Hey all,
My name is Garrison. I’m the founder of Planda a 24/7 support company interested in defeating death by downtime! I just joined and I’m super excited to be apart of this community! Oh and thanks @kalenjordan for pointing this to me! You da bomb!
Cheers,
Garrison Snelling
Garrison! Welcome buddy!
Garrisson is a buddy of mine from the Magento community 
I’ll link up his URL for you guys:
Some of my thoughts:
I think the call to action and story that you’re telling is pretty solid. I think most people don’t get the value prop down as well as you have their first time around - good work! (Or maybe this isn’t your first time around? :))
Handling 24/7 support seems like something that will be really hard to bootstrap, especially if you’re doing it on the side of a day job? I tend to prefer business ideas that can survive with a 24 hour response time.
Handling custom web apps seems complicated to say the least. Have you thought through that at all? This feels a little more like consulting and a little less like a product business? Still could be a great business though.
Might make sense to have an up-front cost for the (variable) amount of time you’ll need to spend up front reviewing their code.
Do you have any initial customers? This seems like the kind of thing that would be great for you to just pick up a customer or two and start working with them and see how it goes.
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I think I saw another service like this recently - might have even been a post on this board - can’t remember. Maybe someone will remember and link it up. Might be good to check that out.
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I think I could potentially be a customer for this type of thing. I definitely like the idea of someone else being able to run the show while I’m away. It would be tough for me to justify the cost though during months that I wasn’t using the service - that might be something to think about.
Best of luck man!
Going to have to disagree with @kalenjordan here. I don’t see much of a value prop here because it’s not explained. Death by downtime is ok, though it seems to imply a lot more than what’s actually offered. It basically sounds like $500 gets you ping monitoring which is a bit pricey
If you do in fact mitigate downtime events by having an understanding of the clients infrastructure and access to it to bring servers back up, etc then all that needs to be spelled out much more clearly. Also, $500 seems impossibly cheap for such a service 24/7/365.
Personally, I think you’re also going to need a lot more details to make me feel warm and fuzzy if I’m giving you server access and such. How is it controlled, who exactly has access, how does the entire process work, what’s the team doing the 24/7/365 monitoring (if it’s just you I def think that will be a big issue!) and so on.
I was wondering. Have you considered niching down to a Magento only service? You are already part of the community, can position yourself as the go-to guy for this kind of services. And would be much easier to say “We are experts on this. We can monitor your site and make sure its works.”
Something like all the WordPress support/maintenance/hosting services that have appeared in the last few years.
I’m going to have to defend my honor from @ian 
I think it was fairly clear that this was not just a ping monitor and that there was going to be access to infrastructure and code-level access. That said maybe it could be clarified even further.
And I completely agree with Ian that $500/month is probably way too cheap for you to truly have expert level developers that can resolve the most critical (and likely complex) issues affecting downtime for business critical applications.
Also agreed that more details would be necessary for the warm and fuzzies.
So I’ve been taking this advice pretty seriously… I’ve kind of decided to focus a little bit more on the business model at this point and then try and pitch it.
In light of that, I have since pivoted. 
So I’m now planning on only servicing Magento clients. (Thanks @conradomaggi!) Checkout my new pricing structure - I think it’s a little bit more in line with the going rate of a magento developer.
A couple of people suggested just niche-ing down to Magento and that’s exactly what I’ve done. My next step is to go after my first customer (based on some direction from @kalenjordan).
So currently I have myself and my business partner to work on the project. My plan is for us just to work really hard until we can afford to hire another person in the opposite time zone. That seems like the proper thing to do for a bootstrapped company. @SteveMcLeod, do you have any thoughts on this? I see that you try and outsource as much as possible.
As for the warm and fuzzy, I’m encountering some issues getting over that hump, but I’m thinking getting an initial set of customers via my connects could potentially solve that problem.
Really appreciate all of the responses. It’s given me A LOT to think about! Thanks a million!
I like this idea better in every single way 
I think the advice you are acting on is putting you in a better position for reaching success. It’s not easy to receive criticism, constructive or not.
Wow - great job absorbing feedback. Love the updated pricing / features and Magento niche-down.
I’m not a big fan of working hard. But yes, if you have +ve cashflow and would like to spend it instead of working hard, it is good to outsource specific tasks. Preferably one-off tasks so that you are not committing to regular ongoing expenses before your company is ready for it.
@SteveMcLeod Hmm. I see! I was thinking of out sourcing some (Aka me secretly hiding the fact that I was wanting to do a lot and am embarrassed by it at this point) but the more and more I think about it… I think it would have greater risk than reward. So we’ll see how it goes. Sorry - thinking out loud at this point. Ha.