8. If I Were You: The Next 90 Days
The single most important thing
Find out whether client contact forms actually break often enough to matter, then get 5 agencies paying at least $49/month for a hand-run daily form test and monthly report by day 45. If either fails, stop.
- Segment: agencies and freelancers that sell monthly care plans to 20+ lead-driven local businesses (law, clinics, dental, trades, home services), mostly on WordPress.
- Job: "Tell me the moment a client's form stops delivering leads, and give me a monthly report that proves we're watching."
- How: a concierge MVP. A Playwright script submits a tagged test through each form once a day, a catch inbox confirms arrival, and a spreadsheet plus a report template does the rest. Charge from week 3. Automate only what you've done by hand at least 20 times.
Plan below assumes ~15 hrs/week. Full-time, compress it into about 8 weeks and double the call targets.
Week-by-week
| Weeks | Goal | Exit criteria |
|---|---|---|
| 1–2 | Discovery and failure count. List 40 care-plan agencies. Book 20 calls. Ask: "When did a client's form last break? How did you find out? What did it cost the client? What do you use to watch sites today?" With 2–3 friendly agencies' permission, start daily test submissions on ~100 real client forms (tagged, to a catch address the agency sets up). | 10 calls done. ~100 forms under daily test. You can write the top 3 agency pains in their words. |
| 3–4 | Concierge offer. Report the first failures found (with the agencies' permission, anonymised). Offer 3 months at $49/month for up to 25 forms, with daily tests and a white-label monthly report. | Day 30: ≥1 real silent failure found in the ~100 forms, and 3 agencies agree to pay. Zero failures means the pain is too rare. Stop, or test booking and quote forms only for 2 more weeks. |
| 5–6 | Deliver and learn. Send the first reports by hand. Time every step. Record every failure's cause (SMTP, plugin update, CAPTCHA key, DNS/MX, spam filter). Note which parts agencies forward to clients. | Day 45 kill test: 5 agencies paying ≥$49/month. Miss it and stop. Don't build. |
| 7–10 | Build the thin v1 (web only): the WordPress companion plugin (Gravity Forms, WPForms, Contact Form 7, Elementor Forms) with a signed test allowlist; daily test runner from 2 regions with retry; catch-inbox arrival check; passive silence monitoring via a tracking address; failure reasons; multi-client dashboard; white-label monthly report; uptime, SSL, domain and MX checks as basics; Slack and email alerts. Terms with a liability cap, a DPA, and your own status page and watchdog. | Concierge agencies moved onto v1. Report assembly fully automatic. False-alarm rate under 5%. |
| 11–12 | Free hook and decision. Launch the free one-off form check. Post the first "what broke" findings (anonymised) in 2 agency communities. Measure. | Full-time: 12 paying accounts, ≥$1k MRR. 15 hrs/week: 8 accounts, ≥$600 MRR. Every month-1 payer renewed. At least 1 in 4 accounts has seen a real failure. |
Kill criteria (write these down now)
- Day 30: no real silent failure in ~100 forms → the pain is too rare. Stop.
- Day 45: fewer than 5 agencies paying ≥$49 → stop. Move your hours to another idea in this portfolio.
- Day 90: fewer than 5 paying accounts, or any concierge agency cancelling because "nothing ever happens" → the wedge is wrong. Don't add features.
Time budget at ~15 hrs/week
| Activity | Weeks 1–6 | Weeks 7–12 |
|---|---|---|
| Calls and follow-ups | 6 hrs | 3 hrs |
| Concierge testing and reports | 5 hrs | 1 hr |
| Building | 2 hrs | 9 hrs |
| Community posts | 1 hr | 1 hr |
| Alert duty and support | 1 hr | 1 hr |
The one thing to stop doing
Stop thinking of this as an uptime monitor.
Uptime, SSL and domain checks are sold by 35+ tools, bundled into WP Umbrella for €1.99 a site, and given away free by Better Stack and Red Sift. Every hour on a faster check interval, a nicer status page or a multi-region uptime map is an hour spent building the 36th copy of something agencies already have.
A close second: stop planning a Product Hunt launch. It brings developers comparing uptime tools, not care-plan agencies with lead-driven clients.
What stays on the long-term roadmap (only after proof)
- HubSpot and Pipedrive arrival checks (the test contact is found via API, then deleted).
- SPF, DKIM and DMARC checks on form notification senders.
- Webflow and Framer form support through passive monitoring.
- A paid tier of the companion plugin in the WordPress plugin directory.
- Then, with enough test runs: a quarterly "silent form failures" index, and possibly data or integration deals with form-plugin makers or hosts.