Excepticon

I woke up this morning to an e-mail that a new user had registered on Excepticon early this morning. I have it set up so that I get BCC'ed on the welcome e-mail that goes to any new users. The user signed up for the free Developer plan, and they even created a project!

This is the first interest anyone has shown in the service since I started publicizing it about a month ago. I feel a bit like a house cat who, now that he's caught a mouse, doesn't know what to do with it. I will likely reach out to the user via e-mail in a couple of days and thank them for trying out the service, ask if they've had any issues/questions getting up and running, and see if there's any feedback that they have for me.

Hopefully this is the first of many!

I started publicly promoting Excepticon by writing a blog post about the project - how it came to be and what some of my goals are for it. I then posted it to Twitter and will be posting it to various social media outlets in the days to come.

My approach will be a slow launch (as opposed to a big, all-at-once launch). This will allow me to meter new users that come on board, identify and handle issues earlier when the user is smaller, scale up services gradually, and evaluate traffic sources somewhat independently as I publish to each new outlet one at a time.

In an effort to make it as frictionless as possible to see what it's like to monitor your application's exceptions with Excepticon, I launched a public demo feature that allows a person without a user account to view a demo project and its sample exceptions. The demo's functionality is limited, allowing only read access. The demo can be found here: https://demo.excepticon.io/projects

Implementing the feature was fairly simple since I already had the screens. I stood up a couple of new Azure app services - one for the demo web app and another for the demo web API and created a subdomain (demo.excepticon.io) to point to the new demo web app. I then had to make some small tweaks to turn off create/update/delete functionality and mask some sensitive data when in demo mode.

My hope with this feature is that more people will be able to jump right in and see the app in action without having to first sign up for an account, install the Nuget package in their project, and generate errors. If the barrier to see the app in action is low, hopefully it will lead to more sign-ups.

After considering the idea off and on for a couple of years, I finally started work on Excepticon after realizing that I shouldn't let existing competition prevent me from building the .NET exception monitoring app that I wanted to build. I wrote about some of my motivations for building Excepticon here: https://blog.jonblankenship.com/2020/03/05/excepticon-exception-monitoring-for-dot-net/