
Ask HN: Building a new website monitoring service in 2017? - mromanuk
I always wonder if &quot;disrupting&quot; existing markets is possible, for example the monitoring website business. Is there any point in building a new service in that space or is better to look in other places? 
This also applies to other common web services, what do you think?<p>I
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kaloryfer
This market is crowded like hell. Check the two posts I'm linking below.

[https://www.supermonitoring.com/blog/the-updated-list-of-
web...](https://www.supermonitoring.com/blog/the-updated-list-of-website-
monitoring-services/)

[https://www.supermonitoring.com/blog/website-monitoring-
serv...](https://www.supermonitoring.com/blog/website-monitoring-services-
that-shut-down/)

~~~
borplk
So here's a question,

These services obviously didn't all appear at the exact same time.

So ... at some point there were 20 of them around, then a bunch of people
launched new ones so now there were 30. This trend continued. At some point
there were 90 of them around, people built more, now there are 100+.

See where I'm going?

Just something interesting to think about. Your service could also be among
the "100 solutions already exist" group.

When there were only 99, someone still built the 100th one.

I feel like in 2018 the internet is so saturated you almost have to ignore the
fact that other solutions exist.

~~~
kaloryfer
I think there numbers are large because of two things:

1\. People are not aware that there are so many services already. It's not
enough to google for "website monitoring" to get the entire picture.

2\. Entrepreneurs think that such service is a piece of cake to implement and
to maintain. But the first 50 customers verify that wrong assumption.

Plus, with that numerous competition, led by a few giants (like Pingdom with
700,000+ customers), it's very hard to get noticed.

------
PaulHoule
Try to sell it to me.

~~~
mromanuk
Alright Paul,

What do you think of a monitoring service that has a quick setup (like in a
few seconds). Where you can login using github|google|facebook. The main focus
would be ease of use (setup and forget) with a lean, clean and aesthetically
pleasing UI. Would be cool to manage and get notifications from your monitored
sites using the following channels: * Whatsapp|Telegram|Slack Bot * an
API|webhooks * Email|SMS * push notifications to a mobile App? * CLI tool (for
managing sites) Also the service would have email/chat support, where all
requests/queries are answered, where your data is not sold and is stored
securely. (This are pain points I reviewed from other services)

The initial milestone, should be to monitor websites and backend services
cloud based or not. Then would be possible to integrate more tools like status
page, reporting, etc

PS: I think there is a new market emerging, which is under–attended, which is
IoT, those small devices based on
[https://freertos.org/](https://freertos.org/) for example chips based in
ES8266 or arduino connected to Internet.

