Survived Year One Full-time! A few lessons learned getting to Ramen Profitability.
Hi, Tony here, one of the co-founders of CloudForecast (www.cloudforecast.io). We’re a SaaS business helping companies eliminate wasted cost in AWS without significant engineering time or resources.
End of February 2020 marks my co-founder and I’s one year anniversary working on the product full-time. What an insane, crazy and wonderful journey it has been to grow this business from $0, to default alive, to our current ramen profitability status.
We started this as a side hustle back in 2018, but we made the decision to go full-time after our Y Combinator interview rejection in Nov 2018 (we’re crazy, I know). Despite the tough year of grinding it out, we wouldn’t trade all the lessons and experiences learned for anything else. We’re now using that extra runway to test out growth channels to help acquire more customers.
Francois and I enjoy being helpful to others and we hope to give back in different ways. Sharing a few non-tactical lessons I personally learned (and learning). Happy to share anything tactical if people are interested:
- Stick to your convictions and your vision for the company.
- The advice and feedback you get can often be 50% right or wrong. Trust your gut.
Especially, why you started the company in the first place. - Be relentlessly helpful to others, even if there is no dollar / sale tied to it.
- Have self-awareness of your own shortcomings and weaknesses. Same is true for your business.
- Surround yourself with a tribe of people who will be dead honest with you.
- Don’t aim to simply build a customer base starting out. Aim to build a TRIBE of customers to start out with.
- Embrace and learn from the rejections, failures and all the lows. We’ve been through it all.
- Always ask and don’t fear the rejections. What’s the worst that can happen?
Test, test and test some more. Always be testing!
Happy to elaborate further in the comments below if needed. If there is anything we can help with, don’t hesitate to comment below!
Congrats, Tony 🙌 And thanks for sharing your story and advice!
This resonates with me so much because I went full-time on my business at the end of November 2018, I’m one of 2 co-founders, I’m building a Saas that’s dependent on another platform (not AWS, but Stripe), and I was living in Chicago when I started my business.
The following points are so spot-on:
I think the biggest gamechangers for me in the past year were
Trusting my abilities and voice -- it’s so easy to get lost in the opinions of anyone who gives you advice, especially if you have self-doubts to begin with. Once you start building up your inner confidence and being your biggest supporter, the feedback becomes so much easier to sift through!
Having a solid routine and sticking to it 5-6 days out of the week -- if you can come up with a consistent schedule for yourself and become your own product manager, I believe you can tackle almost anything.
Giving yourself breaks even if there’s a ton of work to be done -- in the beginning, I used to try and power through 7 days of work, but I felt exhausted and unproductive. Working 1/2 days on Friday and taking Saturdays off have significantly improved my productivity and happiness :)
Constantly reflecting -- what’s going well, what could we do better for our customers, what would make our codebase more flexible for new features, etc.
There’s still so much I have to learn in all areas (sales, marketing, product development, design, etc.), but I’m with you — I think the best learning happens through application!
Congrats again, and excited to hear more about how things go with CloudForecast 💪
Thank you so much for the encouraging words and sharing your "game changers"!
I am happy to hear that the stuff I learned resonated to you and your journey. It does sound like you were able to escape the brutal Chicago winters though, so I am sure that's a huge win for you :). I am still stuck here!
I am in the same boat as you with the "so much to learn in all areas". There's so many areas that I fail on all the time and that I feel so inadequate in. It can feel a bit daunting at times. However, I am thankful to have a solid co-founder and a good support system that can help us think through some of those items. I've also gotten a lot from learning from people who are 10x smarter than me.
This is true.
I'm taking all these points with me to the grave, thanks :D
Very nice points, thank you, and congratulations on your effort! It's quite inspiring 👏
Thank you! We still have a long long long journey ahead of us. Hoping that this is just the start of more.