Transcript: Accidental SaaS: From Side Project to Full-Time Income in 16 Months
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]
Martin: So cool — how much are you making right now with the timer? If you’re willing to share?
Lukas: Yeah, so we are around $200,000 per year that we do in revenue.
Martin: That’s great! After two years, man, it’s a huge success. You were faster than most of us — stretch it a bit, like, say three years at least.
Lukas: It took us a while to kind of get going, get a payment — you know, like okay, from the payments to now it’s two years, but in total three years.
Martin: Yes, yes. Yeah, makes sense. For me it was the same journey for Kabo — like I started by putting it out for free and basically people complained they couldn’t pay. I was like, what the hell, you talking about?
Lukas: Yeah.
Martin: Yeah, we want to pay, because it will be simpler, you know. They had all of this in mind — like, because I told you, Kabo is a system to do updates directly in-app.
Today I welcome Lukas Hermann on the show, so thanks for accepting my invitation.
Lukas: Thanks, Martin. Nice to be here.
Martin: Lukas, if you should resume your entrepreneurship journey in two–three minutes, how would you do that?
Lukas: I’ll take a note. Yeah, I would start by saying I didn’t come from entrepreneurship at all. I was actually doing a lot of volunteering, and specifically in other countries. I always thought I’m going to, you know, just study like my father wanted — get a good, stable job and earn the money. However, I got introduced to entrepreneurship and it always felt right to me to work for yourself, right? Everybody that has kind of worked in a job and then felt like, “No, I don’t — I want to make these decisions. I don’t agree with that. I think I can pull it off.” And I think everybody who does that eventually either says, “Well, if I have the big mouth I have to prove it — let me pull it off,” or they don’t. They just stay in their job. So I said, you know, screw it, I’m going to try it.
[02:00]
But it has been a long journey. I started working with freelancing even while I was still studying as a software engineer, and I tried to start a startup with two friends — like properly, you know, funded. Completely failed due to human problems, got fully into burnout, went back to work in a startup because I said, “I just need people around me. I need to work in an office. I cannot be working for years by myself at a desk — it drives me crazy.” So I worked in a startup for two years, kind of saw the typical experience: funded, what are the problems, what are the challenges, what’s the cool stuff that comes along with a classic funded startup.
And then I saw on Twitter mainly how people were going a completely different way and saying, “Let me be a bootstrapper. Let me be indie. Let me be solo. Let me do this by myself. Let me not take any funding. Let me grow this organically.” So I don’t have all the stress of constantly searching for more funding sources, constantly presenting results to my investors, constantly having to grow 300% year over year, and if I’m not doing that I have all these problems. So I got attracted by that and said, “I’m going to do this — this sounds like the right thing.”
I started basically beside my work, beside my full-time job. I started a little app, more with the thought of just learning all the ins and outs. What do you need to sell something online? You don’t just need the technical part in itself — you need a landing page, you need marketing, you need users to be able to sign up and log in and pay and process all of this and handle the taxes and the accounting and the back office, everything. So I was like, “I’m going to learn this. I’m going to learn this not expecting anything.” And then it kind of took off — like, people started purchasing and I saw that I think I’ve scratched some
[04:00]
kind of product-market fit niche here. And from then I’ve been growing to what it is now — my wife is helping me, I have one contractor that works full-time.
Martin: Okay, what’s the name of this current project? Because you didn’t drop the name.
Lukas: I didn’t even drop a name, right! So my current project is called Stagetimer.io. If you’ve ever seen a TED Talk, you see like the screen in front and it says like, “You have five minutes left on your thing.” And I’m building essentially a clock like this. You can communicate — as the person sitting with all your controls, you can kind of communicate with the person on stage and show them a message — say, “Hey, hold your microphone a bit closer to your mouth,” or, “You really have to come to an end,” or, “Lunch break is in 2 minutes, please rev it up.” Stuff like this. So it’s kind of this communication tool.
And it comes from this place where I thought — maybe I want to talk about this — I thought this is like the easiest problem to solve. I made this long list of what I’m going to do, you know, what awesome project I’m going to build for this world, and I said, “Well, if I just want to try out stuff, let me just pick the easiest one on this list.” And I thought, you know, a countdown where you click Start on one computer and on the other computer it shows a clock ticking — what can be simpler than this? Let me build it. And boy was I wrong.
Martin: [laughs] That’s something we often miss, you know, in entrepreneurship. Like, most software engineers look for a complex problem to solve because they feel like that will make money, but in fact when you solve the most easy problem you realize so much other problems you have to deal with in your journey of entrepreneurship that make the problem very complex. The same with the timer, yes?
Lukas: Like, you have this wrong idea that you start out saying, “Let me build something complex,” but there’s already too many unknowns in a new project. So the less unknowns you have in the beginning, the better you
[06:00]
make your chances for success, which are already very slim.
Martin: Yeah, and I think your timer example is a very good example, because you just think, “Okay, start and stop button,” and then the more you think, the more you’re like, “Okay, now maybe it could be nice if we can send a message to the guy who’s speaking,” because that’s often what they want to do — otherwise they do signs and stuff trying to say, “Clear the mic.” And then it gets more and more complex.
That’s very cool. And what was — to get back to the notes — you said you started doing volunteer work. What kind of things were you doing as a volunteer?
Lukas: Yeah, so I was going through my kind of local church into a project that happened in the Philippines. There were schools that they built in native villages and I was teaching — they have English as their national language, so we were kind of teaching English. It kind of worked out. I’m a bit critical of volunteering now that I’ve done it, because I see the pros and the cons. But back then it really helped me grow and learn English, which was good as a German, but also get out of my shell and kind of see other stuff — especially see problems that other people have that we don’t have.
Martin: Yeah, yeah. That’s very funny — like, when you travel you realize how much your way of thinking is very self-centered, you know? Like, yeah — now I am in South America in Buenos Aires and I was in a bar yesterday and I saw a map and I was super surprised. I was like, what the hell? This map — and this is a map of Argentina, but since they live in South America and in the south of the hemisphere, the map is reversed — the south is the top of the map.
Lukas: Yeah!
Martin: And I was like, “What?” And then I asked a guy and he said, “Yeah, of course! Why are we going to put everything on the north? We have nothing in the north — everything is like this direction.” There’s no — the point of reference doesn’t make any sense, right? You can just flip it over. I was like, “Oh wow.” And that’s so
[08:00]
many things you get like that when you travel. You’re like, “Oh, okay.”
Lukas: Yeah. I had this experience when I came back — after one year — my parents picked me up. I was like 19, 20. My parents picked me up from the airport, we drove home, and people were complaining: “Oh, there’s a construction site and they’re building something and we have to drive slow on the highway.” And I thought, “I’m just coming from the Philippines — I’m happy if there’s no holes in the street, basically.”
Martin: Yeah, yeah, yeah! Like, humans are very good at adapting to anything. So if you live in really difficult conditions, your level of happiness is different than if you live in nice places. And lately I’ve seen many people who live outside of France or Germany — you know, like a country where we are very lucky in a way — saying, “People don’t realize they live in absolute heaven but they believe they are in hell.” Exactly — they love to complain but in fact they have a good life. You know, come out and see the rest of the world struggling as well.
Okay, that’s great. So that was your kind of starting point to open up to the world. And so what was the first — you said you got a first job and did freelancing at the same time. When you were in your first job, what was your first startup you created?
Lukas: The one — if you call freelancing a startup, right, it’s just me offering my website-building services. But because I had this entrepreneurial thought, I came together with three friends and we wanted to make a kind of translation app. That was before AI — like, where you have a book and you want to translate it to another language, so you put it up and we get this kind of crowdsourcing of translators from all over the world. Basically Fiverr but for translation.
Martin: Okay, if you think of it — which I believe was a good idea. I think you could have pulled it off. But what I see, and maybe what you see
[10:01]
often in startups, is it doesn’t fall apart because the product doesn’t work — it falls apart because the people don’t work.
Lukas: Yeah, and you know, one threw the other one out and there was this infighting. And especially if you — it’s not dissimilar to a marriage: if you can’t trust each other, it’s going to fall apart.
Martin: Yeah, I totally agree. Like most — and I think that’s what most people don’t understand — the problem most of the time is yourself and how you behave and your beliefs and stuff like that. And so when you bring a team together, the problem is inside each person. They’re not made to succeed. Like, most people are made to be employees, and that’s a fact — that’s what school teaches. So you have to accept that you are very bad at this job and you have to learn a lot.
And at the beginning when you create your first startup, everyone thinks he’s Steve Jobs and he’s a genius. And you’re like, “Yeah, maybe or maybe not.” And for me there was this kind of thing — every time I started a project we were ego-driven, and we’re not very honest with ourselves. Like, “Yeah, we can do that next week and we’re going to have 1,000 clients — it’s easy.” You do your pitch deck and you’re like, “Yeah, it’s going like that,” and it’s easy. But then when you try to make it happen daily it doesn’t work, and then you have this fight of ego and stuff.
And yeah — in your spreadsheet the business always looks good in the future. Like, I still remember my partner — we were developing the product and one day he came in and said, “Oh, you know, when do we launch? I want to launch, I want to launch.” And I was like, “Dude — do you even know what you’re talking about? There’s like marketing involved, there’s things you have to do, you cannot just—” You know? “We’re launching!” And, ah, this just
[12:02]
drove me crazy. People are waiting for us to give us money, you know? Some people at the beginning believe in that, and then you realize marketing and everything — you need to convince people very hard that you’re worth the money. And that takes so much time, so much effort. They have to see you everywhere many times, you know, and then maybe they say, “Okay, maybe I will try.”
Lukas: Yeah, and I completely shifted my mindset there. I have this mindset now where I say I’d rather fail fast. Everything new that you do you’re always going to make mistakes. You know, you’re going to buy your first car — you’re probably going to pay too much and buy a really bad car. You’re going to get your first apartment — there are so many things you don’t know, and then you end up, “Oh, the shower doesn’t work — I should have checked that.” And with startups it’s the same, right? You build your first product, you’re going to make many things wrong. So you may as well say, “Let me fail fast. Let me get all the failure out of the way — just expect that you have to do a lot of that.”
Martin: Yeah, I agree. But most people have ego things, and I think you get humble with time. Now we can say that because we’ve been slapped in the face many times. But when you start, you’re like, “Yeah, I am better than others.” And then you realize how much you weren’t. Especially you look at all the success stories — you look at Steve Jobs and you think, “I can do this. It doesn’t look that hard.” But then you do it and you’re even thinking, “Oh, Steve just did this that bad and I could have done better.”
So you started this freelance gig, and during that time — the purpose was the translation app, right? And you told me you got burnout from that one?
Lukas: Yeah, so there was kind of this mix. I had this freelancing company and then we did this startup and essentially it went completely south and sour. It ended up that my partner basically left — just left to the US. And all the
[14:02]
things kind of fell to me. At the same time I had to, you know, do the taxes, liquidate the company that we had created. It all fell back on me. One day there were all these letters coming saying, “You have to fix this, this, this, and this,” and do all these things. And we found out that our accountant hadn’t done a good job and had never handed in any of the documents that she said she would hand in. I was scrambling, trying to figure out how to solve this. Eventually found a Tax Advisor who was in the end willing to help me and we resolved it. And it’s still ongoing — I mean, it’s been three, four, five years later and I’m still doing tax documents from three years ago because everything was done way too late and it’s way too complex.
All of this hit me at the same time. It was like, “I cannot do this anymore.” I was really in a depressed state. And being depressed — you know, it can happen because you have this pressure and then you’re alone and you can’t go to anybody. I always thought, “Ah, it’s just now — I’m going to overcome it. I’m going to fix it.” And it wouldn’t go away. It just wouldn’t go away. So much so that last year I went into therapy because of that, and only then was I able to really get better and get on top of it.
Martin: Yeah, it takes time. It takes time. Like, for me this winter was terrible — I was totally in depression because money was not going in, personal stuff was — my relationship was a mess, everything, you know. As you say, everything falls at the same time. You can handle one of them, two of them, but if they all fall together — it’s like a house of cards that suddenly collapses.
And I think that’s something we often forget in the entrepreneurship journey — we go all in on this journey but you also have a social life, you have a partner in your life, if you have a family, and these things have
[16:02]
moments where they don’t work too. If you’re 70 hours into the work, you don’t have time for that. But at one point it will come back and slap you. That’s what happened for me — I had no time for handling other parts of my life, and I was not making good money, so everything fell down and you’re like, “What the hell?”
I was that close to selling my company. I was like, “No, I cannot do this anymore.”
Lukas: And your entrepreneurship is also sabotaging you in this sense, right? Because you don’t have the office, you don’t have your co-workers, so you don’t have this kind of almost-stable social life that being an employee brings with it. So you’re already having this struggle — you need social contacts. You’re a bit lonely because you’re working on your own the whole time.
And then also because you have this mindset of — all the work I do is directly connected to the money you earn. It’s like a one-to-one relationship: if I work 20 hours I can earn so much. And you start disregarding many parts of your life — everything that is not critical suddenly falls off the table. Going to the dentist? Who cares. Going to the gym, maybe, if it’s important to you. But going out with friends falls off the table. And you do this for three years and you find yourself in a hole that is very hard to get out of.
Martin: Yeah, definitely. And I think now that’s something I’m very careful about, because I know I’ve been in this journey many times. I try not to get myself too much into just working. So now I work during the week and I allow myself to not go out if I want, but the weekend I take off for sure — because I need this time. I know on the long run I need to be able to handle whatever is coming. And that’s very important to have in mind, because otherwise — I’ve literally learned that if I don’t take two days of break in the
[18:02]
week, like on a Friday sometimes — if I don’t take a break now and just go outside and walk and just get rid of all these work thoughts, I’m not going to be able to work next week. Because it’s literally such a strong relationship between your mind resting and you being able to power through another five days.
Lukas: Yeah, yeah. This is crazy. And this is funny because when you start your journey you want to be free. For a regular job you have to show up every day, and at the end you just realize the model of work that everyone is working is pretty good. It makes sense — the amount makes sense, having a weekend makes sense, working mornings makes sense, because society is shaped like that.
Martin: Yes. It’s interesting. When I was in therapy — the most important part — my therapist said, “Get a routine. You need a routine. You need things that happen consistently. Everything that’s not consistent brings you down.”
Yeah. And when you grow up and leave home and suddenly you’re an entrepreneur, you don’t have your fixed working hours anymore — you think the world is open, you can do whatever you want. And then a few years later you find out, “I shouldn’t do whatever I want. I should have a routine. I should have a normal job in my job.”
Lukas: Yeah, yeah, that’s so true. That’s so true.
Martin: Like, for a long period of time I was working anytime — with our children and stuff — and more and more I grow, the more it starts to be like it was a job before. And also, often when you’re in the project — you know, you were saying you don’t have a social life and you miss that — for me, the podcast has been kind of a therapy in a way, because you talk with other people with the same struggle and you share that. And that definitely makes me feel I’m not alone
[20:03]
in these things. You know, you talk about how you were struggling, you had therapy and stuff like that — and I think I was needing that for sure. I talked to ChatGPT — that was not the best therapy, probably. But yeah, that’s something I believe helps: helping each other. Even listening to a podcast I think often is a bit helpful.
Lukas: Yeah. When people ask me, “What is the greatest difficulty when you become a bootstrapper?” I say it’s always the loneliness. It’s finding — getting connected again. Especially if you do the nomadic thing and you go to Asia and you travel around. In the beginning it’s awesome, and then you realize not one of my friends is ever going to be in the same place as me for a long time. So you lose that.
You need these stable friendships in your life — even friendships that have nothing to do with entrepreneurship. And you need this kind of social group. You look on Twitter or you find something — you need something as a bootstrapper, some other people in your life that you invest time in and they invest time in you. Yeah, it’s really important.
Martin: Have you done like nomading while you were an entrepreneur?
Lukas: Yeah, so I was married already and we decided to do like a year — just travel around. That was right after I quit my job and went full-time into my own business.
Martin: Exactly, and then after half a year you interrupted it?
Lukas: Half because we wanted this stable place again, and half because it actually got worse with my depression. But we enjoyed it — it was awesome. Everybody should do it. Travel the world for one year, everywhere. But also you realize there are drawbacks.
Martin: Yeah, they are big drawbacks. Like, you don’t have your habits and everything — that’s what
[22:03]
you were saying earlier. It costs you energy to find the place, find the thing. You know, right now I’m in this nice flat but usually I like in my home to work on the sofa, but this sofa is terrible, for example. So I have a place to work nice and stuff, but this desk is super tiny. Sometimes you have a gym, sometimes you don’t. You can’t have a stable hobby because it may not exist in the place.
Lukas: Yeah, definitely. When I was in Madeira I was going every week to bouldering, and here I’m not sure where it is — I have to search, I have to learn the place, how it works, how to get there.
So yeah, there are many things that bring instability. And when you are in the journey of entrepreneurship, stability is also a thing. You gain freedom, but the problem is that with freedom comes the responsibility of how to use your time. And this is your problem to solve in your own life, because you need discipline — and not only for your social stuff, what we just talked about, but also in the beginning you build a new product and it’s amazing and you’re in this honeymoon phase and you just love it. But eventually it just becomes like any other job. It becomes work. You have to fix the bug, create the marketing page, write the emails, get your to-do list, and you need discipline to do it.
Martin: Yeah, you have to do the boring stuff. And one part I think most makers struggle the most with in this discipline is at one point you stop building new things — mostly you have to fix bugs, talk with clients, grow the business. Growing the business is a full-time job. And some people are stuck in this idea of wanting to build new things, so they keep building new things over and over and don’t focus on the main business — like, which is the one that works? You should make it grow. But it sometimes gets boring to make
[24:04]
it grow.
Lukas: Yeah. And it’s literally — I feel like it’s literally the difference between successful people and not. Like, everybody who’s successful, I feel like they concentrate on one, maybe two products. And everybody that is constantly chasing the new thing and building something new every time — not often are they really successful long term.
Martin: Yeah, definitely. I agree with you. Like, the strategy of shipping a lot of things to find what’s working is very nice to start, but you cannot continue like that. Because at one point you need to focus on something that works and make it — continue and grow and stabilize. Because I think this is one sentence from Warren Buffett: the hardest job is not about being smart at making good investments — it’s about lasting. Finding something that works is very easy; lasting forever is super hard. And this is the thing we should focus on, but it’s super boring to try to last, you know? It’s not very funny.
Lukas: Yeah. But that’s what actually makes it successful, and that’s why you need discipline.
Martin: Right. It’s like going to the gym every day. And getting back to what you were saying also earlier about when you work on your own — you don’t have your circle of friends, social life, et cetera. I think this is also what requires a lot of discipline, right? Now you want to talk to people, you want to be friends with people, have nice relationships — but nothing will push you to do it. You’re not working with them, you’re not hanging out with them after work and stuff like that. So you have to be intentional to create relationships with them — get out, invite them to do something. And most people, I realize, are not really good at that. They’re just letting themselves flow in life and be friends with whoever is around.
But in entrepreneurship you have to choose people. This is actually really interesting — I always say, I talk to my wife about this — the “employee mindset” right?
[26:04]
The employee mindset: things happen to me and I react to what life throws at me. And the entrepreneur mindset is the opposite — you have to want something, you have to say, “Here’s my goal, I want to get there. How do I get there? Okay, step 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.” You start, you realize you’re wrong, you adjust. It’s obviously not a straight path, but if you’re not very intentional in what you want, you’re not going to get it. If you’re not intentionally building a circle of friends, you’re not going to have it — it doesn’t come by itself.
I have one of my best friends — she tried to be on an entrepreneurship journey, tried to do coaching and stuff like that. And that’s what was missing to her. She was never surrounded, and I told her, “That will not help.” And now she quit because she was burned out and she felt like she wasn’t surrounded. She told me, “I need people with me daily.” And I was like, “Yeah, that’s the thing I told you for two years.” But now she doesn’t want to be an entrepreneur because for her entrepreneurship is loneliness.
Lukas: And she didn’t get the point that you’re responsible for that. If you’re lonely, it’s not because of entrepreneurship — it’s because you need to take responsibility for it. And this is such a hard learning. It took me a long time to understand it. I was very lost in the beginning. Now I have many friends, many good relationships. And people are like, “Wow, you’re so committed to talking to people and being friends.” Yeah, because if you don’t do it you’re going to be lonely and you’ll fail.
Martin: Yes. It’s almost like budgeting your time in your life. At the beginning of your entrepreneurship journey you suddenly budget everything into work — like, the more I work the more I earn. And then you realize, “No, I have to budget time into relationships, into my family, into my health. I have to budget for just being bored every now and then.” And being capable of being
[28:06]
bored in your entrepreneurship journey is super important.
Lukas: Definitely. Like, I found myself — two years ago — I found myself with the only hobbies I had being on a computer, right? I was working the entire time, playing a game here and there, but that’s it. Everything happened on the computer. There was nothing I did outside — outside the virtual space. And my wife always said, “You have to get a real hobby.” Okay, I’m getting a real hobby.
So I started — first one was Lego. I just said, “I’m going to buy Lego sets and build something. I need to do something with my hands.” And I build them and I deconstruct them, and there’s a website where you get alternative instructions for the pieces you already have. So I found this, bought some, and I’m building — like, I build one car, take it apart, build a different car from the pieces. I love it.
And just the other day I saw somebody post on Twitter — they’re sitting in an airplane, flying a small airplane. I was like, “This is my dream. I always wanted to fly. I always thought it’s unattainable, it’s so far away — who does this?” And they said, “You know, why don’t you just check it out? Go to a local airport and ask.” And I did. I went to a local airport and talked with one of the teachers — the pilot instructors — and now I’m signing up for flight hours.
I’m aware that this will eat up a large chunk of my life, but it’s something I want to do, and it’s away from the computer. It will give me the energy, it will make me excited because I love it, and it will give me the energy to do the work in the time that is left.
Martin: Yeah, yeah. And I think also the original dream we had, all of us, was to be an entrepreneur — to be free, to do these things. But on the journey we often forgot to take this freedom. I had a friend — he was making very good money and the guy was living in a crappy place, working every day, not getting out. And I was like, “Man, you have success! You have good money.” And he was like, “Yeah, yeah, kind of.” “Why the hell are you not using it?”
[30:08]
Lukas: It’s this retirement mindset, right? “One day I will retire. One day I will use my money to do all of this stuff.” And you always think, “Oh, when I reach a million, when I reach 10 million, then I can do this and this and this.” The truth is, most things you can already do now — it just costs you time. But it gives you so much.
Martin: Also, there is something to take into account: every action you do outside of work gives you perspective on what you’re doing. You will find new problems, new ways to solve things, new understanding — it’s like, you know, it’s the same as taking a shower. That’s where you have the best ideas because you can’t do anything else but take the shower. And it will be the same when you’re going to do piloting or climbing or whatever — you get very good insights on what you want to do by doing something else.
Lukas: I’m a lot on Twitter right now, and everybody who’s bootstrapping is building an AI tool to answer your emails, or the next directory, or the next boilerplate. And I’m kind of so sick and tired of these things. I just wish — I wish people had more contact with, I don’t know, people that bring out the trash, people that collect the trash, people that fly an airplane — and kind of get these other perspectives and understand there are so many more problems to solve in this world, and there are people that are really happy if you solve it.
Martin: Yeah, definitely. I think it should be a thing where instead of doing one idea a week or a month, you do one job a month or a week or whatever. And from that you get ideas, because there are so many jobs, so many things in this world that are not solved, and people struggle with them. And there is good money to be made doing that — especially in the
[32:09]
business area. It’s insane, the number of things you could do to solve people’s problems. But you have to know the problem. You have to get out of your bubble and connect with other bubbles to know that.
Exactly. Talking about that — I’m curious, how did you get into the bubble of Stagetimer? What made you connect to it?
Lukas: So I already said I kind of chose the simplest idea. One day I was in a studio of a friend and he was doing a recording. He has all his buttons and switches, but there’s this one thing where you have to stand up, walk to the other room to click on some kind of countdown timer, start it, go back, sit down. Everything is remote — surely there is a solution where you click a button here and the countdown timer starts over there, right? As a web developer, like — cloud, obvious cloud problem, super simple, synchronized, bam.
So I built it, put it online, thought, “Cool solution, somebody will need it.” I looked for some subreddit — on Twitter, on Reddit — I’m betting there’s some kind of group of people that need this. I looked for like live streaming, video production groups, posted there, and people were like, “This is amazing — can it do this? Can it do this?” Going on and on.
Martin: Did you put it for free at the beginning or put a price?
Lukas: I put it for free. Yeah, I just hosted it, put it for free. I never thought I would earn money with it anyway. And then people started using it and started having requests, and I thought, “You know, may as well use it to learn all these skills.” So I’m building some pro features that people have requested and putting a paywall in front of it — which took me eight months to do, because I was working full-time. And the very day I launched my paid version — which I only announced on Twitter to my whatever 300 followers — I got my first purchase. I thought, “Amazing — there’s something here.”
Martin: What was
[34:09]
the first price?
Lukas: $8 a month.
Martin: Okay, yeah. That’s a great starting point. You go up from there because you realize, you know, it’s B2B and you can charge much more. And how long ago was this?
Lukas: This was two years ago.
Martin: Wow, so that’s — yeah, that’s a good path. You know, often we say you need two to three years to get to where you’re capable of living off it. But you’re more than that now in two years — that’s amazing.
And so what audience do you find your timer is the most valuable for? What kind of people are using it the most?
Lukas: Yeah, so actually when I got in I didn’t know this world at all. We just really looked at who is signing up — like, they sign up with their company email, so we just checked out the companies. And we saw it’s a lot of video production companies. If an enterprise hosts an event, or anything you see on TV, it’s often not produced by the people themselves — they hire outside contractors. They come with the cameras, the lights, the audio. And the people that came with the cameras were also the ones doing the mixing and the live streaming, and those were the ones who purchased our product.
So what we did — we tried to talk to them. “Hey, tell us how you use it. What do you do? How does your daily life look?” And we kind of got to see into their world.
I was once invited to an event — an esports event that happened in Berlin. They took me backstage and showed me: “Here’s the big screen, here are all the camera angles, here’s your timer, here’s this and that.” And then there’s the analyst panel — they have this gigantic screen in front of them that you don’t see on camera, and it just shows my timer. And they can show messages. And then there are
[36:10]
the commentator booths — every one of them has a screen. It’s like, okay, so this is how people use it — they just put it everywhere. Everybody sees the same thing. Everybody knows: “In five minutes there’s lunch. In ten minutes there is team selection, map selection, and then the next game — or fifteen minutes countdown.” Yeah.
It opened my eyes. Now I understand: what do they need? Ah — it has to be real-time. It has to be reliable. It has to be — this. So you understand the features you need to build.
Martin: That’s so cool — you can see your product used in real life. Because, you know, I told you Kabo for me is very much a background project — nobody sees it really. It’s like you work in the background. But you can go somewhere and see what you’ve made used by people — that’s very nice.
Lukas: And it’s just awesome, because every now and then somebody sends me an email like, “Hey, I saw Stagetimer at some conference and they had it there.” The other day I saw on Reddit — somebody sent me a link and it was the Trump presidential campaign.
Martin: Ah yeah, I saw that tweet!
Lukas: Yeah, and there was a picture from somebody taken from backstage. There was a person standing on the podium, people watching, and there’s a screen that says, “You’re 5 minutes over.” It was a bit grainy, but you could very clearly see — this was my product. My logo was even right there. Which means they didn’t pay — they just used the free version. But just seeing this — yeah.
Martin: Yeah, it has arrived! It has arrived. Like, people think, “I need a timer — let me use this.” It’s so simple.
That’s so cool. And you remember we talked about this on Twitter — at one point you were talking about how much B2B was successful for you in this area of the timer. And I shared that I had also built a timer app — not for making a stage, but more for CrossFit, you know, just for yourself to record how much time you spend doing sport. And in B2C, the
[38:12]
business — understanding how to grow it — everything was such a pain. People would say, “Okay, you need to pay influencers, you need to connect to CrossFit gyms,” and at the time I was really not willing to do that at all. So I was incapable of making the business grow past, I don’t know, $700 a month. After that I was stuck — couldn’t continue. I sold it because of that.
Lukas: Yeah, I totally understand. I’m a big fan of B2B for that reason. Because yes, it’s harder to get a business to buy your thing than a person to buy your thing. But the regular Joe on the street — they don’t want to pay for their apps. They want it very cheap. Maybe they spend a dollar, maybe two, maybe three. And they don’t want to pay subscriptions — they hate subscriptions.
And then you get to the business world, and they look at it — they have a problem, they find you, they think this solves my problem. And from that point on, the price is almost not a topic anymore. Obviously you want to price it properly, but they just say, “I’m going to try it. $50 to try it for a month? No problem, let’s do it.” And that’s totally different.
Martin: What’s the average price plan you have right now with the timer?
Lukas: Yeah, so in the beginning I had monthly, yearly — the classic. But we found out that many people just use it for one event, and then they have that event like once a year. So they constantly purchase, cancel, purchase, cancel. And then they forgot to cancel, and then they contacted us, and we had to refund the last month. It was a huge mess.
So I said, “You know what — just give us $24 and you get it for a month period. And if you want all the features, give us” — I think it’s $38 or $48 right now. And this works
[40:12]
perfectly. And then the company that really needs it on a regular basis gets the yearly package — the annual — and pays $180. That’s our cheapest annual plan right now.
Martin: So you don’t have a monthly plan anymore?
Lukas: No, we have removed it.
Martin: Wow, that’s interesting — that’s very unusual. But instead you have a one-month license?
Lukas: Exactly, and it expires. It doesn’t recur. And it saves us so much. First, we did it because of churn — our churn was crazy high. I said, “How can we get it down? Okay, everybody cancels because they just don’t need it anymore for a while.” That’s why we did it. But then we also realized our customer support just went way down — way fewer refunds, way less “I forgot to cancel, can you please—” yeah, can you help.
Martin: Usually people say it’s easier with a monthly subscription, but for you it’s the exact reverse — monthly is the pain, and you shouldn’t have it. That’s super interesting to learn.
On the topic — I think we’ve gone through everything I found interesting. Why did you never raise money, like with Stagetimer?
Lukas: So we actually had investors contact us twice — seriously, wanting to invest. We had one from the Netherlands even coming to Germany. He sat with us in a hotel, we talked about it, we did our pitch, we talked it through. And we both left — I think we both left the meeting with the same sentiment. Later we had a call again and he said, “You know, we really love your product, but the niche is very small and the growth can only be so much. There won’t be the kind of hockey-stick explosion with this product unless
[42:13]
you do whatever different verticals or extend your product into different niches.” Which we kind of didn’t want to do.
So we both said, “You know what — let’s just grow it.” He gave me some tips — how I should calculate my total addressable market, how I should approach this. He said if I need any help I can approach him, and I have talked to him a few times already. But we both realized it really is a bootstrapper-and-hacker product — it really won’t get to the $5 million revenue per year that it needs for a great exit.
And I’m totally fine with that. For me it was always the starting point that gives me the capital to do my next product — one that needs more money. So I can have it now. I’m not employed anymore, I have the time, I’m working on my own thing. And because it is — this is the whole thing why you make a product — in the beginning it’s very hard to grow, but once it’s big, once it’s matured, you can not work on it for two or three months and it still gives you the same money.
Martin: Yeah, that’s so cool. How much are you making right now with the timer, if you’re willing to share?
Lukas: Yeah, so we are around $200,000 per year in revenue.
Martin: That’s great! After two years, man, it’s a huge success. You were faster than most of us — stretch it a bit, like, say three years at least.
Lukas: Okay, it took us a while to get going, get a payment. From the payments to now it’s two years, but in total three years.
Martin: Yes, yes, yeah. Makes sense. For me it was the same journey for Kabo — like, I started by putting it out for free and basically people complained they couldn’t pay. I was like, “What the hell are you talking about?”
Lukas: Yeah.
Martin: “We want to pay, because it will be simpler.” They had all of this in mind. Because I told you, Kabo is a system to do updates directly in-app, and people
[44:15]
wanted that. But they didn’t want to store the updates themselves, they didn’t want to have a server to check everything — they wanted that done for them. Like, when you host anywhere, you don’t care about how to host it. And that’s what they were needing. At the beginning, when it was free, they were needing to host themselves. I was just creating a plugin. And then they said, “No, we want all-inclusive — all-inclusive, and we don’t think about it.” And I was like, “Okay.”
One year after I launched, somebody built an open-source alternative for Stagetimer.
Lukas: Wow. And in the beginning I was super afraid — “Oh man, people are going to use this. It can do the same, maybe even more here and there.” But it literally changed nothing. It changed nothing. Because people want, “I sign up, I have it, it works.” Open source always means there are some extra steps. You have to work for it. There are extra steps involved. “I have a bug — okay, well in six months it’s going to be fixed. Maybe. Or maybe not.” With a paid product, you know the people are going to take care of it. It’s online, it’s available, it does what it should. And if I have a bug I know how to contact somebody.
Martin: Funnily, I have both in my product in a way, because Kabo is fully open source. So there are some people who want the struggle — they don’t even look at my price — they’re like, “Yeah, we’re going to deal with the struggle for months to install this thing.” And I’m like, “Wow, man, you have so much time to lose instead of working on your business.” It’s insane.
But yeah, that’s funny — for me it doesn’t change much. In fact I have many people using Kabo paid and Kabo open source. But the open-source ones ask me questions very often and have problems they share, so I just understand them better. And over time I convert them to the SaaS solution, because
[46:16]
my price is way cheaper than them working two hours a week or a month on it. Like, it’s even written in the documentation somewhere: “Just remember how much your time costs and how much my product costs in a year — you will see it’s barely one hour of your time. So you should maybe pay me.”
Lukas: And that is a sweet spot you want to hit, right? You want to hit that sweet spot where people say, “It’s worth it — it’s a no-brainer. It’s obvious I should pay for this, because the alternative is way more expensive.” And if you are at that spot, people stay and they don’t leave.
Martin: Yeah, that’s the exact case right now — I have not hit those sweet spots for enterprise or big projects because my price gets super high. Like, if you have millions of users you can pay me — at one point the calculator goes crazy, like $12,000 to $16,000 a month. When you have millions of users there are a lot of requests, so I have work to do on optimizing the cost — basically it’s just growing because of my cost explosion. Right now I’m able to cut the price by two I think, because of that, on the big clients. So I will do that and I will probably attract more clients from that side.
Lukas: Oh yeah, this is the funny thing — the pricing and the open source. I’m even sure for you it got you more clients over time. At the beginning maybe you got scared of it, but over time you will have people using the open-source thing, complaining, and going to the paid one.
Martin: Yeah. I haven’t — I didn’t open source my thing. But yeah, I think it’s a good model actually.
Lukas: No, but I was talking about the concurrent one — the competitor of yours. I’m sure it brings you clients, because people are just complaining. Not everyone is happy with open source — some are for sure, but some will not be. Some think they need open source and they will realize no, they need a product
[48:17]
with support. Someone who will help them, someone who will do it for them. And they pay for the peace of mind — to not have to think about it.
Martin: Yeah. I mean, as soon as people hit this border of “I have to set something up that works in the cloud” — even if it’s open-source software — it’s just hard. It’s always hard to put something into the cloud. So if you have a product and you say, “Hey, we are already in the cloud, everything works — distributed servers, uptime, reliability — we maintain it for you,” okay, yeah.
Lukas: Definitely.
Martin: And I think that’s why at one point the serverless things became a thing — because maintaining a server is costly, you know? It’s not easy. You have downtime issues, security issues and stuff. That requires work. And that has value for many companies. They have other things to do than maintain a server for a timer, you know? If they are a video company, they have other stuff to do — not maintain a server. Exactly.
Okay, I think we can go to my list of questions a bit — we’ve talked about great things, that was nice.
What’s your biggest success in your indie maker journey?
Lukas: Earning the first dollar is always the biggest success. Amazing. It feels great — it’s like the start of a new life. You feel like Steve Jobs.
Martin: Yeah, yeah, definitely agree. And how long did it take you to be capable of quitting everything else and being full-time, paying yourself?
Lukas: Yeah, it took me basically 6 months from writing the first line of code to quitting and being fully self-funded.
Martin: Nice, that’s so cool. And how long did it take to have your partner come on board?
Lukas: It’s not really employed — it runs under my name and we have a common account. But
[50:18]
yeah, she’s full-time as well. No, yeah, we’re both living full-time off this project.
Martin: And how long did it take for her to join — 16 months as well?
Lukas: A bit longer. She was doing — even now she’s kind of doing her own business on the side, so she’s sharing her time and I’m full-time.
Martin: Okay, okay, okay. Another question — on your routine — how many hours do you work a day?
Lukas: Hmm, six, I would say. If I do concentrated, focused coding, six hours — my mind is right. However, if you do emails and stuff it can be longer, you can do more.
So actually, more interestingly: I don’t work Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays usually.
Martin: Oh, three-day weekend!
Lukas: Yeah, I do a four-day week. At one point I was doing a concept I created — it was called “No More Monday,” because Monday is so much attached in people’s minds. Like, “Oh, this is the start of the week, the weekend was so great,” and you’re kind of having this bad energy of “this is the beginning of the week.” So I decided to try kicking out Monday — to say, “I have one more day than everyone else.”
I wanted three days, so I kicked out all meetings from Fridays. And then I have the freedom that on a Sunday, when I’m recovered, I can work a little bit, but I don’t have to. And this is the free day — I can do whatever I want.
Martin: That’s so cool, that’s super nice. So what’s usually your routine — how do you shape your day?
Lukas: I have almost normal working hours. I start at 9:30, I have calls with the people that work with me in my team. With my — now I have a second product, so I’m having calls there as well. I usually finish — we make a really
[52:19]
nice lunch break at around 3 and we watch something — me and my partner — and it takes one hour. And then I work a little bit more and then I get tired and I stop around, I don’t know, I would say six or seven.
Martin: That’s cool. On the other side — thanks to your project, we were talking about the outside things — do you have something in mind that you got yourself, like it’s expensive or something? Because you got this freedom. Maybe it’s the pilot license, or you have something else in mind?
Lukas: 100%. So I wasn’t — I’m not a big spender on stuff. I hate having stuff — it gives you so much responsibility. But this year I informed myself about what a pilot license is, and I found out it’s actually €8,000 to €9,000. I can afford this. I will do it. It’s my dream.
Martin: That’s so cool. So you’re doing the full license? Because my dad has the Light Sport Aircraft license.
Lukas: I’m going to do the Light Sport Aircraft license.
Martin: Cool, yeah! That’s the best one to start because you’re super free to fly wherever you want, whenever you want. Exactly. And it’s cheaper to fly, right? Like — I didn’t realize — but a Cessna, it really costs like €250 or something to fly per hour because it just eats up a whole car tank full of fuel. It’s crazy.
Lukas: Yeah, and everything is expensive. Like, when you take the full license, everything is such a process — you can’t just fly super easily. Keeping the plane safe is expensive, flying is expensive, making a plan is expensive. And the Light Sport Aircraft one is way easier and more fun — it’s just like flying a plane.
Martin: Yeah, and it’s flying! It’s amazing. My dad had it, and he had a plane at
[54:20]
one point when he had more money. Now he has less money so he sold it, but it was so cool — we’d just fly to grandpa’s, fly anywhere, and you’re just like, “Let’s go.” I’ve never done — I know nobody else that flies. And they took me on like a test ride, like, “Let’s go up.” Immediately hooked.
Lukas: Yeah, definitely. And when you’re up there it’s super safe anyway, super easy too.
Martin: Yeah, yeah. The landing is the harder part.
Lukas: Oh, the landing — hard part, yes. That’s the thing.
Martin: And you have so many details to know for safety, you know? Because landing — if everything goes well it’s not so hard. But learning to land safely any time — that’s the hard part.
Lukas: Yeah, crazy.
Martin: That’s super, super cool. Okay, thanks for that. So I think we talked about the struggles you had — I think the biggest struggle was the depression, so we don’t need to go to that question. One which is interesting: is there something you wished someone had told you before you started this journey?
Lukas: Yeah, I always ask — what would I tell myself? And I go back — honestly, you just have to experience it. You have to learn from your mistakes. There’s no shortcut, there’s no easy way around it. Just do it. The best advice you can get is to get started — earlier rather than later.
Martin: Yeah, no, definitely. I agree with you. Like, most of the things — I ask people this question after, and you think, “If someone told you, would you have listened?” And then they’re like, “No, I would have needed to experience it anyway.” I think the faster you make your mistakes, the faster you can grow from them.
Lukas: Yes, exactly. Try things, get slapped in the face, learn, put your ego aside.
Martin: Okay, that’s super good. Thanks for that. And another question for me — who should I invite
[56:21]
after you on this podcast?
Lukas: What are you looking for — people like us, entrepreneurs on this journey?
Martin: Same as us, yeah.
Lukas: I have one cool friend called Demetrio, who is doing an app called Screenshot One. I’ve talked to him — he’s really cool. He’s smart, he thinks about his product really nicely. I like him a lot. I think he would make a good candidate.
Martin: Yeah, definitely. I’m just looking — currently I am talking with him, like, yesterday I talked with him and he’s unsure about his English in a podcast. But I’m sure it will be super nice — get him on.
Lukas: Yeah, yeah. I like this product too — Screenshot One is a very cool product.
Martin: Okay, thanks for that. And now I think it’s time — thank you for your time, coming on this podcast, thank you for sharing your journey.
Lukas: Thank you. It was really nice. I loved it. I always love these kinds of loose conversations — no strings attached, right? We don’t have to meet next week for coffee. We can just talk and have a nice time and feel less lonely. And that’s it.
Martin: Yeah, appreciate it. Thanks for that.
And for the listeners — thanks for listening all the way here. If you enjoyed it, subscribe, share it, send us a message, send us some love — it’s also nice to receive messages like, “Oh, I enjoyed the podcast you did, that recording.” It’s always nice messages. And if you have any recommendations — topics we should talk about, things you wish you knew and we didn’t cover — you can ask Lukas or me. See you in the next episode, next week. Bye-bye!