#283 - Making $8k/mo Targeting $100M/yr with Lukas and Liz Hermann of StageTimer.io

Speaker A: What's up, dude?

Speaker B: Yo, what's going on, man?

Speaker C: Who.

Speaker A: Who do we got today? Liz and Lucas Herman. I'm excited about this.

Speaker B: The Herman's.

Speaker A: You know what I'm excited about? Luke and his wife Liz. They're sort of a team running this. This company together. Um, their app, I think they make $8,000 a month. That was back in January, so maybe it's more now. Uh, they have, like, this very simple tool that I think anybody would look at and be like, I could build this in like a weekend. You know, I could build this in, like, you know, and usually it's not a weekend or like six months or something, but I could build this very easily by myself. But they're making like 100k a year from it.

Speaker B: Right?

Speaker A: And also, like, that's like. I mean, he was working as a software engineer. I think he went to college. He was software engineer. He was making like 80k a year at a startup, you know, getting underpaid by a startup. And he quit that. And now he's making more than that as an indie hacker from something very simple that he bootstrapped with his wife. And he doesn't owe anybody any money. He's just basically free. He's living the Andy Hacker dream.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. By the way, I feel like that detail of, like, it looks really simple on the. From the surface. I've been seeing that everywhere lately. Like, I. We posted a couple of stories of people that are building AI companies, and every single comment section has one or two people going, wait a minute, this is just two API calls. That's it.

Speaker A: Yeah. Super simple. Well, AI is like, next level. Like, I was posting about AI, I think, a couple days ago, because I've got this, like, new bot, our Anderson Coop bot, who basically is like an AI journalist who sends us, like, little reviews of people's submissions and tells us,

Speaker B: what ratio of your time are you spending figuring out the names of these bots versus actually building the bots?

Speaker A: It's like 50, 50. I would say it's hard to come up with good bot names, but I

Speaker B: think, why don't you use the bots to name the bots?

Speaker A: I should. I've tried it. I swear to God. I put names in the GPT4. It sucks. I mean, you've tried to use it for creative writing. It's not that good at coming up with, like, creative writing. It's not that good at being funny.

Speaker B: M. It's partially in the prompt, but, yeah, creative writing, yeah, it'll.

Speaker A: It'll like, get Your creative juices flowing. It's, like, good for brainstorming. But anyway, I mean, I posted about this bot, and people keep asking me, like, oh, open source it. Write a guide. I'm like, no, no, no. Like, it's like, not that much code. Like, the vast majority of the work is done by OpenAI. So there's a lot of cool stuff you could build nowadays that's super simple. You know what also is cool about, uh, Lucas and his wife? It's not just that they're building something really simple, but that they are incredibly ambitious. So he has Let me send you this thread. I think you've seen this thread. It's like his Twitter thread. The very first tweet of this thread is, I'm going to get rich, and this is how I'm going to do it. He's not like, oh, I'm, you know, I hope to make some money. He's like, no, I'm gonna get, like, insanely wealthy. And like, I am, um, um. He's like Babe Ruth pointing to the outfield. Exactly where he's gonna hit the ball.

Speaker B: He's not. He's not. Hey, guys, I made something. Hashtag buildinginpublic.

Speaker A: Oh, here he is. What's up, Lucas? Hi, Liz.

Speaker C: Hey, guys.

Speaker A: We were just talking about your Twitter thread, Lucas, and I think it's amazing. The vast majority of indie hackers are not that ambitious. Like, Sean Pury from My First Million came on, uh, our show very recently, and he was kind of like, you guys are doing small boy stuff. We're all about big boy stuff on my first million. And I, uh, look at your tweet, and you're the same attitude, right? You've got this app. It's very cool. You're just getting started, though. I mean, even your Twitter background, you've got these three mountains. And the first mountain is a little stick figure walking up it, and it's like a million dollars a year in revenue. And there's another mountain after that. It's a little bigger, and it's like $100 million a year in revenue. And the third mountain is, like, something crazy. And then even, like, your progress bar. Like, every indie hacker has, like, the same progress bar under, like, their Twitter profile, like, where you've got, like, the boxes, and on the left, it's like, zero dollars on the right. It's your goal, and you color the boxes green the further you get. And most of us are like, yeah, $10,000 a month is, like, my goal. Or, uh, you know, 20,000 and yours is like, a million dollars. So just sitting there with, like, one.

Speaker B: And by the way. And by the way, we can't. We can't let them off the hook. Like, I want to. I want to, like, read a couple of highlights from this sick thread. So, number one, you're like, all right, I canceled my interviews. I stopped looking for work because you had gotten laid off. And you're like, but I'm going to be rich. First, I'm going to stop selling my time for money. Then I'll bootstrap a product. I'll scratch my itch. You kind of, like, go through. I'm going to make, uh, a lot of money. Then I'm going to start my second company. And then you do something that's so funny, which is you predict a point that happens in a lot of people's journey that always blindsides them. You specifically go, then I'll have a midlife crisis. What am I even doing? I reached my buddy goals. I'm living the life. My parents retirement is secured. What next? Then I remember, like, uh, now I have my financial freedom. I'm excited about my SpaceX. Right. Like, you. You completely draw this thing out in a way that, like, even the people who do reach these goals don't see, like, all the steps coming the way that you've, like, laid it out.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's pretty cool.

Speaker D: The funny thing here is we are big fans of my first million. And then one day, out of the blue, Sam started following me. And I'm a big Sam fan, and he is a big Sean fan. And then I was like, ah, uh, Sam follows me. And I even tweeted, oh, I think it was by mistake, but. And then he answered. Sam answered and said, no, no, I like what you're doing, and that's why I followed you. And then a few weeks later, he tweeted something, actually saying, and then I'm going to be interviewed on my first million. And then started following him. Okay, we are on the path here.

Speaker C: Yeah. So I just go, like, I'm going to make this killer tweet. And I even looked up the Disney story spine. That's like, you know, uh, things all the time and then happens this and then happens this. But one day, and then I was like, okay, I'm going to write a tweet exactly. Like the Pixar story.

Speaker D: Yeah, the Pixar.

Speaker C: And totally worked.

Speaker A: So let's. Let's clue people on to what you guys are doing here. Your app, as I mentioned earlier, it's very simple. But it's very good. It's called stagetimer IO. Let's say I'm running a conference or an event where I've got speakers. I want my speakers to all know. Pretty simple. How much time do they have left in their talk? Is it 10 minutes? Is it 30 minutes? And, uh, I want it to be on some sort of laptop or screen or iPad that they can see while they're talking so they don't go over time. But I want to also be able to control that, pretty much everything about that timer from, like, the comfort of my seat. I don't want to have to be running up to the stage telling them how much time is left or pressing pause on the screen. And so that's basically what stagetimer IO is. You basically sign onto your website, you create a timer, and you get this whole dashboard with all these cool controls to control a timer. I can add time to it, reset it, make it flash. I can have multiple timers. I can show messages. Whatever. Whatever I want, I can do. And then there's another link I can give people. It's like a special view to the timer that I set up for my speakers, and that will just show them the timer, and it will just show them any messages I send to the timer that I can control. And that's as far as I can tell. That's pretty much it. And I think you're charging, like, 20 bucks a month, 30 bucks a month for this, and you are at last. I saw $8,000 a month in revenue.

Speaker D: Yeah, a bit more already.

Speaker A: Uh, I mean, this is the dream. Channing and I were talking before you came on. Everybody wants to build something that's simple, that's easy to understand, but that makes you a living. I mean, you're making more from this than you're making at your startup job. Lukas.

Speaker C: Yeah, it's actually a bit wild if you think that a countdown timer, like the most unlikely thing that anybody would pay money for, uh, makes me more money than, uh, a startup job. It's great.

Speaker A: Yeah. I saw a post, actually, where you guys talked about coming up with your idea. I think it's really funny how you came up with your idea, because this is, like, the most generic startup advice ever, is like, keep your eyes open for problems in the world, and one day you'll find a problem that's worth solving and then solve it. And almost nobody does that. It's so hard to do that. It's incredibly hard to just stumble across an idea. But that's exactly what you did. You were at, I think, Lucas, a friend's recording studio. Yeah. And then you saw them start a timer on their iPad and then run to the control area to start controlling it. He didn't have a remote. He had to physically sprint across the studio to do his timer. Exactly, yeah.

Speaker C: It's like I see him running in, you know, like, clicking this one button on the laptop, running back out, seeing if there must be a better solution for this. You know, many people say on Twitter, like, scratch your own itch. Do, you know, build a business that you yourself like. And I looked around like, I want to scratch somebody else's itch. You know, I see this guy, like, can I build something that is a solution for him? First of all, I thought, surely, surely somebody else, uh, has made something. I feel like whenever you look in the world and it's like, there's such an obvious solution to this problem that maybe you see because you have the background and everybody else just, like, doesn't know that that's a perfect business. And I was like, I'm gonna build this in one weekend. And of course, like, free, you know, like, just very simple. Put it on the Internet, put on Reddit. It's like, you know, who cares? Let's see if people want this. If people want to use it, I just did it as well.

Speaker A: I get, like, I get skeptical when I see things that are obvious. I'm like, oh, uh, I can just build this on a weekend. And I'm like, somebody has to have already solved this problem. Like, it must be my friend who doesn't understand. He's like, running from the timer to the control. Like, he doesn't understand. He's never Googled this. But, like, there's no way, you know, it's 2023 and nobody's built, like, a timer. Did you do any research? Did you go back and try to find out, like, hey, does this exist? Yeah.

Speaker C: So I, like, on the very spot, I tried to find this solution, and I couldn't. Just a simple website that you open, half a timer, um, that is remote controlled. So I build it, and afterwards I find, like, two or three solutions that are old Windows apps.

Speaker B: What's interesting is you did something that's the opposite of what Paul Graham said just a couple of days, uh, ago. He tweeted, when young founders build something that they don't want themselves but that they believe some group of other people want, 90% of the time, they're building something that nobody wants. And even Elon Musk responded, yeah, it was like, like true.

Speaker D: But I would say also this is the thing about percentages, right? There is still the 10%. You said 90, so there is still 10%. Right. And I'm not saying that other people should do it, but I'm just saying that the smart thing in, in Lucas case that he, he always summarizes, you know, of course, so, so the story goes fast. But the truth is that he went on, on Reddit and he asked, you know, if, if he could use countdown timer that would be controlled remotely, what would this need to have. And from that feedback he actually created the first one and then right away went back to Reddit and told people that he had created that. So that's how he got the first user.

Speaker C: So I want to shine a bit of different light on this, on this graham tree. He's right, right. But I feel like in our tech bubble everybody knows about these tech things like all the tech problems have been solved with open source code and five times already. But then you look at other industries, especially old industries m metal manufacturing and in this case like event uh, organizing and media recording, there's so much low hanging fruit that you as uh, a developer coming from a uh, startup, you look at it, it's like I would automate this, I would change this, I would make this better. There's so much low hanging fruit. I feel there's a lot of remote problems to be solved for developers in other industries.

Speaker D: That's spot on until today. We see that all the time that people actually write us because they love so much the, the interface of Stage Timer. They write and say okay, do you have something like Stage Timer? But for this in the industry. So we get emails all the time, people asking like okay, but do you have something like Stage time before teleprompter, do you have something like Stage Time? You know, and then they are always mentioning things and we're like uh, man, there are so many things that we could do in this industry. Again, these low hanging fruit that are still there to be taken.

Speaker A: It's fascinating because it's like in the world of technology if you're a developer, you're building tools for other developers. You go on GitHub, there's millions of products. Programmers are solving every single little thing about every single thing. And somebody builds a library, then somebody comes and builds another library to solve the problems with that library. And it's just like tons and tons of stuff. So even if software engineers and indie hackers have already gotten to some other industry, like let's say Insurance, and they've already built some tools. There's. They haven't built anything near what they built for software engineers. And so there's guaranteed to be something that you can build. And sometimes it's as obvious as, like, hey, you should be able to control this timer with a remote. And this old shitty Windows app is not good enough, but sometimes it's a little bit deeper. And I think that people can explore a little bit more here and try to figure out what's going on in other industries.

Speaker C: Absolutely. And there's, of course, there's the big industry problems that probably are worked on, but there's always these little niches for indie hackers that are little problems that nobody really wants to solve because there's just not enough money in it. But for a single person like me, like us, it's like, perfect and enough to grow a good business.

Speaker B: What was, uh, patio 11 had a, uh, really simple app for teachers. I forget what it's called.

Speaker A: Bingo Card Creator.

Speaker B: Yeah, Bingo Card creator back in 2007. And it was the exact same story where, you know, it's not a super, super sophisticated product. And when he's talking to developers or to coders, like, you know, eyebrows would go up. Like, really, you're making a product out of that? And the thing that he hammered the drum about all the time is like, look, to us this is just a simple app. But to teachers or people who are not technical, this is magic. Right.

Speaker A: They're literally creating bingo cards by hand for these kids. It's taking them hours. We could use code to do this in a minute. And like, no one's doing it for them because programmers are only making apps for other programmers. You mentioned that you launched on Reddit. This wasn't just like a singular moment. Boom, you have an app. Uh, it was like a six month process. And I found the post where you launched on Reddit. I thought it was so smart how you did it, because the vast majority of indie hackers were like, oh, you can't launch on Reddit, you can't advertise on Reddit, you're gonna get banned. I've been kicked out of so many subreddits, blah, blah, blah. But I think they're just doing it wrong. And I think Lucas, the way you did it was the right way. So you went to, There's a subreddit called R. Commercialav. And he made this post called Advice for Presentation Timer App in the Making. And just with your title, I think you killed it because you're not like hey, everybody, come use my thing. I'm advertising. Blah, blah, blah, Spam, spam, spam. You're like, hey, I need some advice. All of you smart, genius people out there. I could really just use some tips. So it's disarming in a way. And then in your post, you kept it real short and simple. You're like, hey, everybody, I'm building a presentation timer app that runs in the browser, blah, blah, blah. Can you give me some feedback about the features necessary for such an app? Here's the current version. And then you literally put a link to your app. So you've done all the things you need to do. You put a link to your app, you tell people you're building it, and now you get all this free feedback from people and probably some of your first users in just that one post.

Speaker C: So I actually first of all had to look for the subreddit. It's so hard to find a subreddit if you're not knowledgeable. So I found this tool where you could you put one subreddit and it gives you all the connections to the other ones, how they're related.

Speaker A: Is it like that, like, network graph thing? I think I've seen like that visualization. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker C: Like a network graph will stop Reddit.

Speaker A: So cool. It's like a map of Reddit.

Speaker C: It's amazing. And so, uh, I go there and exactly. I thought, okay, how can you post this so people actually want to read it and want to respond, right? Reddit, you can exhaust very quickly. And funny, there's another tool, another timer that launched like a year later in the same subreddit. And I read these posts and it was open source tool. And he posted first one, everybody was excited. And he posted like every single, like every week he posted and it petered out. You can do that on Reddit. It's like one, you've got one post, you make it short, you make it to the point, you ask for questions, you don't advertise. You got it. And then like six months later, I was like, okay, now I did it. Like, hey, with your help, I did it. Uh, check it out.

Speaker D: What do you think that was when the paid version.

Speaker C: That's when we launched a paid version. But I didn't mention the paid version. I just said like, hey, thanks for your help. I built this thing and now it's a thing. And it's awesome.

Speaker A: There's a hilarious comment on, uh, your first Reddit post that I liked. It was like someone's basically talking about a different Time route that they found where a speaker might have 10 minutes, but you can actually speed up the timer so really only nine minutes go by. But the countdown looks like it's counting to 10. And it's like the most amazing trick for basically making so your speakers don't go over time and everything runs smoothly. Do you guys have that? Did you end up adding that feature to your app?

Speaker C: This literally the 1 oldest feature in our backlog and I have not built it yet because it's such a mind boggling hard task on a distributed server.

Speaker D: Uh, we get some very funny requests actually, but we also get some ultimatums. I mean, not anymore. But in the beginning it was really funny building Stage Timer, really listening to the users because we didn't know any better, right? We didn't know how industry works. So I remember the first time I got an email and the person said like, oh, can you add this and this so I can build a rundown with Stage time? And I was like, what is a rundown? And then I asked, no idea. So it was really funny entering an industry with no prior knowledge, but then also the user base, right, Teaching us and educating us. Uh, there was this one guy that was really funny. I think it was one of our first yearly subscriptions and he wrote very like, straightforward. He said, I love Stage Timer and here are the things that I would like to see on Stage Timer because if you don't have these things by next year, then I'm not going to renew my subscription.

Speaker C: I just gave you money. You better have this next year.

Speaker A: Guys like the mafia.

Speaker D: Yeah, he was awesome because then we had exactly what a producer needs. You know, he was really organized and he mentioned the most important things. And we are very thankful for the input of this guy and many other people that wrote us because we didn't know what they needed for the event production space.

Speaker C: Sometimes we just hopped on a call, like, hey, can we have a call with you? Can you tell us what you're actually doing? Just show us.

Speaker D: And of course the cool thing is that when you're dealing with early adopters, they're so super excited, right? So they were actually thanking us for the time they were feeling so good, you know, for talking to, to people that work for Stage time. And until today, we get messages and even people saying, please send my thanks to the team, you know, and then I just turned Ludo and was like, thank you and that's it. Because people actually believe that we are, uh, a larger team. And recently you even met a person and the Person said, oh, you are one of the engineers. And I was like, yeah, wow. A bit more than that.

Speaker A: It's cool, because what you're doing is basically proving that you don't have to solve your own problem. Right? And I think solving your own problem is a little bit overrated, because at the end of the day, you're trying to find other customers and they're going to be different than you no matter what. Even if you know an area inside and out, other people are going to be different than you. And if you don't keep your ears and eyes open to listen to what they have as problems and what they want, you're going to be dead. And so you might as well get in the habit of doing that from day one by solving other people's problems. And I like that you posted on the subreddit and like you said, you posted again. So you later on came back and you were like, okay, hey, it's been six months. Here's a link to my old post. Thank you. And you were super smart again with how you did it. Thank you so much for the advice. It was so great. It's so helpful. Just so you know, here's what the new product is like with all your advice added. So you're not like advertising, you're just participating as a community member. I've tried to get people to do this for indie hackers for so long. It's so hard. You get like, a group of indie hackers or founders together, put them on a forum. Everybody just wants to advertise. And I think everybody cares about what they're doing. And it's like, nobody cares about what you're doing. They care about themselves. They want to feel smart, they want to feel important, they want to feel helpful. And I feel like you're one of the few people who did that. Right. And so I think after that second Reddit post is when you got. Is that when you got your very first paying customer?

Speaker C: Yeah. So I pushed out on Twitter and I had like 300 followers at that time. Like, okay, nobody's gonna read it. But, you know, that's what you do. Build in public, push it out, you know, tweet it out, and just the same night somebody purchases, I was like, this is incredible. If, you know your first dollar online is some magical moment. Like, I contact the guy, write him on Twitter, and it's like, hey, um, like, why did you buy my thing? It's like, oh, yeah, I know you from this first Reddit post, and I just followed you and I love it. I love new things. I love what you're doing. I bought it right away and it knocked me off that it's from this first Reddit post, actually. Somebody purchased.

Speaker A: Are you guys. Are you like, how much do you tweet? I know we were reading that one Twitter thread that you have, but I haven't really. Like, I just followed both of you. How big is Twitter? And you're like, marketing and growth strategies.

Speaker C: Nothing. Because all the people on Twitter, like there's in the Venn diagram between the people on Twitter and people that do, uh, video, video, live video recording and events is like, there's too much.

Speaker A: Don't touch.

Speaker D: Exactly. Yeah. We just created actually now, uh, a Twitter for Stage Timer, but it is not at all our. It's not even a customer acquisition channel for us, so it's not a focus at all for us. And then as Luca said, the first users came from Reddit. And then the coolest part is that it grew mainly through word of mouth in the beginning. So because this industry is so tightly knitted, uh, so it's just the way it is for them, as soon as they find something, they tell others. And the most amazing part about this industry is, as you can imagine, they are great with video. So I think 90% of these people are actually YouTubers. So what happened is that people started making videos about Stage Timer and then we have these really cool videos made about Stage Timer that we didn't even commission. It's just because they're excited and they want to share with other people. So every now and then we get an email from a user and say, oh, I just saw that so and so mentioned you. And then they send the video with the minute already, you know, that I should watch. And it's becoming this, this tool in the space where people even reference already as if it's like, uh, a house brand. And then for example, the other day I saw that a, uh, big creator in the space, he mentioned Stage Timer. Actually he was using Stage Timer and then he mentioned that he wanted to do something related to a Timer. And two people on the comments on the live on YouTube said, yeah, but you should check because Stage Timer actually allows you to do that. It was such a moment for me because, like, oh, look at that. They actually, uh, mentioned Stage Time as like Nike. You know, it's like the Nike of the space. It's just like, you don't have to say anything else. It's just Stage Time. That's really cool to see that it's developing like this in the industry.

Speaker B: That's awesome. And word of mouth is, I mean, it's, I think it's the best type of marketing because it's, you know, your customers aren't being marketed at. The downside of it is that it's relatively slow. And so you had your first, you had your first, uh, Reddit customer, but what were you doing while your revenue grew by word of mouth? And like Lucas, I know that at first you were working at a startup. Liz, what were you doing?

Speaker D: So actually I only joined a few months after he created the paid version. Before I was working in, in humanitarian work and I was working social development and so on. And when I joined Lucas in September 2021, I started helping him exactly. To grow the two. One thing that Lucas did that was quite genius, and this again comes from the way he functions, is that he called the thing stage timer.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker D: It's just like calling a clock a clock. Right? So because he called stage timer, stage timer, um, SEO came by default, right? So when people were stage timer, then you would show we were already on the first page pretty fast because of that. So this was already SEO, then became the largest, actually word of mouth was the second largest growth channel, so to say. And then since we saw that SEO would be the way for us, then we started tackling SEO more intentionally and found out that the best way, because it's such a technical, uh, industry, is to just do technical blogs or documentation. Even better, because these top of funnel silly blogs that usually you can do other projects doesn't work in this case because if I make those, we bring the wrong traffic. These are the people that won't convert because they don't need such a complex timer. So funnily enough, one of the things that brings us the most paying customers is a documentation about how to use a countdown timer with obs. We started to realize, okay, we have to go very technical, which is hard because we don't know the technicalities of the industry so well. But that's how we then started growing, of course, then ads, and we keep expanding to get more and more customers.

Speaker C: So paddling back a little bit, right? You ask, what, what do you do with your time now? And I was in the same position, probably many people in the same position, like, oh, first dollar, what do you do? What do you do? Uh, so as one does, I go on Twitter and I ask, how do I do marketing for this tool?

Speaker A: What do I write?

Speaker C: What articles do I publish? You know, no idea. And somebody said something very genius. They said, you know, some products are so simple. Like, if you sell a horse, just say horse for sale. Like, just say what it is. And I was like, yeah, I think mine is so simple. So I. I just created blog posts or kind of documentation that says, here's how you use my tool. First step, this step, this step. Click this button, do this thing, you know, and these are, uh, to date, ah, the most kind of clicked and converting articles that we have.

Speaker A: Yeah, Yeah. I think I run an Airbnb, and it's kind of in the same, like, bucket. It's like the easiest thing I've ever sold. Like, I'm just like, hey, I got a place you can sleep in it. It costs this much per night. Here it is put on Airbnb, and it's like, ah, I'm just making like $5,000 a month, like, instantly. And it's so, uh, much easier than selling, like, the vast majority of super complicated tech products that everybody's addicted to making. You sell a Stage Timer. It's like, yeah, you want to time your events. Here it is. It's literally called Stage Timer. You said you're killing it. SEO. I Googled Stage Timer, and you guys are the number one result, which is a pretty good place to be.

Speaker B: That's also one of the benefits of moving into a niche that doesn't have a lot of competition. Right. You actually can get that, you know, for example, that domain name.

Speaker C: Exactly. And I mean, the flip side is you go on Ahreds, you look for your keywords, and there's like, zero traffic, but it's just like almost nobody's ranking for it. And then you kind of start doing content, and you realize, okay, there are 100, 200, 300 people coming, and they have really high purchasing intent, so these are enough for us.

Speaker A: So what's it like working together? Because you two are. You're married, right? Yeah. Channing and I aren't married, but we're related. Sometimes we want to kill each other. You know, sometimes works out really well. I think, like, the. The most stereotypical advice is, like, don't, you know, get into business with your friends and your family. We're all four of us are doing, like, literally the exact opposite. Uh, you two seem pretty happy. You're both smiling. You're, like, mutually complimentary. You haven't killed each other yet. How's it. How's it going?

Speaker D: Well, I think I can. I can say more about that because. Because of the falling. Lucas is laughing because of the falling. The other day, I even made fun of on Twitter and said, like, that is awesome. Um, you know, being married to your co founder, because you can have meetings as you go for a walk or as you go out to eat. And then some very patronizing guy comes to me and says, like, yeah, once the pink colored glasses, you know, fall, you're going to. And I'm like, we have been together 10 years, married for seven, have worked together since the day one, because we met while volunteering. So as soon as, uh, Matt, we started working together and we did a ton of projects together while we were working in humanitarian aid. Lucas came to Brazil. We worked together. So this is not our first thing. And I think it worked so well exactly because of that. Because we tested the waters in, like, low risk environments before and we knew that we work well together. And then when Lucas invited me to just join, um, stage time, I was like, yeah, this, this is tried and tested.

Speaker C: I mean, I had to do a calculation, right, Because I invited her eventually. And I was like, is it a wise idea? Is this a good idea? Like, you know, you can't step back from that. It's like having a kid. Co founder, your wife. So I thought, you know, when. When you look at families, most of them, they kind of build up their different jobs and they lose kind of the things that they talk about. And then they end up talking about the series that I watch, and then they get kids and then talk about the kids. And we thought, I thought, you know, if we do work together, we have something like, we have a common interest and common topics. So like a world that overlaps with, that we can use for dinner conversations. And it works great. Just an example, one exercise that we do when we walk, we take a walk outside and, and um, we see businesses like, ah, you know, an old, uh, selling cheese or selling meat or something. And we think, how would we. How would you revitalize or how would you grow this business? Yeah, it was just this challenge. It gives this challenge to each other. And because we're both in this world, the other one can like, okay, I would do this. I would do this. No, I would do this smart.

Speaker D: I don't even know what other couples talk about, but we, we are like, we do talk about series. Okay. We just finished our favorite series, Succession, and we talked about it all the time.

Speaker A: Love it.

Speaker D: But the, the truth is that because we have the same interest to grow this one business, you know, we have way more things to talk about and it's more fun, you know, to be in each other's company and this game that we do, we have been doing that for quite a while already. And this game of just looking around and seeing how we would improve, how we would. Because uh, sometimes we see a business fail and like, what could we have done or how could we actually take advantage of this network effect here, you know. And we are all the time playing this game and I see that this is also what makes us. Because we are, we have uh, side projects to stage timer and we, we usually get these ideas from these exercise and these conversations. So it's pretty cool.

Speaker B: One thing you said that's really underrated is it's not merely that both of you, you know, had a, you know, 10 year relationship, that you were, you, you knew what it was like to live together and to uh, you know, just be together. It's that you also started specifically you did volunteering work together. And so I think that one of the things when it comes to like, you know, working with friends, working with family and there being tension that sometimes arises is because you have totally different types of relationships with people. And so you might be like, actually speaking of friends, Cortland Vincent Woo, one of a friend of the POD and a friend of both of ours used to run this, this company where he called uh, Coderpad, where he taught people how to code and he taught his girlfriend how to code. And according to him, I don't know if I'm supposed to share this but like that ended up being like this huge transition in their relationship. They ended up not working out well. And I asked him for advice. I said, hey, my girlfriend wants to learn how to code. Should I teach her? Do you have any advice for me? And he just looked at me across the table and was like, yeah, don't, don't do it.

Speaker A: He did it anyway.

Speaker B: And that was a useful conversation because I was like, hey, uh, Natalie, here's what Vincent told me. We're going to put like a three month window on this. And I kind of like, you know, sort of created all of these caveats ended up working out well.

Speaker D: I, I gotta say the other thing also is that it's not like I was employed, you know, and then Lucas convinced me to become an entrepreneur. I think that's the other part. Sometimes when I tweet about, you know, how cool it is to be married to your co founder, you people say, oh, uh, how can I convince my girlfriend? And I think this is the problem is to say, I think it was Elon Musk that threw on an interview like recently when people say, uh, what would you say to incentivize. To encourage a person to become an entrepreneur? And he was like, no, if you need encouragement, don't become. Because this doesn't work. And I think it's the fault. You need to convince your partner to do it, then it doesn't work. I had businesses of my own. I'm from Brazil, so my businesses were in Brazil in the past. So I'm not coming like, oh, let me give this a try. And my husband convinced me. And I think that's another important point here, is just that we already had prior experiences working together. We already had started things of our own and together. So we have been testing this concept for quite a while and was fine too.

Speaker C: And I gotta give this credit here because I was working for a startup and they kind of rolled. Roll down like, like, stop. This project that I was working on and they gave me, uh, a few months extra pay to. To find a new job or find. And Liz kind of was the one that congre me, hey, you have this perfect opportunity now to go full time on your own tool. Right? It was very small. I didn't make a lot of money back then, but I thought, you know what, I have a few paid months now. Let. Let's use it, let's do it. Um, and she was the one. I. Without her encouragement, I might have not done it. And we might, you know, so this is a good.

Speaker A: How long until you guys have a bunch of kids and you're basically the family on succession and you got kids fighting for your empire.

Speaker D: That's the thing. We talk so much about that. Funnily enough, the things that I never wanted to actually have kids of my own. Uh, so we had to talk a lot about even having kids of our own. I always wanted to adopt. And we keep postponing. So we have been married, as I said, for seven years. And he's always like, yeah, I think in two years we can have you. And we were supposed to start, you know, like, talking seriously now. And we just talked last week. They were like, let's give him another two years. And we keep postponing. We do want to approach it like a business, to be honest. I think it wouldn't be any different for us. I really hope that we don't end up having four kids, like, in succession, because that would break.

Speaker A: I love that show. Honestly. It's like I'm. I don't. Yeah. Loving the show and emulating it. Two wildly different things, I think. Um, I really love the idea of working with the People that you like. Like, I mean, I work with my brother. Our mom's always, like, in our telegram, chat, chat with us. Two of you work together. I just like surrounding myself with the people that I care about, you know? And, like, one of the biggest reasons that companies fail is because co founders don't get along, right? Like, they don't. They're not compatible. They're not good at problem resolution. Whereas, like, just, like, the two of you guys had, like, you have practice, right? Channing and I have practice. Like, we fought for years and resolved everything. We're like, oh, actually, you know, we get along pretty well. Like, no matter what happens, like, we're not gonna, like, break up over money. Like, we're gonna always be brothers. And so I watched Succession, and I'm not as far as you. You guys said you finished the show. I'm like, I'm taking my sweet time. I don't want to be where you are. I don't want to be, like, done. But I watched, like, this whole family, and it's like, they're terribly dysfunctional. It's awful. Like, it's. It's really, like, a show about bad people. But also, I'm like, it would be so cool if I had, like, all these people around me who I. I don't have to convince them to join my stuff. Like, they all want to be a part of the thing that I created because it's so badass.

Speaker D: I don't want to spoil how it goes, but, like, I think you're going to rethink that once you get to the bed.

Speaker A: Like, everybody dies.

Speaker B: I haven't seen a single episode of that show, Courtland. You've convinced me. I think you've got good, like, tv, uh, show tastes, so I'll check it out. But one thing I do know is that I think probably mom hasn't seen it either, but she probably loves the idea of that show because until you watched that show, I was convinced that you never wanted to have kids. And now this. This, like, bug of I just want to run my own family. Empire has literally the worst of the worst because of that show. Like, you brought up all the multiple

Speaker A: times out of, like, the 10 worst reasons to have kids. It was just, like, written in number 11, the bottom of the list, a whole new. And I watched Succession, and it was great. So I think you have another property that I think another attribute that I think is similar to the Family from Succession, which is just your raw ambition. So I think Channing was reading parts of your tweet earlier, but I'm going to read actual tweets that you wrote in more detail because I almost want to just read your whole Twitter thread and then talk about this whole thing. So you said, I'm going to get rich and this is how I'm going to do it. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not rich yet. And you tweeted this last March. It was about a year ago. So I did my CS degree. I worked as a software developer, just like my parents expected. Every day I worked for my 80k a year startup job. Then last month I was laid off because of that. I started looking for another job. But I don't want to have another job. Working for someone else makes me miserable. So I canceled my interviews. Then you started talking about your finances, right? You don't have a ton of money in the bank. It's not enough to make you rich, you said. But I'm going to become rich first. I'm going to stop selling my time for money. I'm going to bootstrap a product. I'm going to scratch my own itch. I'll make a little money at first, so I'll do some freelancing, but. But only some. So I have enough energy to improve my product. There are better ways to make more money more quickly, but I'm not gonna do this way. This product will teach me about how to run a company, how to build a product, and how to do marketing. It's a long term game and I'm gonna learn the rules. After two years making enough money to get by. Because of that, I'll stop freelancing. I'm living cheap. No car, no frills. So I guess the two of you are living cheap. And then I'm gonna start my second company. I'll look for a good market. I'll think about distribution. I'll scratch somebody else's itch, which we talked about. You're scratching somebody else's itch, not your own. And I'll do the thing that a founder is supposed to do. I'll, uh, build a marketable product. There are more lucrative businesses I could build. I don't care. I want to learn how to manage people, how VC money works, and how to exit. I'm going to grow this business to $10 million a year. So that's ambitious. I'll take the VC money. Once I find a way to grow reliably, I'll hire people who hire people until I finally have a big exit. I am now rich, Sean and Sam from my first million will invite me to the pod. Life is great. Then as Channing mentioned earlier, I have a midlife crisis. What am I even doing? I, uh, reached my money goals. I'm living the life. My parents retirement secured. What's next? Then I remember now I have financial freedom, I have experience, I have a bank account. It's time for the final step to build my company. And I think this is the third mountain in your Twitter profile, the one that's like the moonshot. A company I'm excited about. My own SpaceX. This company will build a product I think should exist, but nobody's willing to build or invest into. The 3D food printer, the atmospheric carbon scrubber, the photosynthesis crypto miner. Then I am really, truly wealthy. Don't get me wrong, I don't care for riches. I just can't work for somebody else. New challenges are what get me out of bed in the morning. Getting rich is just a side effect. Follow me if you want to see me succeed or fail. I love that. That's like the most badass tweet I read out loud on the show. Every single part of it is hilarious, fun, insightful. And you're kind of doing it. I mean, you're on the path you're on. Do you think Stage Timer is the one that gets you to $10 million a year?

Speaker C: No one really one million is possible. And uh, uh, I have the next one in the works. I mean now with AI, there's the whole fomo, like, oh, should we do AI could be have potential. But I, uh, also believe in the industry that we know now, and I believe we can build a product in this industry that makes that kind of money.

Speaker A: How do you get Stage Timer to a million? Right now you're at a little over 8k a month. I think a million is like the magic number. Every Indie Hacker knows $83,333 a month. That's a million. So basically you need 10x, which is not crazy, right? That's a realistic goal, one order of magnitude. You got a plan to get there?

Speaker C: So this month, uh, we have a projection in our Google sheet and we say, okay, what was kind of the growth rates per month? And we apply them into the future and we basically hit the mark this month by like, by like $50.

Speaker D: Keep hitting and actually passing the the mark. And so we have a quite predictable growth right now. So yeah, we shouldn't be too far from that actually.

Speaker C: So, yeah, there is, of course there's a ceiling when you do Mr. Right there is like you have your churn rate and eventually because the churn rate applies on the entirety of your customers, eventually your churn rate will cancel out your new customers and you level off. So we thought what can we do? And one approach we will take is go into kind of add on uh, an enterprise style. So instead of you just having it for yourself, we say, okay, you want to share it with your team. So make an enterprise plan or do like a team plan. Kind of get more from one person than having a cheap one and trying to get more and more customers. Get, get more money from one customer. This is kind of.

Speaker D: Yeah, yeah, we, we have a few enterprise deals already, but we had already deals falling through because we don't have all the legal stuff that is needed. So that's why we are just giving a few more months for us to finish some other features and some other things that are important for the industry and then we want to actually work on that side of the business so I can do more enterprise deals. So that would be another way also.

Speaker C: So that was a serious talk. Now let's go back to this tweet. So from the very beginning I always said this is going to be a game like every game, uh, Monopoly. You have to learn the rules. There's probabilities, there's like bedrock streets. Once you hack the rules, you objectively better than others and life is the same. Life has a lot of rules. They're very hard to learn. Um, but you can learn them. So I say I want to learn the rules of business. How does a SaaS business, how does ah, an online business with productized service work? And that's what we are doing with stage timer. So sometimes we just throw a bit of spaghetti against the wall and see if it sticks. Uh, with marketing and this and that. Um, and I think this is kind of part of it say okay, we have done you know like self service. Now let's try enterprise. We don't know if it works. It could fail, it could be terrible.

Speaker D: There's only one way to find out.

Speaker C: One way to find out. Teach us a lot about our next product.

Speaker D: Yeah, the thing that we are very big into trying stuff and just seeing how far we can, we can grow it. So for me right now is like that everything we have been doing, all the side projects, everything is just to test a bunch of things and see what can we do, you know, what can be accomplished, how far can we go with something. So I recently started a side project and I told Lucas I want to help. Heck, social, um, media marketing. Like, I. I just want to know and do it, like, so well that I can do whatever I want. So I started this side project, and I grew my D2C Instagram account. I started a D2C business, and then I grew my Instagram account from zero followers to 6,000 in less than six months. And then I was like, you see, I can do it. I'm going to now go explode this thing.

Speaker C: So I have to say, there's no pictures of her. Uh, and I never showed my brand account. It's a brand logo.

Speaker D: Yeah. I never showed my face. I never danced in front of the camera. Nothing like this. And it's really. This is how we work. That's how we function. We try things just because we like to excel at things, we like to push as far as it can get. So that's certainly what we are going to do with Stage Timer. But it was from the beginning. Well, not the beginning. The beginning beginning. We didn't even think that this would go anywhere, but as soon as we noticed that this could go somewhere, we said, okay, we just want to make a comfortable living with Stage Timer. So it allows us to pursue other, you know, interests and things that we want to try. So this is what we are doing already because it pays for. For our life, even paid for our world trip, um, these past six months. And now that it pays for our lifestyle, we can try other stuff. So Luca is already starting a new business, which, friends and I, I have this. This other side project, and so on. So we are constantly pushing the limits, trying to see how far can we go with things.

Speaker B: Lucas, I saw you made a tweet where you're like, look, we glorify the solopreneur life, right? Uh, everyone who's getting started, they're like, man, I just want to live that dream where it's just me and my computer and my business, and every day is just going to be the best day of my life. And you're like, well, but, you know, most days are crickets, right? Most days, if you. If you do something good, there's no one to pat you on the back. You don't have this big team. You're working in silence. And it's funny, what you just mentioned is almost like a, uh, reaction to that. It's like a way to solve that problem. It's almost like you find ways to turn it into a game. I almost call it gameful design, where, like, you're always, uh, finding something new to learn. Or you're finding something, something new to master and then to bring it back to Rupert Murdoch. So I haven't watched Succession, I haven't seen that show. But I do have a book, kind of like a biography I recommended. It's called the Murdoch Method. Like his, one of his 20 year long advisors or consultants kept enough of a distance relationship with him that he didn't have to ask permission to like write down everything that he know that he knew. And one of the things that he says about Rupert Murdoch is like the way that he's reached that third mountain of being this massive billionaire with this, you know, this huge media empire is that he just fucking loves what he does. He's, you know, it's like number one, he's super competitive. They said that he stalked the Wall Street Journal for many years. He wanted the New York Post. So he was like, I want to, you know, beat the New York Times. And that was a game in and of itself to him. He's also just really, really curious. One of his friends is like, no, he just knows, you know, you'll never ever get the same topic with him. And that's key to running a news empire. And so I think that the sort of funny catch 22 is that if you want to do something where it's a like sustained run and you're gonna, you know, you're gonna climb this huge mountain, it almost has to be the case that you're not doing it so that you can get to the top of the mountain. You're doing it like to get there. You have to just really, really love like these weird, you know, turnoffs and, you know, sort of experiments and small things that you master.

Speaker A: That's step one. And then step two is you have to have absolutely no succession planning for who your successor is going to be. And then encourage your children to fight and compete with each other to be your successor, which is exactly what Rupert Murdoch has done. And you know who also did that? Genghis Khan. And like a whole groove of other crazy people throughout history. I don't know why that's so common. I don't know why people do that.

Speaker C: And this is true for many, like inventors, if you like Edison, if you read a biography of him. He loves inventing. He just, he sleeps in his workshop. He's like, he's never at home. His wife hates him for that. But he just, he loves inventing. And I'm reading right now a book about da Vinci, Leonardo da Vinci, just finding out things like how does the human Body work. How, like, how does clothes flow? How do you paint something? And he. So far, he. Once he figured something out, he doesn't want to finish his painting. There are so many unfinished paintings of Leonardo da Vinci. Because it's just as soon as he find out the method, as soon as he figured out a painting, he's like, it gets. He gets boring. And he wants to do.

Speaker A: The original indie hacker just kept starting side projects and then never, never launching them.

Speaker B: You mentioned that, Liz. Uh, he didn't convince you. And you can't convince someone to do something like this. And interestingly, I'm also. It's the Isaacson, Walter Isaacson biography of, of DaVinci. Right? So I'm reading that too. And it's so funny when you look at these, pretty much anyone who's done things that people consider them great for. I put people into three buckets in terms of, like, their relationship to their work. You have. And this by numbers. You have the 1 tens, the eight thousand twenties, and the fifty fifties. Fifty, fifty is like, oh, we'll see how I feel about this thing. 80, 20 is the Pareto principle. It's like, ah, ah, you know, how do I be efficient? What's my ROI? How do I do the 20% of the work that can get the 80% out? But all these other people, the Murdochs, you know, the, the da Vinci is pretty much anyone that you know who's doing something great. They're the 110%. Right. Uh, the funny thing about Da Vinci is he'd paint landscapes and he would, um, you know, sort of go and learn about a certain bird and he would always travel to the location. He would, like, go cross country and go visit the thing. When they had like, atlases and they had images, like, there's a way that he could study it. And he, very specifically, when someone questioned him, they were like, why don't you just look at the, you know, why don't you just read the, you know, the encyclopedia on the thing? And he's like, you should never read an encyclopedia when you can go and see the thing in real life, right? And almost certainly that's highly inefficient, right? Like the return on investment, like Courtland just mentioned. He had tons of, like, wasted images, but, like, he was all in.

Speaker D: We actually appreciate a lot this, this kind of mentality and. And I think it's this curiosity, you know. One thing that we always try to emulate is being curious. When I read about the people that now I admire after reading about their lives and so on. It's always these very curious people. They never stop asking questions. And we have been trying to really become more and more like this.

Speaker A: You two seem naturally curious, you seem naturally interested. You seem naturally really excited to be entrepreneurs. You launch in some side projects, you're growing your normal thing. Hopefully we'll have you two back on when you hit your million dollar a year goal, when you hit 10 million, you hit 100 million. And then when you got your own SpaceX, you got two believers right here. I think you're going to get there. Can you tell listeners where they can go to find out more about what you're up to with Stage Timer and your other projects as well?

Speaker D: So I think the best way is to follow us on Twitter.

Speaker C: Yeah come on twitter. Uh uh, nherman1r2n terrible name but you'll find it probably put in the show notes.

Speaker D: Yeah and I think I am at least M. Herman also perfect.

Speaker A: Thanks again guys.