7th March 2025 - Discussion with a Cloud Services Provider CEO

A fantastic discussion with the CEO of a cloud services provider who had lots of experience with lots of service provider models.

Morsels of wisdom

Don't go with hourly support contracts, it's puts yourself and the customer on opposite sides of the fence. One where you want the customer to use up their hours and on the other side the customer actively avoids using the hours even when it could be of much higher value to them.

This was a great comment as it's something I've seen done with a lot of customers when working in Web Development where it's support that the customer actively tries to prove they don't need so they eventually cancel the support contract.

Talk to hosted service providers in Australia. They are motivated to move workloads onto their platforms. Find out how they are marketing and selling and see how your platform would make things easier for them to acquire new customers. Your success would be their success

I think this is interesting advice, if hosted service providers ran the pltfrm, then it could allow customers to come aboard and improve the Australian hosting market. The thing that might not work is that they're likely building their own systems on top of something like plesk or some custom systems on top of KVM or OpenVZ. How would that work when our offering is Proxmox based?

Important Questions pltfrm.team needs to answer

If one of the important parts of our ideal customer persona is that they're primed and ready to leave the cloud environment, what sort of workloads does this customer have?

Questions asked of us

What is it you're trying to sell?
We're trying to deliver a fully open-source bare-metal kubernetes platform that uses incredibly lightweight components to maximise use of the customer's available compute. Then we want to sell Site Reliability Engineering and certified builds of the platform to our customers.

Book Recommendations

The Innovator's Dilemma - Clayton Christensen