From a Timer Started in a Friend's Studio to a Business: Stagetimer

In November 2020, Lukas Hermann saw something odd at a friend's video production studio. His friend started a timer on an old laptop placed in front of a presenter, then ran back to the control desk to run the recording. Lukas thought the round trip could go away if the timer could be controlled from another device. He looked for a usable web-based tool but did not find what he wanted, so he started building it himself.

He had already spent two years writing down business ideas as they came to him. Among them, the timer was small enough to build over a weekend and fit the web technology he already knew well. In the first version, pressing start on one device showed the remaining time on another device connected through a shared link. He focused on that behavior and left out sign-up and payments, so the prototype took about three days.

On November 19, 2020, Lukas posted the product on Reddit and asked for feedback. He went to r/CommercialAV, where people who work with commercial sound and video systems gather. Practitioners tried it, left reactions and suggestions, and even proposed features worth charging for. Lukas expanded the product based on that feedback, and early users supplied the information he needed to fix it.

Talking with users also sharpened the customer picture. Among video production companies and event operators, some needed a way to manage speaking time but could not justify expensive software that bundled many features together. Stagetimer gave those small and mid-sized businesses remote time management on its own. The product that started in a studio spread to universities, broadcasters, and other venues.

On June 13, 2021, Lukas launched paid plans. The first subscriber arrived that evening, and paid customers grew to six by the end of the month. Monthly recurring revenue at the time was 52 euros. He was still working at the startup Laserhub and developing Stagetimer on the side, but now he had to answer to customers who were actually paying.

The next task was bringing in more customers. In July 2021, he sent new customers a short welcome email asking how they had found the product and where they used it. Replies mentioned referrals from acquaintances and Google search, and one customer was showing the timer on a small touchscreen attached to a Raspberry Pi. Lukas decided to improve search visibility and product copy based on those answers.

The plan to learn marketing soon drifted back into familiar development work. In August, while building an intro page for studios, he found rendering and metadata problems on the existing site and moved the content area to Astro, which generates static pages. Fixing issues in that then-young tool took a large share of his coding time. In his monthly retrospective, he wrote that a month meant for marketing had ended up filled with development.

In September 2021, his wife Liz Hermann joined as a co-founder. Liz scaled back her existing work and took over Stagetimer's marketing, sales, and customer support. Lukas focused on product development while Liz handled customers and business operations. Monthly recurring revenue was 249 euros at the time, so the business was still small when the couple split roles.

Around the same time, canceling subscribers pointed to an important problem. Many who answered the follow-up email were satisfied with the product but said they had needed it for only one event. Once the event ended, they had no use for a timer for a while. Seeing that usage cycle confirmed that customers with temporary needs required a matching way to pay.

The result was an event pass for 30 days with no automatic renewal. Customers could easily bill the fee to that event, and they no longer worried about remembering to cancel later. According to Lukas, the pass cost almost twice the monthly subscription at the time, yet it was well received. He said in a 2025 interview that the monthly subscription churn rate fell from 12 percent to about 3 percent after introducing the event pass.

Separately from payment by frequency, free and paid editions were divided by needed features. Free users could try basic time management with a limited number of timers and connected devices. Paid tiers allowed larger setups, integrations with external tools and data imports, and higher tiers allowed custom screens and logos. In that structure, a customer who learned the product at a small event had a reason to upgrade when running more complex operations.

They reinvested early revenue into growing search traffic. The couple hired a specialist for keyword research and three articles, and two of those articles were still major inbound pages at the time of the 2023 retrospective. They checked the phrases people actually used in search tools and revised the intro copy. A separate page built for studios did not bring as many visitors as hoped, so adding a page had to be followed by checking its results.

Documentation also brought customers. In material Lukas published in 2023, three of the ten best-performing pages were product docs with no separate search optimization. Material written to help users understand features and solve problems was also being found in search results. As that work continued, monthly visits from Google grew to about 3,500 in roughly a year and a half.

The product's name also spread where it was actually used. The timer screen on the free plan showed the Stagetimer logo, and users shared timer links with colleagues. Some video creators made how-to videos without being asked by the couple. Lukas said those industry recommendations and introductions contributed to early growth.

The chance to go full-time came when the project at his employer was discontinued. When the company gave him time to look for another job, Liz suggested trying Stagetimer full-time. Lukas wrote in his 2023 retrospective that he made the full-time move about a year and a half after starting the business, when monthly revenue was about 3,000 euros. The couple then traveled in Asia while continuing to work, and by the time they returned six months later, business income could cover their living costs in Germany.

In September 2023, monthly recurring revenue reached 10,000 euros. In the growth record he published, paid revenue took ten months to reach 1,000 euros per month, then eight months to reach 5,000 euros, and another ten months to reach 10,000 euros. Technical infrastructure costs published that year were about 150 euros per month. The couple ran the product without outside investment and grew the business on customer payments.

In an August 2024 interview, monthly recurring revenue was reported at about 15,000 dollars. Monthly revenue including one-time payments such as event passes was about 20,000 dollars. Offering subscriptions and event-by-event purchases together produced revenue from both repeat users and occasional customers.

Sales to business customers stayed suited to small organizations. According to Lukas, even some large customers paid directly on the website without a sales call. Support was handled mainly by email, and customers were generally satisfied when they received an answer within about one business day. Customers who described problems in detail and answered follow-up questions made operating the product easier.

As the product grew, development tasks became more complex. It had to respond quickly across multiple servers and connect with on-site equipment. Stagetimer added messaging to presenters, starting timers at scheduled times, and running several timers in sequence. It also added an API for controlling timers from external programs and an integration with Companion, the show-control tool for event equipment.

A desktop app served venues that had to work without internet access. The app ran a server on the user's computer, and devices on the same local network opened the timer in a browser. That setup allowed sharing and controlling screens inside a venue without reaching the outside internet. A product that began on the web had expanded into installed software fitted to on-site connectivity.

Relationships built in the video production industry led to a second business. Lukas became close with the operators of a Discord community he had joined to promote the product, and starting in 2023 they built Rundown Studio together for event-preparation work. The product targeted planning the running order of an event. At the time of the August 2024 interview, its monthly recurring revenue was about 4,000 dollars, and he was hiring a developer and reinvesting revenue into the product.

After developing Stagetimer for a few years, Lukas had planned to move on to his next idea, but he changed course as the business grew. In an interview published in 2025, he said he had turned down a 500,000-dollar acquisition offer. He judged that the product still had room to grow, and he planned to use Stagetimer income when starting a future business that would need more capital. A round trip of a few steps spotted in a friend's studio had grown into the business supporting the couple's livelihood, and it was now building the funds for their next business.