Serial Cloud Entrepeneur

[Austin Ogre]

Greetings folks..

I'm a technologist from Austin, Texas. I've worked for a number of early stage cloud start-ups (SaaS and WaaS primarily) and I've also started a number of personal ventures. All of the cloud start-ups exited with some level of success, the personal ventures... well, I consider them my real world MBA.

Still pondering my next personal venture, but in the mean time I figured I would lurk and contribute advice based on my experiences where appropriate.

Please feel free to treat anything I say with a healthy level of skepticism (on the internet everyone is an expert) as I've been horribly wrong in the past. But I try to learn from my mistakes the first time (or at east by the 10th).

Things I know a little bit about in case you want to start a discussion:
DNS, e-mail, product management, SaaS, eDiscovery, solutions selling, product positioning, technical discovery.

Full disclosure: My day job is working for Cloudflare. I won't be posting "try Cloudflare" if someone complains that their website is slow, I promise.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Scot]

Greetings folks..

I'm a technologist from Austin, Texas. I've worked for a number of early stage cloud start-ups (SaaS and WaaS primarily) and I've also started a number of personal ventures. All of the cloud start-ups exited with some level of success, the personal ventures... well, I consider them my real world MBA.

Still pondering my next personal venture, but in the mean time I figured I would lurk and contribute advice based on my experiences where appropriate.

Please feel free to treat anything I say with a healthy level of skepticism (on the internet everyone is an expert) as I've been horribly wrong in the past. But I try to learn from my mistakes the first time (or at east by the 10th).

Things I know a little bit about in case you want to start a discussion:
DNS, e-mail, product management, SaaS, eDiscovery, solutions selling, product positioning, technical discovery.

Full disclosure: My day job is working for Cloudflare. I won't be posting "try Cloudflare" if someone complains that their website is slow, I promise.

Great introduction! Have you read the book?

There are a lot of guys who are working on Internet-based businesses, I'm sure you'll have a lot of great value to add.

 

[Austin Ogre]

@Scot haven't read the book (yet), but it's now in my queue.

 

[MJ DeMarco]

Welcome Austin, great to have a guy onboard with a wealth of experience!

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[lifeNchoices]

Welcome your right up my alley with the as a service business. When I have some questions, I'll be sure to seek you out.

 

[maverick]

Hi Austin Ogre,

Great to have you onboard and welcome!

I'm also involved in a number of SaaS startups and would love to get your insight on 2 areas:
1- What tools/templates would you recommend using to minimize the amount of development work that is needed? I'm mainly interested in hearing what open source tech you generally use (e.g. AdminLTE for your admin area: AdminLTE 2 | Dashboard). The tech stack that you use is also interesting to know.
2- The science of pricing. How did you generally work out what price you were going to use for your go-to-market?

Thanks!

 

[Austin Ogre]

Hi Austin Ogre,

Great to have you onboard and welcome!

I'm also involved in a number of SaaS startups and would love to get your insight on 2 areas:

Thanks @maverick nice to be here. If it's OK I'm going to answer those two posts separately in the Internet, Apps, Mobile forum because I htink they are great questions and it'd be interesting to get the thoughts of others as well. 30 minutes til my next meeting so I'll try to bang out a quick response to the first.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Scot]

Thanks @maverick nice to be here. If it's OK I'm going to answer those two posts separately in the Internet, Apps, Mobile forum because I htink they are great questions and it'd be interesting to get the thoughts of others as well. 30 minutes til my next meeting so I'll try to bang out a quick response to the first.

Post the link here. As someone who's dabbling in understanding basic coding, I'm curious to know as well.

 

[Austin Ogre]

Ok, technology stack thread is up:
Choosing a technology stack...

Pricing is a much more interesting topic and I think @Scot is going to have something to say when I post that for sure.

 

[Austin Ogre]

@Scot the pricing thread is up: How do you price a SaaS offering? It's a little disjoined; hard to talk generically about something that has so many possible moving parts.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[grindmode]

Greetings folks..

I'm a technologist from Austin, Texas. I've worked for a number of early stage cloud start-ups (SaaS and WaaS primarily) and I've also started a number of personal ventures. All of the cloud start-ups exited with some level of success, the personal ventures... well, I consider them my real world MBA.

Still pondering my next personal venture, but in the mean time I figured I would lurk and contribute advice based on my experiences where appropriate.

Please feel free to treat anything I say with a healthy level of skepticism (on the internet everyone is an expert) as I've been horribly wrong in the past. But I try to learn from my mistakes the first time (or at east by the 10th).

Things I know a little bit about in case you want to start a discussion:
DNS, e-mail, product management, SaaS, eDiscovery, solutions selling, product positioning, technical discovery.

Full disclosure: My day job is working for Cloudflare. I won't be posting "try Cloudflare" if someone complains that their website is slow, I promise.

Welcome,

If you can create an app that is similar to Cayenne but less geared toward developers and without focusing on automation/IOT instead think more of how can you help smaller businesses such as a plumber convert from the old school method of doing everything from estimates, receipts, pictures, etc. from carbon copies using a clipboard and pen TO being able to do all of what I just mentioned on a tablet or smartphone to simply his job/make him more efficient which allows him to do more work or his/her few employees to work more efficiently, less errors, instantly have paperwork sent from a job site/while in the field to the customer for all their documents/receipts/etc./being sent back to the "brick and mortar" business where headquarters is located so paperwork is not left for the end of the day then "ehhh I'll do it tomorrow and eventually lost" or potentially eliminating a service such as their existing CRM along with the cost saved from paperwork/data entry pure work a small business would typically hire a secretary for would not be needed anymore while increasing efficiency + cutting overhead, and finally the plumber has notes for himself/herself which think of this in every small business from plumbing to local roofing companies....

The only reason I say "small businesses" because they are mostly likely not using such a "system" because of the need for a dedicated server, they don't "know/understand this technology" which has prevented them from transitioning as a larger company is or has already done, and with your skills you listed if you can find a alternative to the cost of a server running non stop plus any maintenance/set up fee's... whether that be a service that exist for businesses on smaller sizes that don't need crazy amount of storage then fit the other puzzle pieces together and go hustle... If you can't find a solution to that server I'm sure your aware of alternatives "think a NAT server" that I or you could build right now from $5-30 for the actual hardware and software. If you don't know what I'm talking about or the tool that would achieve this task then send me a message....

Enjoy!

 

[Austin Ogre]

Welcome,

If you can create an app that is similar to Cayenne but less geared toward developers and without focusing on automation/IOT instead think more of how can you help smaller businesses such as a plumber convert from the old school method of doing everything from estimates, receipts, pictures, etc. from carbon copies using a clipboard and pen TO being able to do all of what I just mentioned on a tablet or smartphone to simply his job/make him more efficient which allows him to do more work or his/her few employees to work more efficiently, less errors, instantly have paperwork sent from a job site/while in the field to the customer for all their documents/receipts/etc./being sent back to the "brick and mortar" business where headquarters is located so paperwork is not left for the end of the day then "ehhh I'll do it tomorrow and eventually lost" or potentially eliminating a service such as their existing CRM along with the cost saved from paperwork/data entry pure work a small business would typically hire a secretary for would not be needed anymore while increasing efficiency + cutting overhead, and finally the plumber has notes for himself/herself which think of this in every small business from plumbing to local roofing companies....
Enjoy!

That's an interesting niche, question. I think there are a few SaaS frameworks which can be used for rapid prototyping. Techello is one, though I've never used it. The 2 primary keys (for me) when thinking about building a SaaS solution are solving the multi-tenancy problem and roles based access controls (RBAC). How do you want to think of a tenant? Is it a single user? Or a customer with users? Do you need to support MSPs who would manage one or more customers? And then within those roles what permissions are needed from the top down? Today when your SaaS company is you and your dog, everyone needs God mode permissions, but in the future your BizOps person may only need read-only access to a (global) reporting section.

If you want to scale a business beyond a lifestyle business (and one can build a damn fine lifestyle off a SaaS business) then planning for those things from day 1 really helps in developing a solution.

As to where to host? In general AWS, Heroku and Azure type solutions offer some really interesting options for building out a large percentage of SaaS type offerings. I don't really do dedicated hardware for any of my dev/test work anymore... but 15 years ago all my test hardware & dev environments sat in the same building.