October was marked by solid growth of paying customers for Stagetimer. Working on it now is more exciting than when I started with it late last year. But while my side project continues to grow and my days at Laserhub come to an end, I am also trying to enjoy life more.

Stagetimer growth

October was a great month for my side project Stagetimer, a simple browser timer that syncs through the cloud. My wife is now on board and she is very enthusiastic to learn and work with customer relationships and marketing. This gives us a much better feel for our users and their actual needs.

Speaking of user needs, I finished the scheduling feature for Stagetimer. This feature allows customers to schedule timers and create an event rundown of sorts.

"Event Rundown", by the way, is a word we just recently learned. We had no idea what it means but we knew pretty well that customers needed it. So as foreigners to the event production industry we embarked on the endeavor to find out what an event rundown is and how we can offer it with Stagetimer.

Fortunately, we quickly learned that it's a simple list with the segments of a show written in a series of start times and durations. One customer actually just sent us their recent event rundown excel sheet which we could learn from. Always ask your customers, many are really willing to help!

In the end, Stagetimer grew 88% month-over-month in October and we are very excited about it slowly but surely picking up steam.

Documenting stuff, for SEO

In an effort to improve SEO I documented the user interface of the controller page. It's not a big thing, but one that I wanted to do for some time now. This will help new customers get a hand at the interface if where it is not as intuitive as I think it is. It also provides search engines with a little more real estate to find keywords in.

I recommend documenting your app's interface. It really gives you appreciation for the features you did not over engineer. 🤓 pic.twitter.com/jobZ7pdosn

— Lukas Hermann (@_lhermann) October 31, 2021

Enjoying life more

On a personal note, I am trying to enjoy life more in October. This sounds trivial, but I have quite some problems laying down my work and enjoying the fruit of my labor. So my wife and I treated ourselves to several nice restaurant visits and even a Thai massage.

I also picked up a very nice computer game called "Outer Wilds". I would describe it as a 4D puzzle game and by the time I had finished it I've never been overcome by such overwhelming emotions from a video game before. So much so that I silently sat through the entire credits role just listening to the music and taking in all that I just experienced with this game. I highly recommend it!

Nice last days at Laserhub

Even though this was my last full month working for Laserhub, I very much enjoyed the work we did. Our team is prototyping better ways to match orders with suppliers and it makes for some nice experimental interfaces. I thoroughly enjoy this kind of groundbreaking work. Shout out to Daniel for his great product manager work.

Plans

The plan for November is to implement a public API for Stagetimer and then work on better pricing for individuals, teams, and companies. We are also going to analyze our current client base and hope to improve content marketing. We are ready to take Stagetimer to the next level and I still have plenty of ideas for it!

Stats

Stagetimer ↗ €422 MMR

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