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Show HN: Simple Ops – My new microstartup after three years of indie hacking
- stedaniels 6y agoThis 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.
- 1hakr 6y agoYes thats the plan, an all-in-one tool.
- dewey 6y agoI'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.
- 1hakr 6y agogood point. thanks will fix that
- rapind 6y agoSpotted a copy bug: "Monitor your website's health performance & performance".
- 1hakr 6y agoGood catch. Thanks mate, will fix it.
- stevekemp 6y ago1. Your /about page also says "wbsite" rather than "website". 2. 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.
- 1hakr 6y agoThanks mate, really appreciate the feedback. Will fix the typos.
- 1hakr 6y agoSimple Ops does these • performance monitoring • alerts in 7 different channels • website health • Real user metrics • Performance check • SSL check • Global monitoring in 5 locations
- mrkramer 6y agoBeautiful website and product.
- 1hakr 6y agoGlad you liked it.
- isoprophlex 6y agoNice work, congrats! 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!"
- 1hakr 6y agoThanks for the feedback mate, I will do that.
- sah2ed 6y agoCongrats 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.
- 1hakr 6y ago#1 I hand coded it from scratch #2 yes thats a good idea, I will do that. Thanks for the feedback.
- qzio 6y ago
- napolux 6y agoHey, looks cool. What's (in your opinion) the real difference between "indie hacking" and a proper startup? (Apart from the legal entity)
- 1hakr 6y agoThe 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.
- napolux 6y agoThanks for sharing!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- boringcuriosity 6y agoPretty interesting one ha
- heipei 6y agoI 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.
- 1hakr 6y agoSimple Ops has everything you need except status pages which i'm currently building and should be ready soon.
- Mojah 6y agoHey! 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. [1] https://ohdear.app/ https://ohdear.app/
- bberenberg 6y agoFYI you may want to remove the reference to HipChat from your landing page.
- agustif 6y agoI'm using instatus and it integrates with some 3rd-party tools like pingdom or newrelic to auto-update status-page. It's nice, might work for you: https://instatus.com https://instatus.com It seems they recently implemented the automation part for the status / incident report. https://github.com/InstatusHQ/public-board/issues/9 https://github.com/InstatusHQ/public-board/issues/9
- 1hakr 6y ago
- daolf 6y agoStarting a startup means optimizing for growth, at all cost. 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 :)
- peterlk 6y agoI 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.
- randall 6y agoSteve 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. http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html 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.
- daolf 6y agoThat 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.
- allrok 6y agoI am using this service since last 20 days and I am 100% satisfied with the matrix on simpleops. Before that for the same reason I was frequently using gtmatrix.
- Semaphor 6y agoThe 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.
- 1hakr 6y agoThis was to make it easy. Does email login work for you?
- Semaphor 6y agoE-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.
- 1hakr 6y agoCool, i will enable email soon.
- bouk 6y agoYou should definitely charge at least double or triple what you are doing right now. You'd still be cheaper than the competition!
- 1hakr 6y agoThanks 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.
- z3t4 6y agoNice graphics!. How much time have you spent on manual sales?
- 1hakr 6y agoTill now zero. Its been less than a month since i made the service available publicly.
- fblp 6y agoHi 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!
- 1hakr 6y agoThanks. Yes thats in my plan, for now you can browse the live demo dashboard.
- progval 6y agoAgreed. 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.
- puranjay 6y agoThe 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.
- 1hakr 6y agoIt feels great to be appreciated for all the hard work i have put in the last few months, thanks a lot mate!
- LoathsLights 6y agoIf 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.
- jaxonrice 6y agoWhat plan does the lifetime offer get you?
- 1hakr 6y agoThe lifetime plan gets you the Maker plan
- wiradikusuma 6y agoWould be great if you have PayPal, as currency rates is fluctuating now and I keep my USD in PayPal :(
- 1hakr 6y agoCurrently I don't support paypal, but I will see what I can do.
- edhadh 6y agoI found these sentences hard to parse, I'd consider reworking them/checking the grammar: Regularly get the real-world Chrome users experience metrics right from dashboard. Its update every week and you can measure improvements.
- marxdeveloper 6y agoNever let users see your website down... and USED BY RefurbMe which seems to be down :)
- 1hakr 6y agosending alerts is one things but i cant control if they fix or not :P
- marxdeveloper 6y agoSeems to be working again, hopefully it was thanks to those alerts
- 1hakr 6y agoPoint proven why every website owner needs Simple Ops! :^)
- wusatiuk 6y agoWe 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.
- 1hakr 6y agoThanks a lot, i will add this feature soon!
- stf-ods 6y agoVery nice implementation. I wish you well! The product reminds me a lot about AppPulse Active (or what it should have been)
- 1hakr 6y agoCheers!
- steventey 6y agoThis is incredible, Hari! Love the vision for SimpleOps, and I love that you're providing a limited lifetime deal package! Great work man!
- aeden 6y agoLooks 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. :-)
- 1hakr 6y agoI will reply to it, thanks for reporting
- leorio 6y agoOff topic: curious.. you submitted this post twice recently. why on top now?
- tommoor 6y agoProbably just shows how much luck is a part in making HN frontpage
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tckb 6y agoGood 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23849221 what has changed since then?
- mtlynch 6y agoMy 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.
- tckb 6y agoBy 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.
- mtlynch 6y agoOh, sorry. I thought you were implying that OP was in the wrong for resubmitting a link that had been ignored previously and not changed since.
- aantix 6y agoWhile 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.
- nine_k 6y agoI wonder if the $5 DO plan, or $10 Linode plan, or the free AWS tier did anything to popularity, and for the general awareness of their offerings. Either that, or you need a sales Dept to talk to corporations directly.
- bdcravens 6y agoI don't think comparing those scale of companies with a microstartup is apt.
- abiogenesis 6y agoIt is not the same thing. If you want more from DO or Linode they are happy to sell 2x the resources for 2x the price.
- brainless 6y agoThis 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.
- 1hakr 6y agoThanks mate. I will rethink about pricing again.
- XCSme 6y agoSo 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). But in the end, maybe money really talks.
- baxtr 6y agoStupid question: What is a micro-startup? Sounds like an interesting concept.
- rephlex2097 6y agoI have this as a template in my naemon. For quasi-free.
- mc3 6y ago"dropbox is just rsync"
- maxlamb 6y agoIf you don't mind me asking, what tools (if any) did you use to design your landing page UI?
- adenozine 6y agoThis is a beautiful page. I like the design very, VERY much. I don't really have the need for the product, but I wish you the best of luck!
- jaxxstorm 6y agoIf I can make a suggestion for a pro feature, it would be good to be able to test/measure pages behind some kind of authentication, even basic auth would be useful
- 1hakr 6y agoThanks mate, definitely in my plan.
- raunometsa 6y agoAs I understand, you're offering a limited lifetime packages (25 x $199 and then x amount of $499)? I guess it's for generating initial $$$ and validating the interest for the product? And when you sell these out, you continue with monthly/yearly packages? This is cool. But I'm sometimes thinking about these monthly prices. Can we sell products with lifetime packages instead? You know, like you can buy and download a software program, like Postico (which is made by an indie dev): https://eggerapps.at/postico/ https://eggerapps.at/postico/ I see the difference for the maker though. Postico's developer has built a software program (a file) that can be downloaded and used, but SaaS lives on the server and needs maintenance/updates. I'm not a fan of paying every month for a lot of SaaS products. But something feels weird to sell an online product with one-time price only: 1) when I have monthly packages, I need to keep the product alive as long people pay me (or when I have only a few paying customers I can say I'll shut it down and they don't need to pay anymore) 2) when I sell lifetime packages, I need to keep the product alive for an eternity even though maybe nobody pays me But as long as new users are signing up and paying lifetime money, it's okay!
- 1hakr 6y agoYes thats exactly my plan. SaaS is very difficult and B2B SaaS is even more so. If i can get my early customers, then i cam easily concentrate on building and improving the product rather than spending most of my time on chasing early customers.
- raunometsa 6y agoThanks! I added you to my website: https://makehub.io/startups/simpleops https://makehub.io/startups/simpleops I hope you like it. Let me know if you'd like to change anything!
- XCSme 6y agoI also have the same pricing structure on https://www.userTrack.net/pricing https://www.userTrack.net/pricing (initially lifetime only, now also monthly). I added monthly mostly to allow customers to get started at a much lower cost, thus making the initial purchase easier to make. This also means that if they can test it for cheal and if are satisfied, after a while, they can switch to the lifetime plan. In my case I think it works because it is a product, not a SaaS. Feels a bit weird to pay monthly for a product, but it actually works and is more like IRL renting or paying monthly installments.
- mangomania 6y agoNice website and great initial results, congratulations!!