Excellent marketing pages, and I can totally relate to your being in a crowded B2B SaaS space. I'm curious to hear how you monitor all those tasks/jobs that you run? And are they running on AWS Lambda or simply from regular servers?
1
Good question!
We have 2 kinds of monitoring in place, one is through Zabbix, an open source - independent - monitoring solution provided by our hosting provider Nucleus. That monitors the general server health, the queues, how many processes we have per minute, how many are delayed, etc.
Additionally, we monitor Oh Dear! with Oh Dear!. Our site and servers are monitored through our own platform, and that actually catches 90% of the issues we might have. The other 10% is covered by having an independent party (our hosting provider) monitor the rest for us.
We run our own queues on our own servers: we're fully committed to Laravel and use its latest Horizon as a job worker. In the backend it's a Redis queue where we have several servers picking jobs from the queue for execution. Same idea as any other queue, just self-hosted.
2
How you see your product in this market so saturated? There is a ton of SaaS in this field: pingdom, updown.io, apex ping, just to name a few.
It's a very big market, every website in the planet, but, still, lots of big players on the field.
3
Yup, absolutely! I'm certain there are other services out there with a similar feature set as ours. But we couldn't find them and the circles we travel in (the PHP community, DevOps community) didn't know about them either.
It doesn't matter - I think - if there are competitors out there. Or even absolute copies. What matters is that you get found over the others, and we feel that's working our pretty great for us so far.
Additionally, we focus on design/usability and the additional features of crawling the website. Hardly any monitoring service is insane enough to actually crawl & report issues. It's a hard problem to tackle - especially at scale - but we went head first & I believe we succeeded in our mission.
4
I think this is spot on. Finding/having an audience, eg. future customers is key and something you should always start with! Using fairly new (open-source) projects as a marketing-tool is really smart too!
Well done. Marketing site is fresh too! 👌
2
Awesome! Worth sharing...
1
It's really interesting to see such a SaaS can succeed these days. I'm using uptimerobot for years now and with their 5 min monitoring and 50 free monitors it's really hard to beat.
1
Any reason why you haven't connected Stripe with Indie Hackers on your product page? It's still says Self Reported Revenue.
2
I'll be honest to say I'm hesitant to do that. I have no problem reporting our current revenue, but where are we in 6 months? Or a year? I hope we're super successful, but do I really want to share our revenue so freely then too?
It's "only" $1.500 today and I can comfortably share that, if we make it to the point where there's an extra zero after that, I'm not sure I would feel good humble bragging about that.
1
It gives more credibility if you add it :) You can disconnect later.
1
Would you care giving some insights in your current role investment. I know Freek is pretty busy with his own company and you also have your own obligations. How do you two balance who does what @mattiasgeniar?
2
Absolutely!
From the very beginning it was clear that Freek knew a lot more about PHP development than me. Heck, I couldn't understand most of what he wrote (and that's my fault for not keeping up with modern day PHP, not Freek writing messy code).
Since that was immediately obvious, we quickly fell into a pattern that seems to work for us: I focus on the support & the administrative side of things (handling customer issues etc.) and create proof-of-work monitoring examples (like transparency monitoring, cipher detection, validating SSL chains to root & intermediates etc.). I wrote all of that code as messy as you could imagine. It worked, but wasn't maintainable.
That was input for Freek to validate the idea so he could throw it all away and write a proper, scaleable and maintainable version. One that actually survives a Laravel upgrade. Or more than 5 users. :-)
Additionally, Freek focusses on all the crawler-related items, as he wrote the original package. I in turn take up the small bugs & feature requests that require little tweaks here and there.
In short: Freek does most of the coding, I handle the support/administration/monitoring-hacks of things. We found this balance to work pretty well for us!
amazing progress. thanks for sharing your story.
Great Guys, i wish you success even more :)
Excellent marketing pages, and I can totally relate to your being in a crowded B2B SaaS space. I'm curious to hear how you monitor all those tasks/jobs that you run? And are they running on AWS Lambda or simply from regular servers?
Good question!
We have 2 kinds of monitoring in place, one is through Zabbix, an open source - independent - monitoring solution provided by our hosting provider Nucleus. That monitors the general server health, the queues, how many processes we have per minute, how many are delayed, etc.
Additionally, we monitor Oh Dear! with Oh Dear!. Our site and servers are monitored through our own platform, and that actually catches 90% of the issues we might have. The other 10% is covered by having an independent party (our hosting provider) monitor the rest for us.
We run our own queues on our own servers: we're fully committed to Laravel and use its latest Horizon as a job worker. In the backend it's a Redis queue where we have several servers picking jobs from the queue for execution. Same idea as any other queue, just self-hosted.
How you see your product in this market so saturated? There is a ton of SaaS in this field: pingdom, updown.io, apex ping, just to name a few.
It's a very big market, every website in the planet, but, still, lots of big players on the field.
Yup, absolutely! I'm certain there are other services out there with a similar feature set as ours. But we couldn't find them and the circles we travel in (the PHP community, DevOps community) didn't know about them either.
It doesn't matter - I think - if there are competitors out there. Or even absolute copies. What matters is that you get found over the others, and we feel that's working our pretty great for us so far.
Additionally, we focus on design/usability and the additional features of crawling the website. Hardly any monitoring service is insane enough to actually crawl & report issues. It's a hard problem to tackle - especially at scale - but we went head first & I believe we succeeded in our mission.
I think this is spot on. Finding/having an audience, eg. future customers is key and something you should always start with! Using fairly new (open-source) projects as a marketing-tool is really smart too!
Well done. Marketing site is fresh too! 👌
Awesome! Worth sharing...
It's really interesting to see such a SaaS can succeed these days. I'm using uptimerobot for years now and with their 5 min monitoring and 50 free monitors it's really hard to beat.
Any reason why you haven't connected Stripe with Indie Hackers on your product page? It's still says Self Reported Revenue.
I'll be honest to say I'm hesitant to do that. I have no problem reporting our current revenue, but where are we in 6 months? Or a year? I hope we're super successful, but do I really want to share our revenue so freely then too?
It's "only" $1.500 today and I can comfortably share that, if we make it to the point where there's an extra zero after that, I'm not sure I would feel good humble bragging about that.
It gives more credibility if you add it :) You can disconnect later.
Would you care giving some insights in your current role investment. I know Freek is pretty busy with his own company and you also have your own obligations. How do you two balance who does what @mattiasgeniar?
Absolutely!
From the very beginning it was clear that Freek knew a lot more about PHP development than me. Heck, I couldn't understand most of what he wrote (and that's my fault for not keeping up with modern day PHP, not Freek writing messy code).
Since that was immediately obvious, we quickly fell into a pattern that seems to work for us: I focus on the support & the administrative side of things (handling customer issues etc.) and create proof-of-work monitoring examples (like transparency monitoring, cipher detection, validating SSL chains to root & intermediates etc.). I wrote all of that code as messy as you could imagine. It worked, but wasn't maintainable.
That was input for Freek to validate the idea so he could throw it all away and write a proper, scaleable and maintainable version. One that actually survives a Laravel upgrade. Or more than 5 users. :-)
Additionally, Freek focusses on all the crawler-related items, as he wrote the original package. I in turn take up the small bugs & feature requests that require little tweaks here and there.
In short: Freek does most of the coding, I handle the support/administration/monitoring-hacks of things. We found this balance to work pretty well for us!