeah, I did — I had the wrong person. But I could solve it. I had bad sleep for two weeks and then I could solve it. And now I have a good person.

Sandra: Nice.

[62:35]

Ah well, you know what — I like this. I like the dream. I think this whole thing with flying, having the moonshot project — it’s actually inspirational. I think a lot of people also look up to you for this. But I’m bothered by one thing: you used to tweet pretty much every day and you had a few viral things — especially the one just sitting on the grass that for some reason the internet loved. But you’re not there that much anymore. You’re not inspiring people these days, and I think that’s a shame. What happened? Why have you stopped posting? Is it just because you have better things to do these days?

Lukas: I feel like the Twitter algorithm has gone a bit crazy. Between one year ago and now it completely changes every now and then, and you have to adjust. And I didn’t.

I have trouble being the “persona” — you know, tweeting the tweet. Sometimes I think, “ah, who cares about Twitter, I’m just going to tweet whatever goes into my head.” And then at other times I think, “how can I put a good hook and write a good thread that’s informative and people like it?” And you try all of that, and what you think is successful fails, and what you think is the stupidest tweet ever gets 20,000 clicks. I don’t know.

Sandra: That’s the same situation with me. I could put some time and effort into writing a tweet and nothing happens. And then there’s a question mark at the end of some stupid sentence and it goes viral. I’m like, “what’s happening? Can someone explain this to me?” I’ve tried scheduling — never worked. The best thing that works for me is if I have a stupid idea at a stupid time and tweet it. Somehow that’s the recipe. But it’s very hard to

[64:36]

reproduce. But Lukas, I have one more question. What is the one thing that you would like to share with other makers out there? Where should the focus be when they are building a product? Give them some motivation — except that you’re the luckiest person in the world.

Lukas: I always feel like all the other people on Twitter — Peter Levels and whatever — are better at that than me. So I always go into my German corner and say, “you know what, what I can really do well is tell people about starting a business in Germany.”

Sandra: Because apparently nobody knows!

Lukas: Yeah. At least the people that write me don’t.

Sandra: Helpful content! Yeah, yeah. But why don’t you think talking about how you’re growing your business is hitting the spot anymore?

Lukas: I think for me the hard part is that Twitter is not really my marketing platform — and my product is very hard to relate to if you’re not from this niche. The catchy content doesn’t come often, because the normal content is just, “what is this, right?” And a countdown timer — people don’t really understand what it does and what it’s used for. So it’s a bit of a Venn diagram problem that I have.

Sandra: Yeah, got it. Well, Lukas, thank you very much. I had a blast. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us in this somewhat unusual show. We didn’t have the snack segment in a while but I think it worked very well. Thank you for the lovely role-playing at the beginning, Lukas!

Lukas: Well, I’m not going to

[66:36]

watch this recording, for sure.

Sandra: Lukas Hermann — he, inventor of timers and probably time zones. Thank you so much for joining us today. It’s been wonderful. You’re a very funny guy, you’re inspirational, and I think a lot of people have much to learn from you. So please keep sharing things — if not for your business, then for your soul.

Lukas: Yeah, I would. I’d miss it.

Sandra: If you’re not following him, and you’re not put off by B2B businesses — that’s exactly the stuff that I think we need. Someone that’s on the other side of this who can tell you what not to do. Because we cannot all make the same mistakes, right? And we are not going to be as lucky as you — we can establish that, that’s for sure. But one thing brilliant that Lukas said was: B2B is not that difficult.

Lukas: How hard can it be? Yeah.

Sandra: Yeah, it’s not, actually. Please take it away. I have some documentation to submit here.

Lukas: Yes.

Sandra: Thank you, Dan. Lukas, thank you for joining us today, and for everyone listening — have a lovely rest of the week. You can listen to us and watch us on YouTube and also Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and join the Morning Maker Show community on Discord as well. Have a lovely — he has to pay for two years! Yeah. Hello, bye! Thank you so much, everyone. Have a great day. Bye!