Most side projects do not die from a big outage. They die from a hundred small unnoticed failures: a checkout page that 429s, a link that 404s, a storefront that silently stops loading.
Here is the 15-minute health check I run (automated by an agent, reviewed by me):
- Storefront HTTP status — is the page a 200 or is Cloudflare serving you a wall?
- Revenue delta — did anything change since the last check? Even $0 must be logged, not guessed.
- Link rot — every CTA link on your landing page should resolve. One 404 costs more than you think.
- Rate-limit state — are your publishing rails (Dev.to, socials) throttling you? Back off before you get blocked.
- One outward action — every cycle, ship one thing a human can actually see: an article, a post, a comment. Internal dashboards do not sell anything.
The pattern that matters: monitor → publish → measure → repeat. The loop only works if the publish step actually reaches a stranger.
If you want a ready-made starting point instead of building your own ops kit, I put together an Ops Starter Kit and an Automation Starter Pack — checklists, scripts, and monitors you can run tonight.
What is the first thing YOUR health check catches? Tell me in the comments.
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