¶ Introduction to StageTimer and Ambition
🎵 Music
Yo, what's going on, man?
Who who do we got today? Liz and Lucas Herman. I'm excited about this. 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 eight thousand dollars 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 like I could build this very easily by myself. But they're making like a hundred K a year from it.
Right. 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's making like eighty K 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 Andy hacker. From something very simple that he bootstrapped. With his wife and he doesn't know anybody any money. He's just basically free. He's living the Andy Hacker dream.
Yeah, yeah. By the way, I 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've 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? Yeah.
This is super simple. Well AI is like next level. Like I was posting about AI I think a couple of days ago'cause I've got this like new bot, our Anderson Koop bot, who basically is like an AI journalist who sends us like like little reviews of people's submissions and tells us
What ratio of your time are you spending figuring out the names of these bots versus actually building the bots?
Yeah. It's like fifty fifty I would say. It's hard to come up with good bot names, but
Why don't you use the bots to name the bots?
I should I've tried it. I swear to god I put names in the GPT four. It suc I mean you've tried to use it for creative writing. It's not that good at no coming up with like creative writing. It's not that good at being funny.
Ma it's par partially is in the prompt, but yeah, creative writing is.
It'll it'll like get your creative juices flowing. It's like good for brand. But anyway, I mean I 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 is not just that they're building something really simple, but that they are incredibly ambitious. So he has let me send you the strat. I think you've you've seen this thread.
I'm going to get rich and this is how I'm gonna do it. He's not 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 I'm he's like Bay Bruce. Pointing to the outfield, exactly where he's going to hit the ball.
He's not he's not hey guys, I made some Hashtag Velding in Public.
¶ Crafting an Ambitious Vision and Twitter Strategy
Oh here he is. What's up, Lucas? Hi Liz.
Hey guys!
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 Perry from My First Million came on uh our show like very recently and he was kind of like, you guys are doing small boy stuff. You know, we're all about big boy stuff on my first million. And like I look at your tweet and like you're like the same attitude, right? You've got this app, it's very cool, you're just getting started.
I mean, even your Twitter background, you've got like these three mountains and the first mountain is like 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 a hundred million dollars 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 gr boxes green the further you get. And most of us are like, Yeah, ten thousand dollars a month is like my goal or you know, twenty thousand and yours is like a million dollars.
Thank you. And by the way, and by the way, we can't we can't let them off the hook. Like I wanna I wanna 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 for work'cause you had gotten laid off and you're like, But I'm going to be rich. First, I'm gonna stop selling my time for money.
Then I'll bootstrap a a product, I'll scratch my edge, you kinda like go through, I'm gonna uh make a lot of money, then I'm gonna 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 they that always blindsides them, you specifically go, then I'll have a midlife crisis.
What am I even doing? I reached my money goals. I'm living the life. My parents' retirement is secured. What next? Then I remember, like, 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.
Yeah, it's pretty cool.
The funny thing here is we are big fans of my first million. And then one day out of the blue Sam started following. And I'm a big Sam fan and he is a big Sean fan. And then I was like, ah, 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 Sean started following him as a okay, yeah on the path here.
Yeah. Yeah, so I I just go it's like I I'm gonna make this killer tweet. And I even looked up the Disney story spine. That's like, you know, uh things like this all the time and then happens this and then happens this, but one day and then have And it's like okay, I'm gonna write a tweet exactly like the the the Pixar story
Yeah, the fixer.
And totally worked.
¶ StageTimer: A Simple, Profitable Solution
So let's let's clue people into 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. So let's say I'm running a conference or an event where I've got speakers. I want my speakers to all know like
Pretty simple. How much time do they have left in their talk? Is it ten minutes? Is it thirty minutes? Uh and I want it to be like on some sort of laptop or screen or iPad that they can see while they're talking so they don't go But I wanna 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 stage timer.io is. You basically Sign on to 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 twenty bucks a month, thirty bucks a month for this, and you are at last I saw eight thousand dollars a month in revenue.
Yeah, a bit a bit more already.
Yeah. I mean this is the dream. Shannon and I were talking before you came on. Like everybody wants to build something that's simple, that's easy to understand, but that like makes you a living. I mean you're making more from this than you're making at your startup job. Yeah.
It's actually a bit wild if you think if if you think that a a countdown timer, like the un the most unlikely thing that anybody would pay money for, uh makes more money than than a than a startup show, it's a bit crazy. It's it's a bit crazy.
¶ Finding Opportunities in Neglected Industries
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 the most generic startup advice ever. Keep your eyes open for problems in the world and like one day you'll find a problem that's worth solving and then solving.
And like almost nobody does that. It's so hard to do that. It's like 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 like start a timer on their iPad and then run to the control area to start controlling it. Like he didn't have a remote, he had to like physically sprint across the studio. Exactly.
I'm I see him running in running in, you know, like clicking this one button on the laptop, running back out, seeing as there must be a better solution for this. You know, many people say on Twitter like scratch your own edge, do you know m build a business that that you that you yourself like
And I looked around like I wanna scratch somebody else's itch. You know, I see this guy like c can I build something that that is a solution for him? First of all I I thought, surely, surely somebody else has has made a has made 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 the perfect business. And I'll say
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 who cares? Let's see if people want this, if people wanna use it. I I just did it as a
Well I get like I get skeptical when I see things that are obvious. I'm like, Oh 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, like, does this exist?
Yeah, so I like on that very spot I tried to find this solution and I couldn't. I you know just a simple website that you open have a timer. Um that is remote control. So I I build it and afterwards I find like two or three solutions that are old Windows apps.
Ha ha ha.
What's interesting is you did the you did something that's the opposite of what Paul Graham said. Just a couple of days e 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.
But I I would say also this is the thing about percentages, right? There is still the thing of percent. She said nine, so there is still this percent, 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 a 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 Rotterweed went back to Reddit and tell told people that he had created that. So that's how he got the first user. So
I wanna shine a bit of different light on this on this gray hem 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 and five times already. But then you look at other industries, especially old industries, met you know metal manufacturing and in this case like event uh organizing and video recording.
There's so much low-hanging fruit that you as a as a developer coming from a like startup, you look at it as like I 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 like remote problems to be solved for developers in other places.
Yeah.
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 triumph for teleprompter? Do you have something like stage triumph, you know? And then they are always mentioning things and we're like, oh man, there are so many things that we could do in this industry. Again these low hanging fruits that are still there to be taken.
It's fascinating because it's like in the world of technology, like if you're a developer and you're building tools for other developers, you go on GitHub, there's like 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 ND hackers have already gotten to some other industry, like let's say insurance, and they've already built some tools there. They haven't built anything near what they built for software engineers. And so there's like guaranteed to be like something
That's
you can build. And sometimes it's as obvious as like, hey, like 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 I think that people can explore a little bit more here and try to figure out what's going on in other
Absolutely. And there's of course there's the the big 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 ch like it perfect and enough to grow a good business.
What was uh Patio Eleven had uh a really simple app for teachers. I forget what it's called.
Bingo card creator.
Yeah, being a card creator back at back in two thousand seven and and it was the exact same story where you know, it's not a super s super, you know, sophisticated product. And when he's talking to developers or to coders, like, you know, eyebrows would go up like really you're 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?
Yeah. They're literally creating bingo cards by hand for these kids. It's taking them hours. We could, you know, use code to do this in a minute and like no one's doing it for them'cause programmers are only making apps for other programs.
¶ Smart Reddit Launch and User-Driven Features
You mentioned that you launched on Reddit. Like this wasn't just like a singular moment, boom, you have an app. Uh it was like a si 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 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 slash R slash commercial A V, and you made this post called Advice for Presentation Timer App in.
And just with your title, like I think you you killed it. Because you're like 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 like smart genius people out there, I could really just use some like some tips. So it's like 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 like literally put a link to your app. So you've done like 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 like all this free feedback from people and probably like some of your first users and just that one post.
So I actually first of all I had to look for the subreddit. It's so hard to find a subreddit if you're not uh knowledgeable. So I found this tool where you like you put one subreddit and it gives you all the connections to the other ones, how how they're related.
Is it like that like network graph thing? I think I've seen like that visualization.
Yeah, exactly. Like a network of platforms.
Yeah, it's so cool. It's like a map of red.
It's it's amazing. And so I go there and exactly I thought, okay, how how do you can you post it? So people actually want to read it and want to respond, right? Reddit you can exhaust very quickly. And funny, uh there's another tool, another timer that's launched like a year later in the same subreddit, and I I read these posts and it was open source tool.
And he posted first one, everybody was excited and then he posted like every single like every week he posted and it petered out. You can't do that. On Reddit it's like one you 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. It's like, hey, with your help, I did it. Uh check it out. What do you think?
And that was when we reached the papers.
That's when we launched the paid version. But I didn't mention the paid version. I just said, like, hey, thanks to your help. I built this thing, and now it's a thing, and it's awesome.
This is a hilarious comment. on uh your first Reddit post that I liked. It was like someone someone's basically talking about a different time wrap that they found where, you know, a speaker might have ten 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 ten.
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?
This literally the one oldest feature on our on our backlog and I have not and I have not built it yet because it's such a mind boggling hard task on a distributed server.
True.
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 the users because we didn't know any better, right? We didn't know how this 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 Multi with no idea. So so it was really funny entering an industry with no prior knowledge. But then also the the user base, right? Teaching us and educating us. 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 and 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. For us
Like I just gave you money, you better have this next year.
They were delivered. 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 the input of this guy and many other people that wrote it because we didn't know what they meant.
Yeah.
For
The event production space.
Somehow we just hopped on a call, like, Hey c can we have a call with you? Like can you tell us what you're actually doing? Like just show us
And of course the cool thing is that when you are dealing with early adopters, they're 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 turn to look and was like, Yeah, thank you. And that's it because people actually believe that we are a larger team.
And uh recently you even met a person and the person said, Oh, you are one of the engineers? And I was like, Yeah, well, did Morgan.
It's cool because like what you're doing is basically proving that like you don't have to solve Right. And I think solving your own problem is a little bit overrated because at the end of the day, like you're you're trying to find like other customers, right? And they're going to be different than you.
No matter what, like even if you know an area inside and out, other people are gonna be different than you. And if you don't keep your ears and eyes open to listen to what like they have as problems and what they want, you're gonna be dead.
And so you might as well get in the habit of doing that from day one by solving like other people's problems. And I like that you posted on the subreddit. And like you said, you posted like again. So you later on like 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. Like thank you so much for the advice, you know, it was so great, it's so helpful. Just so you you know, like here's what the new product is like with all your advice added. So you're not like advertising, you're just like participating. As a community member.
¶ Organic Growth and Intentional SEO Strategy
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 they 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 like 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?
Yeah, so I pushed out on Twitter and I had like three hundred 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, treat it out. And but this the same night somebody purchased it. I was like, this is incredible. If you know your first dollar online is some magical moment, like some I contact the guy, I write him on Twitter, it's like hey, um like
Why did you buy my thing? It's like I uh I I know you're from this first Reddit post and I just followed you and I I love it. I love new things, I love what you're doing, I bought it right away.
And it's
That it's from this first Reddit post actually somebody.
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 in your like marketing and growth strategy?
Nothing. Yeah. 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 and events is like there's
Two circles don't touch.
Exactly. Yeah. We just created actually now a 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 Lucas 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 this industry is so tightly knitted uh so it's it's just the way it is for them. As soon as they find something, they tell all
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 time. And 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 say, Oh, I just saw that so and so mention you, and then they send the video with the minute already, you know, that I should watch. And is becoming this tool in the space where people even reference already as if it's like a house brand. And then for example, the other day I saw that uh a big creator in the space, he mentioned stage timer.
Actually he he was using stage timer and then he mentioned that he wanted to do something related to 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 mentioned stage timer 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 in this
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 I know that at first you were working at a startup. Liz, what were you doing?
So actually I only joined a few months after he created the the paid version. Before I was working in in humanitarian work. and I I was working with social development and so on. And when I joined Lucas in September twenty twenty-one, I started helping him exactly to grow the tool. One thing that Lucas did that was quite genius, and this again comes from the way he functioned. Is that he called the thing stage timer. It's just like calling a clock a clock, right? So because he called
stage timer, stage timer, uh SEO came by default, right? So when people were stage timer, then you would show we we were already on the first page pretty fast.
because of that. So this was already SEO then became the 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 a technical industry is to just do technical blogs or or documentation even better because these top of funnel
silly blogs, you know, that usually you can do with 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 such a complex timer, right? So funnily enough, one of the 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 we then started growing. Of course then ads and and we keep expanding to
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 are 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? What do I write? 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, the and and these are to date uh the the most kind of clicked and converting articles that we have.
Yeah. Yeah, I think I I run an Airbnb and it's kind of in the same 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 five thousand dollars a month.
instantly and it's so much easier than selling like the vast majority of like super complicated tech products that like everybody's addicted to making. Like you sell a stage timer. It's like yeah you want to time your events like 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.
That's also uh 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.
Exactly. And the I mean the flip side is you go on H Reds, you look for your keywords and there's like zero traffic. Uh but it's just like almost nobody's ranking for it and then you kinda start doing content and you realise okay, there there are hundred, two hundred, three hundred people coming. And they have really high purchasing intent. Yeah. So these are enough for us.
¶ Working Together as a Married Entrepreneurial Couple
Working together.'Cause you two are you're married, right? Yeah. Shannon and I aren't married, but we're related. Sometimes we want to kill each other. You know, sometimes it 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.
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?
Well I I I think I can I can say more about that because because of the following. Lucas is laughing but it's because of the following. The other day I even made fun on Twitter and said like that is awesome, you know, being married to your co founder because you can have meetings.
As you go for a walk or or as you go out to eat. And then some very patronizing guy comes to me and says, Yeah, once the pink colored glasses, you know, fall you're going to hard and like we have been together for ten years, married for seven, have worked together since the day one,'cause we met while volunteering.
So as soon as we met, 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 works 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
Right.
I mean, I had to do a calculation, right? Because I invited her uh eventually. And it's like, is it a wise idea? Is it a good idea? Like, you know, you can't step back from that. It's like having a kid. I'm co-founder of your wife.
So
So I thought, you know, when when you look at families, most of them they they kinda build up their different jobs and then they they lose kinda the the things that they talk about and then they end up talking about the series that they watch and 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 topic. So like a world that overlaps with that we can use for with 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 we see businesses like uh you know, an old uh selling cheese or selling meat or something. And and we think how would we how would you revitalize or how would you grow this business?
You know, it's just this challenge, they give 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.
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.
Love it.
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 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'cause sometimes we see a business fail and we're like, what could we have done or how could we actually take advantage of this net worth effect here, you know?
And we are all the time playing this game and I see that this is also what makes us'cause we are we have side projects to Stage Timer and we we usually get these ideas from these exercises and these conversations. So it's pretty cool.
One thing you said that's really underrated is it's not merely that both of you you know, had a you know tenure relationship that you were you you knew what it was like to live together and to, 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 w 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 Wu, one of a friend of the pod and a and a friend of both of ours, used to run this this company where he uh called 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 the relationship. They ended up n 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 And he just looked at me across the table and was like, Yeah, don't
You did it anyway.
And I and I d uh what I speci that was a useful conversation because I was like, Hey, uh Natalie, here's what Vincent told me. We're gonna put like a three month window on this and like I I kinda like, you know, sort of created all of these caveats ended up working out well.
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 a co-founder, people say, oh, how can I convince my girlfriend? And I think this is the problem. It's the same I think it was Ilomas that uh threw on on an interview uh like recently.
When people say, ah what what would you say to to like incentivize to encourage a person to become an entrepreneur? And he was like, no, if you need encouragement, don't don't become, because it doesn't this doesn't work. And I think it's the same. If 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 with was fine.
And I gotta give this this credit here because I was working for a startup and they kinda rolled a roll down, like like stopped this project that I was working on, and they gave me a few months extra pay to to find a new job, all fine. And Liz kinda was the one that concluded 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'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 uh good.
¶ Ambition, Family, and Long-Term Entrepreneurial Goals
How long until you guys have a bunch of kids? And you're basically the family on succession. And you've got kids fighting for your empire.
That that's the thing. We talked so much about that, funnily enough. The thing is that I never wanted to to actually have kids of my own. Uh so we we had to talk a lot about even, you know, having kids of our own. I always wanted to adopt. And we keep postponing. So we're having mered, as I said, for seven years and he's always like, Yeah, I think in two years we can we can we can have it And we were supposed to to start, you know, like
talking seriously now and we just talked last week. They were like, let's give another two years. Okay. And we keep postponing. We we do wanna 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
I love that show. Honestly, it's like I'm I don't
Sure, but they're
Yeah. Loving the show and emulating it, two two wildly different things. I think um I I really love the idea of working with the people Like, like I mean I work with my brother, our mom's always like in our our telegram chat chatting 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
not compatible, they're not good at problem resolution. Whereas like just like the two of you guys had like You had practice, right? Shannon and I had 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 brought up.
And so I watched Succession and 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 wanna be where you are. I don't wanna be like done. But I watched like this whole family and it's like they're terribly dysfunctional, it's awful like
It's really like a show about bad people, but also I'm like, oh 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 bad.
I I don't wanna spoil how it goes but like I think you're gonna re rethink that once you get to
Like everybody dies.
I haven't seen a single episode of that show. Courtland, you've convinced me. I think you've got I think you've got good like uh TV 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 watch that show. I was convinced that you never wanted to have kids and now this this like bug of I just wanna run my own family empire. Like you brought it up.
Like multiple times. Out of like the ten worst reasons to have kids, like we've just like written in number eleven, the bottom of the list to hold me. But I want succession in it. So I think you have another property that I think or another attribute that I think is similar to like the family from succession, which is like just your raw ambition. So we were I think Channing was like reading parts of your tweet.
earlier, but I'm gonna read like it I'm gonna read like actual tweets that you wrote like in more detail because it's it's I almost wanna just read like your whole Twitter. And then like talk about this whole thing. So you said, I'm gonna get rich and this is how I'm gonna do it. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not rich yet. And you tweeted this last March.
So I did my CS degree, I worked as a software developer just like my parents expected. Every day I worked for my eighty K year startup job. Then last month I was laid off, and because of that I started looking for another But I don't want to have another job. Working for someone else makes me miserable, so I canceled my energy. And you started talking about your finances, right? Like you don't have a ton of money in the bank, right? It's not enough to make you rich. He said, But I'm gonna become
And the first I'm gonna stop selling my time for money. I'm gonna bootstrap a product. I'm gonna scratch my own itch. It'll make a little money at first, so I'll do some freelancing, but only some. So I have enough energy to improve. There are better ways to make more money more quickly. But I'm not gonna do those ways. 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
After two years making enough money to get by, because of that, I'll stop freelancing. I'm living cheap, no cart, 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 build a marketable.
There are more lucrative businesses I could build. I don't care. I'm gonna learn how to manage people, how VC money works, and how to educate. I'm gonna grow this business to ten million dollars a year. So that's ambitious. I'll take the V C 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
Sean and Sam for my first million will invite me to the pod. Life is great. Then as Channing mentioned earlier, I'll have a midlife crisis. What am I even doing? I've reached my money goals and living the like, 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 space. This company will build a product I think should exist, but nobody's willing to build or invest.
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 cycle.
¶ StageTimer's Growth to $1M and Experimental Mindset
Follow me if you want to see me succeed or fail. I love that. That's like the most badass tweet I've 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 like on the path. Like you're on Do you think stage timer is the one that gets you to ten million dollars?
No, one million is possible. I think one million is possible. And uh and uh I have I have the next one in in the works. I mean, now with AI, there's the whole the whole FOMO like oh should we do AI or everything? could be has potential. But uh I also believe in the industry that we know now and I believe I can we can build a product in this industry that makes that
How do you get stage timer to a million? Right now you're at You know, a little over eight K a month. I think a million is like you know, the magic number every indie hacker knows, eighty three thousand three hundred and thirty three dollars a month. That's a million. So basically you need a ten X, which is not unre not not not crazy, right? That's a realistic goal. One order of magnitude.
You got a plan to get there?
So this might we have a we have a a projection in our in our Google Sheet. And we say, Okay, what 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 fifty dollars.
keep hitting and actually passing the the mark and so we have a quite predictable growth right now. So yeah, uh we shouldn't be too far from that actually.
So yeah, there there is of course there is a a ceiling when you do MRR, right? There's like you have your churn rate and eventually'cause your churn rate applies on the i the entirety of of your customers, eventually your churn rate will cancel out. And you're and you're lay-off. So we thought, what what can we do? And one approach we will take is go into like kind of add-on.
uh an enterprise style, right? So instead of you just having it for yourself, we say, okay, you you want to share it with your team, so so make an enterprise plan or do like a team plan. Kind of get more from one person than than having than having a cheap one and trying to get more and more customers, get more money from one customer. This is kind of 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 wanna actually work on that side of the business so I can do more enterprise deals. So that would be another way.
also. So that was a serious talk. Now let's go back to this tweet. So from the very beginning I always said this is gonna be a game. Like like every game Monopoly, you have to learn the rules. There's probabilities, there's like better up streets, there's there's Right. Once you learn once you hack the rules, you be u 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 wanna learn the rules of business. How does a SaaS business, how does a does an online business with productised service work? And that's what we are doing with stage timers. So sometimes we just throw a bit of spaghetti against the wall and see if it sticks. Uh with marketing and this and that. And 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.
There's only one way to find out. The thing that we are very big into trying stuff. and and just seeing how far we can we can grow it. So for me right now i is 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? What how far can we go with something? So I recently started a side project and I told Lucas I wanna hack
um social media marketing. Like I I just wanna know and do it like so well. that I can do whatever I want. So I started this my project and I grew my D2C Instagram account. I I started a D2C business and then I grew my Instagram account. from zero followers to six thousand in less than six months. And then I was like, you see, I can do it. I'm going to now go explore this thing. So we Yeah, and I never showed it.
Yeah, I never I never showed my face. I never danced in front of the camera, nothing like this. And it's it's really this is how we we work, you know, that's how we function. We try things just because we we like to excel at things, we we like to push as far as it can get, you know.
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 and things that we want to try. So this is what we are doing already because it pays for our life, even paid for our
um these past six months and and now that it pays for our lifestyle, we can try other stuff. So Lucas is already starting a new business with your 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
¶ The Core Drive of Visionary Entrepreneurs
Lucas I saw you made a tweet where you're like, Look, we glorify the solopreneur life. Right. Everyone who's getting started, they're like, Man, I I just wanna live that dream where it's just me and my computer and my business and every day is just gonna 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 a 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 you're 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 a book. Kinda like a biography. I recommend that it's called the Murdoch Method. Like his one of his you know, twenty 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 knew 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 I wanna, 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, y 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 twenty two 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 you 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.
That's step one. And then step two is you have to have absolutely no succession planning for who your s successor is gonna be and then encourage your children to fight and compete with each other to be your successor.
Yeah.
Yeah. Which is exactly what Rupert Murdoch has done. And you know who also did that Genghis Khan and like a whole group of other Crazy people throughout history. I don't know why that's so common. I don't know why people
And this is true for many like uh inventors, if you like Edison, if you read a um biography of him, he he loves inventing. He just he he sleeps in his 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 I'm reading right now a book about Da Vinci, Leonardo da Vinci. Just finding out things like how does a human body work? How like how does clothes flow? How do you paint something? And he he so far he
When once he figured something out, he doesn't want to finish his painting. There's so many unfinished paintings of Leonardo da Vinci because he's just as soon as he find out a meth method, as soon as he figured out a painting, he's like it gets it gets boring and he wants to do it
The original Indy Hacker just kept starting side projects. Never launching them.
You mentioned that uh Liz, he didn't convince you and you can't convince someone to do something like this. And um I'm interestingly, I'm also it's the Isaacson, the Walter Isaacson biography of of Da Vinci, right? So I'm I'm reading that too and th 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 it's by numbers, it'd you have you you have the one tens, the eighty twenties, and the fifty fifties. Fifty fifty is like, oh we'll see how I feel about eighty twenty is the Pareto. Like, ah, well, 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 Murdoch,
you know, the the Da Vinci's, pretty much anyone that you know who who's doing something great, they're the one hundred and ten percent, 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 the return on investment, like Cortland just mentioned, he had tons of like wasted images, but like he was all in.
We we actually appreciate a lot. This kind of mentality 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 I admire after reading about their lives and so on, is always these. Very curious people. They never stop asking questions. And we have been trying to really become more and more like this.
You two seem naturally curious. You seem naturally interested. You seem naturally really excited to be entrepreneurs. You're launching side projects, you're growing your normal thing. Hopefully we'll have you two back on.
You hit your million a dollar a year goal. When you hit ten million, you hit a hundred million, and then when you got your own SpaceX. When you got two believers right here, I think you're gonna get there. Do 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?
So I think the best way is to follow us on Twitter.
Yeah go go come on Twitter um uh at underscore L Herman one R2N terrible name but you'll find it before we put it in the show notes.
Yeah. And I think I am at Liz M. Herman also.
Perfect. Thanks again, guys.
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