Good idea, great start. I needed something like this in my own app and was considering building it myself. I'd prefer to use some other app to deliver these features tho. You should seriously look at a few of these points. I am breaking my comment into 2 logically separate comments (separation of concerns, too much of a coder :D)
- You are assuming direct consumers of your service. Think of indirect consumers too. Other startups who can piggyback on your offering to add value to their own product.
- Give an api where I can tell you the email message, sms message, various escalation options, option to repeat email/sms/phone after some delay if nobody responded. Also consider an SMTP api interface too. Not much of an effort for you if you already have the http api present.
- The api should also accept email addresses, mobile numbers and phone numbers. I might be signing up paying customers and using your app to send them alerts. I should be able to do this without having to register each of these email/phone numbers to you. Think of your pricing in this scenario.
- People mentioned ticketing system integration. Great idea. Extend it further. Also have an option where u will send the response back to the originating application.
Thanks for the feedback pradeepgatram. We are planning to add the ability to integrate PagerDuty with external products (most likely products in the monitoring space). Please send me an email to alex[at]pagerduty[dot]com if you'd like to know more.
- Lots of tech support happens from India. You are too expensive for this market. I would find it hard to sell your service as an addon to my app.
- Telecom is quite cheap out here. Figure out some alliances to bring down the cost (e.g. local SMS gateway, most of them use http api, but there are some SMTP based ones too).
- Additional SMS @ $0.15 translates to ~INR 7. SMS in my mobile phone plan would cost me ~10 times less. Not a correct comparison, but thats the language buyers use (enterprise buyers use it a lot) :)
