I Built a SaaS for Myself and Accidentally Found My First Customer

A little over a year ago, I started building an uptime monitoring platform.

That wasn’t the plan.

I’ve been a freelance web developer for more than 15 years, and like a lot of freelancers and agency developers, I found myself responsible for more websites than I could comfortably keep track of. Client sites, marketing sites, nonprofit sites, ecommerce sites. Different hosting providers, different CMSs, different stacks.

Over the years I tried just about every monitoring platform on the market. Most of them worked fine, but I always felt like they were designed for a different audience. They seemed focused on servers, infrastructure, and DevOps teams. I wasn’t managing Kubernetes clusters. I was managing client websites and trying to make sure nobody called me on a Saturday morning because their homepage was down.

So I started building something for myself.

At first it was incredibly simple. Check whether a site was online. Let me know if SSL certificates were expiring. Tell me if DNS broke. Give me enough information to identify a problem before a client noticed it.

Then the scope started to grow.

Partly because I enjoyed working on it and partly because AI made it easier than anything I’ve experienced in my career. I’ve seen a lot of technology shifts over the years, but AI has been different. It hasn’t replaced my experience, but it has dramatically increased what I can build by myself. Features that might have taken days now take hours. Ideas that would have stayed in a notebook a few years ago actually make it into production.

Before long, my little internal tool had become a real product.

Eventually I decided to stop pretending it was just for me and launched it as a SaaS.

If you’ve spent any time in founder circles, you can probably predict what happened next.

I launched on Product Hunt. Nothing.

I tried cold outreach. Nothing.

I tried LinkedIn outreach. Nothing.

I started investing time in SEO and quickly discovered that competing against companies that have been around for a decade is a very long game.

The interesting thing is that none of those failures bothered me as much as I expected. What surprised me was how quickly I realized that building the product had never really been the hard part. Marketing was.

For most of my career I’ve been paid to solve technical problems. If a website is broken, I can figure out why. If a client needs a custom integration, I can build it. If a server falls over, I can usually get it back on its feet.

Getting people to pay attention is a completely different skill set.

Somewhere along the way, though, I picked up my first paying customer.

He’s an Interactive Director at a web agency and manages more than 50 websites. During one of our conversations he told me that the platform felt like it had been built specifically for him.

That comment has stayed with me because it perfectly describes what happened.

It was built for him.

Or more accurately, it was built for people like us.

People who spend their days responsible for dozens of websites. People who get the email when something breaks. People who need enough monitoring to stay ahead of problems but don’t necessarily need an enterprise observability platform.

The funny thing is that getting my first customer didn’t make me feel certain about the business. If anything, it raised a different set of questions.

Before I had a customer, the question was whether anybody wanted what I was building.

Now the question is whether there are enough people like him.

On some days I look at the market and think every company that needs uptime monitoring already has a solution. On other days I remember that my customer had access to all of those solutions and still chose mine because it fit his workflow better.

Maybe that’s the opportunity. Maybe it isn’t.

I honestly don’t know yet.

What I do know is that the customer is happy, the product is useful, and the business costs very little to operate. That gives me the luxury of time. I’m not trying to raise money. I’m not trying to hit some arbitrary growth target. I’m just trying to build something valuable and see where it goes.

The biggest lesson so far is that getting your first customer doesn’t eliminate uncertainty. It just changes the nature of it. Instead of wondering whether the product has value, you start wondering how many other people share the same problem.

For now, I’m going to keep building, keep talking to agency developers, and keep looking for the next customer.

I’d be curious to hear from other founders who have been through this stage. What actually moved the needle after the first customer? Was it content, SEO, partnerships, referrals, or something else entirely?