Managing Out(r)age
Your app’s servers went down. Your users panic and post everywhere publicly.
Your messenger explodes. Support channel explodes. You might also get attacked in your personal accounts.
Behind the scenes, you are also be panicking in multiple ways.
How to get things back up and running
Finding out the reason
How the increasing public posts will affect the mindset of potential new users
How to explain it now and squelch the outrage
How to explain it all at the end
You grow increasingly stressed as you and your team are trying to focus to find the cause, yet you still have to think of all the other things.
It’s all just a part of your life as a bootstrapped SaaS founder.
People rely on your service and when things don’t work as it always had, many of your users will have a negative outburst.
There’s no app out there with 100% uptime and what’s a 20 minute down time, right? Well, that’s your point of view.
For users, expect them to vent especially if it’s in the middle of the work day.
Don’t take it too personally. It will happen.
Your job is to get things back in order and get them informed that your company is on top of things. Just take the blows and learn from it.
Once you are done getting things back up, be sure to learn from that and build contingencies with your team and craft your explainer to your users.
They will appreciate your honesty and action oriented work. They’ll also realize that the service has been pretty reliable once the dust has settled.
Outages will happen. Just do your best and communicate.
What’s a 0.01% downtime if you encounter this just once in X number of months, right? Well… unless this happens regularly to your SaaS, which means you have a major problem. You better drop everything and solve that ASAP.
Drop me a DM and say Hi. I'll get back to you as soon as I can.