Interview with the Founder of Instatus

About

Instatus allows users to create a status page to communicate their current status with customers.

In this interview, we have a conversation with the founder of Instatus, Ali Salah.

How did you come up with the idea for the business?

Thought that a status page service would be easy to build, and the main product used (statuspage.io) has an outdated design and is overpriced.

How did you build the product?

Built it in about 3 months. Was called Sup at first. Didn't get any paid customers for it. Rebranded it to Instatus and targeted different audience (bigger companies instead of startups). Then it started getting paid customers. First customer churned, then it started getting better over time :D

How big was your team when you started?

It was just me. Hired the first part-time engineer when MRR started growing and I was able to afford it.

How did you launch the business?

On twitter and product hunt My twitter friends really helped me spread the word :D They were also the first users for the product. They weren't paid but they helped me get logos and nice status pages to feature :D

How have you grown the business since its launch?

• Improving the product and adding features
• Adding higher paid plans
• Blogs posts from Embarque.io

Some side project marketing: — https://instatus.com/now — https://github.com/instatushq/out

What do your financials look like?

Currently at ~15K MRR. Here's the open page.

What is the business model (ads/subscription etc)?

B2B subscriptions