Thesis

We got interested in the world of cost for Cloud. We did a lot of research and learned that it is a red ocean, but we wanted to bring interesting tech to this market.  

Today, solutions fall into a few categories: companies that analyze the cost (why is the AWS bill so high), companies that help you tag resources, companies that do arbitrage, companies that rightsize (you aren’t using your resources well). While those companies can improve things, the value peaks at the beginning of the engagement. Our idea: a solution that runs on the cloud and during continuos integration, new workloads are analyzed to find inefficiencies. The value is ongoing, since development is gradual and incremental and we would analyze each such increment. It could also analyze feature costs and the impact of independent clients on the overall cloud costs as a function of their usage.

Validation

We spoke to VCs and to a company that could be a distributor.

Why the idea didn’t progress

1. People prefer agentless solutions. They are worried that about about agents and foreign code running on their cloud. We spoke to potential clients who said it would be super hard to put an agent in a customers’ cloud.

2. The barrier to entry is very high since the market is crowded. 

3. The buyer isn’t clear. Not all companies have a FinOps engineer or a budget.

Insights

1. Do a lot of research before you start writing code. 

2. Understand what your competitors, which are at the same stage, are doing and how it’s going. (Don’t fall into the same pit that others have) 

3. Try not to take things personally.

4. Strategically choose how you use your network. Close friends you can leverage for everything, but your network is your biggest asset, so you need to be careful in how you use it, and who you reach out to for validation purposes.

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