This App Makes $25,000/Month

N/A 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] welcome Lucas to the channel tell me N/A 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 N/A 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 N/A 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 N/A 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 N/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 N/A 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 N/A 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 N/A about a third of your customers come from word of mouth talk to me about that yeah so from the beginning I wanted to be like Dropbox you know Dropbox you create it and then it says oh you want to have 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 N/A 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 N/A 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 N/A 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 N/A 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 N/A 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 N/A 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 N/A 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 N/A 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 you in the next one peace