StatusPage.io

When Steve and Scott Klein came up with the idea for a start-up called StatusPage in October of 2012, they knew what they were getting themselves into. The brothers had already developed and sold a music app (SoundAround) to Reverb Nation, and were comfortable navigating the unpredictable waters of the start-up world.

Danny Olinsky came aboard in May to help steer sales, and profits have doubled every month ever since.

“We went from $1,000 to $2,500 to $5,000, to $10,000 a month by the end of August,” Scott Klein says. “I think one of the reasons that we’ve been so successful so far is because as a team we know how to build stuff that people want, and we know how to ask them to pay for it at the right time, and make sure that we follow-up to make sure we’re delivering on that value.”

Three months after their official launch on TechCrunch, things at StatusPage are sailing along smoothly. The Y Combinator-backed company currently has 200 clients, including Citrix, Vimeo, Shopify, Disqus, ShutterStock, Jawbone, and New Relic.

How StatusPage Works

StatusPage helps in two ways: First, it provides a stable back-up plan — a stable back-up page — that companies can use to communicate with customers when their main site is down. Meanwhile, it enables companies to share performance metrics (and enhance transparency) when their site is up.

When a company’s site goes down, its status page springs into action. Pages inform and reassure audiences, and customers can sign up to receive SMS or email notification when the site is back up and running.

Still, it’s the StatusPage dashboard that really sets it apart. The hub helps companies share details of the situation — including API response times, errors, outages, and customized updates — with customers. Meanwhile, it serves as mission control for developers by keeping tabs on which pages are operational, or experiencing degraded performance, a partial outage, or a full-blown major outage.

StatusPage services range from $19-$249 a month, while custom enterprise packages are designed for businesses with more than 2,500 subscribers or advanced design and privacy requirements.

Saving Time and Serious Dev Dollars

It would take a company hundreds of hours to create the kind of contingency plan StatusPage offers out of the box.

“We’re seeing a lot of companies actually throwing away their existing solutions because they got kind of half way through it and they sort of launched it but nobody likes it, it looks like crap, and it doesn’t represent their brand,” Scott Klein says. “They put a lot of time and development into their other web properties, and then their status page looks like the shack in the back yard.”

But there’s more to an effective status page than branding and messaging; it requires a lot of technical sophistication, too.

“It has to handle a lot of traffic on a moment’s notice, and it has to be hosted outside of your main data center, because if your whole data center goes down, it can’t take your status page with it.”

With servers in Oregon and Ireland, StatusPage covers its bases, and ensures pages will be operational if and when disaster strikes.

“We do the work to make sure it’s always up,” Scott Klein says. “If Oregon slides off into the ocean, everyone's page just gracefully fails over to be served out of Ireland.”

Like A Good Neighbor

When Amazon experienced an outage in September, StatusPage came to the rescue — even though many of the affected sites weren’t yet customers.

“People were in a bind, they needed to get something up, and because the product is so easy to get started with, we were able to get a bunch of people onboarded in under 10 minutes,” Scott Klein says. “It’s kind of gratifying to know that, even in the darkest hour that they could have, we can be the backbone they rely on to make sure they deliver on their customer experience.”