Blame Stella Provides Easy Website Performance Monitoring
Delano Mandelbaum is the founder of Blame Stella, an open source web performance and monitoring solution. The startup has emerged from his consulting business, Solutious, but most of Delano’s time these days is focused on Stella. We spoke with Delano back in October when we did a coder profile on him.
He started working on Stella in late 2008. It originally started as a performance testing tool for web applications and it’s since evolved into the monitoring service. You can go to the site at blamestella.com, put in a URL and get immediate feedback on site performance. That’s a good hook for Delano to get you signed up for the Stella monitoring service.
Delano has some pretty strong opinions when it comes to monitoring and open source vs. closed source. For one, he envisions a world where every company is publicly sharing their site performance metrics with the world. And he believes that closed source software vendors are struggling more and more to justify being closed source vs. open source. So he makes for an interesting person to chat with…
NextMontreal: What’s your background?
Delano: I’m a technology guy. I started out in IT writing PC hardware reviews so testing and benchmarking have been with me since early on. I was a freelance programmer for a few years and I eventually took a position at Yellow Pages Group (via Verizon Information Services Canada). In 2005/2006 I led the dev team that rebuilt yellowpages.ca and after that I went to work for a search engine startup that was acquired in 2007. I’ve been consulting and working on my own projects since then.
NextMontreal: What about all the competition in this space? Seems like site monitoring is largely a commodity at this point.
Delano: Yeah, it’s a great market to be in. The abundance of competition is evidence that people understand the value of (and pay for!) quality assurance tools. That’s advantageous for a new company because educating a market on the problem you’re solving is expensive and time consuming. Realistically, I’m competing with people doing nothing just as much as I’m competing with incumbent products.
I wouldn’t say monitoring is becoming a commodity though. There are big changes happening in software right now. We’re moving away from expensive, monolithic tools designed for specialists and moving towards reasonably-priced, straightforward tools designed for people with little time to spare. This is partly related to the budget cuts over the past couple years but there’s also a growing disdain for products that aren’t immediately useful. There will always be a place for pricey, sophisticated software but there’s a new, viable market opening up and that’s what I’m going after with BlameStella.com.
NextMontreal: How do you differentiate Stella from other similar products?
Stella is unique in 3 ways:
- It’s the simplest possible solution that still provides value. Most similar products have a higher barrier to entry. They’re quality services, but customer attention is fickle these days. It doesn’t take much to turn people off.
- The data and reports are public by default which is the opposite of almost all existing products. There are a lot of advantages to being open about your operations. Lenny Rachitsky (the founder of Localmind) gave some great examples in his Velocity talk “the Upside of Downtime“. It also allows me to create aggregate reports for hosting vendors, like this one for Amazon EC2: https://www.blamestella.com/vendor/ec2/report.
- I built a strong, charismatic brand in an otherwise tame marketplace (with the help of Still Brandworks and my good friend, Heidi Haering). People love the brand!
NextMontreal: Do companies really want their site performance analytics public? Sounds great in theory, but do you really believe that way of thinking will go mainstream?
Absolutely there are companies that don’t want to be open about their site performance and downtime. But the ones that do have an advantage.
There are only two options: you can hope your customers don’t notice when your site is down or you can control the conversation by being
the source of that information. Either way, people will notice when it’s down and they’ll tell everyone on Twitter or Get Satisfaction or
their blog or their friends and coworkers. So instead of thinking about it as broadcasting a failure, think about it as an opportunity
to build trust with your customers.
NextMontreal: You have 3 pricing plans for people to monitor downtime. How did you decide on these plans?
Delano: Old-fashioned, educated guesswork. I started charging 6 weeks ago and based on the feedback I’ve received so far I’ll probably make a few, small adjustments. Running a business is like piloting an aircraft. You set off in the general direction and make minor course corrections until you get where you want to go.
NextMontreal: How are things going overall?
Delano: Very well! It’s still the early days but I like what I’m seeing. About 30k people have stopped by so far without any ads or solicitation on my part. Last month the site did the rounds on a number of design blogs and there were articles on the Next Web, LifeHacker.jp, and a bunch of sites in Europe and South America. It’s pretty cool to wake up to traffic like that (or in the case of Japan, going to bed).
NextMontreal: The Stella site has a very unique feel to it. My first reaction though is that a possibly client may be a bit concerned about such a focus on humor and fun, especially when dealing with an issue (site downtime / performance) which is neither fun nor funny. What’s the thinking behind the brand?
Delano: People spend a lot of their lives at work and it’s high-time that software was built with that in mind. I want to help people keep their web applications running smoothly but I also want to lighten the mood. If I can’t lighten the mood, I want to at least delight them with the quality of the support. Morton and Tucker (the fictitious characters that run the company) are a means to that end. They’re also fun to work on and it just so happens that the people that enjoy their banter also make great early customers.
NextMontreal: What are your thoughts on the open source business opportunities? And what are your thoughts on Montreal as an open source startup hub?
Delano: I love it. What Evan is doing by leading the conversation is fantastic. It’s a huge, long-term goal and there’s no reason why it couldn’t happen. No matter what, working towards it is good for the city and good for software in general.
Regarding open source in business, we’re getting to the point where the onus is shifting towards proprietary products to defend the value of closed-source software. Especially when it comes to usage inside governments.
NextMontreal: What’s the advantage of open source vs. closed-source?
Developing open source software demonstrates a confidence in your business and your ability to compete in a free market. Closed source
software is a form of artificial scarcity.
NextMontreal: Are there companies that have downloaded the software and set it up themselves without having to use your service?
Yep. Rubyforge.org reports almost 11k installs of Stella. The open source version has been around longer than the service so some of those people probably aren’t even aware of the hosted version yet. And if I think the open source version will suit a customer better, I’ll direct them to it.
NextMontreal: What are the plans for Stella in the next 6 months?
Delano: I’d like to see Stella become the go to web monitoring service in Montreal. That might not happen in 6 months but I can tell you that Morton is at his desk right now with a slide rule trying to figure out what it will take.
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