What do you think? An uptime service that gives you confidence that your web app works for your customers.
Does pushing code to prod make you nervous as well as excited?
Do you work with lots of different projects for yourself and your clients and quickly lose track of what's deployed where, or how to tell if something is still working correctly?
Do you ever worry that an Indie Hacker project you built a few months ago might be spewing errors at people while you remain blissfully unaware?
Me too.
These things have been burning on the back of my mind for a while, so today I launch the landing page for my solution: Intrepid Uptime
I'd be stoked if you'd check it out and let me know what you think. It's still very early days, so if you think this idea sucks, or is better solved some other way, I'd love to hear about it.
I think it’s a very crowded market and the only way to be successful with this is to have a very right niche.
Is there some subset of the industry you can go after?
Thanks again for the list. Just went through every single item and made lots of notes. Got lots of thinking to do now :)
Thanks for checking out my landing page, and I really appreciate the list! It will be good fodder for my research. I will have to dig through it soon and do some compare/contrast on all of them and their features to see where I can stand out.
I haven't nailed down a subset of industry yet, but I agree with you that success will likely be predicated on having a laser-tight focus.
It's good that you actually built and launched something, many don't get that far. However, if your goal is more than learning how to build a SaaS with some technology, you really need to do market research and you'll see that there are tons of similar services, many from IHers.
Thanks for checking out my landing page, I really appreciate it! :)
Interesting - when I looked earlier I didn't see anything quite like what I had in mind, though I do very much agree that there are other uptime services generally.
Are you using any of them? Or if not, do any come to your mind right away?
So what new here? There are so many products on the market already for this..
Including ones that compare rendered screenshots and alert you when they change
And many allow you to script multi stage tests..
Not saying you can't be another one...
Honestly user action stats help more in figuring out faster if you broke something, assuming enough data and diligence.
The landing page style is different..
I appreciate the feedback! 😄
What tools have you used in the past and what did you like/dislike about them?
I agree on the stats thing, though I think for early stage stuff, or for situations where your time is very limited, high quality stats might not be easily available.
Also does "different" mean you hate the landing page style?
pingdom, postman, statuspage, pagerduty, uptime robot, statuscake, cula, cabot, netcrunch, nixstats, freshping, appbeat, scalyr, pulseway, opsgenie, victorops, zenduty, openduty, ilert, alertagility ... just to name a few. there a hundreds, maybe thousands, of other saas, on-premise and tools to check uptime and many many more metrics either frontend or backend.
i have heavily used postman and pagerduty. both great solutions with a different focus group and features, but both giving a very thorough overview as well as being able to test very specific use cases. i.e. -> does login and signup work? Is the database up? What is the TTFB to the DB? etc. etc.
Founder/developer of nixstats.com here thanks for mentioning :)
Thanks for the list of competitors and for checking out my landing page, I really appreciate it :)
I've used Postman personally, but not Pager Duty. Neither look like they actually test your website's functionality as experienced by an end-user (e.g. they rely on APIs returning success responses, or on yet other 3rd party tools). Am I incorrect in that understanding? Do they do more?
correct, and it depends on how you define "end-user experience". at the core it's all just api calls which return some kind of data. if that works, then all is good, isn't it?
if it's the actual experience of a "button-click" you want to test ... not really sure how a machine can give you any insight into the sensation an end-user's experience in his finger pressing down that left mousebutton to click a button on a website, waiting for the page to render and be emotionally touched (either good or bad) of the displayed result.
maybe i am missing something here. perhaps your landingpage needs some fine-tuning in explaining what exactly it is that your service is providing?
Okay, cool. Thanks for the clarification.
You're right that a machine can't quantify an end-user's feeling when they click a button.
Think of what I'm going for more as integration tests rather than unit tests on any APIs people have deployed.
I've seen a decent number of integration failures happen for all sorts of reasons (mistakes, race conditions, impedance mismatches, misconfiguration, 3rd parties going down, etc.) If you looked individually at the unit tests for the APIs, everything was green. But the system as a whole wasn't working correctly.
While a machine isn't a perfect stand in for an end-user or QA tester, we can make the machine interact with a browser directly like a user would, and thus create automated integration tests that can catch a wider variety of problems.
The tooling around these kinds of integration tests has gotten better over the years (it used to be a dumpster fire), but it can still be a pain to get started and to keep the automation running. I've seen numerous teams that pay lip service to wanting to do this kind of thing, but since the initial setup can be daunting and maintaining automation can be annoying, it frequently fails to happen or starts up and then falls by the wayside. You often need an in-house expert to set it up and keep it all running (hi, that's me! I've been that expert.)
My goal is to smooth over the annoying bits and the ongoing maintenance of the automation so people can just setup these integration tests and run with them.
Thanks again for your feedback! I'll do some thinking about how to convey all this better in my messaging. If you think I'm off-base or if things are still unclear I'd love to know.
@tylerchurch I don't know enough about this space but I agree with @hatkyinc. I have seen many of same solutions on IH. It may help to focus on a narrower market and clearly explain what differentiates your product.
More tactically, I think your landing page has some great messaging. Although, I think you may need to revisit the styling once you refine your target market.
I appreciate the feedback, thanks for checking out my landing page :)
Any thoughts on the styling in particular that you have in mind? Or are you just more saying that as my messaging gains more focus, I'll need to update things? (which I totally agree with)
I could be proven wrong but I think developers like a clean (not sure if that's the right word) look. For example, check out ohdear.app and let me know what you think. They invested in the design upfront and it really paid off.
Also, I think you spend 75%+ of your page explaining the problem, which is the part I really like. Would it be possible to explain the 'how' a little more? For example, how will you make sure what your customer sees lines up with they expect? How will you make good on your 'knowledge and confidence' promise? Is there anything unique or interesting there?
You took the effort to tell the story and describe the villain. Now, tell me how the story ends. How does the hero win?
Very nice! Thanks for the example, they definitely do knock the design out of the park.
Gotcha, makes sense. I'll mull over how I can present the 'how' better and we'll see if I can get it to where the reader feels like they can defeat the villain :)