Monthly Update September 2021: I found a co-founder

It's already the middle of October and I'm finally pushing myself to write this monthly update for September. So much is happening currently with Stagetimer that I have little time to spare.

Leaving my current job

First some personal news. I'm leaving my current full-time job Laserhub to join Seervision by the end of November. I thoroughly enjoyed my time as Frontend Developer for Laserhub and like the Team there a lot. I joined the startup in late 2019 when it was around 30 heads strong. This month it just hit 100 employees and it's time for me to move on.

At this point, I want to give a shoutout to Florian Gamper who is an amazing Head of Engineering, mentor, and friend. Thank you for teaching me so much about startups way beyond the area of engineering.

Seervision is a Zurich-based startup that operates in the media production industry. They are building an in-house team for a spinoff software product and contacted me because they saw my work with Stagetimer. I'm looking forward to them, getting to know a new team, a new company, and new challenges as a remote developer.

Good results from last month's SEO work

Last month's SEO efforts have yielded good results. Visitor numbers for Stagetimer are on the rise and we are ranking no. 1 on Google for some relevant long-tail keywords.

1st place on Google for an important long-tail keyword. Thanks for your help @robertodigital_ 😃 pic.twitter.com/kzPByjKI48

— Lukas Hermann (@_lhermann) September 27, 2021

On the other hand, churn went up to 20% this month with multiple customers canceling their subscriptions. Fortunately, they were kind enough to answer our follow-up emails. Most confirmed that they only needed it for a single event and were perfectly happy with the app. This shows the need for a one-time access pricing option which I have to work on soon.

One highlight that made me happy was this tweet:

Today the French PM used https://t.co/RgY0ZprkiE ! @_lhermann pic.twitter.com/21goPbudqz

— turbo Lulu (@luppano) September 6, 2021

Scheduling feature finally done

Scheduling timers has been on the top of the backlog for a long time now as the most requested feature. September was the month I finally implemented it. Most of the time went into the interface and making sure that the new features are both intuitive to use and reliable. It was important to me that the new options are hinted at in the interface, be accessible through a popup, but would not add too much additional noise.

You can read about the details in this product update article.

My wife joins me at Stagetimer

At last the most important update about Stagetimer. I asked my wife Liz to join me and take care of marketing, sales, and customer care.

My wife has her own business activities which up till now took most of her time. But this month she decided to scale down her own work considerably. I don't want to go into the reasons here. But I took the opportunity to ask her if she wants to join me as co-founder for Stagetimer and she was delighted 🎉.

So expect the business activity around Stagetimer to increase in the coming months 😃.

Stats

Stagetimer ↗ €249 MMR