Featured Startup Pitch: AppMoni helps ensure successful Facebook app rollouts by enabling real-time performance monitoring

By Anton Ygartua, AppMoni founder and CEO

Elevator Pitch: AppMoni monitors Facebook apps to ensure no users experience post-launch issues with your app going down or not working. It can takes months to prepare for a social campaign, but only minutes to start receiving negative feedback.

Product/Service Description

AppMoni is a monitoring tool for apps that appear on Facebook. By simply adding the Facebook app URL, our tool allows administrators of a page or developers to simply turn on monitoring effortlessly. It takes less than a minute to set up monitoring of a new app and have peace-of-mind that if anything goes wrong, you and team members will be notified.

Currently AppMoni is the only tool that can detect and monitor apps within Facebook’s environment. This allows us to ensure users experience the app issue free throughout the entire campaign or app lifecycle. If any issues are detected, such as slow server response or errors within the code, AppMoni will immediately notify team members. A full diagnostic check is done and details, including screenshots of the app during the check, will be emailed. Users can turn on SMS notifications to be instantly alerted as well. Once the app is back up-and-running, AppMoni will let you know that all is back to normal and will continue to monitor the app closely.

For developers, our email alerts attach a full diagnostic of requests and responses from the server hosting your app. This includes all the headers, responses and errors which have occurred while trying to load the app. A screenshot is also attached showing you how your app looked during the check. This helps developers resolve any issues without them having to occur again.

There are a lot of extra features that are being fine-tuned and will soon be available, such as notifications when you are using features Facebook will no longer support in the future.

Founders’ Story

AppMoni is being bootstrapped by BOXLIGHT, a digital development agency located in London, which I co-founded and will soon be expanding to Vancouver, Canada. Myself and my business partner, Jamie Learmonth, have been deeply involved in the development and creation of many social media campaigns for large creative agencies and brands for the past six years, which has included hundreds of Facebook apps.

During this time, we’ve seen a lot of viral campaigns start well and then put aside. In this digital age of fast-paced development, it’s essential to follow a campaign from start-to-end and ensure all visitors are receiving the best possible experience. To us, this meant having an automated monitoring service that would keep a close eye on live social campaigns and report back to the key team members involved when things weren’t working.

There are many reasons a campaign can experience problems—from server issues, to development issues with the code, or Facebook making changes to their API. We built AppMoni for our peace-of-mind, and are now extending this to everyone else.

Marketing/Promotion Strategy

We will be focusing on developers to give us firsthand feedback on AppMoni as they are the people most likely to act when problems arise. We will then be approaching agencies and project managers. As we’ve got relationships with most of the London agencies, we will start by pushing the service to our existing clients. We will also be engaging with developers through Facebook events and online marketing to sites frequented by app owners.

Market Opportunity

AppMoni is the first ever product to monitor applications within a Facebook tab or canvas. Developers, project managers and clients (non-technical) are able to easily add their apps to be monitored and alerted if issues occur.

There are many key players in monitoring servers and sites but none currently that can monitor Facebook apps within their native environment, just how a user will experience them. An example which comes to mind would be the Pingdom monitoring service.

How We Differentiate From the Competition

AppMoni sets itself apart from the competition by focusing on Facebook apps, the ability for any admin of an app to quickly set up their monitoring, and allowing them to invite others to monitor the same app.

Our technology can easily be set up to monitor Facebook URLs by intelligently detecting the real location of where the app is hosted. AppMoni relies solely on Facebook Connect to register a user and start monitoring their apps. This means no time has to be wasted with setup or registration and a user can immediately start monitoring without any technical knowledge.

Business Model

AppMoni is currently in beta and free for anyone to add unlimited apps to monitor. In the future as more features are developed a limit will be introduced on free accounts and a few plans will be added for power users or larger agencies that require unlimited monitoring. We may also charge for advanced monitoring features beyond simple uptime as well as SMS notifications.

Current Needs

AppMoni is currently wrapping up its third phase of development which was funded by BOXLIGHT, and will be seeking to raise further funding whilst expanding the development and marketing teams.

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Website: www.appmoni.com