Our Journey Building OpenStatus: From Idea to Reality | openstatus

Our Journey Building OpenStatus: From Idea to Reality

Sep 26, 2024 | by Thibault Le Ouay | [company]

In one year, we've grown our open-source synthetic monitoring platform to more than 6,000 GitHub stars and 5,000 users. This article will reflect on our first year of building OpenStatus.

The Beginning: A Twitter Connection 🤝

It all started with a simple connection on Twitter. As members of the same developer community, we exchanged a couple of messages over the past few months. Our shared experiences and complementary skills led us to a decision: why not build something together?

Our Initial Goals

  1. Launch a viable product collaboratively
  2. Create a sustainable business.
  3. Build an open-source product
  4. Focus on developer tools

The Evolution of our Idea 💡

Our journey began with a simple concept: a beautiful status page built with cutting-edge technology. We would populate this page with our own monitoring checks.

This initial idea served as the seed from which our entire project would grow.

As we progressed, we talked to a lot of users, VC. We explored various directions:

  1. Serverless monitoring: Given that most of our users were Vercel customers, we considered specializing in this area.
  2. Incident management: Inspired by products like incident.io, we contemplated starting with status pages and expanding into incident management.
  3. AI-enhanced alerting systems: We briefly considered focusing on our product's alerting capabilities and incorporating AI for smart alerts.
  4. Real User Monitoring (RUM): We implemented this feature, but after discussions, we recognized the need to focus on our core strength: synthetic monitoring.

Ultimately, these explorations helped us refine our focus and understand our unique value proposition in the market.

We want to build the best open-source synthetic monitoring platform.

Understanding our Market 🏇

Prior to launching OpenStatus, we had experience with tools like:

However, we weren't power users of these platforms. Our understanding of the ecosystem was broad but not deeply ingrained. This experience taught us a valuable lesson:

You don't need to be an expert in a field before starting. The key is to begin building—you'll learn along the way.

Our Marketing Strategy 📈

Riding the OSS train

We started at the right time where lots of Open-Source Software companies flourished, gaining the visibility that helped set us apart.

Leveraging Cutting-Edge Technology

By utilizing the latest tech, we caught the attention of developers, who shared our work on twitter, bringing us more visibility.

Open-Source as a Marketing Tool

We embraced open-source not just as a development philosophy but as a powerful marketing strategy.

To be in these lists you don’t only need to ship features but engage with your community on github.

Content Creation

We lacked a formal SEO strategy, but some of our blog posts performed well:

Organic Growth

Our status pages served as an excellent marketing tool. Each time a user published one on their website, it created a valuable backlink for us.

Tools and Components

Additionally, creating tools and components people love is a great way to draw attention and leverage SEO: time.openstatus.dev - a shadcn time picker drives 3k visitors per month organically.

Our Initial Approach: YOLO 🤘

In our early days, we adopted a "YOLO" mindset.

  1. Rapid iteration: We moved swiftly from one idea to another.
  2. Flexibility: Being a small team allowed us to pivot quickly.
  3. Learning through action: We learned by doing, gaining valuable insights through direct experience.

However, now that we've grown to more than 5,000 users, we recognize the need for a more structured and strategic approach to continue scaling effectively.

Project Management

We experimented with GitHub Projects for our workflow, but this approach didn't quite fit our needs. Now, we've re-initialized Linear and are documenting our upcoming features more thoroughly.

Personal Journeys 🧳

Max

Thibault

The future 🚀

We have a dedicated roadmap that we’re excited to work on. The most important thing is to build, to learn and enjoy it.

As we reflect on our journey, we're excited about the road ahead. So how does our roadmap look like?

OpenStatus has grown from a simple idea into a promising open-source project with a dedicated user base. We're committed to continuing our innovation, engaging with our community, and building tools that developers love.

To infinity and beyond 🚀

Want to join us on this journey? Star us on GitHub! 🌟