I built a simple countdown timer into a 25k per month app. Meet Lucas, a solopreneur from Germany who built arguably the world's simplest app. In this episode, we dive into how Lucas 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 uploads 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. Alright, let's dive in. I'm Pat Walls and this is Starter Story. Welcome Lucas to the channel. Tell me about who you are and what's your story. I'm Lucas Hermann. I'm a software developer from Germany. I turned a simple idea into a SaaS business and eventually I 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. So we've 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. 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? 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 a 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 stuff and I think, you know what? Let me post it here. So I put a link in here and I say, hey, try it out. Give you some feedback. What do you think? This is useful to you. You can see like people make literally lists that they tell 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. He just wants to have our money. It works really well. And then the other thing is I don't spam it. So one post per subreddit. That's great. All right. So you got this Reddit post, you validated it, but 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? So my first MVP, it had like basically just one feature, which was click on a button here and a timer starts counting over there. I'm using all the technologies I already know. I use JavaScript. I use UJS. I use NodeJS. There's no reverse cell. It was new at a 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 three 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 three 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. Nice. What I love about your business is that it's a family business. Tell me a little bit more about that. Yeah. So after I earned the first dollar and we had our first customers, I thought, well, there's also a marketing we need to do and we need to now answer these. 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 an 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 over the street and talk about how we grow stage time 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. It makes for a lot of great conversations. 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. Yeah. 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 build HTML pages. 2017, I started studying and my father really wanted me to have a paper. So I did. At the same time, I started 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? Right? So soon later, I just start tinkering on this thing. So shortly after November, 2020, right as Corona was hitting, first commit for stage time. 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 stage time was already making enough money to just get by 3000 a month. So I did quit. Thanks to her, I probably would have been much longer in the job if it wouldn't have been for my wife. And then by September, 2023, we reached 10K monthly revenue mark that every solopreneur is aiming for. All right. Before we dive deeper into how Lucas 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. 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. It's 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 have you driven customers to your app to sign up and grown this thing to over 25,000 MRR? We have about 50% of our traffic comes 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 that this is the case, right? That people want to talk about us or do inadvertently share our tool with others. So we have a niche tool, right? Very niche. It's 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 companions, 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. Or when you look in YouTube and 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 to have 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 do people actually click on and then double down. About a 30 year customers come from word of mouth. Talk to me about that. 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 five gigabytes more space, you know, share the link with a friend, have them sign up. And I thought, how can I integrate this into my own app called product led growth? And I just made sure every single link that people share, my logo is on it. And not only is my logo just like a picture, it's it has the name stage timer.io in the logo is like literally written there. And it's a name easy enough to remember that people often just see it, even tell us, oh, I saw it on an event and I use it myself. That's the 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 and somebody says, oh, we need a timer. So they say, ah, let me just pull up stage time. When they pull it up, it works so well. People are really excited. Eventually they want to use it for their next event, hit some kind of limit and say, ah, it's it's worth it. Let's let's purchase it happens very often. So having a free tier works really well for us. That's great. What kind of tools and languages did you use to build the app? And then also to run the business. So as a developer, right? I use sublime text and sublime merge. There's some old tools. The fact is for me, like copy pasting into Claude and generating code there and coasting is literally faster and integrated IDEs like cursor or co-pilot. One tool I love is air table. We use it as CRM. It works incredibly well. It's like a big axle 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 a 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 stage timer. That's amazing. Your business makes $25,000 MRR. What does it cost to actually run this business? The SAS business are very, very cheap to run. We have a server and infrastructure cost of 280 some month. Then we spend 250 on tools and services. That is everything from what I mentioned, air table, 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%. Nice. That's a good business. Now let's finally talk about what you built. Can you show me what app you built and how it works and what it does? Yeah, so this is the app. That's it. Imagine you are on a TED Talk and you have to speak 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, you know, holding your microphone too far away. It's not, you're not loud enough. So I show you this 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. You can imagine the first question anybody watching this is having is like, OK, why would I pay for this? I could just use a timer on my iPhone. How does this make $25,000 a month? 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 that do broadcasts for elections and they need to time every speaker. We had horse races by it. So it turns out almost everybody needs a timer and the iPhone time won't cut it because it's just on your little iPhone screen. And you need something that one person clicks start and five other people can see it. Awesome. We haven't even talked about this yet. But like, how did you actually even find the idea to create a timer app? 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 time he has to get up, walk into the other room and hit a button and walk back and my web developer mind immediately says, surely there's a better way. So 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. OK, so you built this business. It makes twenty five thousand dollars a month. What's a key lesson that you learned in the journey, building this one? As I learned, conversely, is that there's more opportunities out there than we think. There's 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's so many like one million dollar niches with little apps that you can build. The only hard thing is to find them once you found them. It's just this great opportunity that's open before you to build a simple app. Cool. Last question that we ask anyone who comes on the channel, if you could go back in time, stand on Lukas' shoulder when you ship that MVP or even before, what advice would you give him? So I would go back and tell myself, Lukas, you're German, you're scared of regulation. You're scared of like the the finanzum, the taxman 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. Any Germans or Europeans watching this, hopefully that inspired you. Thank you, Lukas, for coming on to Starter Story and keep going. I will. Thanks, Pat. 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. I think that anybody can take lessons from his story and build a SaaS, build a cool app, get users and potentially start even getting paying customers. So if you're interested in building something 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.
