CloudForecast
We're helping companies eliminate wasted cost on AWS.
There's no better feeling than getting feedback from customers and directly translating that into features that make their life easier. This month, we managed to push out five feature improvements for our app.
The one I am the most proud of is our AWS Monthly Financial Report feature. We spent the last 4-5 months gathering feedback, making a sh*t ton of mistakes, learning "finance" things, to produce a comprehensive feature that solves a problem for both Engineering and Finance team that need to report on AWS cost every month.
Our core customers are Engineering leaders, so this was a strange new land for us and new sets of problems we got to uncover through this journey. But, through our close relationships with our customers and getting feedback from them, we were able to uncover this problem within our niche.
https://www.cloudforecast.io/blog/latest-cloudforecast-improvements/
We published a new technical resource (https://www.cloudforecast.io/blog/how-tagging-resources-can-reduce-your-aws-bill/) on Monday and posted on various social media / web 2.0 channels on Tuesday. We ended up one of the top post for "Today" on www.reddit.com/r/aws.
Got two quick small wins today:
- My ugly mug got featured here: https://hello.cloudnewbies.com/tony-chan/
- Our "Survived Year One Full-time. Ramen Profitable!" post (https://www.indiehackers.com/product/cloudforecast/survived-year-one-full-time-ramen-profitable--M23vy9TjDzItJaJAjul) got a little bit of exposure last Friday and got tweeted out by IndieHacker this morning. It's been great to be able to connect with others who related to the lessons learned. So happy to hear that this was helpful for people.
Nothing crazy or insane, but every little bit of exposure helps.
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 lessons I personally learned (and learning).
- 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!
We just launched a slew of product improvements for the New Year, 2020!
This is incredibly satisfying now that we have a larger pool of paying customer base to build off of and get feedback from: https://www.cloudforecast.io/blog/latest-cloudforecast-improvements/.
We're relying less on our gut, and now we're now getting tangible feedback to improve on our existing offering. We chat with our customers at least once a month to understand any pain points we can help to solve. We also setup Slack support for some of our larger customers to enable direct conversations with them.
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