Imagine a world without downtime alerts - how would you market the first product of its kind?

[Hanuman]

So, let's say there are no website downtime alert services that exist today. And you have just built the first-ever tool that does this.

The service is free and anyone can sign up. And a monetization model has not been figured out yet. So, advertising is out of question.

How would you go about marketing it? Here are some ideas I have. Would love to hear more scalable

1) Approach all 'X Best Tools For Your Business', 'X Best SEO Tools' kind of listicle articles and ask them to add your tool to the list.

2) Write a script to scrape a list of thousands of websites and their owner email addresses. Add them to the list - they will get to know about this service whenever their websites are down.

3) Try some PR - but this may not be scalable

I cannot literally think of anything else. Could you help me with it?

 

[thisishatred]

So to go based on 2.

Aside from simply making them aware of the service, provide a proof of concept; Go about actually tracking their sites and monitoring their uptime via your tool; The losers (the ones experiencing downtime), you reach out to.

"Your site experienced 5 minutes of downtime on XYZ date...etc pitch"

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Similarly, I'd find ways to incorporate your "tool" with hosting companies, agencies etc. that could make use of your API/Plugin.

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To me I'm big on live examples of a tool working as described on the sales page. Something like social enables you to demonstrate the tool working.

"XYZ.com experienced # Minutes of downtime" - Want alerts like these straight to your inbox/text, sign-up today. - via Twitter

Something that I've noticed on sites like: downdetector.com - is they'll have specific status pages for popular services:

https://downdetector.com/status/steam/

To which user-generated data is generated rapidly.

Often in those comments, there will be jokes similar to: "Damn whats good fellas?? finally they opened back up the communication forum for our tuesday evening huddles.... how you'll week so far?"

The above is sort of contingent on those services being down.

Is the above likely to convert a customer? Maybe not.

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I'd go about comparing popular services for say hosting. Uptime is a big sales gimmick as far as "hosting" is concerned.

Setup a hosting package on:
Bluehost
Hostinger
Dreamhost
Hostgator
A2
etc.

You monitor uptime for all these services, display it in a graph/percentage that people like.

I'd go as far as to reach out to the people who do "hosting reviews" and say "Hey, I run uptimewebsite.com, I've been monitoring the uptime for XYZ host for 90 days, here's their stats"

I'd even display my backend to show that I'm not full of shit.

I'd tell them to feel free to use the data and not even mention linking back to me (they will anyway - or even mention your brand); Offer screenshots if need be.

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That's like 5 minutes of thinking

Also written content related to your niche*

https://uptimerobot.com/blog/

Their blog has decent examples of stuff I was also wondering about:

Monitoring ports
HTTP status codes
web hooks for alerts

Anything related to "uptime" that's worthwhile.

There's like dozens of services that experience downtime that don't write about this type of content. You write about it, possibly answer how to resolve it or what it means, and maybe tell the reader how you knew the site/service was down and why (sell them on your service).

*This is an interesting one too:
https://uptimerobot.com/blog/how-to-set-up-back-in-stock-notifications/

I know stuff like GFX cards / Shoes are sort of tangential to "uptime" but their blog post demonstrates application simply beyond monitoring the downtime of a website via a ping command.

*This is an interesting one too:
https://uptimerobot.com/blog/how-to-set-up-back-in-stock-notifications/

I know stuff like GFX cards / Shoes are sort of tangential to "uptime" but their blog post demonstrates application simply beyond monitoring the downtime of a website via a ping command.

Just thought back to when @CCarter was bringing up semiconductors which resulted in a gross shortage of available graphics cards.

Several YouTube channels popped up that live displayed availability of graphics cards.

This isn't nearly as popular as it was:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Giub2JmpXhA

Whenever a new Card drops - which gamers, miners, and more inevitably snag, I'd setup my tool to do something like the above and then drop a link in the description to my tool.

Curious people like me like to know how that data is scraped and/or monitored. Meaning I'd likely click the link.

At the very least you water-mark the video with your brand name and get curious eyes (usually the tech savy folks you want) on your site.