YouTube Transcript:
This App Makes $25,000/Month
Skip watching entire videos - get the full transcript, search for keywords, and copy with one click.
Share:
Video Transcript
Available languages:
View:
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 ups
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. [Music]
[Music]
Welcome, Lucas, to the channel. Tell me
about who you are and what's your story.
I'm uh Lucas Herman. I'm a software
developer from Germany. I turned a
simple idea into a SAS business and
eventually was able to quit my job and
work full-time. I'm a soloreneur and I
built this business with my wife and a
child. So, we have reached uh 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. 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 SAS. 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
me some feedback. What do you think? Is
this useful to you?" And 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. 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 use all
the technologies I already know. I use
JavaScript, I use Vue.js, I use NodeJS.
There's no Versell 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 I could
ship my MVP in 3 days and then build
upon it slowly and and comfortably in
the 1 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. 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 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? You know, 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 she does uh
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 the product, the 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, you know,
grow this shoe business over there. We
think about these business terms
together which is really fun and it 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
SAS business. Yeah. So, my first
development job was in 2007. That was 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 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 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 timer 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 to quit
because stage time was already making
enough money to just get by uh 3,000 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 a 10K monthly revenue mark that
every soloreneur 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 earlystage 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 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
solarpreneurs 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 have you
driven customers to your app to sign up
and grown this thing to over 25,000 MR.
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 or do 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
solarpreneurs, 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 uh look for countdown timer stream
deck companions, we uh 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's not 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 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 third of your customers come
from word of mouth. Talk to me about that.
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 5 GB more space you know share
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 le 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.
It's 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 used it
myself. That's the one way and the other
way is we make it a premium 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 invited and somebody says ah we
need a timer. So they say ah let me just
pull up stage timer. 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 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 supply text and
supply merge. These are old tools. The
fact is for me like copy pasting into
cloud and generating code there and
coasting is literally faster than
integrated IDEs like cursor or copilot.
One tool I love is air table. We use it
as 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 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 solarreneurs. So these are really
that breadandbut tools that I'm using
for stage timer. That's amazing. Your
business makes $25,000 MR. Uh 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 a 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 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 So this is the
app. That's it. Imagine you are on 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 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. Nice.
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 that anybody
watching this is having is like, "Okay,
why would I pay for this? I can 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
broadcast for elections and they need to
time every speaker. We had horse races
by 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
that one person clicks start and 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. And I was in
my friend's studio and he used this very
old flash app on a 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 and hit a button and walk back and
my web developer mind immediately says
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
the really the simple ideas that you can
turn into a lot of money. 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?
One lesson 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 $1 million
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 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 Lucas's shoulder
when you shipped that MVP or even
before, what advice would you give him?
So, I would go back and tell myself,
Lucas, you're a German. You're scared of
regulation. You're scared of like the
the finansome, 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 like getting by
somewhere and you can do it too. Any
Germans or Europeans watching this?
Hopefully that inspired you. Thank you,
Lucas, for coming on to start our story
and uh keep going. I I will. Thanks,
Pet. Lucas 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 cuz
you don't need an audience and
potentially all your customers are
hanging out in one little subreddit just
like the one that Lucas had posted. I
think that anybody can take lessons from
his story and build a SAS, 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 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
Click on any text or timestamp to jump to that moment in the video
Share:
Most transcripts ready in under 5 seconds
One-Click Copy125+ LanguagesSearch ContentJump to Timestamps
Paste YouTube URL
Enter any YouTube video link to get the full transcript
Transcript Extraction Form
Most transcripts ready in under 5 seconds
Get Our Chrome Extension
Get transcripts instantly without leaving YouTube. Install our Chrome extension for one-click access to any video's transcript directly on the watch page.
Works with YouTube, Coursera, Udemy and more educational platforms
Get Instant Transcripts: Just Edit the Domain in Your Address Bar!
YouTube
←
→
↻
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc
YoutubeToText
←
→
↻
https://youtubetotext.net/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc