JobPulse
As described:StopNarrowed:NarrowNo as described. Go, small, as backup monitoring and proof for small MSPs.
managed IT providers · ~$89 a month per paying MSP · last reviewed (next review by 29 Dec 2026) · 28 cited sources
Start this week
- Tell me your hours per week available, whether you've worked at or with an MSP, and which backup products you've run yourself.
- List 30 MSP owners or technicians you can reach (LinkedIn, r/msp, local IT groups, past employers), and book 15 calls. Ask each for one week of their backup report emails (redacted) and how they check backups today.
- Set up the concierge kit: one shared inbox with a sub-address per client, a spreadsheet of jobs and statuses, and a monthly report template.
- Collect real report emails from Veeam Backup & Replication, Veeam Agent, Acronis, Synology Hyper Backup, Windows Server Backup and MSP360, and write the success, warning and failure rules for each by hand.
Checkpoints and kill gates
Decide in advance what counts as on track. Missing a checkpoint means changing the buyer or the offer, not adding features.
Day 30
~15 hrs/week
15 MSP calls, 3 paying concierge MSPs
Full-time
20 calls, 6 paying
If you miss it
Switch the buyer once, to IT consultants and in-house IT at 20–200-person firms who manage 5–30 servers. Missing twice means stop.
Day 90
~15 hrs/week
v1 live, 8 paying MSPs, 25 trials
Full-time
v1 live, 15 paying MSPs, 45 trials
If you miss it
Cut to the single most-used thing (usually the daily failed-backup digest plus the client report).
Month 6
~15 hrs/week
$800 MRR, ≥25% trial-to-paid
Full-time
$1.5k MRR, ≥25% trial-to-paid
If you miss it
Pivot A: restore-test and backup evidence for cyber-insurance renewals, sold per client to MSPs. Pivot B: a white-label report add-on sold through one backup vendor's partner program.
Month 12
~15 hrs/week
$2k MRR, ≤3% monthly logo churn, 10+ public reviews
Full-time
$4k MRR, ≤3% churn, 20+ reviews
If you miss it
Stop adding features. Fix parser accuracy, onboarding and churn. A profitable $2–4k tool is a valid outcome.
Month 18
~15 hrs/week
$3.5k MRR
Full-time
$7k MRR
If you miss it
Put everything into the best source of trials. Decide whether to add native PSA and backup-vendor APIs.
Month 24
~15 hrs/week
$5.5k MRR
Full-time
$10k MRR
If you miss it
Above target with churn ≤3%: aim for the $20k rung in year 3. $1k–5k: run it as a profitable tool. Below $1k: stop, or sell the code and customers to an MSP-tool vendor.
Do
1.Sell backup proof to small MSPs, not cron alerts to developers. One job: "show me every client's backups on one screen, tell me the moment one fails or goes quiet, and give me the report to prove it."
Target: Every page, post and demo says "backups for MSPs", not "cron monitoring"
Why: The developer market has a solo leader at $24k MRR after 11 years and free tiers from 5 rivals. MSPs pay per client and carry the liability when a backup silently fails.
2.Read the backup reports MSPs already get by email. Each client gets its own intake address. Ship tested templates for the 8 most common backup products, plus a "teach it" screen where the MSP marks the words that mean success, warning and failure.
Target: 8 templates at launch. ≥90% of emails classified with no manual rule.
Why: Email works with almost every backup tool on day one. Backup Radar's own rivals say it is "mostly email parsing". You don't need 235 API integrations to start.
3.Keep the ping URL too, for scripts, database dumps and anything that doesn't send email.
Target: Ping and email share one dashboard
Why: It's the original heartbeat idea. It becomes a feature inside the MSP product, not the product.
4.Alert where MSPs already work. Send tickets to the PSA's email-to-ticket address (works with HaloPSA, ConnectWise, Autotask, Syncro and others), plus Teams, Slack and email. Add native PSA APIs later.
Target: Tickets working with any PSA in v1
Why: Email-to-ticket gives every PSA on day one with no integration to maintain. Automation first.
5.Price per client band, month to month, with no setup fee: Solo $39/mo (up to 10 clients), Team $99/mo (up to 30), Growth $199/mo (up to 80), then $2.50 per extra client. Annual at 10× monthly. 14-day trial, no free plan.
Target: Blended ≥$85 per paying MSP. ≥40% on annual by month 12.
Why: Backup Radar's minimum is $240/month plus $495 onboarding on a 12-month term. Small MSPs are priced out. Don't race Bocada on price ($0.75 per resource); win on setup time and reports.
6.Sell before you build. Run a concierge version for 5–8 MSPs: forward their backup emails to a shared inbox, check them daily yourself, and send a weekly status and a monthly client report. Charge $29–49 a month.
Target: 5 paying by day 30
Why: It proves the pain and the price before 8 weeks of code, and it tells you which 8 backup products to parse first.
7.Make the monthly client report the reason to renew. One PDF per client: every backup job, success rate, failures and how fast they were fixed, and the last restore test. White-label with the MSP's logo.
Target: ≥60% of paying MSPs send the report to clients by month 3
Why: It turns "a tool the tech looks at" into "proof the MSP sells to its clients". MSPs can bill for it.
8.Add a restore-test log with quarterly reminders. The tech records who tested which restore, when, and the result, and can attach a screenshot. Export it as an evidence page.
Target: ≥40% of paying MSPs log a restore test each quarter
Why: Cyber-insurance questionnaires ask about restore tests and want dated evidence (vendor blogs, medium confidence). No monitoring rival leads with this.
9.Build reliability in before features. Two inbound-email providers, an external watchdog on your own alerting, a public status page, a daily "all quiet" digest so silence is visible, and a tested restore of your own database.
Target: ≥99.95% intake uptime. Zero missed alerts.
Why: The moat is trust, not code. Healthchecks.io had two outages in 2025 and a ~$1,800 SMS fraud attack in 2026, after 10 years of practice.
10.Sell where MSP owners talk: r/msp, MSP peer groups and Discords, backup-vendor user forums, and one guide per product ("monitor Veeam backups across clients", "Synology Hyper Backup failure alerts for MSPs").
Target: 10 guides by month 6. ≥40% of trials from search, community and referral.
Why: MSPs trust peers and search by product name. A developer audience on Hacker News won't buy this.
11.Automate operations from day one: self-serve setup in under 15 minutes, a parser test screen, templated support replies, and error messages that say what to fix.
Target: ≤1 support ticket per 10 paying MSPs a month
Why: Support grows with backup products. At limited hours per week, every repeated question must become a template or a doc.
12.Hold the "evidence, not guarantee" line. Say "we show you which backups failed and when", never "your backups are safe" or "insurance-compliant". Store only job metadata, not client data.
Target: Zero guarantee claims. Emails deleted after parsing, results kept 13 months.
Why: You don't control the backup or the insurer. A claim you can't back is a refund, a bad review in a small community, or worse.
Avoid
1.Launching as "another Healthchecks" for developers
Why: A solo leader at $24k MRR with 112,000 free accounts, Cronitor, Dead Man's Snitch, Better Stack (10 free heartbeats) and Sentry ($0.78 per extra cron monitor). You'd be sixth, and it took the leader 9 years to reach $14k.
2.A Laravel-only cron monitor
Why: Laravel's own Forge has heartbeats, Laravel Nightwatch (from $0) captures every scheduled task, and Oh Dear sells scheduled-task monitoring to the same audience. The platform owns it.
3.A Kubernetes CronJob agent as the product
Why: Cronitor already has a no-code-change Kubernetes agent, and platform teams usually alert on CronJobs from their existing metrics stack for free. It's a feature, not a business, for a solo founder.
4.Data-pipeline monitoring (Airflow, dbt)
Why: A funded data-observability category with a different buyer and a long sales cycle.
5.A generous free plan
Why: Healthchecks shows the math: ~1% of free accounts pay. Free users still cost support and reliability. Use a 14-day trial.
6.Building 235 backup-vendor API integrations
Why: That's Backup Radar's moat and a full-time team's job. Email templates plus a "teach it" screen cover most products. Add an API only when 5+ paying MSPs need the same one.
7.SMS and phone-call alerts in v1
Why: SMS pumping fraud cost Healthchecks ~$1,800 in two days (May 2026). MSPs live in Teams, Slack and their PSA. Add SMS later, with rate limits and country allow-lists.
8.Uptime checks, status pages, APM or log search
Why: Each is a crowded product of its own (UptimeRobot, Better Stack, Oh Dear, Hyperping). Even Healthchecks refuses to expand scope.
9.Selling to enterprises or MSPs with 200+ clients before $10k MRR
Why: Procurement, security reviews and custom integrations. They already use Backup Radar, Bocada or the backup vendor's console.
10.Claims like "insurance-ready", "guaranteed backups" or "compliant"
Why: Liability and refunds. The insurer and the auditor decide.
11.Storing backup contents, file lists or client credentials
Why: You only need job name, status, time and size. Holding more makes you a security target for every client of every MSP.
12.A 12-month contract or an onboarding fee
Why: Those are the leader's weak points for small MSPs. Month-to-month, with an annual discount, is your pitch.
13.Paid ads before month 6
Why: MSP owners buy on peer recommendation. Ads to "MSPs" are expensive and send traffic before you have reviews.
14.Adding features when a checkpoint fails
Why: A miss means the wrong buyer or the wrong job. Change that.