Transcript: This App Makes $25,000/Month

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.

Pat Walls: I built a simple countdown timer into a 25K per month app. Meet Lukas, a solopreneur from Germany who built arguably the world’s simplest app. In this episode, we dive into how Lukas turned a stupidly simple idea into a business that allowed him to quit his job and ultimately changed his life. This single Reddit post with 58 upvotes changed everything. Plus, we’ll get into the exact Reddit post he used to get his first paying customers, why he hired his wife to help him run the business, and his framework for finding more simple ideas that can make thousands. All right, let’s dive in. I’m Pat Walls and this is Starter Story.

Welcome, Lukas, to the channel. Tell me about who you are and what’s your story.

Lukas: I’m Lukas Hermann. I’m a software developer from Germany. I turned a simple idea into a SaaS business and eventually was able to quit my job and work full-time. I’m a solopreneur and I built this business with my wife and a child. We have reached $25,000 revenue per month and we have a total of 20,000 users that are using our app. 4,400 of those are paying or have paid at any point in time. And we’re getting 86,000 unique visitors per month.

Pat Walls: Cool. Before we get into what your app actually does, let’s talk about how you validated this idea and got your first customers for your SaaS. How did you do that?

Lukas: So I did it on Reddit. And the reason is I’m building something for people that I don’t know. I’m building it for people that are in the video production industry. Where are they? Where do they hang out? I’m looking for a subreddit. It took me quite a while to actually find one. These are quite hidden. These are very small niche communities. And I thought, you know what, let me post it here. So I put a link in there and I say, “Hey, try it out. Give me some feedback. What do you think? Is this useful to you?” And you can see people make literally lists telling me, “No, do this. Do this. I’ve been waiting for such an app.” And because there’s no price attached to it on the website, it’s also not like he just wants our money. It works really well. And then the other thing is I don’t spam it. So one post per subreddit.

Pat Walls: That’s great. All right, so you got this Reddit post, you validated it. Let’s talk about the MVP and how you built that original free tool. What tools did you use and what features did you include?

Lukas: So my first MVP had basically just one feature, which was click on a button here and a timer starts counting over there. I use all the technologies I already know. I use JavaScript, I use Vue.js, I use Node.js. Vercel was new at the time and I just didn’t know it and I didn’t use it. If I would have used new unknown technologies, I would have had to learn them, understand them, find out they have limitations I didn’t know before. And it was good because I could ship my MVP in 3 days and then build upon it slowly and comfortably in the one hour that I had in the evening, instead of building on it for 3 months just to have something that is usable. And then because it was a side business, a side project, it took me 224 days to actually get my first dollar. And that’s totally okay. It grew from there.

Pat Walls: Nice. What I love about your business is that it’s a family business. Tell me a little bit more about that.

Lukas: Yeah. So after I earned the first dollar and we had our first customers, I thought, well, there’s also marketing we need to do and we need to now answer these customer service emails. And my wife was at a point that she didn’t want to do her old job anymore — teaching. And I said, why don’t you join me? Why don’t you learn marketing and take over these parts of the business? And she was really excited about it, and she really learned quickly. And now she does Google ads, she does all the sales emails, she does all the customer support emails, and we have amazing support — people are really happy with it. And I do the product, the finances, the development, and kind of the overall direction, right? Like CEO work. And sometimes we walk across the street and talk about how we grow Stagetimer, or sometimes we just look at any business, like how would you grow this shoe business over there. We think about these business terms together, which is really fun and it makes for a lot of great conversations.

[04:00]

Pat Walls: That’s awesome. I think that’s super cool how you have that set up. Let’s take a step back. I want to learn a little bit more about your background, how you got started, and how you got to this point where you have this amazing SaaS business.

Lukas: Yeah. So my first development job was in 2007. I was younger, I was in high school. I literally rode my bicycle to work back then and built HTML pages. 2017, I start studying. My father really wanted me to have a paper, so I did. At the same time, I start freelancing. I wanted to know how it is to have your own business as a developer. I get into a startup. Once I’m done — 2020 — I have my degree, but already my mind is like, how can I build my own product? So soon later I just start tinkering on this thing. Shortly after, November 2020, right as corona was hitting — first commit for Stagetimer. That was when I built the MVP, and then a few days later I post this post on Reddit. And by 2022, my wife encouraged me, “Hey, why don’t you quit?” Because Stagetimer was already making enough money to just get by — $3,000 a month. So I did quit. Thanks to her, I probably would have stayed much longer in the job if it wouldn’t have been for my wife. And then by September 2023, we reached the 10K monthly revenue mark that every solopreneur is aiming for.

Pat Walls: All right, before we dive deeper into how Lukas built this into a $25,000 per month business, let’s talk about something a lot of early-stage founders overlook: distribution. Distribution is everything. You can build the best tool in the world, but if nobody sees it, it doesn’t matter. That’s why we’re excited to partner with the monday.com app marketplace. Monday.com has over 245,000 customers using the platform across 200-plus industries, from HR and IT to operations and event planning. And here’s the kicker — 90% of enterprise accounts use monday.com apps. In other words, there’s massive built-in demand. And unlike other platforms, it’s not overcrowded yet. It’s a great time to get in.

[06:01]

This is the perfect moment for solopreneurs to get in early, build niche tools, and solve real user pain points. Even better, monday.com gives you everything you need to succeed: robust APIs, flexible SDKs, detailed docs, and a dev team that actually supports your growth. You build the app, set up your pricing, and monetization is all built in — billing, subscriptions, payment processing, it’s all taken care of. We teamed up with monday.com to create a free resource that breaks down exactly who their users are and where you might find your next winning idea. Click the first link in the description to grab it and take advantage of this opportunity. Thank you to monday.com for sponsoring. Now, let’s get back into the video.

Let’s talk about how you’ve driven customers to your app to sign up and grown this thing to over $25,000 MRR.

Lukas: We have about 50% of our traffic coming from Google, and then a third of our traffic really comes from people recommending our tool to others. And we have done a lot of work so that this is the case — that people want to talk about us or inadvertently share our tool with others. So we have a niche tool, right? Very niche, a niche small enough that most big companies wouldn’t really bother with it. But for us as solopreneurs, perfect. And I decided we will see if we can grab stuff that people are already doing in our niche and then combine our tool with it. So if you look for “countdown timer Stream Deck companion,” we created a documentation page that shows very precisely how you use our tool together with this integration for this physical device. We also created a video and put it on YouTube. When you search for this video, it doesn’t have many views. But the trick is the people that do search for this and the people that do look for this on YouTube — they want to have their question answered, right? They have a concrete problem and they want a solution for it. So they find you and they’re so much more likely to purchase. So this is a super niche keyword. The way we find these keywords is we put up documentation, put up articles, and then we look with a sense for what people

[08:01]

actually click on and then double down.

Pat Walls: About a third of your customers come from word of mouth. Talk to me about that.

Lukas: Yeah. So from the beginning I wanted to be like Dropbox. You know Dropbox — you create it and then it says, “Oh, you want to have 5 GB more space? Share the link with a friend, have them sign up.” And I thought, how can I integrate this into my own app? It’s called product-led growth. And I just made sure that every single link that people share, my logo is on it. And not only is my logo just like a picture — it has the name stagetimer.io in the logo. It’s literally written there. And it’s a name easy enough to remember that people often just see it and even tell us, “Oh, I saw it on an event and I used it myself.”

That’s one way. And the other way is we make it a freemium model. By doing this we capture a lot of freelancers that work in this space and they bring it along to the events that they’re invited to, and somebody says, “Ah, we need a timer.” So they say, “Ah, let me just pull up Stagetimer.” They pull it up. It works so well, people are really excited. Eventually they want to use it for the next event, hit some kind of limit, and say, “Ah, it’s worth it — let’s purchase it.” It happens very often. So having a free tier works really well for us.

Pat Walls: That’s great. What kind of tools and languages did you use to build the app and then also to run the business?

Lukas: So as a developer, I use Sublime Text and Sublime Merge. These are old tools. The fact is, for me, copy-pasting into Claude and generating code there and coasting is literally faster than integrated IDEs like Cursor or Copilot. One tool I love is Airtable. We use it as a CRM. It works incredibly well. It’s like a big Excel sheet with all our customers in it. But what you can do is you can do automations on top of that. And then on top of this, we use Postmark to actually send out emails. I’m a big fan of Postmark. It’s like an email sending platform but really made for solopreneurs. So these are really the bread-and-butter tools that I’m using for Stagetimer.

Pat Walls: That’s amazing. Your business makes $25,000 MRR. What does it cost to actually run this business?

Lukas: SaaS businesses are very, very cheap to run. We have a server and infrastructure cost of $280 a month. Then we spend $250

[10:03]

on tools and services — that is everything from what I mentioned, Airtable, Postmark, all of this together. And then we spend $1,400 on paid ads. So the profit margin is 80% or higher, like between 80 and 90%.

Pat Walls: Nice. That’s a good business. Now, let’s finally talk about what you built. Can you show me what app you built, how it works, and what it does?

Lukas: Yeah. So this is the app. That’s it. Imagine you are at a TED talk and you have the speaker on stage and they want to know how much time do I have left in my presentation. So you put this in front of him, and on my computer I have the control interface for this very timer and I can just click start and you can see how it starts counting. Or you can show a message — like if someone is holding their microphone too far away, I can show a message like, “Hey, hold your microphone closer.” And it’s much easier like this to communicate with your person on stage than holding up a paper sign.

Pat Walls: Nice. And I think the first question that anybody watching this is having is, “Okay, why would I pay for this? I can just use a timer on my iPhone. How does this make $25,000 a month?”

Lukas: So when I built it, I thought, “No way this is going to make a lot of money.” And then people started paying and we started understanding that in real-life events, real-life video productions, people need this all the time. We had TV broadcasts doing broadcasts for elections and they need to time every speaker. We had horse races buy it. So turns out almost everybody needs a timer, and the iPhone timer won’t cut it because it’s just on your little iPhone screen — and you need something where one person clicks start and five other people can see it.

Pat Walls: Awesome. We haven’t even talked about this yet, but how did you actually even find the idea to create a timer app?

Lukas: So it was a bit of an accident. I was in my friend’s studio and he used this very old Flash app on an old laptop, and he remote-controls everything from his nice table. And then to start a timer, he has to get up, walk into the other room, hit a button, and walk back. And my web developer mind immediately says,

[12:03]

“Surely there’s a better way.” So if you go to any other business and you just observe people doing their job and you find that they waste hours and they do things in the most awkward ways that you would have automated long ago — these are really the simple ideas that you can turn into a lot of money.

Pat Walls: Okay. So you built this business, it makes $25,000 a month. What’s a key lesson that you learned in the journey building this?

Lukas: One lesson I learned is that there are more opportunities out there than we think. There are so many solutions that still have interfaces from 1999 — ugly as heck to use, people complain about it all the time, especially if you go outside the developer bubble. I believe there are so many $1 million niches with little apps that you can build. The only hard thing is to find them. Once you’ve found them, it’s just this great opportunity that’s open before you to build a simple app.

Pat Walls: Cool. Last question that we ask anyone who comes on the channel. If you could go back in time, stand on Lukas’s shoulder when you shipped that MVP or even before, what advice would you give him?

Lukas: So I would go back and tell myself, “Lukas, you’re a German. You’re scared of regulation. You’re scared of the tax man coming to you and saying you’ve done everything wrong and you have to go to prison now.” But I would tell him: this is not the case. Just get started. There’s a way even in this country to build a simple business, to scale it up, and to understand how it works. Everybody is just getting by somewhere and you can do it too.

Pat Walls: Any Germans or Europeans watching this — hopefully that inspired you. Thank you, Lukas, for coming on to Starter Story and keep going.

Lukas: I will. Thanks, Pat.

Pat Walls: Lukas is a great example of someone who turned a really simple idea into a really great business. I really like how he used Reddit to validate his idea, because you don’t need an audience — and potentially all your customers are hanging out in one little subreddit, just like the one that Lukas had posted in. I think that anybody can take lessons from his story and build a SaaS, build a cool

[14:05]

app, get users, and potentially start even getting paying customers. So if you’re interested in building similar apps and simple projects, then you should definitely check out Starter Story Build. In Starter Story Build, we show you how to find an idea, how to build it with AI tools, and how to actually ship it into the real world and get users and potentially build something that changes your life. What’s even cooler is that you’ll do it all in just 12 days. So if you’ve got that simple idea or you want to find it, maybe turn it into a great business — head to the link in the description to check out Starter Story Build. All right, guys, hope you enjoyed this video. I’ll see you in the next one. Peace.