BioWorkWriting

October 2021: Solid growth and enjoyable work

Portrait of me, Lukas HermannLukas Hermann
  • Monthly Update

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.

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