Building a cron monitoring SaaS with zero users — am I doing this backwards?
I've spent the last 3 months quietly building a cron job monitoring tool called QuietPulse. It's a simple concept: you add a heartbeat ping to your cron jobs, and if a job misses its check-in, you get a Telegram notification.
The product works. The tech stack is boring in a good way: NestJS backend, Angular frontend, SQLite, Prisma. Free tier gives you 5 monitored jobs, Starter is $7/mo for 20 jobs, Unlimited is $25/mo. No credit card required to sign up. I even integrated crypto payments (NOWPayments) because Stripe doesn't work in Belarus where I'm based.
Here's the thing: I have zero users. Not a single paying one.
Instead of pushing for users first, I decided to try a content-first approach. Over the past 3 weeks, I've published 10 articles on my blog about cron monitoring, plus crossposted them to dev.to and Hashnode. Topics like "How to Get Alerts When a Cron Job Fails" and "Best Free Cron Monitoring Tools." The idea is to build organic search traffic and establish some credibility before anyone actually looks at the product.
My plan:
- Publish 1 article per day on my blog + crossposts (30+ articles planned)
- Post weekly on Indie Hackers (this is #1)
- Eventually share on Reddit (r/selfhosted, r/devops)
- Hope for organic traffic from Google / Perplexity / ChatGPT Search
What I'm NOT doing:
- Paid ads (budget is $0, plus payment restrictions in Belarus)
- Product Hunt launch (not yet — feels too early for "another monitoring tool")
- Cold outreach / sales
So my question is: am I doing this backwards?
Should I be pushing for users first and writing articles second? Or does a content-first approach make sense for a developer tool like this?
I know the conventional Indie Hacker wisdom is "launch early, get feedback, iterate." But I also don't have a huge amount to iterate on — the core product does what it does (monitors cron jobs and alerts you via Telegram). The articles are mostly my way of saying "hey, I know this problem, here's how to solve it" without being salesy about it.
Also: any indie hackers here doing something similar — building in public with SEO/content as the primary growth channel? I'd love to hear what worked and what didn't.
Appreciate any feedback. Thanks for reading. 🙏
