This interests me because I recently started building my own monitoring service but stopped because of the existing / entrenched competitors. While it was fun to build the PoC I got to a point where it was becoming "work" and I questioned the ROI. How did you decide to persevere despite this?

I had a habit of building for two hours a day, so I didn't have a lack of motivation or anything, but what boosted it most was getting better at sales and marketing to make it worth building.