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8 comments
Root cause analysis is a real differentiator but only if your users have already felt the pain of staring at a vague alert at 2am. The question is whether you're reaching those people. On where to find them: not Reddit. Try posting in Discord servers for specific frameworks (Laravel, Rails, Node communities). Backend devs who care about uptime hang out there and talk shop. Also, open source maintainers on GitHub who run their own infra are a great early segment — they feel every downtime personally. On free vs paid: I'm building a SaaS too and went through this exact question. Free works if it creates a habit that paid unlocks. Your auto incident reports feel like the right paid gate that's the thing a team lead needs to show their manager. The monitoring itself is a personal pain point; the report is an organizational one. One thing I'd add: you're asking if RCA is a differentiator, but from the outside it reads as a feature list. The real question is — what does someone search for the moment before they'd want your product? That search intent is your distribution.
"Root cause analysis" is pretty complex, and DNS + TCP + TLS are just a tiny bits of it (and they are one of the most reliable ones too, as those components are written once and then typically never touched).
When I do root analysis, I look into internal logs, server metrics, recent source code changes, and related systems. I am sure this can be partially automated, but this is a lot of work.
An API monitor that can only tell me "You have elevated first-byte latency and increased 5xx rate" is pretty useless, and I certainly don't think it can offer me any "plain-english suggestion" for this problem. What is it going to tell me, "git gud and fix your servers"?
When I do root analysis, I look into internal logs, server metrics, recent source code changes, and related systems. I am sure this can be partially automated, but this is a lot of work.
An API monitor that can only tell me "You have elevated first-byte latency and increased 5xx rate" is pretty useless, and I certainly don't think it can offer me any "plain-english suggestion" for this problem. What is it going to tell me, "git gud and fix your servers"?
LeoLinden(1)
So with that frame in mind, where do people go to ask questions or vent or get information to solve the kind of problem your product claims to solve? Don't go to those forums to just pitch yourself. First, be helpful. Offer insight and advice, or ask clarifying questions, anything to demonstrate that you are listening and can add value.
Later on, after you've provided some help, you can pitch your product. But the first thing is to be helpful. Offer some kind of wisdom or insight that is currently lacking.
I write about this in my blog post about helping indie developers get their first users: https://www.strategicnerds.com/blog/the-indie-developers-gui...