Remote story: How we built a $75K service business, launched a product, and raised VC funding, all 100% remotely.

Ours is an unusual story. A story that was born, written, proof read (PoC) and published entirely remotely.

I'd last met my co-founders Amitava & Bidyut, back in 2014. I remember traveling 2.5 hours to where Amitava lived, on the outskirts of Bengaluru, away from the crowd (we call him Iron Isolation Man 😝), to have a chat on what we could possibly build and startup with.

6 years had passed since, and we still hadn't started. Bidyut kept his day job (later switched to a Cloud company), in a bid to reserve some funds for when we might start up.

Amitava worked some gigs to build customer rapport (and of course, pay the bills).

I'd finally quit my day job in 2017, to work with customers by offering them consulting services for business productivity, cloud hosting, and so on. That surprisingly panned out well, what with generously helpful people I bumped into.

It was 2020, and Covid19 had struck. We had more time on our hands than usual, and it was perfect to re-group and discuss what we must venture into.

After a few weeks of voices constantly emanating from laptop speakers (oh, Covid!), we realised there was one thing in common we all had - the Cloud! And that there was no better way to identify what product we must build, other than working with real cloud customers on their problems.

We wasted no time in signing up with AWS as a consulting partner, and over the next 1.5 years, worked with customers big and small - offering DevOps-as-a-service, Cost optimization services, Cloud Monitoring & Troubleshooting, the works.

It made us realize, how there were soooo many problems developers and businesses ran into when using the cloud, that each problem could be solved with a product targeted at a niche audience.

And thus, KloudMate was born. To help developers who build Serverless-based cloud applications, monitor and observe their applications with absolute ease. To debug in minutes, instead of hours (even days 🤯).

6 months in, we thought we'd managed to build a killer product. But how do we know? Who's going to use it? How do we get the ever-so-busy developers' attention?

Enter, targeted Slack, Discord and Facebook groups (yes, Facebook!) Reaching out was easy - getting in touch with Moderators and Admins and checking if a certain proposition was good enough for their community (whether it's limited time offers, discounts, access to premium features in the future, whatever works to get those early beta users).

(PS: Most of these Mods are helpful and forthcoming - the more relevant deals they're able to share with their community, the better their engagement).

And users we got. 200 of them 🥳! And half of them used the platform in and out, even helped with a ton of feedback.

That out of the way, we simultaneously started to reach out to investors big and small, at home and abroad, day in and day out.

Rejections galore, it took almost 4 months to get the first genuine interest (given the complex nature of our product too).

The founders still haven't met in person, remember 😅.

It was after 6 months of demos, over investor 50 rejections, hours and hours of sorting out indifferences over Zoom, when we landed our first seed investment.

Everyone finally traveled to Mumbai, and met in person. To sign the term sheet.

The first time we'd met in 7 years! But yes, we did manage to start a business, build a product (as a result of), and raise some funds to scale it.

All done remotely. 🚀

Now on the hindsight, it does make us believe, that impossible truly, is nothing.