How would you notify your users if your product is down?
👋 Hey folks! I'm conducting a little bit of research for a small side project that I'd like to start. I consider myself a Maker (have launched several products previously) but am employed by a Cyber Security company, and manage Incident Communication Tools (Statuspage, PagerDuty & Slack) for 11,000 employees and 100,000+ customers.
I think Statuspage, Status.io, PagerDuty etc. have all nailed the communication tools. But not for small startups or Makers, like you, who run side projects. So, I'm looking to build Tiny Status, a lightweight widget & communication tool to notify your users.
My question is … how would/do you notify users if your product is down or experiencing issues? How would you get notified? What would help defer users from "X is broken!", "When will Y be back?" and enable you to focus on fixing/restoring?
I think most makers just use Twitter to inform downtime - e.g. tweeting "pushing a new change" or "everything broke".
Since they're mostly engaged with their audience there, it makes sense for it to be the main communication channel for incidents
I agree with Sergio above, I think tweeting is the current way to go for small indies.
If I had a product-specific twitter page, I'd probably would use a pinned-tweet which would include a link to a "status page", detailing what parts of my product are / aren't working.
As for directly reaching out to users, email might be the best. If the users are already on your newsletter, and your expected downtime is more than a few hours, than sending out a quick email blast letting users know what's going on seems pretty fair.
Main point: Don't always assume your users care about your downtime, don't bother them! lol :-P
+1! Unless you're running a huge mission-critical service, most users don't really mind a few minutes of downtime - don't bother them with it.
I work on Downtime Monkey and my overall impression is that the indie makers and small businesses that use it want to catch downtime and fix it before their users find out. Informing users would not be top if their list unless it's a major incident in which case I agree that Twitter is the most popular - in that case a personal Tweet is usually better than automated with something as sensitive as a major downtime.
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