He Built a $20K/Month SaaS From a Weekend Project (No BS Guide) | Lukas Hermann

Lukas Hermann built StageTimer as a weekend side project. Click start on one screen, a timer shows on another. That was it. No funding, no team, no marketing budget to start. Today it makes over $20,000 a month, runs at conferences and live events worldwide, and his logo even showed up on screen at a Trump event without him knowing.

In this episode of The Founder’s Gambit, Lukas walks through the entire playbook, step by step, from finding the right idea to getting to $20K+ MRR as a bootstrapped founder.

We get into:
How to find a SaaS idea worth building (hint: stop scratching your own itch)
Why B2B beats B2C for solo founders and small teams
The validation method that costs nothing: give it away free and watch if people come back
Why your MVP should be embarrassingly simple (his was a timer with one button)
When to stop vibe coding and hire a real developer
How to get your first users using Reddit with zero following
The SEO strategy that drives 30% of his revenue today
Why most bootstrapped founders quit before $10K MRR and what keeps you going
How to think about churn when it feels like you’re filling a leaky bucket
The freemium pricing trick that turns free users into your marketing team
Why he keeps a cheap plan even when everyone says “raise your prices”
 How his timer ended up on screen at a Trump event through pure word of mouth
What $20K/month actually looks like when you’re bootstrapped with no employees
The difference between going wide (more features) and going tall (second product)
Why “competition is high but also very low” applies to almost every niche

If you’re thinking about building a SaaS, already working on one, or stuck somewhere between idea and traction, this is the episode. No theory, just what actually worked.

Lukas on X: @lukashermann
StageTimer: https://stagetimer.io
Lukas’s blog: https://lukashermann.dev