Happy New Year! Reflecting on the Past Two Years and 2020 Feature Releases

2021 marks the start of year three working full-time on CloudForecast for Francois and I! It’s been quite a journey and uphill battle to get to where we are at today. Despite the challenges running a bootstrapped startup, we would not trade the experience, relationship’s built (users and non-users) and lessons learned the past two years for anything else.

It’s been an iterative process for the app and the features we’ve built. We are constantly learning and extracting feedback from others. After all, our users are everything to us with how we build our company. The process we take is not rocket science. We simply focus on building relationships and being genuine with every interaction.

What does that mean and how has that looked for us?

That meant our approach to every “sales” call has been “how can we help?” and be upfront and transparent as possible with what we can and can’t do. We don’t focus on the commercial sale, but we focus on mutual fit and if we can actually help.

That meant for every customer check-in call, we approach it with a genuine sincerity to learn. If you want to tell us we suck, we’re ready to hear you out and learn from it. If you want to tell us about your cross country EV cannonball trip or the #vanlife bus you took two weeks off to build, we want to hear about it as well. We want you to believe in our vision and be part of our journey.

Features we’ve deployed in 2020

Through hundreds of interactions, we’ve been able to intake a wealth of information. We started with a light weight product in 2018 with our daily cost reports to help users to monitor AWS cost. Two years later, we’re helping users with tagging compliance, cost optimization and many other areas with their AWS environment. Here is what we deployed in 2020:

• Monthly Financial Report (CFO Report)
• Saving Plans utilization monitoring
• Dashboards performance improvements
• Amortized cost for daily cost reports
• Monthly Tagging Compliance Report
• Reserved Instances, Saving Plans and Spot ROI
• Single Sign-on and Multi-user support
• Small version of the Slack Report
• Dedicated Slack support channel
• #ZeroWaste Cost Optimization Report (beta)
• “Why” Drill-down tables (beta)

#ZeroWaste (beta) – Discover possible inefficiencies and underutilized resources within your enviroment to help you save money.

Reviewing this list from 2020, I can tie everything back to conversations with our users and/or free-trial users. Regardless of how much we’ve grown (there’s still just two of us), our focus is still the same…the users. That’s the beauty of being a bootstrapped startup with no investors possibly “pressuring” us to make decisions that are not in the best interest of our users or our company. Our USERS help us make decisions.

What can you expect from us in 2021?

You can expect more of the same across the board!

Consistency is key and we never want to change how we approach and build CloudForecast. We want to do more of this with the product we build, but also the content we write:

1. AWS Tagging Best Practices: https://www.cloudforecast.io/blog/aws-tagging-best-practices/
2. AWS RDS Optimization Guide: https://www.cloudforecast.io/blog/aws-rds-pricing-and-optimization/
3. Reduce your Data Transfer Costs Guide: https://www.cloudforecast.io/blog/understand-and-optimize-your-aws-data-transfer-costs

Here’s to 2021!

To our customers, THANK YOU. Without your feedback and support, we would not be where we are today with our product and company. We wish nothing but the best for everyone with the new year.

As always, feel free to reach out to Francois or I directly if you want to chat or give us feedback: [email protected] + [email protected]. We would love to hear from you!