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Instatus is a simple status page builder doing $25K MRR.
- Solo founder
- Software engineer
- Quit his 9-5 without already having a product.
Now he runs Instatus profitably.
What is Instatus?
Instatus allows you to create a status page. A status page displays your current status and notifies customers about outages. This keeps customers informed and prevents overwhelming customer support during service disruptions.
This is their landing page -
But how did Ali Salah (Instatus’) founder come up with the idea?
Picking the idea
Ali had a very simple criteria for picking the idea -
- Easy to build MVP
- Businesses already paying for similar products
He had zero idea-risk.
But when you build in a competitive market, how do you stand out from the crowd?
Through pricing and positioning.
Pricing and Positioning
When Ali, first launched it, Instatus was called “Sup” and had friendly and cool vibes. It was aimed at other early startups. But it didn’t get traction. Ali discovered that early stage startups didn’t really face the problem he was trying to solve for them.
He didn’t get many customers, and the few he got also churned away.
That’s when Ali decided to pivot to larger companies.
That meant raising prices, a new space themed brand, and a new name - Instatus.
But even after raising prices, Instatus is able to make a no-brainer offer to it’s customers - because of a unique flat rate pricing structure.
While the competitors charge based on user accounts and subscriber numbers - Instatus charges 1 single flat fee for your status page.
The pricing page makes the value proposition very clear -
Early customers and growth
Ali got his initial customers after a successful Product Hunt launch. (559 Upvotes and Product of the Day)
After this he tried Google ads. Bidding on competitor brand keywords like Statuspage, Status.io, etc.
This ensured that the traffic he got was high intent and was already aware of the problem and possible solutions.
Gradually Instatus moved away from Goole ads to focus primarily on organic SEO traffic.
This is their SEO growth over the last 2 years -
They have clearly invested a lot in link building as well content creation.
Lessons
Ali’s journey can teach us 2 very important lessons -
- Start before your’re ready. Launch your product, even if it gets 0 users, you’ll learn a lot.
- Invest in content marketing from day 1 - it’s the best long term growth strategy.
Further Reading -
- Instatus is an Open startup, you can check out all it’s numbers on its open page.
- Follow Ali on Twitter, where he builds in public and shares his journey.
Are you building a SaaS?
I wanted to share this powerful resource from my friend Alex Estner.
He's a SaaS GTM expert, and he's put together 90+ proven, actionable growth strategies for SaaS.
Worth checking out -
Let me know what you think.
From the vault -
3 random post from the Superframeworks archives -
🔗 Super Links
Useful links you don't want to miss -
- How Feedboard got 500 users for free - Indie Hackers on X
- My top 17 blog title templates - Jake Ward
- My simplified marketing strategy in 1 image - Olly Meakings
🤗 How can I help?
Whenever you’re ready, here’s how I can help you -
- Join the tiny community of for yoru big dreams -
- Feedback sessions/Demo Days to get personalized feedback 📝
- Co-working sessions and a peer accountability group with weekly checkins 💪
- Courses, Tutorials, Workshops on topics like SEO, Copywriting, Landing Pages, and more so that you keep growing 🚀
- And lots more!
- We support, inform, educate and inspire each other every day. We are a tight knit group of indie hackers and solopreneurs working on our projects. We would love to have you. Entrepreneurship is hard, don’t do it alone. Come join us!
Thanks,
Ayush 🙏
