The storyHow they got there
Lukas Hermann built the Stagetimer MVP in a weekend in 2020 — a remote-controlled browser-based countdown timer for live events and presentations, launched during the COVID virtual-events surge when every conference had moved online and production teams needed timing tools.
The first ten customers came from Facebook groups for event and AV professionals during COVID's virtual-event explosion. The first hundred came from product-led virality: every shared timer URL was a free ad — production teams would share the timer with speakers, who would see the product and ask about it.
At maturity, the channel mix: SEO for "stage timer" and "countdown timer for events" (~50%), word-of-mouth among event and AV professionals (~30%), direct discovery from shared timer URLs (~15%), and affiliate/partner integrations with ProPresenter (~5%). Paid ads were never needed. SEO and product-led link sharing were doubled down on.
Unit economics: CAC around $10–30, ARPU around $15–25/month, LTV around $300–500. The key insight was pricing: monthly subscriptions didn't fit how events work. Adding a 30-day event license dropped churn from 12% to 3% — a single pricing change that transformed the business. Niche enough to dominate (event timing), real enough to pay well.
Channel MixWhere the growth actually came from
Most case studies hand-wave channels. Here's the rough allocation — not in dollars spent, but in users acquired — across the routes that actually mattered.