Nimble Industries
As of this writing, StatusGator is generating $5,073.45 in monthly recurring revenue. I launched StatusGator almost 6 years ago and it seems simultaneously amazing to have achieved this number but also daunting that it has taken so long. When Andy joined up with me to help grow StatusGator, revenue was about 1/10th of this number. Clear evidence that two heads are better than one. Sharing the...
We recently chatted with AppSumo about the possibility of offering StatusGator on their platform. AppSumo partners with SaaS tools to offer lifetime deals for a small one-time fee, most of which they keep. So the obvious question is: Is AppSumo worth it for creators? For those that aren’t familiar with AppSumo, the kinds of products offered are usually SaaS tools, typically B2B but not...
I’ve been using Krisp for the last two months to reduce background noise on conference calls and it has drastically improved my work-from-home experience. For the past 10 years or so, I’ve been working remotely full time. Remote work, for me at least, truly is the best way to be productive both personally and professionally. I believe it can work well for vast swaths of the workforce...
One of my consulting clients recently asked me to investigate a bug causing an unhandled exception in their production Rails app. The Bugsnag issue looked like countless others any Rubyist has no doubt reviewed before: undefined method `invitation_accepted_at' for nil:NilClass. This type of error indicates the code was expecting an object to have been returned when it wasn’t. A method was being...
GitHub acquired Dependabot and made it free so we tried it out. The results were better than expected. We have long been advocates for consistent software maintenance. It might seem obvious, but software simply must be maintained and kept up to date with its dependencies or it risks atrophying until it becomes an unmaintainable pile of trash. Dependabot is an excellent tool for preventing...
When reviewing Rails apps, I often find many uses of Time.now and Date.today, each of which comes from Ruby itself. Although these methods seem convenient and accessible, they should be avoided inside of Rails apps, as they aren’t converted to the local time zone set inside Rails. Imagine the following (admittedly naive) method inside an Order model: def shipped? shipping_date < Date...
One of the many benefits of the Heroku platform is its ease of integration into modern Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) workflows. Heroku’s built-in CI makes it incredibly easy to keep all your code running in a single platform, without the need to rely on third party tools and without the need to configure and maintain them separately. It’s also extremely...
StatusGator is built on Ruby on Rails, a popular choice for rapid web application development for more than a decade. One of the many benefits of Rails is its rich ecosystem of open source gems which can provide massive value quickly. We discovered one such gem, Ahoy, on our recent quest to understand how our users find out about StatusGator. StatusGator gets about 3,000 visitors and 20 sign ups...
In custom software, the cycle of write, atrophy, rewrite is all too common. Many product owners too reluctant to embrace maintenance and sustaining engineering. A vicious cycle of expensive rewrites ensues. Businesses feel bruised by developers and experience unhealthy surges in cost and business disruption. Think hard before deciding to throw away what you have in pursuit of the greenfield:...
StatusGator has a few thousand users. Recently I grew curious as to where you all are. Surely it would be interesting to learn a little about where they are from. The results are pretty interesting. I’m pleased to report StatusGator helps users in 85 different countries! The top ten are: USA – 1,061 UK – 207 Canada – 115 India – 72 Australia – 70 Germany...
Nimble Industries