StatusGator, the status page aggregation tool I started in 2014, recently crossed $17,000 MRR. 📈 This is a tremendous milestone I thought we would never achieve given that I have been grinding away at this on the side for more than 7 years. Our growth in recent months has been consistent. We made huge improvements to the product in 2021 and are working on some exciting new features that I know will rocket us forward. 🚀
If you’ve used any cloud service in the past 10 years, you are likely familiar with the concept of a status page. Services large and small, from Amazon Web Services to Postmark, publish status pages as a way to communicate outages, maintenance, and downtime. If you build and operate your own web service or you manage IT of any kind, you’re likely dependent on dozens or even hundreds of different providers, each of whom has their own status page.
StatusGator is an aggregator of this status data. We collect the published service status from thousands of status pages, normalize it and aggregate it into a single location. Our users can create and publish an internal dashboard of the status of all the services they depend on. They can also receive notifications when the services they depend on go up and down — Slack is our most popular integration.
I’ve written a lot about the growth of StatusGator here on IndieHackers before. It took more than 3 years to hit $1,000 MRR, something I was hoping to achieve in 3 months. I gave up half the company and got a partner, but built something much larger because two heads are better than one. We had some success with content marketing and we hired out the skills we lacked, such as marketing. All of our growth has been organic via SEO and referrals. We have never had much success with paid marketing though we'd love to figure that out. (If you have tips, let us know down below.)
Right now, Andy and I are heads down on building out some big new features that make StatusGator more applicable to a wider variety of use cases. In the early days, our focus was on notifications — sending alerts via email, Slack, or SMS whenever a status page changed. The genesis of the idea was when I had spent an entire day debugging an issue for a client, only to later find out the issue was with the Facebook API. Why couldn’t I get notified when Facebook had an outage posted on their status page? StatusGator was born.
Over time, customers told us they were more interested in a publishable status page showing the aggregated status of their services. Most of our recent work has been around this dashboard use case. Corporate IT departments love this capability because they can direct their users to their StatusGator dashboard first. If Zoom is down, for example, their dashboard will show it and users won't need to submit a helpdesk ticket. Currently, our fastest growing vertical is K12 education because of the rapid shift to digital learning during the pandemic and the huge numbers of users that school IT departments need to support. (Anyone have insights into how to reach school technology leaders? Please post in the comments.)
The most important thing we have done in the last 7 years is to listen to our customers. We solicit feedback everywhere and anywhere. In the early days, I would give the product away just to get real feedback. These days, we place a huge emphasis on asking for customer feedback in every interaction. For example, we might close a support ticket email with something like: “It would be a huge favor to Andy and I if we could have your feedback on StatusGator. Is there anything you think it’s missing?” We have to over emphasize the feedback part in order to get enough real, actionable advice. And that advice is what drives our product development strategy today. (And so I’ll ask this community: How could StatusGator be more useful? Post a comment.)
StatusGator has been a labor of love for many years. We still have yet to get out a fraction of the value of all the time we have put in. But for the first time ever, it feels like a real business. We were able to take some money from it finally this past year. My partner and I have the ultimate goal of being able to quit our consulting work and go full-time on StatusGator. And with 2022 already off to a fantastic start, we’re stoked that this dream might finally become a reality this year or next.
PS: StatusGator monitors around 1,500 services but we add new ones every day. If you know of any services with status pages missing on StatusGator, please post links to them below so we can add them.