My first SaaS adventure, don't be gentle | Hacker News Reader

My first SaaS adventure, don't be gentle

3 pointsfrankspinnl5 comments

Hi there!

After 10 years freelancing, it was time for something else. I wanted to spend my precious time on building something for myself. I found a co-founder and start building my first SaaS: UptimeMate

We did a small announcement in early February, and the interest was great. We received over four hundred sign-ups. Don't know if that is much, but it felt great!

But then the covid-19 happened, and priorities shifted. My co-founder and I had to make sure that our families were safe and that we had an income during the crisis. Bills must be paid and UptimeMate is a bootstrapped project, so we had to make a difficult decision to push the launch forward.

Now things on the covid-19 front are settling down in our region, we felt that now is a suitable time to give them access to our beta.

This is a huge deal for us, and we are scared and excited at the same time. To give people access to our project where we have put all our free time in for the last 6 months.

We decided that we have the beta until September 1. Is a 2/3-month period normal for a beta? Or is this to short or to long? Our beta is free for everybody. We introduced an early supporter coupon for people who want to support us and want to upgrade for paid plan. We handout a 50% discount. Smart? Or is this way to cheap? In the coming months we are collecting feedback and building out our marketing page. We hope to launch our version 1 in September.

I'm curious what you think and would love to hear your feedback. If you want to take UptimeMate for a free spin? Try it for free -> https://www.uptimemate.com/

I'm here all day for questions, feedback etc.

Cheers and thank you!

Hey Frank, first of all, congratulations and good luck with the launch. I understand that this is an announcement page, and I hope I'm allowed to share my feedback.

The landing page reads "Monitor your websites for technical issues"

I feel the headline can be modified to help a prospect understand why they should care.

Something on the lines of "Boost your website performance to deliver an excellent user experience" will help a prospect understand what they can achieve with UptimeMate. (This is just an example)

I think receiving updates on Slack and email is cool. It'd be nice if you could add that to the sub-heading. Something like "UptimeMate instantly notifies you of technical issues on your websites and ensures YOU are the FIRST to know. Receive updates on Slack or email. Use UptimeMate for FREE during our beta, no credit card required."

The screenshots look really good. The value props of the product and customer testimonials are on point. Well done. :)

Hey - just to report I received a server error on the callback when trying to login via a google account, then when trying to register via email & pwd it stalled on a white screen & console reported a 500 error. Chrome / using ublock

Will compare to UptimeRobot. I monitor about 50 sites for customers. Some of them like the custom status page feature of UptimeRobot, which I didn’t expect until I showed them.

Currently we don't offer any status pages, but it's on the top of our roadmap.

If I understand correctly, you would like to have control over your status pages on site level?

We are planning the following features regarding status pages:

* Create status page for one or many sites * Set status page to private (password) or public * Control which stats you want to show * Show planned downtime (Maintenace for example) * Publish message on a status page

Did I miss anything that is on your wishlist?

UptimeRobot lets me collect multiple monitors and show just those on a custom status page. I can give that URL to a customer, or set up custom DNS for it so it appears on their domain. Not a deal breaker but some of my customers like it.

I also use the keyword matching for checking things like disk space usage on some sites. The SSL cert checking is handy too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com