Week 3/4 - Uptime Tracker - Thoughts?

The story so far

I've always wanted to build a SaaS product and I had the great idea of building an Uptime Tracker and doing it in a less expensive and more user friendly way than Pingdom.

I'm 4 weeks into my journey.

The story continues

Week 3 and 4 have been the slowest weeks yet.

I'm completely off track of my original dev plan.

✅ Simple visualizations of check results
❌ Triggering Alerts.

What I did instead, yes I didn't procrastinate completely

• Wrote up my first blog post on dev.to covering how I setup ChartJS with Rails6 and Webpacker.
• Listened to Courtland's interview of Arvid Kahl gave me a lot of food for thought.

I've been ignoring the elephant in the room, i.e. what's my USP of my uptime tracker and who would be my target audience. Initially I thought it would be devs since I really wanted to make something dev friendly with better API integrations. But thinking on this further, I had the realization that devs likely don't have a need for an uptime tracker. Instead it's business owners of websites (who could also be devs) that would be my main customer instead.

I'm a bit unsure where such people would congregate though. Indiehackers who start a website business would definitely be a user. I'm unsure how to validate this.

So for Week 5 my plans are

• Narrow down who my users are and find a way to validate this.
• I'm not sure I'm ready to pivot on my ideas yet. We'll see though.

Some super useful links I've found so far. Highly recommended for those starting out in the indie hacker career.

• Arvid Kahl's interview which I already shared.
• Michell Hanson's series on finding your customers.
• Tyler Tringa's series on bootstrapping your business. Specifically his Meat Grinder approach

If anyone has any feedback please do send them my way 😃
I certainly need it 😂