Pinger
Uptime Monitoring Service
Because I don't like how other services look and feel. Because I want to be independent. Because I want to put time, effort and soul in my own product and be responsible for it
So, that's it.
I sold Pingr. Even though I had negative revenue, I was able to cover my development expenses with the sale.
The offer was indeed very good and came from a random person.
I was pretty lucky with it.
I've described in details the story of Pingr :
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/i-sold-pingr-lessons-learned-059502d5e6 here
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Now, I finally have time to dive into my passion: ui/ux area. I'd be very happy if you check it out: https://user-interface.io.
It's my first attempt to run a newsletter. But I'll try to do my best.
Before starting it, I tried my skills in Twitter, reviewing other sites, and got a pretty good response. So, hopefully I'll be able to provide some good stuff there :)
Wo-hoo
I've been trying to get there for quite a while, maybe a few months.
And here it is, wrote somewhat motivational article about not being afraid of competition: https://pingr.io/blog/having-170-competitors-is-not-an-obstacle/
But looks like soon I'll get out of the frontpage.
But still, at least it gives some confidence that you can do this :)
I've been always afraid of posting to such resources as Reddit or Hacker News.
Because of this "imperfection syndrome", when you know that no everything works in your app, you have bugs and all that stuff.
But for some reason, I decided to post to subreddit, r/webdev.
At first, the post was automatically deleted, because I didn't have enough karma. Then I asked the moderator to approve it manually and he did.
Now the post is on the front page and I already got one life time deal sold!
So excited about it!
https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/jh7xre/ive_spent_a_year_building_an_uptime_monitoring/
Finally!
After 1000+ hours of work.
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/pingr-2
The day has come. I've been building Pingr for the whole year, literally spent more than 1000 hours.
I had to cope with depression, with joy, with failure and success.
Even though it's only the first step in this long journey of being Indie Hacker, it's still very very important for me.
Now, the pulse is going high, the caffeine is going in, and hopefully the launch will go to be successful.
Thank you, Indie Hackers, you're the best community I've ever met! :)
After almost a year of working on Pingr I've finally managed to sell first lifetime deal!
I found the customer on hacker news. Even though the post didn't get much traction, HN still gives you much traffic.
I posted a couple of times and each time I got like 200-300 uniques. First time user has paid monthly subscription, second time a lifetime deal was sold.
The only thing which confused me is VAT. If we talk about monthly subscription which costs 10$, it's not that painful to pay $2 of VAT. But for LTD, for example 20% might be a lot.
So I'm thinking of excluding VAT from price. Even though it might hurt a bit, I don't think it will decrease conversion drastically. But I'm still in doubt.
Keep on working 馃挭
Even though pinger is still in beta, I got first paying customer!
At first this guy provided me very detailed feedback, even including technical stuff. Then, after maybe a week he bought a subscription. And it was kind of surprise because when providing a feedback he told me that it was kind of expensive.
I asked him why did he buy subscription then and he told me in order to support me.
Moreover he's moving from statuscake to my service 馃槺
After then I rushed into coding and fixing stuff, it really motivates me ! :)
I've been trying to get user feedback for some time for https://pingr.io and it looked like a hard thing to accomplish, since people usually don't want to check your product thoroughly.
To my surprise there is a place where I got a lot of feedback and suggestions for free.
Moreover, I got feedback from technical point of view (guy event pointed out some staff directly related to my stack I used, like "hey you got a console error because of...").
Here is the place:
The important thing is:
- Post in the right time, right after the topic was created
- Get some upvotes immediately so that it stays up
Finally decided to try out product hunt ship.
I've read some opinions about this and I'm not sure if I'll get something out of it. But still I think it's better to try for a month, then get some results and decide whether it was worth it or not.
I'm only afraid that I should've done this like a year before :D
Anyway better late than sorry.
After months of working I finally put the precious "beta" tag in my github repositories.
I think that sometimes people get to the point when they almost burnout and don't know exactly what to do. Like, you have done tons of tasks, implemented tons of features. And you know you can still think of lots of other ideas but you're tired of implementing - you need to get feedback, fix left issues, and get something in return. At least feedback.
So now I'm going to test the app thoroughly and inviting you to be beta testers. If you provide some feedback sure thing you can use my service for free
I have been working on this product for half a year already. I was tracking my time using toggl, and it turned out that I spent more than 500 hours in order to get something out of it.
Why so long? Shouldn't it take like a month to validate an idea?
I think that the idea is validated for me. There are plenty of competitors. The idea is not new at all.
So in my opinion I should start with a good quality product.
The implementation of uptime monitoring service may seem easy at first, and it really did. It's not that hard to ping someone's url once per minute.
But the more I was coding the more problems I got.
- You should ping from different locations. Meaning you should maintain multiple servers
- You need to make them performant. Meaning that they can implement, say, 1000 http requests per minute. Depends on how many clients I will have. At first I wrote nice code and everything worked fine. For 1 site. For 2 sites. But when I created 1000 sites it just went down.
- I spent more than 60 hours in order to optimize the process
- UI/UX. This is almost the reason why I started the project. I want to make it beautiful and easy to work with. So it's endless process
More things should be done, but I guess the next milestone will be beta-release or product hunt launch. Hopefully I'll finish thing up in May :)