Startups For the Rest of Us Episode 798 | Lessons From 10 Years of SaaS Growth Without a Hockey Stick
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Sep 23, 2025 Colin Bartlett, co-founder of StatusGator, shares his journey from a challenging side project to a thriving seven-figure SaaS business. He discusses the pivotal role of programmatic SEO in acquiring customers and how hiring a growth consultant transformed their content strategy. Colin emphasizes the importance of product evolution and positioning, detailing his shift from basic alerts to comprehensive status pages. He also provides valuable lessons for SaaS founders, including the necessity of talking to customers and focusing on a specific target audience.
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Origin Story: Built For A Real Pain
- Colin built StatusGator after spending a day debugging a client issue that turned out to be a Facebook API outage.
- He created the tool initially for personal use to aggregate service status pages into one place.
Users ≠ Buyers
- Developers liked the product but rarely hold purchasing power in organizations.
- The real buyers were managers and IT directors who reduce support tickets across companies.
Programmatic SEO Became The Engine
- Publishing a page per monitored service unlocked search traffic for queries like "is GitHub down".
- Programmatic SEO became their primary acquisition channel over time.