Building a Niche SaaS with your Spouse as Co-Founder, with Lukas Hermann (StageTimer.io)
In this episode of The Bootstrapped SaaS Operator, Lukas Hermann from StageTimer.io joins us. Stagetimer.io offers a countdown timer for the production houses, helping them manage time with an easy and simple yet effective tool.
Topics
- How Lukas found a niche market?
- How has buyer behavior affected Stagetimer’s pricing?
- Does SEO & search ads still work?
- Spouse as co-founder: how to make it work?
- Why taking responsibility is most important part of the founder’s journey?
Transcript
Nikolas
Hey folks, with us today Lucas Herrmann from stage-timer.io. Lucas, super happy to have you.
Lukas Hermann
Yeah, hey, hey, nice to be here.
Nikolas
Cool. So to get this out of the way, let’s dive into like what problem does Stage Hammer actually solve for your customers?
Lukas Hermann
Right, so we’re jumping right in. So my product is kind of interesting. Let me contrast it to what many others do, because I’m active on Twitter. I see what other people do in the SaaS space. And many people do Twitter tools, a bit more unpopular now with the expensive API. But they do growth tools. They basically kind of do SaaS for either developers or other SaaS people. That’s what you see a lot, or at least a lot advertised.
Nikolas
Yep.
Lukas Hermann
So we stumbled into an industry that has nothing to do with coding and marketing at all. We stumbled into the event, like event production, video production industry. And there people kind of need to keep time of what’s happening, right? So there’s this kind of production room where lots of people sit in front of big screens and they have to like say, you know, camera one, go here, you know, interview is taking place in two minutes. this is coming up. So there’s a lot of timing stuff happening. And we build a countdown timer for this purpose. So it counts down to these kind of keystones. And so these people can say, well, I don’t want to keep it so long. But that’s essentially what it is. It’s really a simple countdown timer. We can say like, you know, this is two minutes long, this is 10 seconds long, this is 30 seconds long.
Nikolas
Mm-hmm.
Lukas Hermann
But there’s a hell of a complexity behind it that I had never expected when I started out.
Nikolas
So if I understand that right, it’s basically if I am hosting a conference and I have keynote speakers and they all have like 15 minutes slots basically, then I can use stage timer.io to say, Hey, keynote speaker, you scheduled like two minutes for your intro and then 30 minutes for the actual talk and maybe like a plus two for like buffer in the end. And that’s basically then I would use stage timer to let guide them through that. And I would control that. How would that work?
Lukas Hermann
Yeah. Right. So you sit in the control room, you have like this overview with the list and click start stop. And then you would, you get a link that the person sees in front of them, right? It’s like a browser window that’s essentially in front of them on a monitor. That has the timer very big. So they can glance at it every now and then see how much time they have left. And, you know, it’s like it turns red when it gets close and it kind of starts flashing when it’s over time. So, so they know where in they talk they are, how much time they have left, even if they just kind of glance in the corner where the screen is situated.
Nikolas
Makes sense. And you mentioned that in your intro, that is like not the typical thing, like a SaaS founder nowadays does, especially like what you see on Twitter. How did you stumble into that? Like that’s one of those ideas. Sure, I kind of know that like keynote speakers use timers, but I never even thought of like what’s behind it basically. So how did you stumble into that?
Lukas Hermann
Right. Like, so I was in a friend’s, like he has a studio where it’s like one room recording and one room where he kind of cutting. And so there’s a guy recording like an e-learning course. And before he starts speaking, right, he has to start a time. So he runs into this, the room with the cameras, clicks like I have an old laptop there, clicks on start, runs back out and then kind of runs the show from there. It’s like everything is remote controlled except for this countdown time. And I think, and in my, in my mind, it’s like, this is the easiest thing to do, right? Surely there’s a tool out there in the internet where you, you, uh, you know, you click start, you get, you get a link that you can open on the other side as well. And, uh, and it syncs up. Uh, so I looked right there. I was sitting there. I was kind of co-working with him. He invited me, um, looking through the internet and I, like 15 minutes later, I still didn’t find anything.
Nikolas
Hmm.
Lukas Hermann
that does that. Like, okay, if it takes 15 minutes to search for a solution on Google, it’s like there’s an opportunity here. But still at this point, I thought like countdown timer, it’s not a market, right? I have never done SaaS before and I had in my mind already, I want to do that. I wanted to create my own SaaS product. I had been working as a freelancer in development. And I thought, you know what? This might be a very interesting just test case. just trying it out. It’s so simple at the counter time. It was so simple. Everybody can do it. I whipped it up in a weekend and put it online. And I thought, why don’t I just develop this into a SaaS product just to learn a row. So how does pricing work? How does this work? And I never thought anything would really come out of it. I never thought people would actually buy it. It was just for me to learn the techniques behind it. Yeah, so I whipped it up, put it online, put it on Reddit. And there was more response than I thought. So that’s how it came to be.
Nikolas
Huh, interesting. So let’s jump to today. So could you give us just like basically an overview of your current scale? Obviously either MRR if you’re open to share or like number of customers just so that we all get like a feel for where you’re at today.
Lukas Hermann
Yeah, so we are at around like 8,000 MRR. MRR doesn’t give the whole story for us because we also have like one time purchases that are only a limited amount of time. And we are around like, like lifetime customers are 1,500 plus minus.
Nikolas
And you started roughly two and a half years ago, right? Or when did you start with the whole project?
Lukas Hermann
Yeah. Yeah. We were like, what I just told you was like two and a half years ago. And then it took me another, like, it was just free on the internet. And then it took me another five to six months to set up like a pro feature and a payment integration, because I was still working full time.
Nikolas
Yeah, and I would love to double click on the pricing because you mentioned the one time purchase, which is like super unusual for a SaaS of course, but I would guess it’s highly industry specific due to what you do and pricing is always like a massive issue. So how did like the thing I would like to dig into is.
Lukas Hermann
Yeah. Really hard, really hard.
Nikolas
what pricing did you start with and when or how did you learn then we need one-time purchases, we can’t do all subscriptions.
Lukas Hermann
Right. So like as every kind of good SaaS founder, you start with the $7 price, right? Like the seven, eight, like everybody starts with that, like five to $7. Everyone does that. So we did that as well. $7 per month. Uh, plus a yearly plan. That’s a bit cheaper. Um, and so people kept after a few months, people just kept churning and canceling our, our subscriptions. All like really high churn rates, 20%. So this is like, what is going on here? What is going on here? So we started just sending out emails to everybody who canceled. Hey, like is something wrong with the product? You know, we will give you a refund if something didn’t work. And that worked wonders. Almost everybody answered and told us like, no, no, your product is great. It did exactly what it’s supposed to do, but I don’t have a show for another four months. Right. And we are like, okay. So people like they buy it for a show. you know, prepare it, run it, and then cancel, because they only need it for this limited amount of time. So we said, why don’t we give them an option to just purchase like a 10-day license that is just a little bit cheaper than the monthly price and kind of, you know, the incentive to get it. And then we don’t have churn because they just do that. And in fact, churn did go down once we… introduced that and a lot of people people use it that’s why our price is much higher because like kind of almost 50 percent of people use this one-time license some even going as far as purchasing like three of them per month and the reason for that is so interesting they of course are also freelancers working for some events some shows some some bigger client so they just put stuff on the expense account so when they have a subscription they have to kind of like divide it up for everybody. Uh, but if they have a one time purchase, they just purchase it. You know, one invoice, put it on the Spencer account. Very easy for them. So great for us.
Nikolas
Makes sense. I mean, understanding the buying behavior is super critical because in the end, if you cater to that, it’s like half the battle won basically. And then one interesting thing I found stalking you before this podcast is basically, I just put stage time on an h-res because you’re also sharing a lot of things in public. So I knew that you were doing SEO. And you went from basically zero in April 2022.
Lukas Hermann
Yeah.
Nikolas
to over 10K organics in like basically 12 months later. How did you do that?
Lukas Hermann
Is that good? Is that good? You sound surprised.
Nikolas
I think it’s very solid, like from 0 to over 10k it doesn’t sound too shady.
Lukas Hermann
Yeah, I have like no, I like never done this before. So I have no comparison, you know, I like, is this good? I don’t know, maybe it’s bad. Um, how, how did we do it? Um, so when I started, say, all right, you do the, you do keyword research. So I’ve never done that before. So I look keyword research. Okay. You’re good. Like, good. Like to Google, the Google ads platform gives you kind of this free tool. So I put in like all the keywords I could think of, you know, um, event timer, uh, video production timer. And it’s just zero, zeroes everywhere. It’s like there’s no search volume for none of these things. Like the industry is just very small compared to maybe like a marketing industry, right? Like a typical, it’s just like, it’s big, but it’s also small. So that search volume is like in the low hundreds, very calm, very timid search volume. And we think, what do we do? Well, I mean, we just have to start. So we started. targeting these like very low volume keywords that fit best into our niche. And what we observed is that because nobody else was targeting these keywords and they actually had a lot of buying intent. So there was a lot of like bottom, you know, you speak top of fund at bottom funnel, top of fund is like, you know, just get people on your page and they will find it later and bottom of fund is like a person who wants to have the tool that you offer. And there was almost no competition on these keywords. So we said, OK, let’s try to target them first. And it worked much better than I expected. Even though when you do keyword research, it was still very low volume. But in reality, there was more people coming through them than was shown in the keyword tools.
Nikolas
God, and then in the actual how you did that, did you just write articles yourself? Did you work with an agency? So how did you, like after you noticed, okay there’s low volume keywords which are like very valuable to us, like how did you execute on writing those articles, spinning those pages up? Because in the end you’re only you and your wife so far in the company, which is also an interesting fact, but let’s go there later maybe. So how did you execute on that?
Lukas Hermann
Right. So we did a mix writing our own content. We did hire an agency to write a few articles for us. And then we looked at these articles and thought they were really trash. Because as a developer, you look at SEO articles, and you think, this is trash. Nobody will ever read this. We still put it on our page. Turns out they were really good, even though I still think the article quality is really low. I don’t know. It doesn’t go into my mind sometimes. And then mostly we wrote it ourselves. And then we also, you know, like kind of in the back of our mind, oh, we need some links from third parties. And fortunately enough in our industry, there’s a lot of word of mouth. So people do talk about our tool. And then we went to the kind of typical places, product hunt and stuff where we then kind of place strategic links in, I guess that helped.
Nikolas
And then besides SEO, what else did you do in terms of growth to get to this 8k MRR runway?
Lukas Hermann
Right. Um, so when you look at where do people, we, we ask people, where do you come from? After they purchase, we can ask, Hey, well, how did you find us? And, um, 50% is cool. And then another 30%, like 35, 40% almost is word of mouth. So people just sharing our tool, finding it good, sharing it with others is almost half the cake. Uh, and then we said, okay, if Google works so well. Let’s do some search ads. Um, we tried ads with Facebook already didn’t work as well. Uh, and then, and then my wife got all into search ads and I learned the ins and outs and that’s how we get a lot of traffic as well.
Nikolas
So you were able to basically make Google Ads ROI positive because I heard from a lot of people in the, like it’s getting more and more expensive as everything today, but you were basically able to crack the code for you and make sure that if you put like 10 bucks in that you get ideally 11 or more out.
Lukas Hermann
Yeah. Yeah. So, um, first of all, again, like there was almost no competition on our keywords. Like there’s kind of one competitor that we have and he doesn’t even do a good job with SAO and marketing. So we couldn’t, usually you go to the competitor, put in the, put in the website and see what they rank for. Turns out they just don’t rank for anything, uh, valuable. So we had to come up with one. Um, and then, yeah, we were ROI positive. I think we… did have like 200% return on investment from ads. In the beginning, last month was lower, but depends how you calculate, right? And you just need to calculate with a lifetime value and do like immediate returns, or do you just calculate like, okay, I calculate three months of this customer being with me. So if you calculate a bit more generously, we are very ROI positive.
Nikolas
And then what’s your current plan to get to… first like the 10k MRR and then 20k MRR. Do you think like SEO and Google Ads will scale? Because I guess word of mouth will grow with more customers. But I mean, that’s kind of a thing. Besides building an amazing product, there’s not too much you can do there. So how do you think about that? Like basically like scaling, so to say, those marketing channels? Because there’s not infinite people searching things, especially in such a niche.
Lukas Hermann
Yeah, so I would love to give you the perfect answer here, but it’s this big question mark in my mind. Maybe we can bounce it back.
Nikolas
Let’s do the truth, because being a founder is a weird journey where you don’t have a clue what you do anyways. So let’s go for the truth, not for the PR version.
Lukas Hermann
No. No, no, that’s fine. I actually would, because you’re in this niche, I would love to bounce it back and forth with you a bit, just to, I just like, so one thing is of course, Google ads, right? You can scale them. You can say, let’s put more money into them. But if I understand correctly, eventually the, the investment will lower and it’s like, there’s kind of a saturation that you reach, um, like where the point is empty, right? Fish are all satisfied. So, so what do you do? Like, what would you do in our shoes?
Nikolas
I mean, first of like no marketing expert here, but what we do right now, so the thing we’re actively still trying to grow is the agency part of our business, React Squad. And we basically, I’m not sure, somewhere on Twitter I found a book recommendation for, like I’m stuck on the name. I think it’s like scale, but I will link it below. I have no clue what the name is, but it’s basically using a bullseye framework where like in the outer ring, it’s like… all marketing things you can do, event, like conferences, word of mouth, call, calling, all of them. And then there’s the middle ring, which is basically the gut feeling of, okay, for my product and my market, what could potentially work, like what’s working for others. And then there’s like the bulls eye, the thing in the middle, what is currently working and double, doubling down on that.
Lukas Hermann
Mm-hmm
Nikolas
So what historically always worked for the agency, which I guess for most agencies is truth, just like meeting people, networking, going to conferences. So we said, okay, let’s double down on that with like 50 to 80 percent of like basically the energy we have or like that’s more like time basically. And then we had a couple of things like in the middle ring where we think, okay, that might work. So we’re currently testing those out. But again, like, I like, and the goal is basically to take something from the middle ring to make it work, get it into the inner ring, do that until it like caps out basically, and then try to search for new stuff. So we’re currently basically trying to see until like the end of the year, did we cap out networking, which is like kind of a random thing anyway, because it’s just like meeting people and then
Lukas Hermann
Right.
Nikolas
They DM you later when they need a developer, but that’s how we go for it. But even like for the SaaS tool we’re building, we basically just decide, okay, let’s start with one specific growth channel. So we’re right now for the SaaS tool we’re building, just go for SEO, just we’ll see, okay, how far will SEO get us? And then if it doesn’t work, what’s the next thing? So that we just go sequentially through things because in the end as a small team. there’s not too much you can do anyway in parallel.
Lukas Hermann
Yeah. Yeah. So, um, so what we did as like also people that don’t know marketing, we just threw the kitchen, the kitchen sink at the wall, right? That’s like every, like just everything. So, so we did, like, we went to a trade show. Um, we tried to contact YouTubers. We tried to contact podcasts. We tried to contact print, uh, print magazines to, to put our, our, our thing in and, um, Then we turned, like, turns out premium super expensive. YouTubers in our, so funny in our space, YouTube was like, no, we don’t do marketing, like we don’t do, we don’t do feature channels. We don’t, we don’t do that. We keep our, because they are all obsessed with production value. The production value, like they have, they have 50 followers. They have like a hundred viewers. Their production value is through the roof. It’s crazy. So there are some people that just made, uh, like videos about us. We didn’t ask them, they just say, Hey, it is a new tool. Let’s make a video that these videos, they’re top.
Nikolas
Huh.
Lukas Hermann
notch, you know, like great value, great quality. It just there for free. And it’s like, can you put it on our website? Yeah, sure. Awesome. It’s so funny.
Nikolas
I guess free marketing is nothing one should complain about so good job there.
Lukas Hermann
No, no, no. So what did we end up with? We ended up with Google Ads work. So we scale this until it saturates. SAO works. And what we observed in our case is that technical, like very deep technical content actually performs very well. You know, usually you have these kind of typical five, you know, five things to do, five apps to use, blah, blah, like kind of superficial, almost articles.
Nikolas
Hmm.
Lukas Hermann
in our case, like the documentation pages that almost perform better in the long run than the articles. So we really want to double down on good documentation, like how to use X with X tool, right? How to use this tool that you already have with our tool. How to use this kind of hardware device that you already have with our tool and integrate into your workflow. So this is, it doesn’t have as much search volume as like these kind of shiny articles, but there’s a lot of people that find this and use our tool right away. So there’s kind of like almost bottom of the funnel content. And I think as long as we don’t run out of those, it’s, it’s worth to invest the time.
Nikolas
Makes sense, makes sense. And then I would like to switch gears a bit because you’re doing two, at least to me, super interesting things. First off, you decided to build in public. So if one goes to your Twitter feed, it’s like great insight, like really like actual things that one goes through day to day and not just like the hurrah, here’s another win of ours basically. And the second is like that you do the company with your wife, which I also find super interesting.
Lukas Hermann
Yeah.
Nikolas
But let’s start with why did you decide to build in public? Was it like, do you think as office, as a marketing stunt to get customers, which is like super valid, or just like, did you have the urge to write and share? What made you do that? Because you’re very open to an extent where I would maybe even think, oh damn. If our competitor is still stupid right now, maybe I make him smart and he will bet he be a harder, be harder competition. So like what went into that?
Lukas Hermann
Yeah. So, um, like the truth is I just did it because everybody else did it. And I saw people on Twitter doing it. It’s like, okay, that’s, that’s how you do it. I will do it. And then retroactively as one does, I found a reason. So the, uh, in our cases, it’s not as critical because as I said, like we have one real competitor and it’s not like it’s on a different level, so it’s, it doesn’t matter that much for us. Um, and the other thing.
Nikolas
You
Lukas Hermann
is I kind of like the kind of feedback loop that you get from building public. So I don’t share as much like here’s my, my, uh, revenue every month, like, oh, it goes up, goes up, goes up. No, I like to share more like, oh, here’s a, like a thing that, that I tried out the last month and here’s how it worked. How is yours not, did not work out. Here’s a challenge that I tried to overcome. So both technical and marketing and just business related. Um, and I like the feedback loop that you get with other founders. Um, I’ve talked to many of them and it’s really cool to have other founders that you can talk to and then they go through the same problems and then you can share it and say, okay, this is a problem that everybody else also has or this is a problem that only I have. And I saw this whole stage timer thing, as I said, as a test, just to get into it. It’s more successful than I ever thought it would be. And I definitely have to plan to do like a next project.
Nikolas
Hmm
Lukas Hermann
believe Seichan will be like finished quote unquote soon and it will have steady growth and there will not be as much that we can do about it and I don’t wanna have VC investment but maybe wanna have a next project that does have all these things where I do not share in public because sharing in public also has its drawbacks.
Nikolas
Yeah, absolutely. And then how did you come to work with your with your wife as your girlfriend? Because there’s like a lot of things you hear like never work with your spouse, never even like, some people say don’t even work with friends. And then for me, my girlfriend is a nurse. And sometimes I basically get on her nerves by just telling her about business stuff. So I sometimes think like I romanticize working with my partner maybe. So like, what’s the how did you get there?
Lukas Hermann
Yeah.
Nikolas
like if it’s not too private, what is it like to work with your spouse? Because in the end, you still need to have like a private life and can’t talk business all day. So I think that could also be a hard separation to make then.
Lukas Hermann
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I let me know in case she listens, I can’t say anything. No, no, no, it’s all fine. So I did, I made an experience with bad founders before where we, you know, we came together, we were kind of friends and then it didn’t work out and everything turned sour. So that is a thing that happens. And I also currently have a co-founder for a new project who is a friend and it works really well. So
Nikolas
.. .. ..
Lukas Hermann
So it’s really good to have like a test period with people to see how good you work together. What we did with the new one, we did like a fun project. We said, we do a fun project, no stakes, like just fun, see how it goes. And it went well. So this kind of beta testing, your founder is really a good idea. So with your, your spouse, you have the advantage that you’re already better, it kind of better tested it, right? You’re like, you have been together for a while. So you know how the other person thinks. And my wife was in the education. area active. And then she said, I’m kind of tired of it. I don’t want to teach people anymore. They don’t want to learn. And so I said, you know what, if you’re willing to learn something new, why don’t you work with me for a while and do marketing and customer support for StageTimer? And she was really excited to kind of switch gears, learn something new. She’s really good in self-teaching, so she learned really well and does a really good job with it. And it has been, I would say it has been working out better than I expected. Like, yeah, you have these things, oh, how is your private life and so on. We do talk business. We probably should talk, like have like more structured meetings as you would have with co-founders. This is our kind of standup time. This is our meeting time. We don’t really have that because we’re always together. So it almost, we almost… sometimes miss out on talking about the next steps part, like the big picture part, you’re constantly in details because we walk outside and we think, oh, what, like this detail and this detail and that detail and we lose sometimes the big picture. That’s a bit hard, I find. But then on the other hand, it’s really fun because you have more conversational topics, right? beside like what you talk in private about the movies you’re watching or whatever, we have this thing that when we walk outside and we see some kind of interesting business, we think, okay, how do they make money? How would we scale that? How would we make this better? And because we now both have kind of the same background with the SaaS product, it is really interesting to talk about these business related things, which sometimes you cannot do if maybe your wife is a nurse, maybe it’s kind of hard to talk about big picture business decisions because they’re just not interested in it, which is fine. But it is fun if both have the same interest.
Nikolas
It makes sense. That’s really super interesting. Then you slightly mentioned this basically like twice already, like first of that you sometimes miss talking about the big vision, but also that you think that stage timer will have a time when it ends, not ends for the customer, but ends for you as the developer or like basically kind of CTO driving it forward. So what’s your current vision for the company or for the like talking about the product stage timer, meaning like where, where you want to go, not only product wise, but also do you want to bring in someone to run it or like, how do you, how do you plan with, with the long-term basically, right?
Lukas Hermann
Yeah. So it’s a question that I ask myself often. Right now it’s my wife and I have like a part-time freelancer that helps me with coding. And I’d say finish because just from a product idea, right? It is a small scope. It is a countdown timer. You can have like presets and then can switch between them. And then you can do a bit of styling, but it’s pretty much it. And I didn’t want to explode the scope because often with products…
Nikolas
Mm-hmm.
Lukas Hermann
They get successful, then they add more and more features that people request, and then they become complicated, and then they get superseded by the next one. And I wanted to avoid that, so I said, this is my scope, and I stay in it. What fits in the scope, I will implement. What falls outside the scope, I will not implement. And that’s why I say there’s a stage when it is quote unquote finished, because every extra feature I could add adds like no real marginal value. and just makes the interface more complex, which I don’t want. So that I think it can actually just be run by us on the side, like just kind of keeping an eye on it, make sure it’s running, maybe have a freelancer that is also responsible in case the server goes down to bring it back up. But I think that’s pretty much it when it comes to that product. So, but. Of course, through it, I learned a lot about the industry. I learned what they need. I learned like things that are very similar to, to the tool that I’m building right now, things that fall outside my scope that are pretty important for the people. Um, so right now I’m working with two other, uh, friends, uh, slash co-founders on a very new project that’s similar to stage timer, but has this kind of expanded scope, uh, that it can work with more like high class, more prosumer and kind of in the broadcasting world where you just need kind of a higher level of tech. So that’s my idea, right?
Nikolas
Interesting. So then when that’s live, we need to record another one and dig into that too. Awesome. Then the last one, just because what I also want to try to achieve with this podcast or show basically is also to show the honest side, because in the end there’s a lot of podcasts out there which…
Lukas Hermann
Sure, sure, sure. Yeah.
Nikolas
took like this topic, the superficial PR version, everything is the rosy, everything is perfect, but in the end, being a founder, sure, it’s fun, it’s freedom, but it’s also there’s downside. So like, what is like a war story that you lived through? Meaning just like a challenge, it can, doesn’t need even need to be a business challenge, but could it even be you were just in a slop for a time or whatever? Like what was something that you didn’t expect that you need to go through and like. I would love to hear the story about that.
Lukas Hermann
Yeah, I think so. Like a big picture, honest thing that every founder encounters is that whatever product they go into, if they like it, not like, you know, it may be selling Barbies or like doing whatever a, a server hosting environment, whatever they’re passionate about. In the end, it’s almost always about marketing, how to get users, how to get customers, how to grow your business. And that’s hard. And it’s a relearning for everybody. But this is a big picture. You just go through it every day. Um, one, like, would say hard, hard thing that I had was with these co-founders that I had before, when it kind of went sour and broke apart, it’s very hard to kind of break apart a business. And, and, because you still have to agree, everybody has to agree that, um, okay, we have to dissolve it now. What do we do with the, with the money that’s left or what do we do with the, maybe debt that’s left? How do we resolve that? And usually when you do it the first time, you didn’t know about taxes. You didn’t know about writing things down, making contracts about everything. So there’s not much written. So you have to do everything. You have to find the agreements after it went sour, which is really hard. When you go into a partnership, you do want to agree beforehand how it turns out if you decide to stop it. How do you dissolve it? agree to that before you started. And also you should know how taxes work. And I feel like there’s not enough talk about how SaaS companies get taxed and how to, to work with that. Um, so we had this problem that not only did it turn sour, but also we had a bad accountant that eventually ghosted us. And then we hadn’t made a tech, didn’t have the taxes made for the last two years, and then we had like, then it kind of fell on me to. this burden to find an accountant and do this retroactively. And this was probably the hardest time. Like this was a really hard one, two years of my life, still resolving part of it. And it brings you into like these depression and almost suicidal thoughts territories. And often you see founders that are successful, like look at them, you know, having this amazing business. You see it on Twitter, people build it public. But if you dig in, and I’ve talked to some of them in private, many of them have stories like this. Many of them have stories like five years ago, I was in this very bad place. because when I started, I made these mistakes. So you start and you can never start early enough, but you will make mistakes and they will be hard. And I think it’s just good to know that all other founders had equally, maybe not the same, but equally difficult mistakes that they went through and had to resolve.
Nikolas
Eamon, yep, can totally understand that. And did you do anything specific to get through it besides basically just like, yeah, basically just like keeping the eyes closed and keeping walking, like anything specific you did that helped you get out of that state or?
Lukas Hermann
I think taking responsibility, it sounds a bit cheesy, but it’s something, it’s very hard to learn when you grow up. Like the school doesn’t really teach you how to take responsibility in life because it just teaches you to be a good employee. And then you get, you know, all this is taken care of. But once you have to do it at yourself, like, okay, when a problem comes, tackle it right away. Like, I came to this point where I said, okay, no, like my co-founder said, don’t do anything. And I cannot trust him. So I have to do it. Like I have to push through this. And then also in my mind, I just said, okay, just, I’m just switching the switch. It’s like, I’m going to push through this. Like I’m, there has to be a way out. Like this, the, the, the, the option is hope, right? Like in the Star Wars rebellion, right? Without hope, what is a rebellion built on? Right. Like there has to, it has to work. So you just push through and you take responsibility and you tackle these, the hardest thing first and then the next and then the next and then the next. And it will also help immensely because you know, you learn a lot of things in the process. Now I know how to handle taxes, right? I know how to, like what administrative problems are ahead of a business. So when I create my next one, I know what to look for. Yeah.
Nikolas
I think that’s a perfect point to wrap up. Thanks a ton for being so open. Love talking to you. Thanks, man.
Lukas Hermann
Yeah, thanks, Nicholas. I love to talk as well. Hope you stay in contact. I will let you know when the next thing hits the market.
