PagerDuty (YC S10) Raises $90M at a $1.3B Valuation • Hacker News Board

Re: PagerDuty (YC S10) Raises $90M at a $1.3B Valuation

#101

Post by exclusiv » Fri, Sep 07, 2018, 1:56 PM UTC

borplk wrote: post #98

exclusiv wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. I need a phone call to pay any attention. I use UptimeRobot and their RSS feed to pipe into a Zapier Zap which uses Twilio to call me and read me the site that is down in a British voice haha. Easy to setup, works and really cost effective!

Too many weak points of failure on that setup for an alerting system.

I don't think so for my usage and I shared it because it's cost effective and would be acceptable for a lot of devs' projects. I still get UptimeRobots notifications if Zapier or Twilio hiccups. For the phone notifications, if the system fails on a given night it's not the end of the world if I don't wake up. I can fix in the morning.

But I agree for e-commerce or mission critical applications - you need redundancy and it's worth ponying up the extra money for an advanced system.

Re: PagerDuty (YC S10) Raises $90M at a $1.3B Valuation

#102

Post by mgliwka » Fri, Sep 07, 2018, 1:59 PM UTC

exclusiv wrote: post #101

borplk wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too many weak points of failure on that setup for an alerting system.

I don't think so for my usage and I shared it because it's cost effective and would be acceptable for a lot of devs' projects. I still get UptimeRobots notifications if Zapier or Twilio hiccups. For the phone notifications, if the system fails on a given night it's not the end of the world if I don't wake up. I can fix in the morning. But I agree for e-commerce or mission critical applications - you need redundancy a…

If you can fix it in the morning, why bother at all? As long as it's not an common occurrence, it should be fine, right?

Re: PagerDuty (YC S10) Raises $90M at a $1.3B Valuation

#103

Post by debaserab2 » Fri, Sep 07, 2018, 5:08 PM UTC

nodesocket wrote: post #83

debaserab2 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember when I first ran across PagerDuty I thought to myself, "wait, I think at my last job we just had a couple of perl scripts do that..."

You had a couple of perl scripts that integrate with 3rd parties (Slack, Pingdom, etc), manages complex on-call schedules, make phone calls, send SMSes, handles retries, and is fault tolerant across providers? That's some amazing perl skills. :-)

No, it didn't do all those things. All it did was hook into nagios and alert the IT pager. That's all we ever needed it to do.

Re: PagerDuty (YC S10) Raises $90M at a $1.3B Valuation

#104

Post by verelo » Fri, Sep 07, 2018, 7:27 PM UTC

dan0- wrote: post #90

verelo wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this kind of sound a like a UX bug. Ideally the behaviour could be changed to match the way you’re using it, which is more of a wake up call than a call based notification system.

I feel like the core product is pretty easily replicated with Freeswitch and tailored with a little configuration. Eg: Ring a phone for 30 seconds (so as not to leave a message accidentally), if answered read back the issue (using text to speech), otherwise send the phone a text and . Having set systems like this up for numerous clients, the latter bit is usually a case of waiting a few minutes for the on call person…

The core feature of Pagerduty here is resilience imo. As in, i expect whatever’s issue I’m having that they will not be having. I imagine if an AWS zone is down, large scale network issue, etc, any home rolled solution is likely to be impacted too.

Re: PagerDuty (YC S10) Raises $90M at a $1.3B Valuation

#105

Post by exclusiv » Sat, Sep 08, 2018, 12:33 AM UTC

mgliwka wrote: post #102

exclusiv wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so for my usage and I shared it because it's cost effective and would be acceptable for a lot of devs' projects. I still get UptimeRobots notifications if Zapier or Twilio hiccups. For the phone notifications, if the system fails on a given night it's not the end of the world if I don't wake up. I can fix in the morning. But I agree for e-commerce or mission critical applications - you need redundancy a…

If you can fix it in the morning, why bother at all? As long as it's not an common occurrence, it should be fine, right?

Because many times it's just about being proactive and getting things done ASAP because having your client find out first is bad.

I also prefer not starting my day with a fire. I'd rather do it off-hours.

Re: PagerDuty (YC S10) Raises $90M at a $1.3B Valuation

#106

Post by zaroth » Sat, Sep 08, 2018, 1:42 PM UTC

spullara wrote: post #64

zaroth wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends entirely on your growth rate. In my experience, a lifestyle business growing 20% YoY with 5% churn and 10% operating margin will sell for around 2.5-3x ARR.

20% YoY is very low relative to most of these large SaaS startups that you see on here. The S-1 for Elastic had it at 75% YoY or so. Most of these companies also have absurdly high negative revenue churn. Gross margins approach 75% which become net margins when they stop growing so fast. See the 40% SaaS rule. https://saasholic.com/the-rule-of-40-for-saas-and-subscripti...

Exactly! Every time you double your growth rate it also approximately doubles the Price / Revenue ratio.

20% growth will yield a 2-3x ratio. 40% growth 4-6x, and by 80% growth you’re looking at a valuation of 8-12x ARR.

Re: PagerDuty (YC S10) Raises $90M at a $1.3B Valuation

#107

Post by bradgessler » Sat, Sep 08, 2018, 8:20 PM UTC

holstvoogd wrote: post #3

plz stop.. PD should be a cash cow, stop 'innovating' and 'growing', just deliver what it says on the tin. Over the past few years I've been using PD it is becoming worse and worse, it seems to me because they have to keep their developers busy. They could of course just make the core product better, but thats not cool enough i guess.

I built https://www.pagerline.com/ to be the “core product” that Pager Duty use to be. It doesn’t have an app; you just create a team, invite people, they add their phone number, and when an alert triggered it txts a link to the alert and rings your phone. That’s it. No app. No ticketing systems. No VC pressure to bloat the thing.

Would love feedback from folks on here about it or what they’d like to get out of a “core pager duty” product.

Re: PagerDuty (YC S10) Raises $90M at a $1.3B Valuation

#108

Post by cphoover » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 7:31 PM UTC

draw_down wrote: post #7

cphoover wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the main problem with the SAAS model. Trying to increase value is antithetical to the Unix Philosophy.

Who said anything about Unix? Or capital-P Philosophy?

Obviously a typo. Thanks for being an ass though.

I was responding to the parent comment. The value of tools are diminished as they try and do too many things for too many people. Single purpose applications, that are compose-able and interchangeable are better, then big software suites that try to provide for everything under the sun. The issue with SASS over open source, is cloud companies are constantly trying to attract new investors, and justify new funding but building out new feature sets. It is antithetical to the premise of singular purpose, simple applications.

Re: PagerDuty (YC S10) Raises $90M at a $1.3B Valuation

#109

Post by dan0- » Fri, Sep 14, 2018, 4:36 AM UTC

verelo wrote: post #104

dan0- wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the core product is pretty easily replicated with Freeswitch and tailored with a little configuration. Eg: Ring a phone for 30 seconds (so as not to leave a message accidentally), if answered read back the issue (using text to speech), otherwise send the phone a text and . Having set systems like this up for numerous clients, the latter bit is usually a case of waiting a few minutes for the on call person…

The core feature of Pagerduty here is resilience imo. As in, i expect whatever’s issue I’m having that they will not be having. I imagine if an AWS zone is down, large scale network issue, etc, any home rolled solution is likely to be impacted too.

While I get the point, two servers running Freeswitch combined with a bit of python and a regular rsyncing of the user data would give one pretty good uptime for monitoring.