After on-boarding the first customer: What they really liked surprised me

Yesterday I posted a milestone.

When I was onboarding my first customer with a production app, I was surprised that they liked an additional feature that I have built when I had free time. I didn't even give it a lot of thought while making it.

For context: Appliku provisions servers on Digital Ocean, sets them up for running your apps and builds and runs your apps (just like Heroku, but on your Digital Ocean servers).

Everything worked fine, but what made this customer excited was the simple table with "docker ps" grepped by the app name to show containers of the current app.

It appeared that deployment itself was the expected thing and happened quickly. But what made customer stay in the Appliku interface is the process list with memory and CPU consumption. They spent the whole day playing with their app settings and watching in real-time how it affects resource consumption.

In comparison, Heroku only shows graphs with averaged values and you can't test how app usage affects the app resource consumption in real-time.

This was really huge for them.

I had the idea that once they will deploy the app, they would never come back to the dashboard. But this 5-minute feature made them stay in the app, and enjoy using Appliku.

"If I had a SaaS of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?" (c) Lewis Carroll ft. Me

P.S. Of course, they enjoy the partial move from Heroku because their cloud spendings would be less by $300/mo. And we have just started moving off of Heroku :)