Cloud Deployment As A Service: Go to Market Strategy, looking for tips.
Hi,
I was looking to get some advises around go to market strategy.
I'm Greg, a Lead Cloud Architect the day, founder and CEO of Cloudbuddies the rest of the time, fed up with how the IT market behaves.
About the company:
We vision to provide a one-stop solution for Cloud adoption journeys. We offer an innovative Cloud Consultancy approach as well as managed Cloud services (cost effective, less corporate, more fun, less bullshit, less talking, privileging action and efficiency). However, our Unique selling point is our Multi-Cloud Deployment As A Service platform, Archie, that is making Cloud Deployments ridiculously easy, standard and fast. Our slogan : Don't reach for the stars to settle in the Cloud.
About the USP:
This platform can be used by anyone from anywhere. Single user, smbs or enterprises. It will be full available online, no software or cloud expertise will be required to deploy resources in the cloud. It supports existing IT workforces to easily deploy: Cloud Landing Zones, Cloud Accounts, Cloud resources or even Full Applications stacks without the need of cloud expertise. Ofc you will need a bit of understanding, but Archie will do the rest. It is based on the principles of well architected framework and Infrastructure as a code as well as our experience in the domain, to respect the cloud providers best practices and avoid surprises/mistakes.
I'm convinced that there is a place for such a tool, as most of my clients/colleagues are struggling with either best practices, Architecting/Programming tooling, or cloud adoption rules. Archie combines all of this, abstracts these complexities from the users thanks to a nice, user friendly, intuitive interface.
About the Strategy:
Our plan is to build and publish Archie MVP in the next weeks. It will provide a trial for 7 days with limited features, a monthly subscription will enabled premium features, one off payment will provide additional features (mainly the landing zones).
We target end users that are looking to deploy faster in cloud, consultancies that can buy this tool and provide it to their employees to accelerate their own deployments process, small business that don't have the knowledge, the skills to adopt cloud as the big enterprises do. Maybe cloud providers that could partner with us to propose Archie as another deployment tool (but this is maybe dreaming too much :) ....we also would be interested to find investors that could support us so that we bring new features faster to the market.
We plan to use Indiehackers, reddit users, linkedin as our main communication channels. We also plan to organise free webinar where we would demo the tool and explain our vision (meetups). We also plan to give a free access to the tool with limited features.
Happy to discuss around the strategy, the idea. Happy to have advises, critics that could help us launch the products and the company smoothly.
Thanks
Greg
The way i understand this is your key differentiator is ready to use templates. The business outcome is agility and cost saving (devops time/pay). You could also focus on the templates being best practices in terms of security, production-grade setup.
Now coming to the market, I have been working in cloud business for a while so I can add a few notes here.
Your market seems similar to "Relay" by puppet. Essentially, underserved sysadmins that are being overwhelmed with devops and programming world.
This also seems to cover needs of indie developers, founders who would want a production-grade template to deploy on cloud. Instead of having to research the right packages, methods to deploy from security, privacy perspective.
I think you could focus on being production grade templates with one-click cloud deployment as your theme and pull the string from there.
Today's cloud is lacking graphical installation wizards that worked great for desktop /servers, you could be the one for cloud.
Good luck.
Hey, thanks for the answer. Yes that's exactly that. Ready to use templates that fits particular situations, but also a way to customise the principal settings of them to give some flexibility. Templates will be available for prod and non prod for example, respecting each environment conditions. Prod would be HA everywhere, Non Prod would only focus on 1 AZ for example, to save costs. The templates are following the well architected principles so we ensure they are doing what they need to do, respecting, security, compliance, cost, operation efficiency etc etc ....and they are all deployed via IaC from the browser.
Agreed for Puppet, but as said before, those tools are more devops focus. Archie is a simple webapp, in just a click you can have your resources configured and ready to use without having to bother/know too much.
Indeed we want to help the non experts, give them a fast, easy way to start in the cloud, but also start correctly to avoid mistakes. We saw a lot of clients mixing dev and prod, not using policies and complaining, using wrong instance sizes, not enabling HA in every step...Archie will fix all that.
We still need to improve the MVP, bring some features and design into it, we are also struggling a bit as we are all busy in our normal work, we are looking for additional devs but are also lacking funding ...yep its not an easy task to build a company :)
Thanks for your words, hope we can make it. Feel free to follow us on linkedin, cloudbuddies.io, there are some basic screenshots teaser there. Also don't hesitate to talk about the idea to your colleagues or network if you think it deserves it. We will soon share the link to Archie in our IH company page, happy to have you share it around your network and get feedback.
Is this designed to be a competitor to Render, AWS, Google Cloud, Heroku, etc.?
Hi, thanks for reading through and answering.
No, Render is focusing on app deployments and as harness is targeting expert/ developers. No way to compete with AWS or GCP, that's not the idea as it is impossible, but simplify the way they do things yes this is possible.
I can give a basic example. Imagine you want a full Production VPC in your AWS account that spans 3 AZs for High Availability.
You will need :
etc etc
Your options are :
Use the console and do all these steps manually, time consuming and not error free.
Use Terraform or Cloudformation or whatever else and code this template, but you need to know how to write all these.
Both those options requires cloud expertise.
With Archie you will have the way to deploy a preconfigured standard, compliant template or even customise it (with your own ip ranges for example) and have your VPC ready to use in less than 2 minutes ...this without any other tool than your browser and without cloud architecting or coding skills.
This is just a basic example but you can imagine more complex designs, templates that will deploy in one shot ready to use vpc, enable load balancing, autoscaling group, target instances, master and slave database, buckets etc etc ...all this without manual actions or without the need of learning coding/architecting. Possibilities are endless.
We want to offer an easier way to deploy complex cloud infrastructures to clients that don't have the resources, the time or the budget to pay for this expertise.
Thanks for the reply!
I'll have to admit, I don't understand much of what your wrote, but your reply was so good, that I'm thoroughly impressed!! :)
I was asking mostly because I'm going to need to have a MERN stack installed somewhere to host a SaaS MVP.
Some developers I've spoken with have recommended AWS, Google Cloud, & Heroku as possible options.
I noticed IH is using Render for this site, so I thought that platform may be worth looking at too, though I don't know if it's a viable place to deploy my app.
Hahaha sorry, yes I used too much acronyms :)
Coming to your question, yes AWS, GCP or whatever could fit for you, if you just want to run an app in the cloud without too much struggle you can use such tools. But if you want more control, more flexibility than you could do it yourself in the cloud and consider the cloud as your "Datacenter". This is ofc more complex but gives you full control. We could maybe discuss this together and see if Cloudbuddies can guide you in the right direction ;)
Appreciate the help! Would welcome any advice on this, since I don't have any experience in cloud infrastructure. If you'd like, drop me a line at oh.iam.mike@gmail.com. Thanks again!
Greg, good to see.
Sorry for my ignorance. How’s it different from Harness.io
Hey, thanks for reading through and answering. Harness is focusing on continuous Deployment and application delivery. They target developers and advanced users.
Our solution, Archie, is operating a level below, we provide infrastructure. You can compare Archie to terraform, just that to use Archie you don't need coding skills. On the top of that Archie also handle the architecting side,by providing well designed infrastructure templates (for prod and non prod for example) that are preconfigured, easily deployable and even customisable. They also respect the cloud provider best practices. All this right from the browser. No software needed and deployed in minutes.
We target users that are not experts in cloud , small companies that want to go cloud but don't have the budget to hire big consultancies, cloud architects that don't code (or don't want to code), developers that cannot architect correctly.
We offer an easier way to everyone to deploy cloud landing zones/ cloud accounts/ cloud resources/ cloud infrastructures securely and conformly in the Cloud.
Hope this helped to understand better. Let me know if more details are needed ;)
I see. Good to hear.
You are the expert, so I am assuming you have done research on the market segment for that. All the best.
Feel free to DM me (If you would like to brainstorm. I have been an SRE for last 5 years worked on companies which use public clouds and currently, working for a cloud provider :) )
I could imagine that this could simplify the life of small companies, they could use their existing IT to deploy infrastructures in the cloud instead of hiring expensive expert profiles or highly priced consultancies. This could also accelerate deployments for engineers other than Dev (architects, db engineers, applications owner) so that they don't have to wait or rely on devs to deploy what they need. Archie also sets up standards and policies to avoid surprises/mistakes, we want to offer smbs the same methods and tools that big banks/enterprises are using juts more cost effective and easier :)
Imagine you are a database engineer, your speciality is Databases not designing an highly available infra from scratch or coding this infra from scratch. Archie could provide you the adequate account, network topology, control policies, instances where to run the databases, all the infrastructure layer could be done easily by deploying a ready to use or customised (to your liking) template, the only thing the db engineer would have to do is upload and maintain the db. No need to bother the devs to deploy the infra. More time for them and more time for the db engineers.
Feel free to follow us on linkedin, cloudbuddies.io, there are some basic screenshots teaser there. Also don't hesitate to talk about the idea to your colleagues or network if you think it deserves it. We will soon share the link to Archie in our IH company page, happy to have you share it around your network and get feedback.
sounds good. ATB.
Thanks :)