Status Hive

Over the last 3 months, I've been developing Status Hive, a free uptime monitoring and status page application.

After delaying my launch to work on some new features, last week I decided that it was time to start marketing my product.

Landing Page

After receiving some advice on Twitter, I decided that I needed to update my landing page to become more informative about the use of the status page, as well as to show off some existing status pages. It took a good few hours to make the changes to the site, but I think it looks a lot better

Cold Outreach

I cold DM'd a number of fellow indie hackers on Twitter offering a free advanced membership in exchange for their status page being featured on the landing page. Despite most of my messages being ignored, a few people got back to me and have since created an account. I'm still receiving replies from a few people at the moment, so I'm hoping that I'll have more example status pages to use in the next few weeks!

Indie Hackers Post

I wrote my first post here on Indie Hackers discussing how I launched Status Hive after months of building. The post didn't do very well, as I suspect it was a bit too wordy, so I plan on creating some shorter posts here in the near future.

Website blog posts

To improve my SEO, I've been working on adding a blog section to my landing page. Last week, I wrote 2 new blog posts, bringing the total up to 5 on the site. There's not been any traction on these posts yet as they've only just been picked up by Google, but I should start to see some traffic from these over the next few months. I definitely need to do some more keyword research and add more blog posts here to improve my SEO.

Giphy

Yesterday, I saw some posts about how using gifs can bring traffic to your site. I've just set up a Giphy account and have submitted a few branded gifs. I'm hoping this should have quite an impact on traffic within the next few weeks, as gifs are frequently used in all of the tech companies that I have worked for over the years.

Reddit comments

I've also started browsing through posts on reddit around status pages and uptime monitoring and have been commenting on some questions asking for advice on which status page solution to choose. I'm planning to utilise Reddit more this coming week with some dedicated posts to Status Hive, so I'll see if that has more traffic

Overview

Overall, I've kickstarted quite a few different marketing techniques over the last week. I'm planning on narrowing down some of my advertising next week to be more focussed on areas where people from smaller start-ups are online as well as following up on some more leads from this week.

If anyone has any other marketing tips, I'd be excited to read them in the comments!

Over the last 3 months, I have been working on Status Hive, an application that provides uptime monitoring and highly customisable status pages. During development, I found myself repeatedly delaying the release of the app, as I was trying to create the perfect product that would stand out from the competition.

How Status Hive Started

I originally came up with the idea for Status Hive after wanting to add uptime monitoring and a status page to Code Poster, another one of my projects, and finding none of the other options suitable because they either:

• Didn't offer enough customisation options
• Didn't provide uptime monitors in house
• Were way too expensive for my limited budget
• Didn't look beautiful enough

I decided that I wanted to create a new status page solution that would cover all of these key features and more, and so Status Hive was born.

To start with, I grabbed the authentication logic from Code Poster and began setting up some basic ping uptime monitoring and a simple status page editor.After one month of development, Status Hive was a fully fledged MVP ready for launch.

However, after looking at some of the competition I decided that Status Hive needed some UI / UX tweaks and a bunch of extra uptime monitoring options and status page customisation features in order to keep up with other solutions. As soon as I finished implementing a feature, I would find new tasks to complete in order to make the app even better. After a further month and a half of repeating the cycle of implementing features, fixing bugs, then finding new features to add, I decided that things needed to change.

The Turning Point

After spending a total of 2 1/2 months working on trying to perfect Status Hive, trying to implement enough features to properly compete with the other solutions on the market, I realised that I would never be able to achieve a perfect product and that the longer I waited to launch, the more market opportunities I would be missing. I knew that I needed to take action and overcome my perfectionism if I wanted to see Status Hive succeed.

To do this, I set a hard launch date of 13th January for Status Hive and made a commitment to myself to launch on that date, no matter what. I also set realistic goals for the last few changes that I wanted to make so that I would be happy with the launched result. With this mindset, I was able to launch Status Hive on schedule, which has definitely been the best decision I've made on the project so far.

Post Launch

After launching Status Hive and sharing the project with a few other solopreneurs, I started receiving new feature requests and bug reports that I would never have found on my own. Despite not having all of the features that I deemed essential when comparing Status Hive to other services a few months prior, Status Hive had started growing from an idea in my head to a real software solution that people were using and enjoying in a matter of days.

Although it's only been a matter of weeks since the launch of Status Hive, the direction of the product has already started to focus on the needs of actual users, rather than my interpretation of what other users needed. This user-focussed approach has helped Status Hive to stand out from the crowd of status page solutions in new ways that I never thought possible.

Final Thoughts

Over the last few months of creating and launching Status Hive, I've learned that the key to overcoming perfectionism is to focus on the essentials of your product, being willing to accept that there will always be bugs and issues and most importantly, that getting community feedback is always better than waiting for every feature to be perfected. If you're an entrepreneur who is struggling with perfectionism, I hope that my story will inspire you to take action and launch your project!

If you're interested in getting a free status page and uptime monitors for your service, have a look at Status Hive at statushive.net, or follow along with my build in public journey