One Person Business: Healthchecks
One Person Business: Healthchecks
Simple and effective cron job monitoring, with $9.5k MRR
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Healthchecks, created by Pēteris Caune, is an online service for monitoring regularly running tasks such as cron jobs.
This is a SaaS business that really strikes my hitch about one person businesses. Why? Because it solves a very specific problem and does it really well.
If you’ve ever built any sort of software, you might have had this issue: you have a server running, that’s critical to your product. And you need to guarantee that the server is up and running at all times. If the server goes down, you’re in trouble.
How do you fix this?
Well, you might create a recurring task that checks on the server from time to time. But you might not want to be developing that.
Or you might have a couple of servers and can’t be bothered to build multiple tasks to check on them.
So, what do you do? Well, you use a product like Healthchecks. Easy to implement, removes a huge burden from your shoulders, and it just works!
On top of that, I think Pēteris made an excellent job explaining the pricing model - with multiple FAQs, with clear and concise answers. It gives the user clarity on how it works while creating a level of trust that you don’t tend to see around here.
So, what are the numbers then? Well, you can check them here but let me give you the breakdown:
Years in business: 7
# of free accounts 21.000
# of open source and non-profit accounts: 44
# of paying accounts: 491
Monthly recurring revenue: $9.500
I couldn’t find any numbers for actual profit, but given how tech-based this product is, I’m going to assume the margins are pretty high.
I really like this product for the reason stated in the beginning: fix one problem, fix it well. This is what most wantrepreneurs are looking for. And it should be what you look for as well if you want to launch your own.
And if you think “Oh, but all the good ideas are taken already”, let me tell you something, let me tell you something: you’re probably wrong. There are a gazillion problems out there waiting for someone to come in and solve them. You just need to find them.
Here’s a good place to start: Nugget.
Here’s a good piece on where ideas come from
Good tweets are the best tweets
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Until next time - Guilherme
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