I’m the Co-founder and CEO of StatusGator. At my core, I’m a builder who got tired of the “Is it just me?” guessing game every time a website crashed. I helped start this company because I saw how much time teams wasted hunting down status pages while their own systems were on fire. I took that frustration and turned it into the engine we use today, which keeps tabs on over 4,000 cloud services so our users don’t have to.
My day-to-day is spent making sure that when the big players like AWS or Zoom go sideways, you’re the first to know—not the last. I’m a huge believer that being honest about downtime actually builds more trust than pretending it never happens.
Company: StatusGator
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
Colin Bartlett: I’m Colin Bartlett, and I’m the Co-founder and CEO of StatusGator.
My journey really started from a place of personal frustration. As a developer, I spent way too much time refreshing vendor status pages and checking Twitter (X) just to figure out why my own apps weren’t working. I realized that while the world was moving to the cloud, we were all flying blind when those cloud services went down. I built the first version of StatusGator to fix that—to take thousands of scattered status pages and roll them into one clear, unified dashboard.
Today, StatusGator has grown into a vital tool for thousands of IT teams, especially in the education and MSP sectors. We monitor over 4,000 services, giving our users a heads-up the moment a dependency fails. I’m a big believer that you can’t fix what you can’t see. Therefore, my mission is to give teams back their time and sanity by providing total transparency into the tech stacks they rely on every day. We’re a small, agile team and we stay close to our users to ship the features they actually care about without the corporate red tape.
What was the defining moment when you decided that strong ethics and high profits were not in conflict, but could actually reinforce each other in your business?
Colin Bartlett: We realized this early because our entire business model is built on truth—even when that truth is uncomfortable for the big tech companies we monitor.
In the software world, there is often a temptation to smooth over bad news or delay outage notifications to keep SLAs looking perfect. We decided to do the exact opposite. We built our engine to detect failures based on real-world data, flagging an outage long before a provider officially admits to it on their own status page.
We are ethically committed to the fastest, most honest data possible. Even if it makes a giant service provider look bad, we build trust with our users. That trust is exactly why they stay with us and pay for our premium features. We found that the more transparent we were, the better and more popular our product became.
Can you share one specific decision or policy where you chose the ethical path even though it appeared more expensive or risky in the short term, and what was the long-term business impact?
Colin Bartlett: In the early days, it would have been much cheaper and easier to only focus on the top 50 services. Maintaining a massive library of thousands of individual status integrations is a massive technical debt and an expensive engineering hurdle for a small team. From a short-term profit perspective, those resources could have been spent on aggressive marketing or flashier features.
We knew all this and still chose the path of completeness. We knew that for an IT director at a school or a small business, a failure in a niche educational tool or a local payment gateway is as devastating as a global cloud outage. If we only monitored the big players, we’d be providing a half-truth, and that didn’t sit right with us.
The risk was that we’d spread our engineering team too thin. The long-term impact has been our greatest competitive advantage. Because we put in the expensive work to monitor everything, we became the only solution for organizations with complex, diverse tech stacks. It turned us from a simple notification tool into an essential piece of infrastructure. That ethical commitment to not cutting corners on data coverage is exactly why we have such high retention rates today. Our users know that if they rely on a tool, we’ve got their back, no matter how small the vendor is.
How do you embed your core values into daily operations and decision-making without sacrificing speed, competitiveness, or profitability?
Colin Bartlett: We use the rule: Data never lies. We’ve built our systems to alert users the second our monitors detect a failure. There is no human intervention or review process where we decide if it’s a good time to report an outage. By taking the human element out of that decision, we move faster than anyone else in the industry and stay competitive. If we spent time worrying about whether an alert might annoy a service provider, we’d lose our edge.
What’s the biggest pushback you’ve received from investors, board members, or stakeholders regarding your values-driven approach, and how did you handle it?
Colin Bartlett: Early on, there was a lot of pressure to broaden our scope and become a general uptime monitor like Pingdom or UptimeRobot. The argument was that the market for general monitoring is huge, while “status page aggregation” was too niche. My co-founder was worried that we were leaving money on the table by being so specific about our mission of transparency.
I argued that the world didn’t need another generic pinger; it needed a source of truth for the thousands of services that companies don’t control. I showed the team that by doubling down on our niche, we could own the transparency category entirely. Once the revenue started growing and we hit seven-figure ARR with just a handful of people, the broaden the scope argument died a natural death.
For other CEOs who want to build a values-driven yet highly profitable company, what is the one practical piece of advice you would give them to get started?
Colin Bartlett: Don’t treat values like a manual power. You don’t need to wait for a situation to arise to decide if you can afford to be ethical. It is exhausting and slow. Turn your principles into a default to remain value-driven and profitable.
