Idea validation: What if I'll take care of your server support? 24/7?
Hello,
I'm hearing a lot of words about how painful it may be to wake up in the middle of a night to see if your server is alive and did not die under a launch load. A lot of founders here do everything by themselves. But what if I can take care of all that support work?
I have launched a website called http://UnlimitedDevOps.com to help you guys who need such a service. For a fixed monthly fee we can support your server — 24/7. We can do more if you'd like.
What do you think?
Firstly, well done for getting started.
My immediate thoughts are:
You might find a market in security sensitive startups who don't want to use clouds but then you run into the problem of "How do I give you access to the box while ensuring you don't do something nefarious?".
In general I would suggest that manually managed servers are a declining market and I would stay away for that reason.
Have missed a point regarding "How do I give you access to the box while ensuring you don't do something nefarious?"
That is a huge question and I was thinking what people do now....when they hire a freelancer. I think they have some level of trust & confidence AND reputation of that freelancer. So this is something I have to work on definitely. To build a trust.
Yeah I think some case studies or testimonials are going to help you out a lot when it comes to convincing customers. If you've provided this service to other people already and they say you've done a good job then I'd be more willing. I think one high profile client (someone with a lot of Twitter followers or something) could help you a lot.
Hello David,
Thank you for your comments. I was polishing this landing page for a month, I think =) Still have to work on texts to give a better idea for people.
I'm not going to replace cloud services and run all servers in my own datacenter. I'd like to help people get rid of a system administration work they do every time — OS patches, backups, server downtime, critical updates, application monitoring, etc...
Heroku solves part of it but the bills are going crazy if you scale I think. So eventually more people are switching to their own servers.
It is good to have Digital Ocean, Linode, AWS, etc.. But you will have to manage & support your servers in any way.
What you say about Heroku is definitely true. I run an app on Heroku right now and I would definitely move off to DO or AWS if it started to scale to multiple dynos.
Another thing you might have to address is the interaction between the system and the application running on it. Imagine I'm building an application which I'm deploying to servers managed by you.
Spectre/Meltdown happens and you need to patch the servers. But some of the patches released were causing 30% performance loss in the application. You and I obviously need to coordinate so I can perf test my application on the new kernel. How do we do that in a way which allows you to operate as a service and not an employee.
I think you have a great opportunity to use the Spectre/Meltdown situation as a case study actually. Many businesses were caught by surprise there and you can use that to say "here's how things would have been better if I had been working with your back when these vulnerabilities were announced".
I think this case can not be solved without talking to a client/dev team since there has to be some decision approved.
David, what will be the best solution for you in Meltdown/Spectre case if you would use unlimiteddevops.com for example?
Probably create a new server with patches applied, run the CI (or whatever perf tests exists) and report back on expected degradation. That would be awesome if you could handle all that.
This comment was deleted 8 years ago
My first thought: trust?!
Sure. Fine for more industries but you don't want "trust" to be your answer when you're describing your security model to a potential enterprise customer.
I think you're describing Ops, not DevOps.
I appreciate that there's no formal definition and people argue about this a lot on StackOverflow. But I'll give you some examples of the kinds of devops problems we've faced last month:
All of these are operational problems which require some appreciation of the development of our software. If I'm hiring a DevOps person I'd expect them to confidently diagnose and deal with these kinds of problems.
I think your offering has value, but could be narrower and clearer about what you can specifically do. I don't think I'd be able to make use of it with the above issues.
Those are really good examples, Tom. Thank you for describing your thoughts and showing me actually some weak points.
I have to figure out ho better & simpler describe what we can do for a customer so his/her expectations won't be ruined.
I think you're on to something. It's just my personal gut feeling, but in general having A Human Being™ to talk to would probably help a lot of founders running servers that are not 100% confident.
I think your target market is indiehacker types who are sat in the middle ground where they've started making money of but haven't gotten large enough to start hiring people.
Have you considered a "hotline" approach, kinda like https://wpcurve.com/ that offers unlimited help but only one thing at a time?
You could also offer something like a "Product Hunt pre-launch tune-up" package where you load test and prep a product for launch and include N days of support. I've seen people pay for peace of mind before.
Content marketing-wise you could do well by giving away free general information, and then plugging your productized self in the end of the articles.
After writing this out I would probably try to find anxious founders who are close to launching and sell that type of package in order to validate.
Hope this triggers some creative thoughts on your end! Cheers.
This comment was deleted 6 years ago
Yeah, it could be shared, I think. And thank you for asking.