8. If I Were You: The Next 90 Days
The single most important thing
Get 5 small MSPs paying for a hand-run version of "every client's backups on one screen" before you build the product.
- Segment: MSPs with 1–20 staff and 5–80 clients, in the US, UK, Canada or Australia, that manage backups for clients across two or more backup products.
- Job: "Tell me the moment any client's backup fails or goes quiet, and give me a monthly report I can send the client."
- How: a concierge version. The MSP forwards backup report emails to a shared inbox with one sub-address per client. You classify them each morning (by hand, then with scripts), send a daily digest and a monthly client report. Charge $29–49 a month from week 3. Automate only what you've done by hand at least 20 times.
Week-by-week
| Weeks | Goal | Exit criteria (~15 hrs/week / full-time) |
|---|---|---|
| 1–2 | Discovery. 15–20 calls with MSP owners and technicians. Ask: how do you check backups today, how many products, how many jobs, how long does it take, when did one last fail silently, what did it cost, what do you pay for today, do clients or insurers ask for proof? Collect one week of redacted report emails from each. | 12 / 15 calls done. You can write the top 3 pains in their words. You have real emails from at least 6 backup products. |
| 3–4 | Concierge pilot. Offer 5–8 MSPs the hand-run service: daily digest, alerts to their PSA's ticket email, one monthly client report. Charge for it. | 3 / 6 paying. If fewer than 2 will pay, the pain isn't real for this segment. Switch to in-house IT at 20–200-person firms once, not the pitch. |
| 5–8 | Build the thin v1: per-client intake addresses (two inbound providers), templates for the 8 most common products from the pilot, "teach it" rules, ping URLs, the multi-client board, alerts to email / Teams / Slack / PSA ticket email, daily digest, monthly PDF report, Stripe billing. Plus an external watchdog and a public status page. | Pilots move from concierge to self-serve. ≥98% of their emails classified automatically. |
| 9–10 | First content and community. One guide per backup product ("monitor Veeam backups across all clients"), 2 honest posts in MSP communities, a 3-minute setup video. Offer the 14-day trial. | 25 / 45 trials started, ≥60% from MSPs (not developers). |
| 11–12 | Measure and decide. | 8 / 15 paying MSPs, ≥80% month-1 retention, zero missed failures, at least 3 "caught it" stories. If you hit it, add the restore-test log next. If you miss it, go back to discovery. |
Kill criteria (write these down now)
If at day 90 you have fewer than 5 paying MSPs, or any missed failure you can't explain and fix, the wedge or the build is wrong. Don't respond by adding features. Respond by changing the buyer (in-house IT) or fixing reliability first.
The one thing to stop doing
Stop planning a generic developer cron monitor with a free tier.
It's the most tempting item: easy to build with AI, easy to launch on Hacker News, and it feels like a product within a week. But it enters a market with a trusted solo leader at $24k MRR, 112,000 free accounts already sitting on that leader's free plan, and free cron checks inside Sentry, Better Stack and Laravel. It's the clearest case of building to avoid selling.
A close second: stop treating SMS as a v1 feature. It's a fraud target that cost a 10-year veteran ~$1,800 in two days.
What stays on the long-term roadmap (only after proof)
- Restore-test log with quarterly reminders, and an insurance evidence export.
- Native PSA APIs (HaloPSA first if pilots use it; assumption).
- APIs for the 2–3 backup products that most paying MSPs use.
- SLA and RPO tracking per client, to serve MSPs with 50+ clients.
- Then, if a backup vendor or PSA offers a partner listing, sell through it.