StatusGator
Status page monitoring service
After spending hours debugging a problem at work, I realized a cloud service we used was down. I wanted a way to notified when a service goes down. And I wanted to see the status of all my dependencies in one place.
StatusGator, the status page aggregation tool I started in 2014, recently crossed $17,000 MRR. š 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. š
Product concept
If youāve 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, youāre 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 ā Slack is our most popular integration.
How we got here
Iāve 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 ā 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 couldnāt 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: āIt would be a huge favor to Andy and I if we could have your feedback on StatusGator. Is there anything you think itās missing?ā 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 Iāll 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, weāre 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.
It's been a few months since my last update but StatusGator's growth has been steady. It's our goal to grow 10% every month and we're tracking about that now. We recently crossed the $10,000 MRR mark -- a symbolic but small step towards our goal of $100,000 MRR.
We recently realized that we will never meet our revenue goal without hiring more help. We hired a part-time CMO a few months back and that's been working out great. But what we really need now is help with customer service and account administration. So we're starting the daunting task of hiring a full-time Customer Success Manager. Our hope is that this will help lift the admin burden from us a bit so we can focus more on product development.
Most of our time and energy outside of admin tasks has been on a massive redesign. We're really excited to modernize our look and feel and bring much-needed product education features to the onboarding experience. I really believe we might be able to go full-time on StatusGator in the next 18 months and we're working hard to accelerate that timeline.
It's crazy to think it's taken 7 years to get here, but we are incredibly bullish on the next few months.
It's been more than 6 years, but StatusGator has crossed $7,500 MRR this month. Growth has slowed the last few months and it's been difficult to stay positive. But after retooling our strategy, we are optimistic that some forthcoming improvements will get growth kickstarted again.
We are earning this revenue while keeping the costs consistent. Our IT and software expenses are around $800 per month meaning our profit margin is holding steady around 90%.
We are hoping that 2021 will be a breakout year for StatusGator!
It's been almost 6 years of grinding, but StatusGator has crossed the $5k MRR threshold. Growth has been slow but steady the last few months and this milestone is a huge one for us mentally. More importantly than just this number is what lines beneath it though: Our gross profit on this revenue is about 88% and we're growing at a consistent 10% rate every month now.
We did, however, recently stop publishing our MRR here on IndieHackers and wrote about why on our blog. The main reason is that the number was pretty inaccurate at times. Plus, it seems silly for everyone to compare themselves with a number that's quite meaningless in a vacuum.
Regardless, we don't mind sharing our accurate numbers openly. And we're excited to have reached this milestone! Andy and I can both see a path forward for us to quit our consulting and work full time on StatusGator. In fact, we are already starting to pull back on our consulting so we can invest more time in growth.
It has always been my dream to stop trading time for dollars and to instead build my own products. I cannot believe it has taken 6 years to get to this point. But I am thrilled that we're actually making it work and cautiously optimistic that growth will continue.
Good news:
The blog post which we spent many hours creating in hopes that it would be a viral hit on Hacker News, was indeed a hit! It ended up #1 on Hacker News for several hours yesterday. Our blog got more than 10,000 visits yesterday, compared with the usual 10. Interestingly enough, I had actually written this post off entirely. I published it almost a month ago after several weeks of data analysis, writing, and even hiring an infographic designer on Fiverr. After publishing, I submitted to Hacker News, tweeted it, cross posted it to Dev.to, and... flop! Nothing. Barely a handful of hits. However, yesterday, in a reply to another post on Hacker News, I linked our article. Someone must have found it and submitted separately because within a few minutes it was #1 and our site was getting slammed with traffic.
Therein lies the bad news:
We stupidly did not prepare for an onslaught of traffic and our site was barely accessible during the initial crush. How embarrassing to spend so much time creating a post in hopes it gets a crush of traffic, only for that to happen and to be unprepared for it! It's especially embarrassing that this happened to us once before, and I'd forgotten. Anyway, it was resolved in relatively short order by throwing Cloudflare in front of our Wordpress blog.
The the end, we got a handful of free signups to StatusGator from our post which is not as great as we had hope. I think moving our blog to our product's site rather than our company's site will help, and that is in the works. But in the end, it was still heartening to see people appreciated and were interested in our content. It's motivating me to continue writing.
April was an epic month for StatusGator, our status page monitoring service.
The bad news first š
We lost more customers this month than ever before. Several really long term customers, as well. All of them were from voluntary churn. That is, they cancelled their account personally, rather than being involuntarily cancelled for a declining credit card. One actually told me they liked the service and "would be back" in the future. Another was clearly in an industry hard-hit by COVID.
Now the good news š
Both plan upgrades from existing customers and new brand new customers also reached new records in April! Despite losing 5 long-term customers, we gained 9 brand new customers. Plus, our newer pricing plans and better differentiation between plans has lead to a much higher ARPU across new customers, especially relative to the old ones. In fact, all of the customers that churned were on old, outdated plans that ranged from 66% to 33% lower than the cheapest plan we currently offer.
The bottom line: A net 15% increase in our MRR which is the highest month over month increase in our more than 5 year history. It's been a very slow and steady journey to almost $3,000 MRR.
I am incredibly excited for the future of StatusGator and promise to keep updating here with good and bad news alike.
It's time to go after those bigger fish!
Several times throughout the last five years of StatusGator, we have received requests for organizational accounts. As more and larger teams have joined, thereās been a steady increase in requests for multi-user accounts. Last week I took the time to bang out a first pass of organization accounts. It took less than a day -- what was I waiting for!?
Our first implementation of this is quite simple: separate user accounts are joined together by linking them to a parent Organization record. Each of these users has one of three roles:
- Leader: Thatās the organization member in charge of billing and has access to everything.
- Admin: Thatās an organization member who can manage other users including inviting them and signing in as them, but canāt manage billing.
- Member: No ability to manage or invite users and only has access to their own StatusGator dashboard.
There are several different scenarios that make StatusGator organizational accounts attractive, even in their current, rather basic, form. The first is where an organization wishes to provide multiple members of their team access to create a StatusGator dashboard, complete with notification preferences, Slack integration, component filters, and more. The organization leader can invite other members, each of whom can subscribe to status page change notifications and create a single unified dashboard of their personal, or team, service dependencies.
The second, is when a team of users each wants to each be able to edit and maintain a single dashboard of service dependencies. In this case, each user would need to be granted Organization Admin privileges. Each user would sign in with their own login and password and then, in order to maintain their master dashboard, would sign in as (impersonate) the organizationās main user.
Lastly, a variation of this is a bit of a trick: Even if you are only one user managing your StatusGator account, but you need different sets of service dependencies to get notified to different places, such as different Slack rooms, you can use an organization account for yourself. Simply invite another email address, impersonate that user, and youāll have a separate StatusGator dashboard.
Our organizational features are just beginning and have a long way to go. Right now, they are not much more than a hack of tape and glue to link together accounts. But if there's interest, and if they help encourage users to sign up for our more expensive plan, then we will put more time and effort into fleshing them out.
StatusGator 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.
Integration of StatusGator with Microsoft Teams has been requested more and more over the last few weeks and months. It seems that since the COVID-19 lockdown, a lot of companies started using Teams or relying on it more. We decided to finally tackle this feature, so I took a stab at launching an MVP of the integration.
I was shocked at how easy it was to crank out this new feature, and a little embarrassed that I hadn't tried to before. In fact, it took twice as long to figure out how to create a Teams account for testing and to invite my team than it did to actually write the first version of the working feature. For now, the feature is very basic but already 6 people have started using it. We're going to continue to solicit feedback and watch the numbers closely from our Metabase dashboard. If more people start using Teams, we might put more effort into a deeper integration.
I posted more details on our blog.
Over the last two weeks we've seen a sizable uptick in traffic and signups to StatusGator, our status page monitoring service. This week is so far our biggest week on record, having recorded 100 new users, pushing our total active users over 5,000. We also had 5 new paid subscriptions purchased in 24 hours, another new record.
We're not entirely sure what to correlate this uptick in business to, but appears to be related to the surge in users of chat apps like Slack and Teams, most likely due to coronavirus-induced work-at-home policies. Our product integrates with chat services like Slack and sends notifications to your channel when cloud services post downtime.
There is also a large surge in users monitoring video chat applications, specifically Zoom. When these services have outages, people search for their status page on Google. Some stumble across our service, a few sign up, and a small fraction end up converting to paid users. These small fractions are starting to add up and as the "top of the funnel" gets fatter, so do our user and engagement metrics.
Based on a surge in requests over the last week, we're going to focus on Microsoft Teams integration next. We're hoping this attracts new (and larger) companies who might gravitate towards Teams instead of Slack.