Instatus

We just hit $100K ARR

We're now a small team.
One full-time engineer. One part-time software engineer. Two interns, and me :D

For the previous months, we've been working on small features, scaleability, security, help pages, tests, simplifying our setup, etc.

We're also working on big projects like monitoring and incident management.
Side project marketing (Instatus Now)
And a new instadocs product 👀

Sooo stay tuned 🚀

More updates on:
My twitter: https://twitter.com/alisalahio
Open page: https://instatus.com/open

🤗 all customers: ~6K
🔥 paid customers: ~160
👩‍💼 business: 2 in trial (not included)
🍏 oss & non profit: ~40

Here are my learnings:

1. Adding business & enterprise plans is the most low-effort / high-reward thing you can do

Supporting SSO using https://workos.com took a couple of days to implement, and already got me 2 business customers in trial (= 30 pro customers) and many more to come 🔥

2. Design is underrated in SAAS ✨

Many next-gen products choose Instatus just because it has a futuristic vibe and is better designed than competitors

It's also the reason why it's popular with younger people who have gaming servers & discord bots

3. Reach out when you get customers you love 🤩

The main reason brands like Sketch and Restream use Instatus is that I reached out to them once they signed up, and told them I'm excited they're trying Instatus, and would do anything they want to make it really happen 🔥

These are my future plans:

A. Building Instatus Now (side project marketing)
A better downdetector to eventually get their traffic 🔥

B. Adding monthly content with

Started investing in monthly content (embarque.io by @JIC94)

His one guest post became a huge source of traffic for Instatus, so let's see what 10x of this brings 🔥

C. Moving into Monitoring

Monitoring is the most requested feature by customers

Everyone has a monitoring service, but all of them suck 😛

My goal is to build the most user-friendly + dev-friendly monitoring service out there 🚀

D. Hiring a small team

To increase the speed of building monitoring & incident management and make Instatus an all-in-one solution

I'm doing interviews like crazy to start a small team that increases shipping speed by 10x 😼

Instatus is going to the moooooon 🚀

instatus.com/open

Instatus just reached $2K MRR 🚀

It's an exciting checkpoint to reach, but my goal is to reach $5K MRR by the end of 2021. Here's how I plan to do it:

🚀 Instatus Out for the web

I recently launched a free desktop app (as a side-project marketing) that notifies people when their favorite services are down. It's called Instatus Out.

I plan on expanding that to the web, with the aim of ranking for keywords like (slack,zoom,etc status page)

I always procrastinate on content. It feels a lot like work to me. "___ status page" are the most popular keywords anyway, so it's easier for me to build a website than release content.

🙈 Password protected status pages

I already have MANY customers who are using an early version of private pages. Many new customers are waiting for this to be released.

I need to ship this to be able to offer it on a paid plan (maybe $30 to $50/mo)

🔥 Move into monitoring

This will help add value to Instatus. It will help it become a one-stop shop for monitoring, status pages and incident management for teams.

It will add a lot of value for customers, and help me start higher tiers.

Let's goooo 🚀

So excited to share this milestone:

Instatus just reached $1K MRR today! I've been waiting for this milestone for so long, and it was my goal for 2020 :D

I'm 2 months late, but never late than never :D

My top learnings so far:

• 5% improvement to your product can make it usable. 10% improvement can make it buyable.

I offer a free forever plan. During early months, no one would upgrade.
Now, some customers upgrade within a day of trying.

My first couple of customers churned in just a few months.
Now, churn is very low.

Nail the product, then nail it some more. Invest in marketing when you're sure that your product converts, and that you have happy customers.

• Be pro-active in customer support

I had zero experience in doing customer support, so my tendency was to fix issues first, then reply & communicate. Don't do this!

Level 0: Fix then reply
Level 1: Reply, then fix, then reply
Level 9: Send them an email if you notice a problem. Don't wait for them to send you.

Over-communicate. Reply fast, even if all what you have to say is that you read their request and looking into it.

I created an /open page for Instatus at instatus.com/open
And I'm also open for any of your questions. I'll reply fast ⚡️

Cheers!