100 Customers, finally... After 5 Years
by Colin BartlettStatusGator has finally reached 100 paying customers, all of whom use it to monitor the status pages of the services they rely on. Wow, that took much monger than anticipated.
Thinking back to when I started this whole thing in 2014, if you had told me then it would take more than 5 years (and thousands of hours of work) to get just 100 paying customers, I certainly would never have built it. Back then, all starry eyed, my goal was $1,000 in monthly revenue to supplement my consulting and my timeline was 6 months. That goal alone took more than 4 years to achieve.
I'm still bullish on StatusGator. The truth is, I use the service every day, I rely on it every day, and I can't imagine maintaining a software product or service without it. Others do, too -- hopefully all 100 of those. But the market is absolutely huge. How many software development or devops teams are there out there, with critical infrastructure in the cloud? Over a million for certain. Even narrowing that to teams of a certain size, the market is still clearly in the tens of thousands, meaning the potential for StatusGator is still enormous.
So 100 customers after 5 years. What's the next goal? That 100 just needs another zero after it. Let's hope it doesn't take 50 years to get there.
-
3
Your perseverance is terrific! A hearty congratulations!!!
-
3
This product is a fantastic idea. Congrats on the 100 customers!
-
3
Congratulations 🍾
I really do hope I won’t have to wait 5 years ... 😢
-
3
Wow! 5 years?! It is really inspiring you didn't give up. Good luck with the next 100
-
1
Thanks, it's been a long road of continual improvements so I never really felt like giving up at any point. The only time growth plateaued was when I had taken a very demanding full-time job, instead of consulting. It was after that job ended that I took on a partner and really doubled down. That's when it got really exciting.
-
-
3
Well still congrats mate!
What would you have done different 5 years ago with the knowledge you have now?
-
4
In addition to my other comment about maybe starting the free trial earlier, I also would have taken on a partner earlier.
I started StatusGator by myself and it grew at quite a slow rate when it was just me. But having a partner, someone to hold me accountable, someone to bounce ideas off of, someone who took on a share of the burden of maintenance and feature development and customer service (and on and on...) really helped accelerate growth.
I gave up half the pie but now the pie is more than twice as large.
-
1
Thanks for the explanation, really valuable to see what drives business to be succesfull.
-
-
-
2
Colin, congrats. What are your biggest lessons for getting to 100? Going back to 2014, what would you have done earlier ?
Also, I think you are in good company, hopefully your success compounds from here!
-
1
Thanks! Most everything has been very incremental. But I probably would have added a free trial plan earlier. I've always had a freemium model with a free plan that lets you monitor 3 services and I figured that was enough to show people why they should upgrade.
But you can't really get the full value of the service, nor understand it, unless you monitor all the things you depend on. Plus, the more you monitor, the more likely one of those is to experience an outage and send you a notification, thus demonstrating the value of the product. So adding a one-month all-you-eat free trial period has really helped.
-
1
Very great lesson and also very useful to know this
-
1
@cbartlett first of all congrats!! What do you think is better, 30 days money-back guarantee or 1 month free trial?
-
-
-
2
It's inspiring that you keep going even though it took you five years! I wonder, what's the conversion rate of your homepage? Cause I think this tool definitely has potential in it!
-
1
Thanks. Nearly all of our acquisition comes from organic search. Really by accident, we managed to get pretty good rankings for "{service name} status" on many services. The good news is that, there's a ton of free traffic we get from that. The bad news, it converts pretty poorly, less than half a percent. Most people bounce when they realize it's not the official status page. But a tiny fraction do sign up. And a tiny sliver of those do convert to paid.
-
3
Ok, so you have an organic source of traffic which is very nice! I'd say that if your website doesn't convert *at least 1% * it's a bad sign. Landing pages are often known to achieve a conversion rate up to 8%. With the last 2 landing pages, I've made I achieved an average of 6% conversion.
So it might not be what you'd like to hear, but I think the website could use a redesign which looks a little bit more modern... I'd create separate feature blocks on your pages with the features you've now displayed above the fold. Especially if people are visiting your website for the status of a specific service, create a separate landing page for the service with the current status. Showcase some other features on the page as well and try to convert them. Maybe start with 5 popular services people visit your website for.
If you'd like to talk a little bit more about how you can improve your website lets have a chat. I couldn't find a way to send my email address in a private message to you but you can hit me up on https://linkedin.com/in/sjorsvandongen
-
1
First, congratulations with 100. I agree with @MrAtiebatie. I'm definitely in your target group but not a customer. Ive found (earlier) statusgator but didn't sign up. Here's what I remember happened and my thoughts back then:
Searched for statuspage saas
Found your site
Weird name, something alligator? (I'm not native English). Name didn't sit well.
Looks homegrown. Not strong and reliable.
Left site--
I suggest redesign and a/b split test and redesign like a mad man 😁
-
-
-
-
2
Congrats Colin.
-
1
Thanks, Shiva!
-
-
1
Congratulations. I took two years to get to one customer and I look forward to the possibility of faster growth that you are dangling in front of me! Seriously though, there is a huge success bias in all reporting of start-ups so it is great that you share.
