$17,000 MRR
by Colin BartlettStatusGator, 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. 🚀
Product concept
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.
How we got here
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.)
What we're doing
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.)
Our biggest lesson
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.)
The future
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.
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Hey, I loved your idea about how you guys placed this product. Let me know what difficulties you have faced with paid promotion. On what platforms did you monetise and what content flow was used to reach the target audience. I guess we can definitely find a solution to that.
I would love to help you find the right audience segment to market your product.
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Congrats on the huge milestone! Are you scraping the status pages of each service or do you use an api like downdetector to get statuses?
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Thanks!
It's a mix. If a status page publishes an API we prefer that. If no API is published, sometimes we reverse engineer it, otherwise we scrape.
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Woohoo! Congrats buddy, well psyched for you guys. This is so encouraging and exciting for others to see.
If you don't mind me asking, how did you create those cool animations on your site? I absolutely LOVE them!!
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Congratulations! Loved the idea and am happy to see the platform grow.
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Thanks! Appreciate the encouragement.
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Congratulations mate, pretty exciting journey. Thanks for sharing!
I would love to know what have you guys tried with paid ads that have not worked? Maybe what campaigns, audiences, creatives, and budget as well you've tried.
So I can bring on some tips and get more specific in which direction to go, that have worked for myself and my clients in the past 5 years.
PS: The brand and website are great-looking.
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The biggest challenge we had for a long time was defining our audience. I think we still struggle with this. We have people from companies large and small in many different roles using StatusGator. In the early days we thought our target market was people in DevOps, but so far it's shaken out more to people managing IT and internal support helpdesks, a distinction.
Recently, we hit on this K12 education segment which is working well. This, at least, is a well-defined persona. The problem there is this segment is very expensive to reach. There are newsletters and communities for education technology leaders but they are saturated with advertisers selling multi-million dollar cloud deals so they are very expensive.
On top of that, there are basically zero direct competitors the product category itself is not well-known and not something people are looking for. That makes it tough to explain in the tiny creative space of an ad.
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we hired out the skills we lacked, such as marketing
Any tips on hiring marketing freelancers?
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We have hired out various tasks via both Fiverr and Upwork. I think Fiverr is a great place to start because tasks are more well-defined. We tried a few different people but one in particular was great. He wrote the article we requested but then told us all the reasons we were targeting the wrong keywords and presented a much better plan on what we should be doing. So we hired him to execute on that plan! For me, finding someone we felt comfortable with was the hard part so getting to try various people via small, well-defined tasks from Fiverr worked well.
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Thanks a lot for the tips! I tried Fiverr for a while, but I felt that the quality of the work was all over the place, and it was more like a lottery trying to find a dependable person. I will give it another go.
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Congrats, that's a huge milestone!
Note that on your landing page, the carousel with "Solutions for Everyone" is not working for me (in Brave).
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Funny you mention that, there's an PR to fix it! Should get merged and deployed today.
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Great update - thanks for sharing all of the details!
Congratulations on sticking it out and getting to this point
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Thank you! In the early years it helped a lot that it was very inexpensive to keep going and that I used it personally myself and really relied on it. That was motivation enough to keep sinking time and money into it. Eventually, the MRR exceeded the hosting costs and then I felt like I could keep it going forever, even if it never grew. But getting a partner and doubling down on it is what really helped explode the growth.
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