Comment by outcoldman
2 years ago
7 years ago I started a site project for forwarding logs and metrics from k8s, docker, openshift in Splunk. It is enterprise offering, and I started making money pretty quick. After 6 months I already made 40k, and quit my employer. Tight now this company generates 7 figures, and still run by me with one more person helping with accounting.
https://www.outcoldsolutions.com
Now I also started macOS development for the last 2 years, and making around 2k a month.
How do you get enterprise customers to feel comfortable depending on a project run by a very small shop? Like, how do you assure them that their operations will not be impacted if something were to prevent you from working for a while, etc?
It was just a right moment. 7 years ago Splunk did not have a solution for showing to customers. Splunk has an app store where I published the apps, we become technical partners, and even participated with Splunk in a few tech events together as partners, like Docker, Kubernetes, RedHat conferences.
We don’t offer anything crazy on the support side. 2 business days reply. It is not sas, so nothing crazy to monitor from our side.
Also, we have insurances, a lot of resellers, we are technical partners with a lot of companies, have 7 years experience of business behind us.
It all came with time, and we build our confidence.
Would love to get into enterprise software. How did you get your first customer?
If you are a one-man shop, no you probably don't.
Enterprise customers seem very lucrative and in rare cases can be, if you are working with a small department or individual with autonomy.
If you find yourself being asked to make a sales presentation to an IT steering committee, run away.
Hmm,can you elaborate a bit? I know lots of people are saying that b2b is the greatest model, since businesses often are willing to pay way more than regular people. There are lots of people who make a decent living from micro-SaaS/SaaS with this business mode. From my personal experience working for companies, they often pay tons of money for quite simple software.
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Is your pricing usage based on log volume?
This helps hockey stick revenue but is also the #1 customer complaint since logs will always grow (no cap).
Just curious how you hit millions in revenue with a 2-person company.
I'm sure lots would love to hear more about your story (e.g. perfect write-up for IndieHackers.com)
We do the same offering as openshift/docker, based on CPU. So we help customers to forward less logs, and not to have impact on our revenue.
I have a B2B micro-ISV, and getting our infosec product in front of the right people is tricky. Would love to hear something about your approach to marketing and advertising?
See my other reply. Basically just a right moment in a right time. We participated as Splunk technical partner in a lot of conferences in beginning and that definitely helped. And focused on making our partners wanting to sell our software by offering them good discounts.
curious ... why not "just use the UF"?
We provide more complete solution, with metrics, alerts, dashboards, everything you need right from the start. So in 5 minutes you will get complete solution. Of course, you can build it in-house, and keep working on it, but it is going to take time and resources. And we don’t charge that much.
Also we provide very unique solutions, like transforming, redirecting logs with annotations applied to your pods/deployments/namespaces. Also can pickup logs from volumes without any additional deployments.
So some customers see benefits from us, some don’t.
or "just use syslog-ng"?