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Ask HN: Review my Startup - Dead Simple Monitor

12 points by cracell ↗ HN
Dead Simple Monitor alerts you when your website is down via email, SMS and/or a phone call.

http://www.deadsimplemonitor.com

And here's a special link for you guys so you can signup to check it out without putting in a credit card http://www.deadsimplemonitor.com/signup/hackernews

9 comments

[ 6.3 ms ] story [ 32.6 ms ] thread
nmcfarl
So just getting started looking at it - but I did notice that the "Plan and Price" page doesn't have a call to action to sign up - or even a good link to the signup page. I'd fix that first.
c4ncll3
Thanks, we added a link to sign up in the "Plan and Price" section.

Also added a link specific to Hacker News visitors which takes you to the 'sign up w/o a credit card' page.

nmcfarl
So I got my first phone call from the service - everything works very nicely indeed! That certainly lets you know that something is up!
famfam
Just curious, why did you decide to do this? I raised a similar idea a little back on HN and I would say overall the response was negative. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1401914) The space is in fact, very very very crowded, and there are already a lot of "dead simple monitors" out there. Where do you see an opportunity? Congrats on putting this out, either way.
cracell
Ah I missed your post, very interesting.

Honestly I don't think the space is crowded at all. When researching the space I found that the competition is entirely disappointing. There's a host of services that do a lot more and you pay for it. I don't need an enterprise solution that costs $100 a month, I just need to know if my site is up.

And then you have a bunch of unprofessional and confusing small ones. That are after the exact same customers but are doing a very poor job at it. The only real serious competition that we found is Pingdom. Which I've used personally for my sites and I've always hated that they make me refill SMS and that they couldn't call my phone. I often simply ignore texts for hours or sleep through them. Though in my research I found I'm pretty alone in wanting a website up monitor to call me and not just text.

famfam
That's cool. I agree there are a lot of junky ones, and absurdly expensive ones, but I did find quit a few "modern" ones like what you've implemented, basically at the same price point, same features etc. I wish I had kept the list, because they're hard to find through Google... since there are so many results in this category.

Do you plan on running SEM campaigns to promote this? I'm really curious if your CPA can get low enough to come out ahead for an offering in this price range. The CPC doesn't seem cheap since the higher end guys charge a pretty penny in this space. I guess it all depends on your gross per customer, which you won't know until customers start to sign up AND then terminate after X months.

Are you running the whole thing out of Heroku? Do you think that you're putting the availability of your service at risk by doing so? (e.g. are you just measuring whether or not Heroku can see their website?)

cracell
Currently the service is running entirely on Heroku. We plan to run the monitor itself in slave mode on completely separate virtual machines with a couple different hosts. Depending on the userbase. Once that system is finished if Heroku or EC2 for that matter went entirely down the interface would no longer be available but the alerts would still fire. I don't see the point of checking it from various regions around the world. When you are a company like Amazon this makes sense but for small companies and consultants I just can't see the use case.

We do have logic in place to ensure that it doesn't think everything is down if it loses it's http connection.

I plan on experimenting with Search Engine Marketing but that really is a hard game to play at this price range. I have a lot of ideas and rough plans marketing wise but for this type of product it will definitely be an uphill battle. I don't have any experience in marketing but have read a lot and am excited to try it out first hand.

Long term we hope to succeed by being better and cheaper than the alternatives. If you have happy customers using your product they recommend others to it. But it will take a long time to build that customer base that is recommending us to others.

justinchen
Clickable HN signup link: http://www.deadsimplemonitor.com/signup/hackernews

Just signed up. I agree with your annoyance about Pindom SMS credits -- it makes the service much less valuable when it's only email.

I do like having it be a phone call b/c then I can program in a very ominous ringtone.

jeffepp
very useful - already signed up and currently monitoring my app.. well done.