This is a crowded space, but you seem to have integrated many related features into your offering. With that in mind is a bit tricky to see exactly how you compare to the competition. I know some are for and some against competitor comparison tables... I think you'd come out favourable however.
It looks great! If I had the cashflow is jump at that lifetime offering. I wish you well.
I'd structure the pricing page a bit differently. Having a "Lifetime" plan isn't really something that's common for a offering like that because everyone knows it's not actually lifetime. I only realized that there are more "normal" plans once I scrolled but on the first glance it looks like the lifetime plan is the only one available.
Simple Ops does these
• performance monitoring
• alerts in 7 different channels
• website health
• Real user metrics
• Performance check
• SSL check
• Global monitoring in 5 locations
My 2 cents: Work on validating your pricing! I see very little differentiation between the 10 and 20 usd/mo tiers, and my gut feeling was "they're offering wayyyy too many nice things in the 10 usd tier!"
Congrats on shipping! The design is really well done.
1. Did you hand-code it from scratch or you use a template/theme?
2. What about a domain renewal check? The person who registered a domain might not be the one that signs up for Simple Ops, so a renewal notice would be nice for when a domain is about to expire.
The product is the same, its just the mind set. In a startup you are more focused on securing a funding and grow 10x and on the other hand Indie hacking is more on bootstrapping. I feel startups started bootstrapped but have turned into what they are today because of VC. Also the biggest reason why 95% startups fail.
I recently researched third-party services that do performance / uptime monitoring, alerting and more. There were a couple of good ones, but none that I found that integrated monitoring/performance/alerting along with a publicly accessible status-page/dashboard which also had the option to create incidents with status updates (text description). You might consider if this is worth adding.
For now I went with the Open Source Statping tool but I'd happily use an affordable service if it unified everything.
Hey! Sorry to hijack the thread for the other, but just like the OP we've spent the last few years building Oh Dear and it does about 99% of what you're looking for. [1]
It has uptime, performance, SSL alerts and status pages. What's missing is the performance graphs on the status page, which is coming in a few months.
Simple Ops goes further than us by also measuring FCP though.
I mean, if we want to argue about definitions, personally, I like Steve Blank's:
"A startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. The goal of your early business model can be revenue, or profits, or users, or click-throughs – whatever you and your investors have agreed upon. Most startups change their business model multiple times."
I disagree with the idea that a "startup" needs to be "optimizing for growth at all costs" - as you say. I think this is actually a rather dangerous approach because growth at all costs is how we get things like Ponzi schemes, WeWork, and other abusive organizations.
Your comment also seems to imply that you can't do anything meaningful if you don't have/raise money. This is simply not true.
Steve Blank's definition is not widely accepted in silicon valley. You can argue about what you'd like startup to mean, but what startup means to most silicon valley-ish people is a company designed to grow quickly. It's irrespective of investors, or other things.
Growing quickly doesn't mean growing quickly sketchily... it means companies like Facebook who go from nothing to 3 billion people in a decade... something that was much more difficult before software.
That was a short answer, of course it could be refined :).
This part of Steve definition is for me the most fundamental: "The goal of your early business model can be revenue, OR profits, or users, OR click-throughs – whatever you and your investors have agreed upon".
When bootstrapping you cannot afford to have a business model that can generate anything else than revenue. Except if you optimize for time while having another full-time job for example.
I was not at all implying that you can't do anything meaningful if you don't raise money. But again it depends what you mean by meaningful.
If by meaningful you mean developing a product / idea that will completely disrupt an industry or the way people live (think Tesla, AirBnB, Apple & co), I'd argue that 99% of the time, people with that ambition will use the VC way.
If by meaningful you mean building a strong business, generating millions of $ and creating hundreds of jobs (think BaseCamp, MailChimp, ConvertKit), I agree that raising money is not mandatory.
But I stand by my point, if you want to change the world, you should probably aim for the VC road.
The service looks nice and at a very fair price point. But I can’t stand it when I’m forced to go through a 3rd party to sign in. At least this made me create a throwaway GitHub account for OAuth.
E-Mail signup/login is my favored way, every time. FB/Twitter/Google are, of course, by far the worst, but even Github might randomly decide they don’t want me on their service anymore. My E-Mail provider is the only one I pay and the only one I have some slight trust in.
Thanks for the suggestions. I will comeback to pricing if there is enough traction. My current goal is to reach as many website users as possible and make performance monitoring available for everyone.
Hi there, ive been browsing hn for over 7 years and this is one of the nicest indie landing pages ive seen. I like your eye for design.
Have you considered letting the uder do a demo by entering a URL and then you email then the results of the initial site scan? (later generate a page). You get an email, they get a low friction semo. Win-win!
Agreed. In addition to looking nice and working without JS, I understood in less than five seconds what it's about. That's much better than most landing pages.
The design is nice enough but from a marketing perspective, the copy was really great. No fluff, just a very clear value proposition. I understood immediately what the service does and how it could benefit me. Far more mature than most indie SaaS websites I've seen.
If you'd like some feedback there's one/two things that stood out to me.
When you click on the pricing page your navigation bar becomes a mobile style one, those are usually only shown if the screen width is small like on mobile.
When you click on the live demo page you get a back button top left thing that seems like it belongs to a mobile app, on a desktop where the screen is wider this design choice seems a bit odd.
I'm guessing this stuff comes from still being in a bit of a learning phase with Vue or some library you're using. Otherwise great site, just something to look at in case you want to improve on it.
We are looking for such a solution combined with data available via a Google datastudio connector. Could be an awesome feature to attract agencies as customers, who need to report to their clients.
Looks like there are some issues to resolve with the signup process and billing. I've contacted you via your support channel so we'll see how this works out. :-)
Good to see this one on the top of showhn. I see that you shared the same 2 days ago and the one before 8 days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23849221 what has changed since then?
My understanding is that this is acceptable practice. There's a lot of luck to a post reaching critical mass on HN, so if you happen to get lost in the noise, you can try again. Trying three times does not feel at all egregious to me. As long as you don't delete old submissions to hide what you're doing, I think that's in line with HN's rules.
One notable difference is that today is a weekend, which means there's less traffic on HN but also less competition to reach the front page.
By looks of it you seem to have misinterpreted my question. I never suggested it to be a bad practice but rather was curious if there’s was something changed to post it again, I certainly would.
While I understand the sentiment behind a $10/mo offering, you will attract cheap customers. Which are the worst. They demand more support while knowing less and pay less. The worst of all worlds.
Price is a signal. You’ve done a lot of great work. Don’t sell it short now.
This is NOT the same. With infrastructure based companies you are seeing a lure to get into an hourly priced game that the house ALWAYS wins. You start with 10, because there are many others that are paying 10K. IaaS is a different game.
So your suggestion is to increase prices just to get rid of "poor" customers? I think this is a really good ethical discussion, and I personally beleive many products/services are way overpriced because of this, which really raises the bar for small businesses and developers.
I am also building a high-quality, high-value product that I am making affordable even for really "poor" webmasters. I am thinking of raising the pricing, but at the same time I still receive messages from devs that are just starting saying that they like by product but it is too expensive for them, which is a bit sad to hear (you create something nice that some people can't afford).
Low prices attract customers that will demand more features and make more complaints to you then any other demographic. In SaaS higher priced customers are typically more accommodating and in addition you get more resources to meet their demands.
Somehow there's something psychological that makes you appreciate a product less when you paid 10$ vs 1000$.
I think you want to build your business out first. Once you're there you can use higher paying customer to subsidize lower tier customers very similar to how business travel works.
In the SaaS world, that's like Intercom or HubSpot giving their entire services or $50/m if you're a startup which is <$1M in rev, founded <2y ago etc.
The other shortcut is venture subsidized growth where you sell for cheap to show growth with the hope you'll have net negative churn and the expanded revenue will make up for it. This is highly segment dependant.
But as the founder of Intercom said: startups make a poor market, there's no recovery from death. So choose wisely.
This is not the case here, but my opinion is that if you still haven't reached product market fit and your value proposition is still changing, it makes sense to charge less, get more customers and, with that, more feedback.
Besides, with more customers you can have the luxury of deciding which segment you actually want to serve and start refining the product for them (thus increasing the value proposition and allowing for a higher price point).
I was recently introduced to parity based pricing - the app was priced around $99 or so. However if you are from a country with lower purchasing power, they would reduce the price. Same for students or charities.
That's interesting. Do you remember how the pricing was explained? Did you have to contact them and explain your status to get the discount?
I also want to provide more affordable pricing for people with lower purchasing power, but I would do it per person, not based on geolocation. I was thinking to just add some text: "Too expensive? Send me an email explaining your current status and why you want product X and I will make a suitable offer for you".
I'm unable to dig out the link now. But from what I understand, it was not coded in the script. Instead, if you were someone from a developing country, you could email them about a discount and the site owner would then send you a unique URL with a cheaper price point. Not scalable at all, but I guess it works for the first several paying customers.
116 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 93.4 ms ] thread2. Your /features page is blank.
3. Some of the copy on the /docs tree could be proof-read and reworked. e.g. /docs/faqs
Nitpicking aside it seems like a cool service, and a cool site.
My 2 cents: Work on validating your pricing! I see very little differentiation between the 10 and 20 usd/mo tiers, and my gut feeling was "they're offering wayyyy too many nice things in the 10 usd tier!"
1. Did you hand-code it from scratch or you use a template/theme?
2. What about a domain renewal check? The person who registered a domain might not be the one that signs up for Simple Ops, so a renewal notice would be nice for when a domain is about to expire.
Thanks for the feedback.
ie, a backup job that runs at cron, if it doesn't report back I need a "ping" so I can fix it.
For now I went with the Open Source Statping tool but I'd happily use an affordable service if it unified everything.
It has uptime, performance, SSL alerts and status pages. What's missing is the performance graphs on the status page, which is coming in a few months.
Simple Ops goes further than us by also measuring FCP though.
[1] https://ohdear.app/
It's nice, might work for you: https://instatus.com
It seems they recently implemented the automation part for the status / incident report.
https://github.com/InstatusHQ/public-board/issues/9
Bootstrapping or indie hacking have usually different goals: you optimize for revenue or time spent.
Shortly said, when building a startup you aim to change the world, when indie hacking you just want to change yours.
At least that is why I chose that path 2 years ago :)
"A startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. The goal of your early business model can be revenue, or profits, or users, or click-throughs – whatever you and your investors have agreed upon. Most startups change their business model multiple times."
I disagree with the idea that a "startup" needs to be "optimizing for growth at all costs" - as you say. I think this is actually a rather dangerous approach because growth at all costs is how we get things like Ponzi schemes, WeWork, and other abusive organizations.
Your comment also seems to imply that you can't do anything meaningful if you don't have/raise money. This is simply not true.
http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html
Growing quickly doesn't mean growing quickly sketchily... it means companies like Facebook who go from nothing to 3 billion people in a decade... something that was much more difficult before software.
This part of Steve definition is for me the most fundamental: "The goal of your early business model can be revenue, OR profits, or users, OR click-throughs – whatever you and your investors have agreed upon".
When bootstrapping you cannot afford to have a business model that can generate anything else than revenue. Except if you optimize for time while having another full-time job for example.
I was not at all implying that you can't do anything meaningful if you don't raise money. But again it depends what you mean by meaningful.
If by meaningful you mean developing a product / idea that will completely disrupt an industry or the way people live (think Tesla, AirBnB, Apple & co), I'd argue that 99% of the time, people with that ambition will use the VC way.
If by meaningful you mean building a strong business, generating millions of $ and creating hundreds of jobs (think BaseCamp, MailChimp, ConvertKit), I agree that raising money is not mandatory.
But I stand by my point, if you want to change the world, you should probably aim for the VC road.
Before that for the same reason I was frequently using gtmatrix.
Have you considered letting the uder do a demo by entering a URL and then you email then the results of the initial site scan? (later generate a page). You get an email, they get a low friction semo. Win-win!
When you click on the pricing page your navigation bar becomes a mobile style one, those are usually only shown if the screen width is small like on mobile.
When you click on the live demo page you get a back button top left thing that seems like it belongs to a mobile app, on a desktop where the screen is wider this design choice seems a bit odd.
I'm guessing this stuff comes from still being in a bit of a learning phase with Vue or some library you're using. Otherwise great site, just something to look at in case you want to improve on it.
Bravo for the landing page!
Regularly get the real-world Chrome users experience metrics right from dashboard. Its update every week and you can measure improvements.
One notable difference is that today is a weekend, which means there's less traffic on HN but also less competition to reach the front page.
Price is a signal. You’ve done a lot of great work. Don’t sell it short now.
Either that, or you need a sales Dept to talk to corporations directly.
I am also building a high-quality, high-value product that I am making affordable even for really "poor" webmasters. I am thinking of raising the pricing, but at the same time I still receive messages from devs that are just starting saying that they like by product but it is too expensive for them, which is a bit sad to hear (you create something nice that some people can't afford).
But in the end, maybe money really talks.
Somehow there's something psychological that makes you appreciate a product less when you paid 10$ vs 1000$.
In the SaaS world, that's like Intercom or HubSpot giving their entire services or $50/m if you're a startup which is <$1M in rev, founded <2y ago etc.
The other shortcut is venture subsidized growth where you sell for cheap to show growth with the hope you'll have net negative churn and the expanded revenue will make up for it. This is highly segment dependant.
But as the founder of Intercom said: startups make a poor market, there's no recovery from death. So choose wisely.
Besides, with more customers you can have the luxury of deciding which segment you actually want to serve and start refining the product for them (thus increasing the value proposition and allowing for a higher price point).
I think more apps need to do this.
I also want to provide more affordable pricing for people with lower purchasing power, but I would do it per person, not based on geolocation. I was thinking to just add some text: "Too expensive? Send me an email explaining your current status and why you want product X and I will make a suitable offer for you".