Statusdroid: AI-powered website monitoring solution. Make sure your website is ok.
Someone’s success is interesting at least for exploring how not making the same mistakes or to find useful business tips in good time. There is why New Line Technologies interviews startups paying special attention to how they were launching and growing. Technically most complex European startups are in our field of vision. Here you can find all of our interviews with startups. And today let us introduce you Lucas Pour who is Founder & CEO of startup Statusdroid based in Prague.
What is Statusdroid?
Statusdroid is building a responsive website monitoring tool for marketing agencies, eCommerce sites and for website owners. Our tool controls your website, can manage your PPC ads and lets you configure automatic social media notifications.
When and how did you get the idea to create such a project?
In my 10+ years of experience in IT management, I have realized that people are not fully aware of problems that unsecured website might bring. After a short research, I have found out that there are not many monitoring tools that would have easy set-up and simple interface but did all necessary checks to compete with complex tools. That was the beginning of Statusdroid.
Do you have any worthy competitors, and how do you deal with them?
We do have a few, pingdom.com, updown.io or uptrends.com. We are building simple version that needs only a few of your steps to set up, explain everything we do and why we do it so everyone can understand it. All together we are simple & effective monitoring solution.
What are your competitive advantages? What helps you to maintain a strong position in the market?
We have added a new feature that no other provider has, monitoring and management of PPC ads and automatic social media posts. This means, when we find a problem with your website, we pause your ads and notify your customers. This way you save money, protect your reputation and your users know that the problem is being addressed. As soon as the problem is fixed, we resume your ads and again notify your users.
Are there any weaknesses in your product in your opinion? If yes, what kind?
Our online presence is not as strong as it could be, therefore our user base is not as big as we would like. However, we see this as a challenge with room for improvements.
Is this the first your startup or did you have other ones previously? What are these projects and on what stages they are?
I have been running a successful IT company – lukapo.cz for past 6 years and then 1 year and a half ago we have started creating Statusdroid.
Look at how another European startup has used its founder’s knowledge about Artificial Intelligence to create an AI-based security system. Was it successful? Let’s check.
If you do not mind my asking, what was the investment amount for project creation and initial promotion? Was it an investor’s money or your personal savings? If it was an investor’s help, could you tell us how you found him?
Initial amount invested was approximately $80.000 from personal savings. We have no investor so far.
What experts were indispensable at the stage of creating and launching a project?
We worked closely with experienced python developers and server management technicians. We also had mentoring from marketing guys and growth hacking guru.
Who are your customers? What kind of requests do they make?
Our customers are professionals, e-commerce sites, marketing agencies and everyday users that want their websites to be as secure as possible.
What were the challenges during the launch and how did you cope with them?
We had to overcome several technical issues but overall the lunch was not as tragic as we thought it would be.
What are the most effective approaches for your product promotion?
We would like to raise awareness about problems that unsecured websites can bring, using social media engagement and teaching people how to secure their website.
What startups do you have a partnership with and how does this help you promote your project?
We have no partnership yet but we are working on integrating our app with several agencies.
How to start promoting a young technology project in your opinion?
Firstly, you must find a problem that you want to solve. Then you have to explain the issue and the process you want to use to solve the issue with your project. This way you can make technology accessible to more people by using product you have built.
What of your knowledge and skills were useful while launching the project?
By combining marketing strategies with great pieces of advice I have received and my technical knowledge we were able to launch our project quite smoothly.
Would you recommend to startuppers to subscribe for the pages of any Internet communities able to provide them with some helpful information? Which ones?
Social media is great source of information. Marketing groups might be the best to start with.
If there were no Statusdroid, what another project would you develop?
I don’t know, to be honest, we are fully concentrated to make Statusdroid great!
How do you see further development of your project?
So far we are creating a strategy for increasing our user base. This goes hand in hand with scaling our application to accommodate more users and improving the overall user experience.
What is the most valuable business advice you’ve ever received?
Only paying customers will tell what the truth about what they really need and what they want to pay for.