It has been a wild six months for us at OpenStatus. In late June, we began writing the first line of code for OpenStatus.

We started with a simple idea: make an open-source a status page, but we quickly realized that we could do more. We could build a platform that would allow you to monitor your services and notify your users when something goes wrong.

In this article, I will share with you the challenges we encountered and how we solved them. We will also be sharing our metrics and our plans for the future.

A quick recap of our journey

June 2023

Middle of month

I asked on Twitter if people would be interested in an open-source alternative for a status page. Max replied to me, and we started to work on the project.

End of month

We wrote the first line of code for OpenStatus.

July 2023

Middle of month

My tweet got a lot of traction, and and it gave us the motivation to continue to build OpenStatus.

End of month

We launched the initial version of OpenStatus, which was more than just a basic status page. We incorporated website monitoring features that would shape the future of OpenStatus.

Max's Twitter thread went viral, gaining us a lot of attention on the platform.

After that OpenStatus trended on GitHub for a few days.

August 2023

Middle of month

We launched our first paid plan, which allowed us to cover our costs. Couple of hours after the launch, we had our first paying customer. We were so happy! 🎉

September 2023

It was a month of reflection for us. We were a bit confused about the direction we wanted to pursue at that time. Having just a status page as a side business is cool, but we also aspire to build something that could become a full-fledged company in the future.

October 2023

Beginning of month

We launched on Hacker News, and we got a lot of feedback from the community. We were so happy to see that people were interested in our project.

We were not expecting such a good traction from the hacker news community

Middle of month

For some cost saving reasons, we decided to migrate our checker infrastucture from Vercel to Fly.io.

End of month

We told our migration in a blog post, and it got a lot of traction, also on Hacker News.

November 2023

We have rewritten our checker infrastructure in Golang to enhance stability, resulting in cost savings on fly.io server.

December 2023

We have launched our deploy your own status page

Our metrics

Our product metrics

Number of new users per week

Number of monitors created per week

Number of page created per week

Other metrics

Number of GitHub stars

Number of visitors per month

Search console

Financials

Monthly recuring revenue

Let's talked about our 2023 year

What went well

We launched OpenStatus 🔥. We didn't waste too much time over-engineering it.

We had a good traction among the developer community. We were able to get a lot of feedback from the community, which helped us to improve our product.

The number of GitHub stars, users are a good indicator of the traction we had.

We both reach more than 1000 followers on Twitter.

What could have gone better

We can brag about our MRR on Twitter but we are still not profitable. We are still not able to cover our costs despites a small MRR.

We could have listen more to our users. We could have done more to improve our product. We should have done more users surveys.

What went wrong

We got confused. We were not sure about the direction we wanted to pursue. We also got defocused when VC started to reach out to us. They are paid to talk to you but not us. We are not building anything when we are talking to them.

They also don't know more than us about what our customers want. They are not the one we should listen to. We should listen to our users 😁

We still pay too much for Tinybird 😭.

Our plans for 2024

First we want to reach profitability. 😁

We will allocate more time to the project 🚀

We will follow our intuition and not listen to VC. We will listen to our users instead. 🤦