bluehost

DevCloud

Frictionless Cloud Servers

for developers, by developers

Business Case

Realization

Being online and serving your customers is a rapidly rather exponentially growing need for businesses in this modern world. Be it a IT services agency, a restuarant owner or a proprietor running a garage sale, everybody needs faster and efficient methods to run their business, reach their customers, market their products and endless touchpoints to make their businesses grow.

Market Insights

Businesses rely on expensive enterprise solution who have build solutions like a Shoe thats fits all. While it may have its own advantages, the biggest disadvantages of such products donot cater to specific needs of an industry but be generalists and serve everyone.

Hypothesis

Hosting products in the market are not meant for small & medium businesses. They are complicated in user experience and high on cost. Users pay for a hundreds of features and tool sets that theydon't even require and never will.

Target Audience

- Small to medium enterprises - All kinds of Industries like IT services, Arts & entertainment, ecommerce, business services etc. - Small-scale devshops, IT solutions agencies - Full stack developer of a startup - Freelancer/Independent IT consultant

Problem areas

- All the enterprise products are complicated. - It needs proper understanding and learning their system almost every tiny bit a devops is trained in. - There are simple to understand products like digital ocean that are credit card based systems that have great offering. - The price for cloud infrastructures, likes of AWS is a lot. - Too many tools and features that tech doesn't need.

Product Opportunity

Build a simple to understand, easy to use, affordable platform with just the right kind of fea- ture sets to help developers of small/medium businesses deploy their code on cloud without worrying and having pain to understand complex deployment methodologies and tasks.

Personas

Venu Gopal

Back end developer in a tech startup - Uses AWS as its an industry leader with lots of features, documentation, support. - Finds it too expensive though. - Impressed with lots of features. - Want solutions that can let him scale when his startup grows. - Pays Rs. 15,000 per month to AWS. - Finds documentation very well written and elaborate.

Rahul Garg

- Owner of a IT servicing agency. - Uses AWS, haven't tried Google cloud - Recommends clients to be on AWS who have scalability needs. - Open to try out product that serves small businesses as they find AWS too expensive. - Haven't tried google cloud platform but is aware about it, too comfortable with AWS.

Sanya Malik

- Health& fitness Startup founder - Uses digital ocean as recommended by technical lead in her company. - Requirements for her business is to host an android app and serve 1000 - 2000 customers radially growing over a consistent rate of 10% currently. - She wants a stable environment that lets her app perform fast and stable. - Tech wants data to be safe & secure and easily management after deployment as per scalable needs.

Objectives

Increase DevCloud's customer acquisition & retention by improving the product's key problem areas like user abuse ratio, bad product experience and improve on an overall customer experience from tech, design, service and offerings.

Problem Areas

Abusers

First MVP of Devcloud's billing was post paid. It also doesn't forces users to attach any payment instrument. This caused users to abuse the system by using the services and not pay.

Acquisition

Users were asked to add balance to a pre paid wallet before they could spin a server. Such bad experience led to a drastic fall of user acquisition.

Lack of Trust

Lots of users complain about that they were being charged different bill amounts each monthly cycle. This creates lack of trust or doubt about whether they are being cheated.

No presence in market

There is little awareness of a product like dev- cloud in the market having big player like AWS, google cloud and digital ocean who have taken the market by storm. Also, Devcloud lacked a planned marketing strategy.

No Brand Strategy

DevCloud as a brand needed evolvement in order to connect with its target audience in order to acquire, engage and retain them as loyal customers.

Lack of Product parity

DevCloud is still in its initial steps to make a mark, The product has its basics right, Its easy to use but still not powerful or useful enough for a lot of de- velopers who would want to make a shift from a competitor product.

Competitors

IaaS

PaaS

Experience Strategy

Platform stategy

- Building a responsive web app is our speciality. Given the tech capability for a MVP, Web apps were a choice more than native environments. Future goals are to scale to Native android and then iOS environments.

Freemium model

- Provide a trial period of 15 days and give limited access to the new users to experience it first and then begin a subscription model.

Referral program

- Incentivize users to refer their friends who can potentially benefit from devcloud. - A promotion like this will make businesses grow faster and induce an already going on culture of helping each other in the startup community.

Value Adds

- Planning and created POC of various value adds and feature sets based on user interviews and product differentia- tion and similar offerings that competitors are providing.

Billing Model

- Envison 2 models for billing, that is Pre paid and post paid for both kinds of user needs who have a limited period require- ment and for those who want to run this service on an uninterupted recurring basis.

Brand Experience Strategy

- Brand strategy was thought to connect with our target audience that is small businesses, IT services and tech startups. - Brand manivestation has taken place in design in the form of setting up a brand guide, identity, mail marketing campaigns, banners, posters etc.

User Experience

Freemium flow

2 step sign up flow

Studies show Users do not participate in long sign up forms, pay before they try out new products, users sign up if they like product. - While it was necessary for us to make our users sign up to spin up our servers, It was of atmost importance to make this process as smooth and frictionless for the users without inviting abusers. - Check users score by an API that deter- mines how risky the user can be and is most likely to abuse our system. We man- date mobile & email verification for such users.

The Firewall Rules screen — a table of incoming rules with permission, service, protocol, port range and source IP columns

Firewalls

Security feature

Firewalls is a value add feature that lets users secure their cloud servers without having much intervention to set up complex firewall rules. Its done by defining firewall templates to each service and apps they would install in their servers.

Billing

Pre paid billing

Billing focuses on transparency and fair- ness in how much they are charged each month. There's a direct relation between Usage and bill amount. - User can see outstanding balance for previous due bill, be notified, download invoice etc. - See usage per month & compare it with previous months. - There will be future feature improvements like usage calculator so that users can recharge their wallet accordingly and be worry free for months to come.

Referral

Marketing feature

Users can refer their friends who can bene- fit to devcloud's service. This will promote a culture of businesses helping each other to grow and word of mouth deceases our marketing spend. - In return, referrers receive free hours of usages per referral.

The Manage Orgs/Projects screen — an organisation with 25 servers running, a 12-member team table with roles and statuses, and an account switcher

Feature concept

Teams

Developers work in Tandem with each other when it comes to coding, pushing various builds, code testing, merging. Thatswhy, deployment management should also be collaberative. - Teams let Developers to assign admins, member rights to provision servers and manage them as a team.

Brand Strategy & Design

Core Idea/Story

DevCloud is a Product that is built for simplicity. Made by developers, We shall market ourselves on our strengths that we are developers ourselves and we understand what small businesses & developers need to run their code and deploy online. The product is fulfils the bare necessity yet its growing with you as the business you are in grows.

Competitor’s space

Linode: - High performance SSD linux server for all your infra needs

Lightsail: - VPS made easy - Everything you need - Low predictable price

Digital Ocean: - Deploy in seconds

Kubernetes: Production-grade container orchestration

bluehost

DevCloud

Tagline

"Frictionless Cloud Servers.

By Developers , For Developers"

Brand Values and Attributes

Made by domain experts