Sunshower.io
Beautifully Simple Application & Infrastructure Management
We submitted a white paper to the US Air Force back in July. We just heard that they want a full proposal from us! It's due at the end of September, and we'd find out if we got the contract by the end of the calendar year. Lots of paperwork to do, but worth it!
We responded to a thought leader's blog post about how we thought his stance on right-sizing was ... a little nonsense. Posted it on Friday (May 24). It went what is, for us, "viral", on May 27 (500 views in a day), with more sustained traffic on May 28 (300 views so far). We jumped from 16 users to 25. We're now managing 2800 instances, and have uncovered 176k (out of 233k) a month in AWS EC2 savings.
The post: https://blog.sunshower.io/2019/05/24/why-right-sizing-instances-is-not-nonsense/
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Nicely done! And it's always helpful to see the results others get from creative marketing tactics, thank you :)
Hi Lisa and Josiah,
Unfortunately, we've decided not to fund Sunshower.io this batch.
This was a tough call - that's why we asked to come back to interview a second time - because we really liked you two as founders. You're a team we would like to see in YC.
However, we weren't convinced that the Sunshower idea was promising enough to fund. AWS cost optimizers is actually one of the most common ideas that applies to YC, so we've read dozens of applications every year from companies working on this. That doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad idea to work on, but it probably means that there are some significant reasons why it's difficult to do, and we didn't hear any specific insights about why you wouldn't run into the same issue that other companies have. The biggest issues, as I understand them, are that actually implementing these recommendations is challenging without causing downtime, and that engineering resources are super expensive and scarce, so that spending engineering time to save money on AWS costs is a bad trade unless the cost savings are huge. In your case, it seemed like you had already run into a lot of these issues with your already customers, along with the issue of reserved instances.
That said, we assume that someone will eventually crack this, and maybe it will be you. It's possible that the rise of kubernetes and containerization will make these problems finally tractable. If you do make more progress getting customers and show that you can actually get them to take your recommendations and save them money, we'd certainly be happy to talk again next batch. And if you would be interested in brainstorming other ideas with me at some point, I'd be happy to do that too.
Thanks very much for coming out here to interview with us in person. I really enjoyed meeting you and hope you'll keep in touch.
Best,
Jared
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Most just say, "Not interested" so this was actually a thoughtful response and maybe has saved you a decade of work
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It was super helpful -- we'd been thinking of doing much of this anyway, so it just accelerates our timelines.
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Wow, very specific feedback. Better than most VC's.
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"...implementing these recommendations is challenging without causing downtime" (and in doing so) " is a bad trade unless the cost savings are huge"
Are there ways to accomplish the same task by looking at historical data from x months? I would imagine the data would be quite the same.
The feedback at least gives you a direction, problem and (because of "previous companies") proves that you're on the right path.
If I we you I'd go back to your customers and try to figure out a solution for them by working closely, maybe even offer at reduced cost while trying to figure it out. After all they were once a startup too.
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We look at the last month's data by default, which we currently get from CloudWatch. The concern is that if you're not using a more modern tech stack, updating instance types can be a lot more than just changing one line of a script/file somewhere. We have three different approaches planned out, the most promising, long-term, probably being getting folks on Kubernetes and helping them manage it, including doing in-place real-time optimizations.
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An entertaining story through the YC Process | https://danielhgranados.blogspot.com/2020/12/journey-to-center-of-yc.html
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@lisa can I connect you with John, he's the VP of a company and I'm hoping he can use your service or just talk to you - so you can figure out a way to solve his problem
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Sure thing! My email address is lisa@sunshower.io
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Thanks for posting this. I was also rejected, its nice that they sent you a reason.
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That's one of the benefits of getting the reinterview, I think. We were hanging out with someone else who had interviewed on Tuesday, and he got a more rote rejection email, but had just done the one interview.
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I am really interested in keeping hosting costs down, but my current setup is at just over $6/month and I've stress tested the setup at over 1,000x current peak traffic. So despite your site looking fantastic, my very frugality would keep me away.
So it seems like this product needs moderately price conscious users, like Hatchbox.io
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We're targeting folks spending 200-200k/month. We're tweaking some pricing, though, so once we start charging, the first 3 instances will be free. That said, you're basically at every cloud provider's base cost at $6/mo.
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This comment was deleted 7 years ago
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I meant 1000 times my current peak traffic (updated the comment). And yep!
Initially, I made a super minimal clone of the Phoenix Framework itself, built directly on Cowboy server. After learning a lot, I made a series out of that work and then installed the real Phoenix Framework.
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How do you feel about this?
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At first, pretty terrible. Now, actually quite good. I'd been having some of these concerns for a few months, and just hadn't quite admitted it to myself. We have quite a few ideas on how to MAKE the problem tractable, and the fact that they deliberated so long despite having seen the idea so many times feels good. We can execute pretty quickly, so assuming I can get MY act together on the sales front (ohhhh lawd 😂) I think we're in a really good spot.
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Despite having basically made up my mind that it wouldn't happen, we got the invite!
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Congrats and good luck!
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Congrats! The question is, will you accept?
I just listened to Lynne Tye's IH podcast, I found her YC story funny and great (and perhaps not very typical?)
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Well, we have to make it in, first. I figure it's about a 1/4 chance now? Maybe 1/3? I try not to get too excited or plan too much because I'm secretly very superstitious and am worried I'll jinx it. Like yesterday I had basically decided that there was no way we were getting an interview.
We've had interviews for other accelerators, and you end up getting a strong vibe off whoever you interview with that definitely steers my excitement about the opportunity itself.
Definitely going to listen to that podcast, thanks for passing it along!
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A local publication found out about us after we placed second in a local pitch competition, and decided to feature us, so we're TECHNICALLY IN PRINT WOOO.
Link to full article (behind paywall): https://bizwest.com/2019/04/04/startup-navigates-cloud-computing-world/
#winning
All of our users -- active or in the process of onboarding -- we've found through our network. Which is great, but doesn't necessarily scale well.
We're looking for ways to get our message & product in front of more people, but the range of potential users (those using AWS EC2, for our initial product launch) is so broad, there's not necessarily one congregation point. A good problem to have, but makes targeting tricky.
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This comment was deleted 2 years ago
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We're doing some Facebook advertising to figure out who's most responsive (turns out, typically CTO-types), since it was recommended by a growth marketing type. Also trying to get involved in Twitter, but that's a bit more of a spray-and-pray type approach. We're blogging, too, but that's going to take a while to really take off, presumably.
We need to get more involved in communities like Reddit and Quora, but there's so much there to get into, and time is finite. :/
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We took second in a local pitch competition! And, importantly, we won what we wanted to win -- a $10k contract with a PR agency for six months. Using them to get our SEO and social media strategies into shape!
Our platform has a lot of capabilities. We know we wanted to do optimization based on metric resource utilization, but we had been prioritizing drag-and-drop deployments first. All that changed when an investor contact sent us a company that was having trouble making their cloud bill. We finished up the outstanding R&D for our metric optimization engine over the next month.
As software engineers, we’ve been in the same position as our target clients. We’ve seen first-hand how challenging it can be for organizations of all sizes to migrate, manage, and monitor cloud resources. We saw how much our choices on, for example, instance sizes could impact our employers’ bottom lines, or how switching to a new deployment technology could slow down our velocity. We tried to solve the problem with the solutions that were already out there, and were dead in the water due to expense or lack of flexibility. So, with a background in distributed systems and compilers (Josiah) and user experience (Lisa), we set about to make a solution that would save companies time and money. And our empathy interviews, conversations with leads and feedback from users all back this up -- it’s easy to rack up charges on the cloud, and difficult to unravel it and figure out how to scale.
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Fingers crossed!
In theory our chances are really good -- we just need to justify the cost & schedule for the project. 🤞