Feedback on my idea - IT downtime notifications
Started working on a new web app for IT departments to notify employees of downtime.
As far as tech goes the plan is for the MVP to have a simple interface to add emails and phone # (for sms) for your org. Then a simple way to write a message and send it or schedule it for later.
At the same time starting to write blog posts about downtime notifications and looking for potential customers.
Would love to hear thoughts from the IH community on the idea, how to market it - or apps you already use for this problem.
Will the system itself detect downtimes? Or is it more of a system where you manually send out a message (which in theory could be any message) to people?
The latter - manually sending messages. There seem to be plenty of apps like Pingdom and Statuscake for detecting downtime - but mostly used by ops folks who need to react at that moment.
My app would be geared more towards the IT management notifying of planned outages and keeping folks updated as systems are being fixed.
I see. I'm currently kind of stumbling pretty close to this territory with my current project (see https://www.indiehackers.com/@insats/from-idea-to-almost-mvp---a-detailed-journey-6001c46804). One of "my" competitors in the space is SnapComms, who are actually one of the top ranking solutions when googling "downtime notification system".
Anyway, to answer your question, I'm not a sysadmin so I don't know of any other existing solutions - but my quick google search didn't find much either, which.. is a little surprising since IT people are often the first to build stuff that solves their own problems. Perhaps it isn't much of a problem for people?
Have you talked to any sysadmins about the idea?
Cool - I did see SnapComms but it looked big with lots of different products.
The people I talked to so far all need some form of complicated integration with AD or something like that. Still looking for people who would just want to do what I plan for the MVP. If I don't find any I'll have to expand the "minimal" part I guess.
Totally understandable. Companies don't start their own internal IT department until they are at least 50+ employees. And at that size, having to manually update contact information in an app like yours would be horrific. I bet they use something like "everyone@example.com" when they need to reach everyone regarding downtime, maintenance etc.
If so - what would make your app a better alternative than that? It doesn't require any additional software and is super minimal.
I am planning to include email and sms globally. When there is maintenance you sometimes lose company email.
Also plan to have scheduled posts as maintenance approaches if it was scheduled.
To go around AD integration I would just have a script an admin can run to update contact info.
Sounds reasonable. Ok, so next step would be to validate the problem and that people consider it a big enough one to be willing to pay for it.
Site notifications are good, but it seems like they're a dime a dozen. What is separating you from other down notification services? Notifying employees via email, sms, phone, or integrating with an existing internal communication tool like Slack is standard now for such services.