#283 – Making $8k/mo Targeting $100M/yr with Lukas and Liz Hermann of StageTimer.io

Courtland Allen (0:06)

What's up, dude?

Channing Allen (0:07)

Yo, what's going on, man?

Courtland Allen (0:09)

Who do we got today?

Liz and Lukas Hermann. I'm excited about this.

Channing Allen (0:13)

The Hermanns.

Courtland Allen (0:14)

You know what I'm excited about, Luke and his wife Liz? They're sort of a team running this company together.

Their app, I think they make $8,000 a month. That was back in January, so maybe it's more now.

They have like this very simple tool that I think anybody would look at and be like, I could build this in like a weekend. You know, I could build this in like, you know, and usually it's not a weekend, like six months or something. But I could build this very easily by myself, but they're making like 100K a year from it. And also, like that's like, I mean, he was working as a software engineer. I think he went to college. Software engineer was making like 80K a year at a startup. You know, getting underpaid by a startup and he quit that. And now he's making more than that as an Indie Hacker from something very simple that he bootstrapped with his wife and he doesn't know anybody, any money. He's just basically free. He's living the Indie Hacker dream.

Channing Allen (1:02)

Yeah, yeah, by the way, I feel like that detail of like, it looks really simple from the surface. I've been seeing that everywhere lately. Like we posted a couple of stories of people that are building AI companies and every single comment section has one or two people going, wait a minute, this is just two API calls.

That's it?

Courtland Allen (1:21)

Yeah, it's super simple. Well, AI is like next level. Like I was posting about AI, I think a couple of days ago, because I've got this like new bot or Anderson Coupot, who basically is like an AI journalist who sends us like little reviews of people's submissions for writing and tells us.

Channing Allen (1:36)

What ratio of your time are you spending figuring out the names of these bots versus actually filling the bots?

Courtland Allen (1:41)

It's like 50-50, I would say. It's hard to come up with good bot names, but I think-

Channing Allen (1:45)

Why don't you use the bots to name the bots?

Courtland Allen (1:48)

I should, I've tried it. I swear to God, I put names in the GPT-4. It sucks.

I mean, you've tried to use it for creative writing. It's not that good at coming up with like creative writing. It's not that good at being funny.

Channing Allen (1:58)

It's partially as in the prompt, but yeah, creative writing.

Courtland Allen (2:01)

Yeah, it'll like get your creative juices flowing. It's like good for brainstorming. But anyway, I mean, I posted about this bot and people keep asking me like, oh, open source it, write a guide. I'm like, no, no, no, like it's like not that much code. Like the vast majority of the work is done by OpenAI.

So there's a lot of cool stuff you could build nowadays that's super simple. You know what also is cool about Lukas and his wife? It's not just that they're building something really simple, but that they are incredibly ambitious. So he has, let me send you this thread. I think you've seen this thread.

Here, it's like his Twitter thread.

The very first tweet of this thread is, I'm going to get rich, and this is how I'm gonna do it. He's not like, oh, I hope to make some money. He's like, no, I'm gonna get insanely wealthy. And he's like Babe Ruth pointing to the outfield exactly where he's gonna hit the ball.

Channing Allen (2:48)

He's not, he's not, hey guys, I made something. Hashtag building in public.

Courtland Allen (2:53)

Oh, here he is. What's up, Lukas?

Hi, Liz. Hey, guys, we were just talking about your Twitter thread, Lukas, and I think it's amazing. The vast majority of Indie Hackers are not that ambitious. Like Sean Perry from My First Million came on our show like very recently and he was kind of like, you guys are doing small boy stuff. You know, we're all about big boy stuff on My First Million.

And like I look at your tweet and like you're like the same attitude, right? You've got this app, it's very cool. You're just getting started though. I mean, even your Twitter background, you've got like these three mountains and the first mountain is like a little stick figure walking up it and it's like a million dollars a year in revenue. And there's another mountain after that, it's a little bigger and it's like a hundred million dollars a year in revenue. And the third mountain is like something crazy. And then even like your progress bar, like every Indie Hacker has like the same progress bar under like their Twitter profile, like where you've got like the boxes and on the left, it's like zero dollars, on the right, it's your goal. And you color the boxes green, the further you get. And most of us are like, yeah, $10,000 a month is like my goal. You know, 20,000 and yours is like a million dollars.