WebGazer

@altanakdgn was working on WebGazer and doing his PhD simultaneously. At the beginning of 2019, he noticed the time he spends on WebGazer was causing him not to succeed in his PhD.

He decided to take time off for an indefinite amount of time. We broke up on good terms 🙂 and decided to have him back on board when WebGazer gets to a state where it can be a full-time thing for both of us.

WebGazer is growing, but very slowly because of me being an "engineer monk". I tried to grow faster but I still feel like I don't have what it takes to "hustle". Looks like I will have to get a job and grow WebGazer at the same time.

One of the users that came from Product Hunt listing decided to upgrade.

We celebrated on the phone. The celebration wasn't about the first $5 WebGazer made but the validation. One user's decision to pay for the service meant that there should be other customers. We only need to find them.

I rebuilt the product and we did some local hustling. Surprise surprise, it didn't work and we started to doubt ourselves. We decided to ask for product hunters' opinion.

It turned out unexpectedly well. We got about 600 signups that day and I still remember how we celebrated yelling "sign uuuuup" together with @altanagdgn when a new user signs up.

WebGazer was #1 for most of the day but completed as #2.

It took me a while to come out of the financial struggle.

But when I did, I have convinced one of my best friends from college @altanakdgn to team up and retry together. We entered some local contests with the project resulting in meeting with some awesome people like @mrozansonmez and @soylemez_basak that helped us greatly. We generated some money from here and there. Decided to take another shot, this time together.

Founded WebGazer, Inc. via Stripe Atlas, agreed to rebuild the product almost from scratch.

I will try to keep this one short.

I met a dude, he told me he could fill the gaps I leave empty and we can revive the project back together. It seemed like a bright idea. The working code was still on my repository, I shared my previous work, we did some rebranding with a different name and domain.

He didn't keep his promises, tried to buy me off for cheap and he tried to steal and execute the project with some friends without me. They failed, I dodged a bullet.

One of my friends has called me "engineer monk" (in 2017) and it stuck. First, it sounded like an insult, but now I agree 🙂 You will, too. Keep reading.

Do you know what happens when you build an awesome product that really works and solves a problem that a lot of businesses encounter on a daily basis? I did know. People rush to your website and your servers hardly handle all the people entering their credit card numbers. Guess what? DEAD WRONG.

Next 1 year after releasing MVP, all I got were a few free users. I was not bad at building a product, but TBH, that was all I knew. I didn't even bother reading other people's stories. I was sure that if the product is good, people would come no matter what. I didn't post anywhere, didn't let anybody know. How did I expect people to find out about WebGazer, I don't know.

I was already struggling financially at that point. Decided to give up.

I was already familiar with the development procedure but not with some concepts like async task queueing and generating reports from data. I spent some time figuring out those new topics and if I am not mistaken, completed the first working product around June 2015.

I have started working as a frontend developer at Opsgenie (which has recently been acquired by Atlassian) and found out that there is such a thing as Software as a Service. Uptime monitoring was still a thing but there were far fewer alternatives available back then.

I have been developing web sites and applications as a profession and web incidents were something I was familiar with. I thought a service that notifies about downtimes would be useful for me, why wouldn't it for someone else? I was already struggling with my job at Opsgenie, due to long work hours and the time I spend between home and office was hard to bear.

So, I did quit my job there and started to work on WebGazer. In order to make ends meet, I took some freelance gigs from the people I worked with earlier.