Co-Founding A Bootstrap Startup
From 2011 to 2015, Kevin Griffin and I ran a startup for automated monitoring of Windows Servers. It was so much fun and so much work, but we shut it down in early 2015 due to a lack of traction with our paid offering.
I don't regret a minute of it.
We designed it to start out with defaults that didn't need tweaking for the majority of business servers (cloud and on-prem) and the ideal customer was a small business that wanted to track their server health but didn't have a full-time server admin to implement a costly and complex traditional monitoring solution. It was the easy button for server monitoring with built-in SMS alerts, but we sucked at finding out audience.
I've lost count of how many awesome people I met (and are still friends with) because of that experience.
Since the service isn't around anymore, I thought I'd list some potential replacement services that would be good in small business with only a few servers:
- newrelic.com - I think it's free for just basic server monitoring, gets pricey to monitor specific apps.
- serverdensity.com - $10 per server/mo
- lots of others...
Curious what we've been doing since then?
- Kevin co-created an awesome non-profit developer conference Revolution Conf on the water in Virginia Beach.
- I co-created a Code for America Brigade in Norfolk/Virginia Beach to help local governments adopt the modern open-source web and open their data to citizens.
- Kevin started his own software consulting company as well as a development training business called Swift Kick.
- I Shifted my focus from general sysadmin to DevOps-focused consulting, especially around Docker containers.
- Kevin started a money-saving podcast with Sean Merron called 2 Frugal Dudes.
- I started a Docker monthly Meetup and was nominated a Docker Captain.
Basically we just love helping others.
Reach out on Twitter and say hi!