QuotaGuard

One of our primary goals for 2020 (we missed it by a month) was to integrate with AWS and get Quotaguard natively integrated for AWS users.

AWS is a much simpler, much more direct, integration than we previously experienced with Azure (see my Sept 24, 2020 entry). We had to make a few adjustments along the way as the pricing models were slightly different than what we are use to, but in the end, AWS provides incredibly helpful personnel that can help navigate around any issues for new marketplace providers.

AWS will now be one of our most recommended marketplace integration partners because they went above and beyond to make experts available to help get us up and running as quickly as possible. The documentation was spot-on and - other than us going back and forth with what type of pricing model we wanted to use - the process was straight forward.

So a bit late to launch, but really happy to have another successful launch while still trying to ride out the pandemic.

Onward to integrating with the GCP Marketplace....

I am very excited to continue expanding our footprint across multiple marketplaces, to now include Microsoft Azure.

Integrating with Azure was a bit of a challenge, not so much technically, but in dealing with the behemoth that is Microsoft and learning all of the quirks and bugs present in the Azure infrastructure. It's Microsoft, so I don't think anyone would be surprised if I said that "there are a lot of issues with their procedures and technical documentation". If that's a surprise, I'd love to know what Microsoft products you're using.

We did find it stunning how much of Azure's marketplace onboarding technical documentation was just flat out incorrect. Usually you can find an error and say "oh, I see this likely was something it use to do, but this value has changed a little bit, no big deal..." but that's not the level of incorrectness in Azure's documentation. It seemed like it was written for an entirely different set of API's. We just stopped referencing the Azure documentation all together.

In the end, we just worked against the Azure API as a blackbox and figured out how to integrate with user sign ups, plan changes, usage, and cancellations by blind testing. Once we had that all figured out, there's not much more integration that needs to be done from a technical standpoint.

We've already got over a dozen customers on Azure and it's been a great solution, now that it's up and running. A bit challenging to get everything correct, but once it's running, it appears Azure is a stable and promising cloud marketplace for the future.

Onward to AWS marketplace integration!

July 2020 continued to demonstrate the same overall trends I’ve seen in the last few months for QG. From my vantage point, very little changed in the overall business environment for cloud application service providers.

The most obvious takeaway was there was nothing abnormal about the month, it was boring, routine, and predictable. In 2020, that's a welcome sign.

We experienced normal subscription growth in June and, once again, I didn’t notice any lingering effects from the pandemic although I continue to keep my eyes open for any signs of a slow down.

As businesses continue to migrate towards a new normal, it seems many enterprise customers have their work from home teams established and are moving forward with normal business operations, to include using cloud infrastructure services.

Pent-Up Bounce Back?

Now that we're well into the new normal, I am starting to wonder...will there be an IT infrastructure spending boost in the future as the pandemic becomes less of a threat and the future looks more positive?

Since many companies still aren't operating with completely back-to-normal budgeting, plans, or operations, this may be wishful thinking or too far off to assume will come to fruition, but it is something I've been thinking about a little bit lately.

That's a lot better than the "how bad can this get" thinking of just a few weeks ago.

Hopefully, there is a delayed spending boost to come at some point in the future. It could be six months out, or it could be two years from now. But once the rear-view mirror sees more pandemic that I do out my front window, I'm starting to believe that a delayed cloud infrastructure spending boom is a possibility.

Check back in again in August!

Obviously, it's been a busy few weeks. But I wanted to update on how QG was doing in light of roughly 2-3 weeks of global economic shutdowns across a majority of our customer base.

Similar to last update, nobody has written us noting that something needed to be changed due to the business environment. Mostly, as far as we seen, it's business as normal.

There have been a few retail customers that have downgraded as a result of slowing business, but that has been manageable for the month, so far. We aren't seeing cost cutting at a level that would cause me concern at this phase of the pandemic.

Sign ups continue at a normal, to slightly accelerated, pace. As QG is part of the cloud infrastructure, we may be benefiting more from the overall increased need for cloud services that is occurring from businesses moving to WFH across the globe.

With these updates, I'm going to try and make sure to pass along any tidbits that I think could help an IH'er in the future with product ideas, generation, or production.

First Tidbit : Fortunately, the IT departments for our vendors and customers continue working and we haven't seen anyone indicate they can't help or respond EVEN through their customer-facing business is closed.

If you're trying to think of a product to make, having a product or service that is integrated into an IT department is a good idea, as IT never closes (even if the Internet is down for days, IT will be working...). No matter what is happening in the world, tools used by IT departments are likely to continue to be needed and/or increased during periodic changes to normal business operations.

As of now, that's all we've seen that directly appears to be a result of the pandemic. I'll update soon with anything else we see, but everyone stay safe out there!

I'm pretty sure a lot of people learned a lot about how stable, necessary, and vulnerable their business's were in the past 2+ weeks in the USA and Europe.

I also did not know how vital QuotaGuard would be for my customers in the face of a pandemic, but it's been a few weeks and I can report based on what I've learned so far from customer activity.

First of all, not a single customer has written us using any variation of the phrase "because of the pandemic, we are..." which is surprising. If you look at Customer Service emails over the past month, you would have no idea anything had changed.

At this point, we haven't seen a dramatic drop off in sign ups or any disappearing acts from current users. For mid-way through the month, we're down about 0.5% in MRR (mainly due to one customer wrapping up a project), which is sometimes typical, as MRR growth usually occurs in the latter half of a month for QuotaGuard. This is due to customers exceeding usage limits and upgrading as the month progresses. Most of the early part of the month, MRR decreases when a few customers cancel and/or downgrade. I try hard not to look at numbers before the 15th of each month to keep my spirits up. But this month, of course, I made an exception.

Only time will tell if this stable to slightly positive trend continues, or if worse weather is in the future.

If a national lock-down occurs, will customers cut off "in progress" projects and cancel current subscriptions...possibly to pick them up again in the future? Or will most tech companies (by far our biggest customer segment) continue to work, deploy, and create new projects from remote locations?

I'll post any new changes I observe to share how QuotaGuard is seeing the market shifts as a result of the pandemic and the human/business reactions to the situation.

Stay safe out there everyone.

Reaching 55 active customers, QuotaGuard Shield eclipsed $2,000 in MRR for the first time. With 33% paying customers, lower than our historical 75%, we need to focus on bringing on more customers and converting those free customers to paying customers to get up to our standard of 75% paying vs. free.

To reach this point, a lot of work had to be done to the website to marry the two parallel, but different, product offerings and distinguish one from the other both in Features and Pricing.

Personally, I find it a challenge to sell two different products that both, at their core, solve the same problem...one just has a more robust security implementation and is run on a more secure infrastructure for customers that need a higher level of security.

The logical question is, "why not just make the more secure option an "add-on" type of bolt-on, where a customer could select at checkout that they want the most secure version of the product, instead of make it two separate purchase choices?"

Unfortunately, the two are not interchangeable, they are built on two different server setups and a customer can't just switch from one to the other seamlessly. Therefore, we have to market them as two different products that need to sold independently from each other. That has made marketing and the pricing page a bit tricky to present successfully.