Ask HN: I have built a giant product. Now I want to trim it down

3 points by pravanjanc 2 years ago | 4 comments

So, we started in 2021, and we have built a giant DevOps automation platform (https://www.facets.cloud/). We’ve been selling to enterprises and growth-stage companies. Our challenge right now is that the sales cycle is pretty long, and we don’t have enough users to get proper feedback. So, we thought of trimming the solution to suit the needs of early-stage startups and make the product self-serve. We are thinking of something on the lines of “easing cloud deployments and infrastructure management”. What would be something that’s helpful to developers of early stage startups? Think on the lines of easy rollback, managing cloud infrastructure, spinning up environments, etc.

Loxicon 2 years ago |

Or, "migrate from cloud to cloud"

If someone is fully embedded into the AWS eco, and want to move... I havent seen a good solution for this yet. It's also hard to do because the answer to "move to what" will be different. Just a thought.

BTW, I am an early startup selling to startups. I am curious: how do you sell to enterprise? how does that even work?

pravanjanc 2 years ago | |

> how do you sell to enterprise? how does that even work?

It's not working as much as we want it to. I mean early sales were from network. But being a one man sales team, it's really difficult to map multiple personas in an enterprise and sell to them. That's why we are stripping down our product to something people can buy in a self-serve manner. Getting a good number of users quickly is what's most important for an early stage startup is what I've realized.

tj1516 2 years ago |

Went through your website. I think you need some video or something so that people can understand your product better.

I am an early-stage founder here, and we normally use AWS + ECR + ECS. But, now we are facing challenges because we need to shift to a different cloud or incur costs from AWS. (credits over). But doing that entire thing looks like a 2-3 months project. So I think, if you can solve this challenge, it'd be really nice.

and the other things that you mentioned, they are somewhat easy to do if you're on a single cloud and don't have a complex infrastructure.

gjvc 2 years ago | |

>Went through your website. I think you need some video or something so that people can understand your product better.

Yes, show the steps the user takes from zero to deployment or whatever the operation is.

The "how" is better that the "what" in these situations, IMO.