Episode 798 | Lessons From 10 Years of SaaS Growth Without a Hockey Stick

Rob Walling:
If your goal was to listen to an episode of Startups For the Rest Of Us, you’re in the right place. I’m your host, Rob Walling, and in this episode I talk with Colin Bartlett about his long journey. It’s actually just over 10 years building, growing, and scaling status skater from just an idea back in 2014 to seven figures of a RR. Today, you’ll hear some really interesting learnings that Colin and his co-founder have taken away over the years, and we cover some of those during the episode. And then a nice recap at the end of just some things he learned and would recommend other founders do as well. Before we get into that conversation, TinySeed Fund one has now returned more than 100% of our invested capital, including all fees to our limited partners, and we’re not stopping there. We’ve raised most of fund three, but there’s still a bit of room for investors who are interested in backing ambitious B2B SaaS founders, much like Status Skater, who you’ll hear from in this episode. 

If you’d like to diversify your portfolio out of public markets and index across dozens, if not more than a hundred early stage B2B SaaS companies, reach out to my partner Einar Vollset at EIAR TinySeed dot com to check out our thesis and learn more about our results to date, head to TinySeed dot com slash invest, and if you’ll be at MicroConf, you’re up next week, you can chat with him there. In addition, I wanted to remind you that MicroConf Mastermind matching applications are open. I’ve talked a lot on this podcast about how important masterminds have been to my entrepreneurial success, but finding the right founders to join up with can be really hard. So over the past several years, my team has successfully hand matched over a thousand founders into mastermind groups by looking at their revenue team size, strengths, goals, and a few other data points to make sure your peer group is the right fit. And once you’re matched, you’ll have access to our mentorship series, an eight week program where you can connect with some great minds in sales, biz dev marketing and more. If you’re looking for accountability, honest feedback about your business and the opportunity to make new friends that care about your business, you should apply at MicroConf dot com slash masterminds. Applications are only open until September 24th, so make sure you sign up before then. That’s MicroConf dot com slash masterminds. And with that, let’s dive into my conversation with Colin. 

Colin Bartlett, welcome to Startups For the Rest Of Us.  

Colin Bartlett:
Thanks for having me.  

Rob Walling:
Do I recall correctly that you’ve been a longtime listener of the show?  

Colin Bartlett:
Yes, I have been at least five, six years, seven years maybe. Yeah, for sure.  

Rob Walling:
Very nice. Well, it’s good to finally have you on here as a guest. You’re building status skater with your co-founder, Andy status skater.com. H one is early outage alerts for every app you rely on. You have hundreds of integration slash status pages and you get early alerts. Someone listening to this might be thinking, what is it? How do you get early alerts?  

Colin Bartlett:
Good question. Well, we basically detect when there are outages with providers because people come to our site and look for the status of a service. So hundreds or thousands of people might come to our site. Yesterday, there was a big Google meet outage, had a huge influx of traffic, people searching for the status of Google Meet. Just the fact that they come to our site looking for that is an indicator to us, but also they report outages to us. They tell us about those, and so we essentially say, okay, something’s going on with Google Meet because there’s all of these people looking for the status of Google Meet.  

Rob Walling:
Got it. So Google Meet is when Microsoft Teams Google Chat, discord, slack, WebEx,  

Colin Bartlett:
6,000 services. Yeah.  

Rob Walling:
You have 6,000 services. And so you have this interesting advantage. Let’s say I were to try to build a competitor to you today. You must have a huge SEO Google footprint to be able to  

Colin Bartlett:
Yes, there’s a lot of programmatic SEO. Exactly. Yeah.  

Rob Walling:
Okay, got it.  

Colin Bartlett:
We also pull in their official outages as well. We can tell, okay, there’s nothing on their official status page yet, but something’s going on because all these people are interested in the status of that service. And that was the actual original idea behind Status Gator. The status aggregator was that it was collecting this official status. And so for that, we have over 350 different connectors or checkers we call them, where we pull in this official status data as well.  

Rob Walling:
Got it. And that’s where it started. And then today you’ve added in all, I mean, would you call, I’d call it crowdsourced data in a way?  

Colin Bartlett:
Yeah, exactly what we say crowdsourced. Yeah. So we say you’ll get both official outage alerts and crowdsource, we call them early warning signals. So these are often before the providers acknowledge ’em. And some providers don’t have status pages at all, and we still list them on our platform, and people still report outages about them. Yeah,  

Rob Walling:
Yeah. And so folks actually should follow you on LinkedIn, your Colin Bartlett, and I don’t know, it seems once or twice a week I see a post come up from you that basically says, Google whatever has been out or is down. And we knew it 30 minutes before they announced it. That’s crazy.  

Colin Bartlett:
Yeah, that’s been a game changer for us in terms of marketing or selling our products. It’s really turned it from a vitamin into a painkiller, as they say. Knowing that a service is down is useful, but knowing before anyone else is much more useful. Is it me or is it everyone? That sort of thing.  

Rob Walling:
That’s cool. And give us an idea where the company stands today, maybe in terms of revenue and team size.  

Colin Bartlett:
Sure. Yeah. We’re low seven figures a RR, and we have six full-time employees, including myself and my business partner.  

Rob Walling:
Very nice. And we exchanged notes and kind of a timeline before this interview. And one note, I’ll probably read a few quotes. You had some really, really choice quotes in there, but one of the first things you said is the story of status skater is just one of perseverance more than anything else, because 11 years ago, summer of 2014, you had this idea while you were a contract software engineer. You want to tell folks about the initial spark of that idea and then maybe what it looked like because you launched it, I guess you launched it in March of 2015, so it took you about nine months-ish to build it and get it live. Talk us through that. Early days.  

Colin Bartlett:
I think I did the first commit in December of 2014. That’s when I call it originally born. And our first paying customer was spring of 2015. But this idea was something that I had when I was consulting, I’m a contractor as a software development contractor, and one of my clients had basically assigned me a ticket to say, figure out why this isn’t working on the site. And I spent a whole day build them, whatever, a thousand dollars. Turns out it wasn’t anything with the software at all. It was a Facebook API issue, and not even a serious one, but sort of like an intermittent issue they were having. And it was on the Facebook status page, but I didn’t even know that status page existed. I didn’t think the check there. I just thought, shouldn’t there be some place that I can aggregate all these different APIs because this product connected to a lot of different APIs. Just see the status of this in one place. There are official incidents and outages, and that’s how it was born. I just built it for myself. I really wanted it.  

Rob Walling:
So you didn’t do any validation. Who does the market want this? Is there SEO traffic? Is there any of that? Did you have conversations before you built it or did you sit down and start coding?  

Colin Bartlett:
Absolutely. I mean, I basically built the first version just as a little script on my computer first, and I used it myself and then started talking to all my developer friends. I mean, the original idea was this, it was a developer tool. I was telling this to developers, kind of a mistake in retrospect, but the idea was I was talking to developers and asking, would you use this? Would this be useful to you? And I got a lot of good feedback. I was like, wow, yeah, this would be awesome. Especially now we’ve got a lot of cloud services, everything’s moving to the cloud. How can we get all this on one screen?  

Rob Walling:
And you just said something in passing that I want to dig into, which is I was talking to a lot of developers in retrospect that turned out to be a mistake. What was the mistake there?  

Colin Bartlett:
Well, mistake is developers don’t have money to buy products at a company. I mean, maybe some do, but at an enterprise, it’s not the developer that makes a purchasing decision. That’s not to say there aren’t tons of products that go from the bottom up and get sold into organizations through developers, but in retrospect, that’s not really who’s benefiting most from our product. And the product’s evolved quite a lot, which I’m sure we’ll get into, but it is more of an executive level product or a manager level product. And so it’s not so much developers that are going out there looking for this as it is the people who have the checkbook.  

Rob Walling:
So these days, who would you say your ICP is that actually maybe makes the purchase or finds you or is it a mix?  

Colin Bartlett:
It’s a good question because the product has evolved. It’s been around for 11 years, and we don’t kick people off the platform. So there is a lot of different people using it for a lot of different use cases. Even some really strange ones like competitive intelligence, like looking at when their competitors go down or sales sending email outreach when competitors go down. Right?  

Rob Walling:
Oh my gosh. Wow.  

Colin Bartlett:
But the primary one I would say is IT directors, IT managers, somebody who is trying to primarily reduce support tickets across the organization. So when Google Meet goes down, if you are a large enterprise, you are getting a lot of tickets to your help desk saying, I can’t get into Google Meet. Can someone come fix my computer? Well, not only is it not your computer, there’s nothing you can do about it. So you don’t want 500 tickets about Google Meet. What you want to do is show everyone before they submit a ticket that there is an outage with this service. And that is, I would say, the strongest fit use case for Status Gator. You get one page, you can share it out with your entire team, your entire company, sometimes thousands of employees, and they can see what’s going on with all of these services before they submit a ticket. That I would say is our ICP that we focus on now, but there are still smaller startups and DevOps teams and people who are using it for all kinds of other things as well.  

Rob Walling:
And it’s so interesting. So I talk on the show about horizontal SaaS and vertical SaaS, right? Verticals focuses on an industry, and then I coined this term orthogonal, I think it was last year, about it’s horizontal that can be used by any industry, and that’s your tool, but it goes after a specific title or role in a company. And that’s what you’re saying is it’s like the head of IT or the it, I suppose it could be a VP of engineering or something at a SaaS company, right?  

Colin Bartlett:
Yeah. Sometimes is that role. And I think the thing that we’ve found that has the most commonality among the verticals that we do well in is that they have a high number of, perhaps unsophisticated is a diplomatic way to say it, users. So education is a big market for us. Not so much terms in revenue, but in terms of customer count, things like financial services and legal services, they often tend to have rooms and rooms and rooms full of employees who might not be the most sophisticated people compared to developers who in meets down, they know meets down, they know it’s their problem. And so when you have these industries or these verticals with a lot of people to support, that’s where static GA can be super helpful, especially with the early outage alerts when you get that indicator right away that something’s going on. Yeah.  

Rob Walling:
Got it. So it is ideal for less, you said less sophisticated, but I think you mean less technical.  

Colin Bartlett:
Yeah, basically.  

Rob Walling:
Technically sophisticated, right,  

Colin Bartlett:
Exactly. Yeah.  

Rob Walling:
Alright. And I do want to talk about the evolution of the product the same, but it’s different is how it feels. It’s evolved over the 11 years, and I want to get into that here or a little bit later. But for now, I want to ask you about the early days and how you were not a believer in SEO that you actually thought SEO was a scam. And this is a common sentiment, especially among developers. Now, you and your co-founder are both developers, is that right?  

Colin Bartlett:
Yeah. Yep.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah. And so you have two developer, and you’re back here in 2015, and you have this, well, your co-founder. When did Andy join? Actually, he came in and 2018. 2018, yeah. So at this point, it’s just you’re a dev, you launched this side project in essence, right? It’s not full-time income and you’re trying to get it in front of people. You don’t believe in SEO, but you changed your mind. What happened there?  

Colin Bartlett:
Yeah, I would say the very first early users came from guest blog posts that I did. I did some posts on some other sites, and that maybe is a form of SEO, but I wasn’t really involved in any of that. I just knew that I was getting traffic from these posts, and that was very helpful to gain early traction and get conversations going. And then, I don’t even know where the idea came from, but I decided to publish a page on the site for each service that I was monitoring, which was like 50 pages at the time. And I had them all listed on the homepage, Google Meetup, GitHub down, whatever. And when you click through that page, it would say GitHub up. And over time, this evolved into a very useful page with tons of metrics and information and outage history and all this stuff. But it just occurred to me to put that on the site to make it more full fledged for people who hadn’t sign in so they could maybe see what was on the site. And then I started getting traffic to those pages, people searching for things like, is GitHub down? Is Microsoft Teams up? This kind of stuff. And that turned into basically our number one acquisition channel. I would say 90% of our growth comes from people searching for services online.  

Rob Walling:
So you stumbled into it a little bit by accident, but I, I’m guessing you heard about programmatic SEO from, I dunno, a podcast or Patrick of McKenzie.  

Colin Bartlett:
I don’t know if I ever heard that term. I just sort of felt like, well, this is actually working. Maybe if I created a second page for each one targeting different keywords. And at the time it just felt like a cat and mouse game that was never ending. You choose something that helps and then Google changes the algorithm. And to some extent it is. But if you do those things, you can see incredible results. And that’s the thing we found.  

Rob Walling:
And so SEO sounds like it’s been your main channel for these years, and that was 2015 when you did the landing pages. You have a few years, 2016 to 18 labeled as your stagnant side project era. And what was that? Is it just what it sounded like? You just kind of were like, eh, there’s this thing I’m going to let it grow on its own. Didn’t focus much time or energy on it  

Colin Bartlett:
Basically. Yes. I launched it with payment right away, payment processing right away. I did not want to have another non monetized side project. I’d done 10 or 20 of those, and I got people very quickly enough to cover the Heroku bill. So it was profitable, so to speak, not by my time, of course, but it was profitable and I used it and loved it. So I wanted to keep it going. And I was contracting and consulting and I ended up taking a full-time job from one of my customers. And I dunno, that just monopolized my time basically. And it just wasn’t, wasn’t something I focused on. It was something that I put time into at least every week for sure, responding to customers, fixing bugs, adding services. But it wasn’t something that I focused on and I wasn’t really sure what the potential was still at that point. It definitely just felt like something that was useful to me, useful to others. Who knows where this will go? Let’s keep it alive.  

Rob Walling:
And so what changed for you then? Because in May of 2018, you joined forces with Andy, and as you put it, you built a new company that builds multiple products. You wanted to have a lot of different SaaS products. So what changed for you to suddenly be like, oh, I want to invest in this path?  

Colin Bartlett:
Well, that gig that I had full-time gig kind of went away. Andy was also working with me there. We were both sort of contracting. Again, here it is opportunity to maybe have more time to put into this thing. And I’ve known Andy for 20, 30 years, maybe we’ve had other businesses together too, and it just thought there’s something here, but I don’t know if this is the product that is going to make it happen. There’s a lot of ideas that we have. We’ve always been idea people and had lots of things we wanted to build, and we thought like, let’s work on some of those ideas. Let’s see if we can apply what we learned on Status Gator to some other projects, and let’s see if we can grow a company that grows products.  

Rob Walling:
How do you feel about multi-product approaches now that you’ve done it? It doesn’t sound like it worked out so well for you.  

Colin Bartlett:
Yeah, didn’t a big distraction, honestly. I mean, certainly in the early days when none of them really had any traction, maybe it’s fine. But once Status Gator started gaining some traction, so around 2020, I would say, honestly, during the pandemic is when things kind of clicked for us. Everything was going remote. A lot of people were dependent on cloud services more than ever before. There was definitely more interest in this stuff. There was starting to actually be a market for the product that’s already been around five years. And I think the other ones were either had no revenue or very little revenue, and we just thought, what are we doing? Let’s just focus on this one thing. We didn’t shut anything down. We kept all those alive for a long time, but we just focused on the one that was actually making money. We’re like, we got to stop this multi-product stuff. We’ve got the focus on the thing that’s actually working because it is working.  

Rob Walling:
No, that makes a lot of sense. That’s the entire thesis of TinySeed, of course, is to get people to focus. And we don’t allow folks in who are going to bring in multiple products unless the products are an ecosystem, right? Or highly related to each other, but just scattered kind of the indie hacker collection of ideas. It just doesn’t do it. So then by early 2019, you and Andy are still, you’re kind of doing freelance consulting contracting work during the day, and you have this Nimble Industries, I believe is what the company is called. So by January you’re doing 1100 MRR collective across everything. By January, 2020, you doubled that to 2200 MRR. And then you did something that almost no one ever pulls off, which is you brought in a marketing growth consultant and they actually delivered. This is the key, the first part, developers do over and over and over and over, and I say, I don’t know, maybe 49 out of 50 times, it just doesn’t work. They’re not very good. Zero to one marketing is also really hard, and it often takes founder activation energy. And there’s been a couple, like Derek Rimer brought in, Corey Haynes to help him with early Savvy House stuff,  

Colin Bartlett:
Legendary.  

Rob Walling:
And there are some marketers out there that do it, but your marketing growth consultant sounds like he was instrumental in kick-starting your growth. Yeah. Talk us through  

Colin Bartlett:
That. Absolutely. And I probably left off the part where we did hire someone else who was a dud and delivered nothing basically, which is the norm, but that was short-lived. Yep. We came to Max because now we’re a EO believers, and we started looking more at like, well, okay, this traffic that’s coming to us is great, but they’re not really our ideal profile. They’re people who are searching is Google Meet Down? They’re not people searching for, how do I monitor Google Meet? And so we started to think about content marketing and writing blog posts and doing this content stuff to actually target our ICP. And so we posted on one of those freelance websites, say, can you write some articles for us? And this guy, max replied and said, I can, but that’s not the article you should be writing. You should be doing this stuff instead. 

Here’s a whole bunch of suggestions. I wrote this deck for you. Do you have time to go over it? Which is a great lead gen idea for him. And it was mind blowing to us that he had so much knowledge as to like, oh, don’t do what you want me to do. I’ll do something else instead. Yeah, and we’re still working with Max to this day. The role has evolved over time, and he technically is separate. He has an agency and he has other customers, but he’s been really instrumental in just helping us with experiments and trying things out and seeing what works and the whole SEO and especially the technical side of SEO is really his expertise.  

Rob Walling:
Very nice. And you found one of the good ones. It sounds like not that the other folks aren’t good, but it is very hard to bring in someone to do founder, it sounds like. Who’s doing founder level zero to one marketing, and that’s pretty exceptional. You’ve probably heard that chat. GPT can do all of your marketing, but that’s bullshit. Unless your strategy is blindly following tired, recycled, outdated strategies. If you care about systematically creating a marketing engine that converts, not just throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks you need real humans who actually understand positioning, persuasion and modern customer acquisition playbooks. That’s conversion factory. They’re a SaaS marketing and design agency that have worked with over 50 startups, including several TinySeed companies. Book a call@conversionfactory.co and mention this podcast for a thousand dollars off your first month. And if you’re at MicroComp, you’re up next week, make sure to connect with Cory Haynes in the hallway track. 

So as we bounce through into 2021, January, 2021, you’re at seven K of MRR, and then by fall of 22, you’re at 25 KMRR, and you applied to TinySeed and you got in to TinySeed. The reason we’re telling this story in this way is that it started, this is eight years after you started it, or I guess 2015. So it’s like seven years after launch. You’re finally at 25 KMRR. Some of these things can take a while, especially if you’re not focused on them not putting the, it’s often a lot of iteration and thinking and time. It doesn’t just magically happen on its own. If it had magically happened on its own, it would’ve happened in 20 16, 17, 18, 19 when you mothballed it. And this is something I really want listeners to take home. I harp on this all the time on this podcast, throwing a bunch of ideas at the wall and seeing what grows on its own. It’s not a good approach. You would not be where you are with a seven figure, mostly bootstrap SaaS company if you hadn’t at some point decided we’re going to focus on this.  

Colin Bartlett:
And I think TinySeed was a big driver of that as well, because I would say even going into that, I would not say we were focused entirely on status Gator. First of all, we saw jobs. I mean, 25 KMRR sounds like a lot, but with two founders and families to support, it doesn’t go all the way. So we still had jobs or consulting and we never wanted to take money, never the VC treadmill never interested us at all of us have worked at startups, and it’s just very dreadful idea to me honestly. But we have long time listeners, first time caller, but we just loved the idea of TinySeed not being a high pressure VC engine. It seemed like something that if we were to ever take money from somebody like diluting money, this would be the one to do. And I saw the call for submissions and we were on our weekly call. Andy and I had been doing weekly calls for a long time, and we said, let’s just apply. Let’s just do it right now. And we just did it. And I dunno, two days later you’re emailing me saying, let’s have an interview. It was blowing my mind.  

Rob Walling:
That’s super cool. That’s the thing I seem to remember. And during the interview you saying, we’re not taking money from you or no one. And that was one of the early moments that I realized that the brand we had built with TinySeed or this podcast or MicroConf for me or whatever you want to say, I was like, oh, that’s a very high compliment. You know what I mean? That you would feel that way of like, oh, TinySeed or nothing. What did you expect? What did you think you would get out of TinySeed? I know you applied on a whim, so I was going to ask you why did you apply? And it was like, because when in doubt, fill it out, right? That’s what Rob says. But going in, what did you think you would get out of it?  

Colin Bartlett:
I would say the number one thing is just validation, honestly, that somebody else outside our ecosystem, as you say, your original investor is your spouse. So our spouses believed in us, but outside that, no one ever said like, oh, we believe after eight years or however long it had been that this can be a big enough thing that I would smack down money on the table for it. And for you to say that was just huge. And I think it changed our minds. Maybe it even changed our spouse’s minds even more to say like, okay, there’s really something here. I will hope to get that out for sure. And got that just by having a conversation with you and getting in. But also the money was huge. I mean, we were generating money and not taking a ton of it out. Of course, we had other gigs, but we certainly weren’t going to hire a bunch of people or even contractors without some idea that we would be able to pay them for a while. And it was very scary to us to actually spend the money in the bank account until yours landed. We were like, okay, now we can do it.  

Rob Walling:
And that’s an interesting part of a lot of TinySeed founder stories is a lot of folks say, I don’t actually need the money. What I want is the guidance, the mentorship, the community. But then they wind up, the money comes in and they’re like, no, this is really nice to have low six figures in my bank account and be able to do it. It’s almost this unexpected boon. What did you wind up spending most of the TinySeed money on?  

Colin Bartlett:
Some growth experiments that were maybe too cost prohibitive to run, but mostly contractors to rebuild our site. So I had designed all the various versions myself, and I’m not a designer. And this time we hired an actual UX designer to think about the product from beginning to end and redesign the whole thing. And then we bought in a bunch of front end and rails, back end people just to rebuild the whole thing, which was massive success. I mean, still one of the greatest engineering achievements of my life to completely redo this site while it was still live, it was a big deal. And the product is way, way better from a UX perspective than it ever was before.  

Rob Walling:
And I know you raised prices in fall of 2023. Was that based on our TinySeed urging raise charge more? It’s kind of our  

Colin Bartlett:
Yeah, definitely. Absolutely. TinySeed provided a lot of validation to things that we already knew we should be doing, and I think that’s what I got most out of the mentor calls and playbook calls, we would hear these things and we would have these conversations say, we should probably be doing X, we should probably be doing Y. But then to have the experts who actually have some skin in the game tell us, you should be doing these things, it was like that’s what we needed. So we had raised prices many, many times on new customers starting at $10 a month in 2015 to now $79 a month is our lowest tier plan, but we had never gone back through it’s, it was very scary to go back through and charge that to existing customers, but that was a game changer. Got rid of a lot of dead weight people that weren’t good fits big time game changer. That’s the only little, not even a hockey stick, but it’s the only bump in the graph if you look there.  

Rob Walling:
And raising prices is scary even to do it for new customers. You don’t want to break your funnel, but to go back and to potentially piss off people who’ve been paying you for years, it’s much more of an emotional ride than I think people realize. You need reassurance from other folks.  

Colin Bartlett:
Yeah, I think the second or third customer, whoever paid me money, canceled during that upgrade and it hurt me. I was like, this guy believed in me at $10 a month for many, many years and now canceled, but all for the better.  

Rob Walling:
And so let’s talk now about, I want to continue with this story and get into 24 and 25 and such, but I want to hear how the product has evolved and how you and Andy made the decision to evolve the product. And I’m phrasing it in this way because everyone says, listen to your customers, talk to your customers. The problem is your customers give you, if you get a hundred data points, it’s a big cloud. And it’s like how do you know what to do and which customers are saying the right thing or it’s like a big mess and you got to compile it, put it into your own founder intuition and basically say, this is the direction we’re headed. Right? And your product has significantly evolved from what it was in 2014. So you want to walk us through that journey a bit?  

Colin Bartlett:
Yeah, I would say it was originally very focused on the notification aspect of it, like getting an alert when a service goes down. And we just started to see that some people turned that off entirely and were just using the, I’ll call it single pane of glass, just that single list of all the services. When something goes wrong, they go there and to check it. So looking at the data and talking to customers and saying, look, I don’t really want a lot of alerts. Some of them are noisy and not helpful. I want to just have a place to go. Then we started hearing people saying, well, I want to actually share this out with my company. I don’t want just a dashboard that’s private to my login. I want a public dashboard. We evolved it into a public dashboard and then no one really knew what a public dashboard was. 

So we started calling it a status page, and then we started seeing that people were really using this as an internal team status page, talking to people. They were saying, I want to have a status page for my company. I want to have a status page for my team. So went in that angle and then we started getting sales objections that were more like, well, this is cool. It’s nice, but it’s not like killer because I still have to wait until they update their status page for it to show on that screen. And for me to wait an hour for Google to acknowledge that, it is just not that helpful. And that’s where we started doubling down on this sort of early outage alerts, early warning signals. And that’s been just game changer. I mean, it has completely changed the marketing. I remember, I’m 90% sure it was on this podcast that I heard someone say, you need to have an opinionated angle to your marketing better to have a strong opinion to your outbound marketing or your advertising. And we didn’t have that. We were very much like, okay, well if they take a long time to update their status page, nothing we can do. But now we can say, listen, status pages lie. Everyone knows they lie. They’re very slow. We have a solution for that. And it much resonates much more with people. That’s where you focus now. Yeah, that’s the H one now,  

Rob Walling:
And that’s the thing is this, I was talking to a founder the other day and they have this great tool, but it is essentially a commodity. I can go to 20 other tools and get basically the same result. And so I’ve said it on this podcast and I said it to them in a coaching call the other day was you have to figure out a differentiator and position yourself as we are the corner of the market that does this, right? And so Drip originally was an ESP, and there’s a bunch of ESPs and we were marketing automation, aren’t there a bunch of ’em? And it was like we were lightweight marketing automation. That doesn’t suck, that implies everyone else sucks. And our positioning was, we are so easy to use, we’re a little less expensive, blah, blah, blah. That’s just one way to position yourself. 

You can also position yourself in a vertical. You could say, and this wouldn’t work for status Gator, it wouldn’t make sense, but you can say, well, we’re a CRM and there’s 20 well fricking 500 other CRMs. We’re going to be the best CRM for realtors or the best CRM for Canadian realtors or something. You just pick that vertical. That’s one way to do it. But there are other ways, right? It’s exactly what you’ve kind of, I’ll say, stumbled into that doesn’t give you as much credit. It’s not like it was pure luck. It was knowing you were smart, you and Andy were smart enough to know that you were getting a little lucky is what it is, right? It’s like there were signals and you’re like, oh, I’m going to try this next thing. I’m going to try this next thing. And it just goes to show the iterative path that it can often take to find that unique angle and to figure out how to position that unique angle and communicate it.  

Colin Bartlett:
Yeah, and I think we’re still evolving to this day mean still even this is only a year old, this feature, and we’ve started this angle of really being opinionated and almost adversarial with the people that we’re monitoring. And I think we need to quite frankly exploit that even more than we are already doing more ads, more videos, just more comparing us to what the alternative is, which is just sitting on your hands and waiting for Google or GitHub to update their status page.  

Rob Walling:
And folks go to your site, they can check out your pricing and you have a free forever plan that’s pretty limited starter. I guess these are annual prices, but it’s like 72 bucks a month for starter, 137 for teams, 2 75 for corporate, and then you have an enterprise plan at 800 and up. And when you joined TinySeed, your pricing was, I’ll say relatively low. It wasn’t catastrophic, but it was not as high as it is now. But in addition to that, I believe you started seeing more enterprise deals come in, or at least mid-level deals, right? 5, 10, 15, KACV 20 k, I don’t know what your biggest deals are now, but how did that come about? Because that’s what this dual funnel is what I’m getting at, right? You kind have a dual funnel, you have a self-serve, you’re free in your $72 a month plan. I don’t think you’re doing a big sales process for those, but then for 10, 20, 30 KA year, I think you’re doing a sales process. So that’s what folks will recognize that as the patented Rob Walling dual funnel. That’s an incredible asset to build that, but it’s really hard and not every business can do it. So how did you get there?  

Colin Bartlett:
Slowly with a lot of iteration, I would say. We do have this dual funnel and we do a lot of sales demos and this funnel up to the enterprise plan for sure. I think what we saw early on was that there were companies with very deep pockets who really valued the service and were sort of blown away with how cheap it was at two or $3,000 a year. The hard part was you can’t just tell people, well, you have more money, please pay us more. You need to find something that they just can’t live without. And that took a lot of iteration on the plans and pricing side. And I think especially after a couple of mentor calls and talking to people who did have sort of experience in this, we did get a set of features that was like, okay, you talk to them and you say, well, that’s all well and good, but in order to get X, Y and Z, you have to go to the enterprise plan. They just say, okay, sure. That’s the one we want. And that has really changed the A CV dramatically. I mean that and also just removing things from lower tier plans for sure and raising prices, but getting that right set of features on the enterprise plan so to speak, has been a game changer for us.  

Rob Walling:
And tell me about the free plan. My typical take is, hey, when you’re first starting out, by default you shouldn’t do a free plan, but free plans can work if you know what you’re doing and you have data and you’re looking at stuff. And so I’m curious from your perspective, if you still have a free plan, I’m assuming it’s working for you.  

Colin Bartlett:
It is working. I would say the biggest reason we keep the free plan is it’s very hard to deliver a aha moment in a 14 day free trial with a service that is dependent on other providers going down. And so people sometimes, if they just want a single pane of glass to see all of this stuff, they love it. They sign up in that 14 day trial, great. But if they’re really more interested in the alerting especially, or getting those alerts early, I can’t guarantee that Google’s going to go down in 14 days during that trial. So we keep it around so that people can monitor a few things and stay on it. And then sometimes six months, a year later they’re like, wow, this is so helpful. I just got an alert before that status page. We need to get everything monitored in here. I pass this up to my boss and he wants to get on the enterprise plan. We just did an enterprise deal with a customer who’s been on the platform on the free plan for three years. To me, it just makes it all worth it.  

Rob Walling:
Yeah, I like that. And similarly, you put in the notes, if we smash cut to 2025, you’re the early warning signal status page. Now you can predict outages. But you said it’s essentially turned us into a two-sided marketplace, which as everyone knows, don’t bootstrap a two-sided marketplace unless you already have one side. That’s what I say. So you did already have one side.  

Colin Bartlett:
We did have one side,  

Rob Walling:
And you were doing hundreds of thousands if not low seven figures in revenue as you decided to make this pivot, but not even a pivot, but just as you adjusted that thing two-sided marketplace is working and is it a headache as well?  

Colin Bartlett:
Yes and yes. I mean, the reality is we basically sell data from visitors to our site to enterprise customers. That’s the two sides of the market. People visit our site report an outage for free. They don’t, doesn’t cost you to report an outage. That’s one side of the marketplace. And the other marketplace is people come to us to buy the service, buy those alerts. So we have to cultivate both of those angles. We have to spend energy on SEO. That has nothing to do with targeting our ICP. It has only to do with ranking for keywords like is GitHub down? And that’s exhausting because it’s hard enough to do one SEO angle, but to do two across 6,000 services is a lot of work. And yeah, it’s annoying. I wish that it didn’t have to be, but unfortunately this has been a game changer for us. So now we now probably put a disproportionate amount of time and energy into that other side of the market, and most of the growth from the other side is just organic and kind of referral and natural.  

Rob Walling:
So you are a begrudging two-sided marketplace operator versus all the people who used to write into this podcast before. I just said flat out, I’m not answering two-sided marketplace questions. Who really want to do it? Yeah, don’t do. It’s the thing unless it makes sense. You guys made that very deliberate decision to do it with all this data. And again, a SIM figure or SaaS, that’s a different position. And I have an idea to connect people who cut hair with their dog, people who own dogs, and such as we wrap up, I loved that I asked you to send over your timeline so that we could tell the story and at the end you just put lessons learned. And I want to walk through those real quickly. The first one you said is talk to as many people as you can about your product idea. Beg for feedback. This is the number one thing I recommend to all early founders. So some type of validation in quotes. It doesn’t have to be this prescriptive, oh, I follow exactly what Rob Walling says in cess Launchpad, right? The steps, or I follow exactly what Eric re said in Lean Startup, but there’s some research, some conversations that should probably be had before you go sit in a basement and code.  

Colin Bartlett:
Yeah, absolutely. I think the most valuable ones were things that we had with real customers or even real prospective customers. Even to this day, we all pitch in on support tickets here and there, and then when I reply to a ticket for sure, I always say, I handled that for you. By the way, house status Gate are working out for you. And you would be shocked at how many people open up them with just that simple question like, oh, it’s great. We love it. Here’s a nice tidbit for your website, a nice little quote. But also, here’s the thing I think could be improved. You get a lot more valuable feedback from interactions like that than you do asking someone in a bar whether you think this is a good idea to build, because they’re going to say yes. It is just way more natural. And so we just literally, at every chance we can in every email, just ask people, literally beg them for their feedback. I would love to hear feedback. It’s really important to me. We’re a small company. Please let me know what you think. And yeah, it’s very hard to filter through all that, but through those things, you get the pieces that are useful.  

Rob Walling:
The second thing you said is charge more in general, which is like, all right, I don’t think we need to belabor that. Third one is we invented a product category. Big mistake. Didn’t really intend to do that. You were just trying to solve a problem you had. Maybe that’s why it’s taken 11 years. Well, I mean I guess there was a kind of the highest mothball, but it has been kind of a wandery implies a negative thing, but it’s taken a lot of trial and error to get there. I think perhaps because you did invent a product category.  

Colin Bartlett:
Yeah, status page aggregator didn’t exist and we made that up. We could say we invented that. The reality is that is our number one keyword now that people search for. We dominate that keyword because we have first mover advantage there. But no one was searching for that in 2015. No one even thought about that. It reminds me a lot of just status pages in general. Atlassian acquired status page IO many years ago, and when status page IO came around, they kind of invented the status page idea, and I think it took a long time before everyone had to have a status page. Now everyone has a status page. Soon everyone will need a status page aggregator as well.  

Rob Walling:
Next one is a multi-product company is a fool’s errand. To some extent we still are, but we are far more focused than ever before because you have,  

Colin Bartlett:
We do have another monitoring tool that we acquired and kind of a plan to merge and never did, but it’s a very, very minor piece of our business.  

Rob Walling:
And we talked about this earlier about multi-product. And lastly, you said being focused on a narrow ICP has huge benefits and I want to call out to listeners. You’re not saying you need to have a narrow focus on a single ICP to succeed, or you must or anything. You’re just saying it has huge benefits and maybe I can just toss it to you of what are some of those benefits that you’ve experienced?  

Colin Bartlett:
Yeah, I think the challenge with us is because the product has evolved so much from just that early alerting tool in the beginning or just alerting tool in general to now single pane of glass status page aggregator, there’s a lot of people with different roles and titles and use cases. The idea for us is that it’s really hard to abandon those people now and just decide on one and remove all the features that those people depend on. It’s really hard to focus at this point because we were evolving for so long, but if I were starting over, I would definitely focus on a single use case. And for us, the primary use case and the best fit is this IT support angle. People seeing the status of all of these services in one place that is our ICP, but it is still spread out among a lot of different roles and titles and it is difficult.  

Rob Walling:
Colin Bartlett, it’s been a pleasure having you on. If folks want to keep up with you, you’re on the LinkedIn and someone can Google Colin Bartlett LinkedIn status skater, you’re the first result, or we’ll link it up in our show notes and if they want to see the best status page aggregator on the internet, status skater.com. Thanks again for joining me, man.  

Colin Bartlett:
Thanks for having me.  

Rob Walling:
Thanks again to Colin for coming on the show. Thanks to you for listening this week and every week. This is Rob Walling signing off from episode 798.