Freek Van der Herten
Partner & developer at Spatie
@freekmurze
Blogging at https://murze.be
Side project: https://ohdear.app
About me
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About this talk
This is not a sales talk
Product demo
Why & how
Code dive
Q&A
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Oh Dear!
Website monitoring SaaS
https://ohdear.app
Checks uptime, SSL certificates, mixed content, broken links
Heavily customized Laravel Spark application
Sideproject by Mattias Geniar and me
What?
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Oh Dear!
What?
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Oh Dear!
Launched February 2018
More than 80 million checks performed
± 200 paying customers
± 1 500 EUR monthly revenue
What?
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Product demo
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Why and how
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Oh Dear!
Other tools either:
• do too much
• confusing
• ugly
• expensive
Why?
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Oh Dear!
Oh Dear! aims to be
• beautiful, easy to use
• no feature bloat
• built with companies like Spatie in mind
• easy price structure
Pro-tip: build something for yourself
Why?
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Oh Dear!
Competitors
There are a lot of competitors out there
Doesn't really matter
Finding your audience
Pro-tip: focus on what your audience finds important
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Already had a lot of things in the open source space
First meetings in August of 2017
Started building September 2017
Pro-tip: start a mailing list
Process
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First working version late November 2017
Tested with sites belonging to Spatie & Nucleus customers
Invited some close friends
Launched in beta February 2018
About 10% - 15% conversion from our mailing list
Pro-tip: don't be afraid to launch
Launch
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Oh Dear!
Dividing the workload
Mattias: SSL knowledge + customer support
Freek: coding
Laravel Spark took care of the boring stuff
Design: outsourced to Spatie
Pro-tip: team up with someone
Process
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Mailing list
Discount codes
Code snippets on Twitter
Doing talks
Pro-tip: provide value in your marketing
Marketing
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Marketing
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Marketing
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Oh Dear!
Main web server at Nucleus
Uptime sattelites: DO and Vultr servers
Sentry
Gmail
GitLab
Pro-tip: use services you know and love
Services used