A Practical Monitoring Guide for Indie SaaS Founders Before 100 Customers

Indie SaaS founders are often tempted to delay setting up monitoring while still building features and finding product-market fit, but early users are particularly unforgiving of silent failures. A broken homepage, failed signup flow, or expired SSL certificate will typically cause new visitors to leave rather than raise a support ticket. The recommended approach focuses on user-facing reliability over internal system completeness, prioritizing the paths a new user takes to discover, sign up for, and begin trusting the product. Key monitoring targets include the main marketing domain, the signup and login pages, auth callback routes, and a lightweight API health endpoint. The core principle is that a green homepage does not guarantee signup works, so each critical URL should be monitored independently with alerts routed somewhere the founder will actually notice.