Stage Timer

Lucas Herman was at a friend's recording studio when he noticed something absurdly inefficient: his friend had to physically sprint back and forth between an iPad timer and the control area dozens of times during a shoot. "I see him running and running, clicking this one button on the laptop, running back out," Lucas recalled. The solution seemed obvious—a browser-based timer you could control remotely. Lucas was skeptical that no one had solved this yet. "Surely somebody else has made something," he thought. After a quick search, he found only old Windows apps. He decided to build it in a weekend as a learning exercise.

Lucas bootstrapped the initial version with zero investment. "I just did it as I get like I get skeptical when I see things are obvious," he explained. He built a minimal viable product: a simple timer you could view on one screen and control from another. The interface was straightforward—add time, reset, make it flash, show messages. "I thought somebody has to have already solved this problem, but like there's no way," Lucas said. He put it on the internet expecting nothing. What surprised him was that the solution, despite being technically trivial, resonated strongly with an industry he knew nothing about.

Lucas didn't launch with typical indie hacker bluster. Instead, he went to r/CommercialAV and posted: "Advice for presentation time wrap in the making." Rather than advertising, he asked for feedback. "I thought okay, how do you post this so people actually want to read it and want to respond?" The post asked thoughtful questions about what features event professionals needed. Crucially, he didn't mention payment—just shared the link and asked for input. He returned six months later with a simple follow-up: "Hey, thanks for your help. I built this thing. Check it out. What do you think?" This time he mentioned a paid version. The Reddit community embraced it, and within days of promoting it on Twitter (where he had 300 followers), his first paying customer appeared. The buyer had remembered him from the original Reddit thread and purchased immediately. "It knocked me off that it's from this first reddit post actually somebody purchased," Lucas said.

SEO became their secret weapon. Lucas had named the product exactly what it was: "Stage Timer." When people searched for "stage timer," Stage Timer ranked first almost immediately. This wasn't accident—Liz, who joined in September 2021, recognized the opportunity and doubled down on technical SEO. Instead of writing broad how-to content, they created deep technical documentation: "How to use a countdown timer with OBS" became one of their best-converting pieces. "If I make those we bring the wrong traffic. These are people that won't convert," Liz explained.

Word-of-mouth proved equally powerful. The event production industry is small and tight-knit, dominated by YouTubers and live streamers. When people discovered Stage Timer, they made videos about it—without any commission or prompting. Users started emailing Lucas saying, "I saw [creator name] mention you in a video." The product became so established that when a major creator mentioned wanting timer functionality, community members in the comments replied simply: "Stage Timer does that." It had achieved house-brand status.

They initially struggled with enterprise because they lacked legal infrastructure, but they learned quickly from customer calls. One early subscriber was so organized in his feedback, giving them a one-year ultimatum about specific features, that they used his requirements as a roadmap. "We are very thankful for the the input of this guy and many other people," Liz said.

At $8,000+ MRR, Lucas and Liz are charting an audacious path. They're projecting to hit $1M ARR this year based on consistent monthly growth rates they track in a Google Sheet. Their plan involves enterprise add-ons and team plans to increase customer lifetime value, while Lucas pursues side projects to test other business ideas. He's been transparent about his ambitions: start with Stage Timer to learn bootstrapping, launch a second $10M company to learn VC and team management, then pursue a moonshot third venture building something nobody else will touch. "Don't get me wrong, I don't care for riches. I just can't work for somebody else," he tweeted. What makes them extraordinary is their refusal to be convinced: both had startup experience and their own businesses before combining forces. They work while traveling, gamify business problems to stay engaged, and view each venture as a rule-learning game. Stage Timer is a masterclass in finding non-sexy problems in non-tech industries, building something simple that works, and nurturing a community that sells for you.