What features you miss in uptime monitoring? 🤔

[truth_quest]

I'm building yet another uptime monitoring service. This app checks that your site is up & running and notifies you when it's not.

I know there are tons of them and it's hard to think of some unique propositions, but I spent (gosh ) more than 600 hours building this so I'd either make it better or die

All of these services has notifications, SSL certificate checks, monitoring from multiple locations etc.

Do you personally need something? Currently my focus is on different ways of notifying user, which suits everybody, but need to be sure it it's that important.

Maybe you need:

- Nice analytics, with historical data?

- Mobile version, for some reason?

- Powerful bots which will be used by your team for something. Like list all of the sites which were down in the past week or had some error responses?

Anyway, here is mine: https://pingr.io

 

[foreverever]

@truth_quest i was working with a cloud provider and monitoring services in dev and testing envs was big hassle. no one cared except the next dev who was going to use it.
always thought this was good usecase for uptime monitor

 

[truth_quest]

@foreverever Oh thanks for your reply!

Could you clarify a bit. What's the difference between environments, I mean, if you add a couple of urls like dev.site.com and prod.site.com, and monitor them? I thought about adding tags & projects, for those who has a lot of sites in order to manage them easier.

But it seems like you meant something else?

 

[foreverever]

@truth_quest I was sharing my use case and perspective. The dev and test environments need more uptime monitoring than prod ones. No body looks at these envs unless they need and sometimes they are down when you need.

Also In the past, i felt a need for tool that goes beyond just alerts but lets me take simple actions like shutdown machine if app is down for certain no of minutes, bring up another machine if this one is down . etc

With so many tools out there for monitoring uptime, I would pivot to action based monitoring that will save money on cloud billing.

Again this is advice on internet so please take with a grain of salt

 

[truth_quest]

@foreverever Thank you so much.

It's an interesting idea to allow users do something in case the site is down. Like ssh to server and run some commands. Looks like not a hard thing to implement. I'll put this in my backlog

 

[hiservant]

@truth_quest I think you need to think long and hard about how you differentiate your business from this feature-set. The market is really saturated already, and many of the most popular options are free.

Stop thinking about feature parity, or what competitive products provide. Start thinking about features no one else is providing, or how you could repurpose uptime monitoring for a niche that needs it, but does not yet have it -- think about crazy outliers, like design managers who want to monitor when their employees update their portfolios, or something crazy like that.

 

[truth_quest]

@hiservant Thanks for your reply!

I agree with you.

But I really want to understand how this works. Look, my dream is to get revenue like 2000$/mo from side projects. While I was building mine, I saw at least one example which has proven MRR of ~2800$. Which has just the same things as others, and it is yet uptime monitoring service.

I understand that this won't make me a millionaire, but I still see that products which does the same thing, have some success (even though it's not that big). Like, I know people how make landing pages builders, uptime monitorings, to-do apps.

Is having something unique is a requirement for getting small revenue, or I could get something out of it first, and then invest more time & money trying out crazy new ideas?

Btw indeed, it's not a big deal to get the time the page was updated, so probably I'll figure something out. Anyways, need some brainstorming.

Thank you so much!

 

[hiservant]

@truth_quest You have to build something people want, and something they will pay you for.

Unfortunately, you're in a niche saturated by very robust free products.

You will have to be remarkable to charge a minimal amount of money.

Much easier to find an enterprise product that charges $5k/year per customer and figure out how to build a lean version of that, and charge $2k/yr.

Impossible to find a product that typically charges $0 per year and figure out how to charge $2k/year, in an established market, without pivoting.

 

[lidzia]

@truth_quest

I know there are tons of them and it's hard to think of some unique propositions, but I spent (gosh ) more than 600 hours building this so I'd either make it better or die

This is sunken cost fallacy, don't build a business if you don't already have clients !

 

[truth_quest]

@lidzia I think I should've made this mistake once and learnt from it. At least I got way too much experience from coding this stuff

 

[613jono]

@truth_quest Hi @truth_quest

I'm also thinking about building an uptime monitor, and I'm facing the same dilemmas as you.

I also saw the guy making 2.8k from this type of business and thought the same, like if he can then I can also.

I know you would probably want to persuade me away from this idea but I want to hear your experiences from building this before I start.

I think the hard part is really marketing this, which is the only way you can get customers. I mean, you can have the best product out there but if you can't market it properly it doesn't worth anything.

 

[truth_quest]

@613jono My first motivation was something different. I wanted to make my own product, wanted to be responsible for it's quality and wanted to develop it, make it better.

I'm not good at marketing but this is another opportunity to learn how to do that.

Well, regarding developing the product it turned out much harder than I thought. Having many servers, which should be able to ping a lot of sites in a minute, UX stuff etc. So I spent waaay too much time.

But anyway, I think it's better to try than do nothing