Growing a web monitoring tool to $1M ARR by building in
public
Eight years ago, Mattias Geniar was an employee managing websites for a living. Then, he spotted a gap in the toolset and built Oh Dear with his cofounder, Freek. Now, they're bringing in $1M ARR.
Here's Mattias on how he did it. 👇
Seeing a gap because he knew the space
I am a developer with over 20 years of experience writing software and applications, together with a strong background in system administration and server management. Currently, I'm working together with my colleague, Freek, on Oh Dear: the all-in-one website monitoring service.
Freek and I come from a background where we were responsible for managing websites. Freek from the development point of view with his agency that managed websites, and me from the data center and server-administration world where I was responsible for hosting those specific websites.
We both realized that there weren't any good tools that gave website owners the confidence that everything was working smoothly. You have a lot of uptime monitoring tools that focus on monitoring a specific URL. Usually, it's just the homepage. They ping that every minute and, if that's loading, they assume the rest of the site is loading too. But we know that not to be true, so we decided to build Oh Dear for more — and better — insights.
Not only do we check for uptime, certificate expiration, domain expiration, etc., but we also crawl entire websites, similar to a search engine. We report broken links, we look at Lighthouse SEO scores and accessibility scores, we investigate mixed content alerts, report application health errors, notify you of changed DNS records... you name it.
An intentionally-boring stack
The first version of Oh Dear was launched almost eight years ago and it included just the bare minimum. It had an uptime checker, certificate expiration reporting, and our killer feature: the crawler that checks and reports on all of the broken pages on the website.
We've since added a lot of different options and different features, expanded on the different toggles that you can have, and even shipped monitoring beyond websites, by also monitoring TCP ports and servers via ICMP ping. In the past eight years, the product has grown tremendously.
Our stack is intentionally boring because reliability and uptime are core to our service:
Bare metal servers for the core dispatching of all monitors.
> 50 VMs spread across Digital Ocean, Vultr, & Amazon for our worldwide coverage of monitoring endpoints.
The core application is built on Laravel, PHP (yes, really), MySQL, Redis, and Clickhouse.
A million-dollar SaaS model
We use a traditional SaaS model. There is no free tier, just a free (no strings attached) trial period. A user subscribes, and depending on how many sites they wish to monitor, they pick the plan that matches their usage. There are no hidden features behind the premium/more expensive plans, just based on the monitor count.
Over the past years, we've gradually increased prices to keep up with inflation and the increased feature set that we offer. We can justify those price increases because, to this day, replacing Oh Dear with 5+ separate tools will be 10x more expensive than just using Oh Dear.
We're currently at $1M ARR.
Word of mouth
"Getting known" is difficult. Freek and I come from technical backgrounds, so by default, we focus on all the technical issues like good code quality, unit testing, server deployments, etc.
And all of that is fine, but if you have a technically-perfect product that nobody knows about, then what's the point? The goal is to get your product in the hands of users.
At the risk of sounding a bit cliché: Distribution is hard. Getting to users and getting them to use your product is still our biggest challenge.
We've tried so many things:
Google ads: Spent a ton, no meaningful difference. Saturated market.
Reddit ads: Worked best in terms of pay-for-ads, but still not great. Worth experimenting with.
Paid copywriting/SEO articles: Those were mostly garbage. The only content our audience cared about was content written by us. Surprise, surprise.
In the end, we grew mostly through word of mouth.
Freek and I both have the benefit of having had an online persona for the past 20 years — both through our Twitter accounts and our newsletters. We've built audiences in different niches of the tech space, and we were able to kickstart Oh Dear by appealing to those audiences. Asking them for feedback and asking them to be loyal clients at the beginning.
And that has snowballed into what has become Oh Dear today: A pretty big company with thousands of clients, all because of word-of-mouth from those initial few users.
Don't build in private
Don't build in private. Don't hide what you're working on. Be vocal on social media, even if it's scary.
If you're starting something new and you're not quite sure if it will catch on, you tend to be quiet about it, right? But that's exactly the time to make some noise: Tell the world what you're going to do and what you'll be building. If the feedback is instantly negative, maybe you're building the wrong thing. If it's instantly positive, you're building your initial and crucial first following.
As you build in public, share what's going right and wrong in your business. Be open about what you're building and how it's going.
The downside is that you risk having a very "founder-led business," because if you stop tweeting or writing about it, chances are you're gonna get less revenue. But it's worth it. Because, these days, people prefer products built by humans that they can relate to. And building in public makes you more relatable.
What's next?
Up next, I'll continue to translate our learnings from managing and building web applications into the best website monitoring tool out there.
You can follow along on my Twitter, Freek's Twitter. And check out Oh Dear!
Leave a Comment
Inspiring read — thanks for sharing your journey 🙌
I can relate a lot to the part about resisting over-engineering and focusing on delivering value. We faced something similar when Pivotal Tracker was discontinued: instead of overthinking, we built LiteTracker agile PM tool to preserve the simple, structured workflow we loved.
Today it helps teams (from small startups to larger projects) stay aligned with labels, real-time collaboration, and dashboards.
Love seeing other indie founders take the leap — thanks again for sharing your story!
What about now, cloud, k8s. They have own monitoring of websites. Do you see any problems?
Identify your problem, solve it, and share it with the world!
Really enjoyed this, Mattias. Love how you solved a real problem from your own experience and kept the stack simple yet reliable. Building in public and growing through word of mouth is truly inspiring.
I second that
Really enjoyed this story. Since Oh Dear grew mainly through word of mouth, what’s the one deliberate action you’d recommend to founders who don’t yet have an existing online audience to kickstart that same momentum?
This really resonates — I’m currently working on a personal project and I Would love to hear what deliberate steps helped others get that initial traction.
Impressive work
The key lesson here isn't just "build in public"—it's "build a public first."
Their 20 years of audience-building was the real engine; "building in public" was the turbocharger they bolted on later. They weren't starting a fire from scratch with wet twigs; they were pouring gasoline on a bonfire they'd been tending for two decades.
For founders starting at ground zero, it begs the question: is the real work not building the product in public, but building the public in public?
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Hitting $1M ARR with a web monitoring tool by building in public really comes down to showing proof of progress and trust. People buy into transparency because they see the product solving a real pain point in real time. One tactic I’ve seen work is blending community-driven feedback loops with lightweight marketing experiments. For example, when I scaled , I noticed that openly sharing both wins and struggles brought early adopters who felt part of the journey — and they stuck around. The same principle applies here: if you keep refining the product around the audience that’s watching you build, growth compounds much faster than just paid ads or cold outreach.
I keep seeing people building in public, my concern is that people might steal your idea while in the process of creating the product. how real is this concern?
really inspiring read mattias 🙌 the part that hit me most is “dont build in private”. i catch myself polishing features instead of just putting stuff out there and getting feedback. crazy how you grew mostly thru word of mouth, shows trust + solving a real pain beat ads any day. congrats on the $1m arr, big motivator for those of us just starting our own mvp journeys
This is inspiring! For startups focusing on marketing automation, I’ve been exploring CausalFunnel, which makes analytics and campaign tracking very simple. It’s super useful for early-stage founders. More info: please visit causalfunnel
I’m putting together a free SaaS Founder’s 7-Day Growth Blueprint — a step-by-step playbook to fix your landing page leaks, get traffic in 7 days, and turn trials into paying users.
Would you want early access?
Love this transparency 🙌 — building in public to $1M ARR is super motivating. I actually checked my own site (a small gratuity calculator tool for UAE employees) using your web monitoring platform, and it was a nice way to see performance gaps.
As someone running a niche micro-SaaS, I’m curious — when you were early on, how did you balance focusing on product improvements vs. spreading the word? I often feel torn between tweaking features and just getting more people to try it.
Great write-up — reliability and visibility really are everything.
If your product ships physical goods (or you rely on third-party delivery), think of shipment tracking like uptime monitoring: lack of visibility creates support overhead and a bad user experience. We built LocateParcels to give teams a single place to check parcel status across major couriers and share a simple tracking link with customers so you can automate status emails/alerts and reduce support volume.
Try it here: locateparcels. com
Happy to share examples of how teams embed tracking into onboarding emails or alert flows.
Best quote for me: "Don't build in private. Don't hide what you're working on. Be vocal on social media, even if it's scary."
I have not event metiononed on LinkedIn or facebook what I am doing. Maybe I should. THis article got me thinking alot.
Products designed for real users from the outset are the ones that truly capture genuine needs. Thank you for sharing, truly inspiring.
Building something meaningful is not only important people should understand the value of content, Building a wow product but door closed sitting in room and just feeling great does not make you money it will just make you proud fo you. Building product and building content around it is so much important
Growing a web monitoring tool to $1M ARR through transparency, community engagement, and user feedback is one of the keys to trust, rapid adoption, and sustainable SaaS business growth.
This is impressive stuff man, it's crazy how you're able to just take a small problem and make a lifelong sum of money out of it, awesome work.
This is impressive, really respect the way you scaled by focusing on reliability first. I’m building AdaptiFit , an AI fitness app that builds injury recovery directly into the program so athletes don’t have to stop training when setbacks happen. Different space, but I’m also trying to grow by building in public and staying user-first. Any advice for someone just starting out?”
Really appreciate the transparency here 🙌. Love the reminder that distribution is just as critical as code quality. The bit about “don’t build in private” resonates a lot — it’s scary to put an idea out there early, but it seems to be the only way to get real feedback and traction. Thanks for sharing this story.
Really impressive work! I like how Oh Dear goes beyond simple uptime checks and actually crawls entire websites for broken links, SEO scores, and more. That extra depth makes it way more valuable than the usual monitoring tools.
Great read, Mattias; love how you and Freek turned real ops pain into Oh Dear and kept the stack intentionally “boring” (Laravel/MySQL/Redis + ClickHouse; bare metal + 50+ VMs) so reliability is the product.
The bundle (uptime, cert/domain expiry, full-site crawl with broken links, Lighthouse SEO/accessibility, DNS change alerts, etc.) makes it feel like five tools in one, which explains hitting ~$1M ARR with a free trial but no free tier, and why word of mouth beat ads while you built in public.
Curious: in the first week, what signal best predicts a paid customer — first incident caught, first full crawl completed, or N monitors added? And if you had to double down on one distribution lever next quarter, would it be Twitter/newsletter, product-led status pages, or Reddit ads?
P.S. I’m with Buzz, we ship conversion-focused Webflow sites and pragmatic SEO for dev-facing products. Happy to share a tight 10-point launch-page checklist if useful.
Interesting
Really motivating story, I like how you leaned on word of mouth rather than trying to brute-force growth with ads. It’s a great reminder that building in public not only builds trust but also creates an audience that sticks with you long term. Curious to know—looking back, was there a single moment or feature release that you feel really tipped the scale for growth?
20 years. huge dedication.
Nice thread, something related to the topic — if anyone’s struggling with outreach, I built a small kit (15 prompts + 5 outputs) that turns cold ideas into warm messages you can send in 10 minutes. Happy to drop a free preview here if helpful — DM me.
Very interesting
Very interesting
hmm very helpful, the build in public is that the #buildinpublic in X ? thanks for sharing
super
Growing a web monitoring tool to $1M ARR by building in public showcases the power of transparency and community-driven growth. Sharing progress, challenges, and wins openly builds trust, attracts early adopters, and creates loyal advocates. By involving users in the journey, refining based on feedback, and showing real metrics, founders can accelerate traction. Building in public turns product growth into a movement, inspiring both customers and other entrepreneurs alike.
It's great to know about the journey. I think Oh Dear needs a Landing page update.
This is super interesting, thanks for sharing the backstory,
Cool! Proud of you!
Really enjoyed this! The reminder that distribution and trust matter more than just building features hit me hard. I’m trying to do the same with my own project
Inspiring journey Mattias...
just do it
Impressive journey! It’s clear you saw a real gap in the market and built a solution from deep firsthand experience. Love how you combined technical expertise with practical user-focused monitoring.
Really inspiring read! The biggest takeaway for me is that reliability and trust beat flashy tech or aggressive ads. Building in public, keeping the stack simple, and leaning on community/word of mouth feels like the sustainable path to real SaaS growth.
Love this — proof that you don’t need a flashy stack or huge ad budget to win. Focus on solving real problems, stay transparent, and let word of mouth do the heavy lifting. Congrats on hitting $1M ARR!
Really inspiring journey, @Mattias! Love how you kept the stack intentionally simple and focused on reliability while growing to $1M ARR. The “don’t build in private” advice hits hard — distribution and word of mouth really seem to have made the difference here. Thanks for sharing such a transparent breakdown.
this is a gr8 reminder that founder-market fit beats product-market fit early on. Solving problems you’ve lived yourself makes messaging, pricing, and adoption almost effortless. Word-of-mouth + transparency = sustainable growth.
Thanks for the article, I would have liked to hear how exaclty you built it in public. Did you have development sessions in twitch or was it just about social media posts?
Have you thought of doing more with the tool and turning into something like ManageWP?
Excellent, so inspiring. thank you!
With over 20 years in software development and server management, I saw a clear gap in website monitoring tools. Together with Freek, we built Oh Dear—a platform that goes beyond basic uptime checks to offer full-site crawling, SEO insights, and application health monitoring. It’s grown to $1M ARR through word of mouth and building in public.