Hi, I'm Robert working on website monitoring service

Introductions
#1

Hi,

My name is Robert and I’m a software engineer from Vancouver BC. I’ve been reading this forum for about a year and this is my first introductory post.

I’m in the industry for about 10 years during which I was always working for big corporations. In Amazon building new AWS services. In Microsoft creating software for teachers and students used in the classroom. In Red Hat developing automated tests for Java enterprise platforms.

A few months ago I’ve decided to challenge myself and create something completely on my own. And today I would like to introduce my project Monitoria - https://monitoria.ca/

Monitoria is an active monitoring service for websites or basically any HTTP(S) endpoints. It will periodically send HTTP requests to the selected URL and when it starts receiving errors, it will send you a notification. This way you will know immediately when your website is down.

So far it is a very simple service, but it’s fully functional.

Please check it out and let me know if you have any questions. I would be happy to hear any comments or ideas for improvement.

Even better, if you think about any feature that may be useful for you, let me know and I can build it.

Thank you very much!

Robert

1 Like
#2

Congratulations on launching Monitoria, Robert!

You are probably aware that website monitoring is an extremely crowded market. What’s your plan for getting the first few customers?

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#3

Thank you Steve!

Yes, I know it’s a really crowded market. I should’ve been probably thinking about it before I started working on this :smiley: But I like this project from a technical point of view.

Anyway, I understand it will be hard to find customers. I’m planning to contact my ex-colleagues and figure out what they are using and what issues they have. They are software engineers or managers so they should have already some experience with service monitoring.

Bad thing is that most of them are working for big corporations and they already have some internal tools for monitoring.

I’m also thinking about writing some content about DevOps in the future.

What do you think may work?

PS: I updated the design of Monitoria today. So it looks a little bit better.

#4

With some small modifications you could target the “watched webpages” market which is much less crowded. Happy to schedule a call and suggest some reasons why this might be several orders of magnitude more profitable. I worry you will not be able to cover your costs of customer acquisition in the uptime monitoring market. You can reach me at skmurphy@skmurphy.com.

#5

Hi Sean,

Thanks for advice. I’ve sent you an email.

What do you mean by “watched webpages” market? Could you please give some examples?

Thanks!

#6

Right now you are “Watching a web page” to see if it responds.
You could also watch it to see if it changes and then report the fact that it changed and summarize the changes for bonus points.
You could report if links were added, for example or the nature of content changes.

Here are some examples
paid

https://changetower.com/page-watcher/
https://versionista.com/pricing
https://www.aignes.com/
https://trackly.io/

free

https://nodetics.com/pageprobe/
https://www.followthatpage.com/
https://slackbuilds.org/repository/14.1/network/urlwatch/
https://pypi.org/project/urlwatch/1.15/
http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/xenial/man1/urlwatch.1.html
https://www.patdirienzo.com/ezwpw.html
https://github.com/alberanid/diffido
https://github.com/girishso/page-poller

My question is “are you trying to make money with your product?”