I Solved a Personal Problem. Months Later, 100+ People Are Using It.

A few months ago, I wasn't planning to build a process manager.

I was working on a Bun application for a client and needed something to keep the app running, restart it when it crashed, and generally manage the process.

I looked at the existing options, but I wanted something that worked really well with Bun.

So I started building a small tool for myself.

I called it ProcBoss.

At first, it was just a side project. I wasn't thinking about users, revenue, or building a company around it. I just needed a tool to solve a problem I had.

Once it was usable, I decided to open-source it.

That's when things started getting interesting.

Within about three months, more than 100 people started using it.

That completely changed how I looked at the project.

What started as a tool I built because I needed it was becoming something other developers were actually finding useful.

And that raised a new question:

What if this could become a real product?

From process manager to product

The original version was pretty simple.

I mainly wanted to run my Bun application reliably.

But as more people started using ProcBoss, the scope naturally expanded.

It became a universal process manager that can run Bun, Node.js, Python, Go, Rust, Ruby, PHP, Java, shell scripts, and other binaries.

I've also been adding things like health checks, graceful restarts, monitoring, cron jobs, namespaces, logs, and other features that make running production applications easier.

The interesting part is that many of these ideas weren't in the original plan.

They came from actually using the software and seeing what developers needed.

The unexpected lesson

The biggest lesson for me so far is that some of the best product ideas don't start with:

"What startup should I build?"

They start with:

"This is annoying. I need a better way to do this."

I wasn't trying to find a market.

I was trying to solve a problem I personally had.

Opening the project up to other developers then gave me something even more valuable: feedback from people who had completely different use cases.

Now I'm building a business around it

This is where things get interesting.

ProcBoss is still open source and can be used completely independently.

But I'm now working on building a hosted layer around it for developers and teams running applications across multiple servers.

The idea is simple:

ProcBoss keeps your processes alive. ProcBoss Cloud tells you what happened when they die.

Instead of SSHing into different servers to figure out what's happening, the goal is to eventually give developers a single place to monitor their processes, deployments, health, logs, and server activity.

I'm still figuring out the product, pricing, and exactly what people will pay for.

But that's a much more exciting problem to have than the one I started with.

Three months ago, ProcBoss was just a tool I needed for a client project.

Today, 100+ people are using it, and I'm exploring whether that side project can become a real business.

I'm curious about other Indie Hackers:

Have you ever built something just to solve your own problem, only to realize that other people wanted it too?

ProcBoss on GitHub