Ask HN: Building a new website monitoring service in 2017?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16078735

by mromanuk • 9 years ago

5 5 9 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I always wonder if "disrupting" existing markets is possible, for example the monitoring website business. Is there any point in building a new service in that space or is better to look in other places? This also applies to other common web services, what do you think?

PaulHoule• 9 years ago

Try to sell it to me.

mromanuk• 9 years ago

Alright Paul,

What do you think of a monitoring service that has a quick setup (like in a few seconds). Where you can login using github|google|facebook. The main focus would be ease of use (setup and forget) with a lean, clean and aesthetically pleasing UI. Would be cool to manage and get notifications from your monitored sites using the following channels: * Whatsapp|Telegram|Slack Bot * an API|webhooks * Email|SMS * push notifications to a mobile App? * CLI tool (for managing sites) Also the service would have email/chat support, where all requests/queries are answered, where your data is not sold and is stored securely. (This are pain points I reviewed from other services)

The initial milestone, should be to monitor websites and backend services cloud based or not. Then would be possible to integrate more tools like status page, reporting, etc

PS: I think there is a new market emerging, which is under–attended, which is IoT, those small devices based on https://freertos.org/ for example chips based in ES8266 or arduino connected to Internet.

kaloryfer2• 9 years ago

This market is crowded like hell. Check the two posts I'm linking below.

https://www.supermonitoring.com/blog/the-updated-list-of-web...

https://www.supermonitoring.com/blog/website-monitoring-serv...

borplk• 9 years ago

So here's a question,

These services obviously didn't all appear at the exact same time.

So ... at some point there were 20 of them around, then a bunch of people launched new ones so now there were 30. This trend continued. At some point there were 90 of them around, people built more, now there are 100+.

See where I'm going?

Just something interesting to think about. Your service could also be among the "100 solutions already exist" group.

When there were only 99, someone still built the 100th one.

I feel like in 2018 the internet is so saturated you almost have to ignore the fact that other solutions exist.

kaloryfer2• 9 years ago

I think there numbers are large because of two things:

1. People are not aware that there are so many services already. It's not enough to google for "website monitoring" to get the entire picture.

2. Entrepreneurs think that such service is a piece of cake to implement and to maintain. But the first 50 customers verify that wrong assumption.

Plus, with that numerous competition, led by a few giants (like Pingdom with 700,000+ customers), it's very hard to get noticed.

Ask HN: Building a new website monitoring service in 2017?

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