42
56 Comments

I built a product in 1 year & a video in 3 days. The video got more attention!

I launched instatus.com 3 days ago and got it to #1 of the day on PH!

I've been working on it for more than a year. Perfecting the landing page, onboarding, dashboard, and features.

But since I launched, all of the talk & praise is about the video! I'm not sure how should I feel about that?

PH: https://meow.ph/instatus
Video: https://instatus.com/video

  1. 6

    Def the video was outstanding and helped with the social media virality. Personally, it was the reason for me to stop scrolling and play around with your app in the first place.

    However, the actual product was that made me continue and use it. The onboarding process was outstanding and you should get praise for that too. It was flawless with simple and concrete steps!

    When launching it's normal for peoples to pay more attention to your promo material. In the long run, though, your product will be at the center of attention, I'm sure!

    1. 2

      Omg thank you Jim! 🔥

  2. 3

    Did you get some subscribers/paying customers? Then don't worry too much about it :).

    Personally, I didn't like the launch because you were bashing a little too much on statuspage, while you clearly took inspiration from them. That isn't professional in my opinion and shifts focus from building a cool product.

    1. 4

      Thank you for sharing your opinion with me.

      They're the main player in my market, and imo it's helpful to Instatus & potential customers to directly compare my service to them.

      The bashing I did was some tweets like them being meh. They're not that offensive or even meaningful imo. I'm trying to follow the "pick a fight" advice. It helps position Instatus as the competitor. That's what I'm trying to do, but I totally get your view point.

      Right now there are about 800 free pages and 5 paid customers. I'm starting to work on content-marketing and will try Google ads if I can make them profitable, to make these numbers grow. If you have suggestions, please let me know :D

      1. 2

        I absolutely understand that and it's great that you position yourself as the competitor. I just didn't like the way you did it :). I much prefer a page like "instatus Vs statuspage" where you list why you're better without saying the other is "meh".

        Saying the other is "meh" would be okay if they truly are meh. But if I'm not mistaken you took over most of the design of a status page from them. So in fact, they helped you shape your product :). As far as I could see, stating you're 95% cheaper is also a bit misleading. The baseline is a $9 difference which is what most people would be paying.

        Anyway, love the video and love the product. Just wanted to share why I was reluctant in giving it more attention.

        As for Google: a page with "instatus Vs statuspage" ;-) get some ads pointing to it when people search for statuspage.

        1. 1

          Yeah, the status pages at Instatus have a similar design. But most other status page services look similar as well :D I tried to be as creative as I could, honestly :D

          Their $29 plan is not comparable :D
          250 subs vs unlimited. 5 team members vs unlimited.
          They don't allow SMS notifications, or custom css/html/js under that plan.

          I understand that most people will subscribe to their lowest plan, but that's due to their big jumps in pricing :D

          I have a VS page, please let me know how I would improve it? Maybe make it more prominent? https://instatus.com/statuspage-alternative

          I totally get that you don't want a product to get bashed in the process because sometimes I feel that too lol

          1. 1

            Aha, looks good! Overall it looks like a real solid product so I'm sure you'll do great :). Good luck!

            1. 1

              Thank you, Maarten! I appreciate you were being honest with me. Thank you for your feedback :D

      2. 1

        Sorry to hop into this thread here but I wanted to just drop a little bit of advice for content and Google ads. I would avoid G Ads for now as it can drain money super quickly and with all the nuances that come with quality score it can just become a pain.

        That being said, working on content and using Facebook promoted posts is a fantastic way to get traffic, test your targeting as well as your title text etc. For $5 you can get your content seen by 000's VS 1 click-thru on a Google Ad that may or may not make a purchase. With content and FB promo you get to build really low-cost awareness through subtle cues, not buy-buy-buy-buy.

        THEN you can use G Ads for retargeting to people who visit via FB Ads which will hopefully mean they will be more engaged. :)

    1. 1

      Wow I’m a big Seth Godin fan and can’t imagine I’m getting this comment 🙌 Thank youu!

  3. 2

    Bravo 👏 . Love the video.

  4. 2

    Happened to me as well, where people were just ignoring the product and everyone was paying attention to the video.

    I have always believed that show casing your product through a video could help you build up a story in a better way.

    Also helps catch the first time attention to let the potential users to land on your landing page.

    Here is my tweet from last year

    1. 2

      Yeah your video is awesome man! 🤪 I'll check out the product too! :D

  5. 2

    That landing page though! Wow. Great job man. This is the sort of product launch that is inspiring. I will be following along on your journey.

    1. 1

      Omg thank you Brenton! :D

  6. 2

    Nice video and overall the the whole landing page is beautiful, good work!

    Do I understand that you only charged for custom domains? That would be quite generous free plan.

    1. 1

      Thank youu! Yup, the only limit of (free forever) is custom domains! :D

      1. 1

        That's awesome and probably good acquisition plan as well. Good luck man, I might try it later if I need a service like your.

  7. 2

    Two types of marketing work IMO

    Educate your audience or Entertain them

    You did both and you did it in an excellent way!

    Congrats on the launch

    1. 1

      Omg thank youu! 🍿

  8. 2

    There's a lot of bad promo videos, and yours definitely stands out. Did you make it yourself? If not, I'd love your producer's contact info :)

    1. 1

      Thank you, James. Yeah I made it myself :D

  9. 2

    Congrats on the launch 🚀 And yes, I really liked the video ✨

    1. 1

      Thank you, Raz. That's awesome to hear :D

  10. 2

    Great video and the landing page looks fantastic!

  11. 2

    It is a great video lol.

    1. 1

      Guess I'll have to live with that :D Thank you, Terry!

  12. 2

    Didn't know about the video, but I think I saw Rosie linking to instatus today and signed up. Good work!

    1. 2

      Thank you, Matthias! Please let me know if you have any feedback :D

  13. 1

    Thanks for sharing this useful article www.hindulive.com

  14. 1

    Congrats and that is a nice video.

    Shameless plug: I'm working on a product that will help you create videos like this of your app https://glitterly.app/ - and it will hopefully take less than 3 days :)

    1. 1

      Haha thank you :D Will check it out!

  15. 1

    Question about music. Did you buy a license or negotiate with the author? I found this track (Savvier -- Fame Inc), but it does not have a free license

    1. 1

      Nevermind, i found where to buy it (icons8). At first I found only the musician’s page on soundcloud, but now I see where I can buy his tracks.
      This music makes the video really cool. it is like Gesaffelstein’s early work and it sounds very cool.
      Btw, gl with project ;)

      1. 1

        Thank you! Yeah, it's free to use at icons8 :D

  16. 1

    The website is amazing i like it very much, but the video is an another level, awesome! well done!

  17. 1

    Fantastic video, and it sets a tone that makes the website more fun to browse.

    1. 1

      That’s awesome to know :D Thank you!

  18. 1

    Congrats on the launch! Just signed up.

    I am curious about the architecture.
    I understood from your "statuspage vs instatus" page that you are generating and deploying static page.
    I am assuming you have a classic web app under /app and built some kind of workflow to build/deploy the static pages.

    Would you care to explain how you went into making an architecture enabling you to build and deploy static pages on subdomains and letting people their own domains?

    1. 2

      Thank you for signing up. Please let me know if you have any feedback :D

      I create a separate deployment for each status page hosted on a static host (vercel). It uses nextjs new features (incremental rebuilds + preview mode) so that the admin doesn't have to wait for a complete rebuild after each update. Users get the new update after the first refresh by the first user.

      1. 1

        But how does the custom domain feature work under the hood?

        1. 2

          I use Vercel API to add the custom domain to the deployment

          1. 1

            Thanks. Very cool that it's possible to do via their API.

            1. 1

              Yup I'm a fan of Vercel! :D

              1. 1

                Big agree on that. Love Next.js too. Top stack!

  19. 1

    What it is for and how to use it?

    1. 2

      This. This was my first thought after watching the video.

      The video stood out, particularly on the entertainment factor, but it wasn't very educating. Even when I visited the landing page, I quickly realized this product was meant for someone already with some knowledge and expectations about how status pages should work and who the main players were.

      You should feel proud of that video. It captures the attention in places where attention is scarce!

      In other words, the reason why the video got more praise is that entertainment is useful for everybody, while you product is useful for a smaller subset of that audience. That's perfectly natural.

      You'll get fewer praises from your users but these praises matter more.

      1. 1

        Yeah, that's why I asked.

    2. 2

      It gets you a status page for your company. A place for your customers to check your current status and subscribe to get updates if there's an incident or a planned maintenance.

      Communicating early builds trust in your brand, and reduce the amount of support tickets opened when there's an issue with your app.

      1. 2

        Okay, Now it makes sense more for me. Thank you.

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 48 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 28 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments My Top 20 Free Tools That I Use Everyday as an Indie Hacker 13 comments Use Your Product 13 comments