[skym]

I hope this doesn't come across as critical; this is a terrible question. The thing that makes 'boring business' an opportunity is that the tech is irrelevant. How did you identify the market? What are your demographics? What unique problem are you solving? How did you identify an unserved customer segment? These are the questions that should be on the forefront of your mind. Boring businesses are rarely if ever engineering challenges. They are people challenges. Once you identify that the tech stack becomes a commodity. I know because I made this mistake numerous times in my early career as a software entrepreneur.

[rozenmd]

100% - I could've built this in PHP if I knew it

[em-bee]

how did you come up with this idea, given that alternatives already exist?

[Jemaclus]

Alternatives exist for everything. The goal isn't to come up with a totally unique idea, but rather to find a market that is sufficiently competitive in which you can carve out a tiny slice. For something like an uptime monitor, you aren't going to make millions of dollars per year, but you could easily carve out a 500/mo income for practically no effort. With a little more effort and advertising, you might even be able to make it your full time job.

[em-bee]

you think so? given that there are several free options. what kind of features are people willing to pay for?

[Jemaclus]

You'd be surprised! One thing to consider is that _people_ want free stuff, but _businesses_ get to write off a lot of expenses, meaning that for most businesses, $100/mo is nothing at all and any random employee could probably set it up without going through a whole bunch of financial stuff. Find 10 small companies that need to ensure their website is up, charge em $99/mo, and now you're making $1000/mo.

Could they use a free one? Sure. But most companies won't think twice about paying $100/mo for something. And you don't need _every_ company to pay you $100/mo, just 10, 15, 20 of them. And there are hundreds of thousands of companies out there.

The other thing is that there aren't a ton of uptime monitors out there because they don't make money; quite the opposite, there are a ton of uptime monitors out there because they create value and people are willing to pay for it!

To put it a slightly different way, there's a reason there are a million pizza restaurants and burger joints. It's not a zero-sum game! If there are five pizza restaurants, then there's likely room in the market for a sixth. Similarly, if there are 99 uptime monitor companies, there's room for a 100th!

If you find an area where there are _no_ competitors, that should actually be a red flag: why aren't there any? what's wrong with the business? is it because you're a genius and thought of something nobody else has thought of (let's face it, you may be a genius, but this is very unlikely), or is it because there isn't any money to be made (ding ding, we have a winner)?

Honestly, the best way to think of business ideas is to look at businesses that you already like, then just do what they do. Yeah, you're competing against an established player, but markets are rarely 100% dominated by your competitor. There's almost always room to squeeze out a lifestyle business. Plus, they've already done the R&D and validated the market! Win/win, honestly.

[em-bee]

i agree with your points, especially the red flag. that's pretty clear. and the reason why so many offers exist also makes a lot of sense.

i am not sure about the pizza comparison because that's a question of capacity and location too. in any given location there is only a few and maybe there is room for a sixth but not for many more.

for a monitoring service the question is: what drives the diversity instead of everyone using the same one service?

why would i trust a new service instead of one others have recommended?

like email: there are thousands of email providers, but only a handful huge ones like gmail. is that different, or is it the same with monitoring services?

i guess my question is: how would i break into the market and find my first customers?

[rozenmd]

I had a specific need for my own clients that other tools didn't fix in the right way.

[em-bee]

that's a good starting point. the best starting point i think, actually.

how did you grow your users/customers?

[rozenmd]

tons of stuff actually: https://onlineornot.com/how-to-get-your-first-ten-customers

[em-bee]

that's a very nice writeup, thank you.

for one it shows that you did have a differentiating value proposition, and also it doesn't look like the low effort project that others suggest would be possible.

can you share some milestones? how long did it take to get to 100$ 1k$ 2k$ monthly revenue?