In a candid SoftwareSuggest interview, we spoke with Mattias Geniar, the founder of Oh Dear, a leading website monitoring solution that addresses real customer problems. By spotting gaps in existing tools, Mattias built Oh Dear into an all-in-one monitoring tool for uptime, security, performance, and website changes.
Like a few other monitoring tools, Oh Dear is versatile and capable of really helping businesses with reliable website monitoring and security confidence. We discussed Mattias’ mantra for success, the journey to build Oh Dear, and how to stand out in a competitive SaaS space. He shared future insights on website monitoring and advice for aspiring SaaS founders.
In Conversation with Mr. Mattias Geniar, Co-founder and CEO of Oh Dear.
Read on to learn more about Mr. Geniar and his insights on the monitoring tools industry.
A warm welcome from SoftwareSuggest, Mr Mattias Geniar. What is your success mantra? (Something you have followed personally that has helped you in your journey.)
Keep the focus on the customer problem you’re trying to solve, communicate early and openly, and accept any feedback a customer can give to make your product better
What inspired you to create Oh Dear, and what problem were you aiming to solve with this app?
We found that the existing solutions to monitor websites didn’t offer good coverage: they were really good at checking if a single webpage – usually the homepage – was online, but they never looked deeper than that. Today’s websites are much more complex than a decade ago, and the expectations from visitors are higher. With Oh Dear, we want to give our users the peace of mind that if we don’t alert you, your entire website will be functional, not just the single page that happens to be monitored. This all-in-one solution combines the features of many other services and packages them in one great application.
Can you walk us through the initial development stages of Oh Dear? What were some of the biggest challenges you faced in building the app?
Development started over 7yrs ago, at a time when it seemed like many competitors were also starting. Our main focus has quickly been to expand beyond “just” uptime monitoring by releasing broken links that crawl from the very start. This allowed us to stand out above the others; it was our differentiating feature. The biggest challenge to get this started & deployed was in developing our in-house crawler to remain performant yet keep our overall costs down, as the biggest reason competitors don’t offer broken links checking is because it is expensive to crawl all websites every day. The service would be much cheaper if we didn’t bother crawling all pages, but to us, that’s one of our most important features, offering all our users peace of mind that all pages can be checked.
How has Oh Dear evolved since its inception, and what are some key milestones you’re particularly proud of?
Since inception, we’ve added 6 more powerful features to the application while keeping the service affordable overall. We’re on our third iteration of the design, and every time we investigate areas for improvement, we do so with our customers in mind: What would make Oh Dear better and easier to use for customers? Our latest redesign two years ago really elevated our usability and design language to the next level.
What do you believe sets Oh Dear apart from other website monitoring tools in the market?
We offer many more features by default than our competitors. Many focus just on single page uptime checking + SSL certificates, but our service includes broken links checking, SEO validation, sitemap monitoring, scheduled task monitoring & performance monitoring for all our users.
How do you prioritize feature development at Oh Dear? Is it driven more by user feedback or market trends, or a balance of both?
Over the past years, we’ve been pioneering our feature development internally, staying ahead of the market trends. When we launched our extensive SSL certificate checking, we performed many checks the market didn’t expect, but they’ve proven useful time and time again as we can alert on technical problems well before our competition can. For the last few features, we’ve listened to our customers and distilled their feature requests down to the core to implement them in the most usable fashion. In short, we combine our in-house expertise to predict where the market will trend to and we’ll always listen to client feedback.
With the growing focus on web performance and uptime, how do you foresee the future of website monitoring tools evolving?
Customers are expecting more from their uptime monitors. They should provide actionable alerts and business value to the team. With websites’ increasing complexity, it’s no longer enough to just say, “The website is down,” but it should be, “The website is down, we detected the following scheduled tasks have failed that might lead to the downtime.”
In the crowded market of website monitoring, what has been the biggest challenge in differentiating Oh Dear from other tools?
Getting the word out to the public: I believe our feature set is attractive, and our pricing is competitive, but with so many monitoring tools out there, it can be hard for users to figure out which service is best for them.
Security is a major concern for websites today. How does Oh Dear address security issues, and how do you ensure your users are protected?
One of our first monitor checks was extensive SSL/TLS certificate validation, going far beyond what competitors were checking at the time. This focus has remained throughout our lifecycle. Where possible, we’ll alert users on potential security problems—including mixed content errors and Lighthouse validation—before they become a major problem.
What are the key metrics or data points that Oh Dear users should focus on to truly understand their website’s health and performance?
Uptime percentage, performance, and accessibility/search engine optimized metrics. All of these Oh Dear can offer.
As a founder of a growing app in a competitive market, what advice would you give to other founders looking to succeed in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry?
Look at competitors for inspiration, but don’t copy them. If you want to stand out in a competitive market, give the product your personal vision and execute it better than the competition.
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