I was visiting my friend's studio to set up some IT hardware. He was using an old timer app on a spare laptop and always had to run into the recording room to start the countdown timer and then run out again.

I was thinking “Surely there is a nifty online app for this problem that just syncs through the cloud.” But I couldn't find one. I almost couldn't believe it!

So I made a simple prototype that weekend, using my experience as a software developer.

I made this free version available online and posted it on Reddit. Though the first version was very bare I got good responses. Seems like I found a pain-point. So I added some simple premium features and limited the use of the free version. When the payment integration was done I posted it on Twitter. That very day I got my first customer. I had about 200 followers then.

Our product is very niche. Users are from the AV industry, broadcasting and some education and corporate. We made some connections to AV professional communities. We do some moderate SEO and Facebook ads turned out to work quite well in our field.

Mistakes are good, learn to make them. Nathan Barry built 10 products before $84M revenue ConvertKit. Pieter Levels built 7 products, and then went back to #4 nomadlist.com.