SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Developers Side Project Lands First Customer from Reddit Community CloudyGamers
11 May 2021
Chapter 1: What service does Sven Friese provide with AirGPU?
Do you have one customer right now or do you have multiple? Oh, I've got five at this point. Oh, five. All at 25 bucks a month? Yeah. That's 125 bucks a month, man. That's good stuff. How big does it take you to quit your full-time job?
I don't think I'm quite there yet.
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Chapter 2: How did Sven onboard his first customer?
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Like Eric Wan, 18 months before he took Zoom public.
We've got to grow faster. Minimum is 100% over the past several years.
Or bootstrap founders like Vivek of QuestionPro.
Chapter 3: What challenges did Sven face before getting his first paying customer?
When I started the company, it was not cool to raise. Or Looker CEO Frank Bean before Google acquired his company for $2.6 billion. We want to see a real pervasive data culture, and then the rest flows behind that. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
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Chapter 4: What strategies is Sven using to grow his customer base?
He's bootstrapping AirGPU, a service to play the latest games on your laptop, next to his day job as a software engineer. After working on multiple side projects over several years that either weren't released or generated zero revenue, he recently onboarded his first paying customer at AirGPU, which we love. Sven, you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, let's do it.
Nothing like that first dollar revenue, is it?
It's really amazing. It was the perfect moment. I was just feeding my son, and Guns N' Roses was on. And then I got that sweet, sweet notification from my payment provider that I earned my first dollar. It was really great.
Chapter 5: How does AirGPU work for users with low-spec devices?
How much was the sale for?
That was $25. 25 bucks. I love that. Okay. What are they paying for? What are you building? Yeah. So AirGPU basically lets you play the latest games just in your laptop or any other low spec device. So your Raspberry Pi, your smartphone, whatever.
Chapter 6: What are Sven's plans for scaling AirGPU?
So how that works is you're getting access to a full gaming PC in the cloud, essentially, where you can just install your games and just stream it to your local device. Okay, got it. And when did you write the first line of code for this? What year? What year? That was last year in December. So it's like, yeah, five months. Yep, yep. And what did you do to get the first customer?
How did you onboard them?
Chapter 7: How does Sven balance his full-time job with his side project?
So... For me, how I started this whole project was in one of the bigger cloud gaming communities on Reddit. What I did when I had this idea and I decided to start building it is to basically go back to those communities, talk to the people there. There are always threats every day where people are looking for something like that. You can't really self-advertise those threads usually.
What thread got you the most traction?
What was the name of the Reddit sub-community or sub-group? Cloudy Gamer is the name, the sub-Reddit.
Cloud Gamer sub-Reddit. Interesting.
Chapter 8: What advice does Sven have for aspiring entrepreneurs?
Yeah, exactly. So I reached out to a few people via personal messages because I know that they had a struggle and I had a solution for them. And I posted a few comments here and there. in some of the questions. And that's how I got a few visitors on my website.
This is great. And so how do you go from one customer to 10 customers? Where do you think the growth is going to come from?
I think it's going to be pretty similar. So AGPU is currently in beta, so I'm not really pushing it too much right now. My goal is really to get the first few customers in and see if the tech works, if they're happy.
Um, then my plan for, um, yeah, getting more customers on board would really be to, um, go back to the communities, um, look into questions that are commonly asked, um, turn those into blog posts potentially. Um, that has worked for me with a past project, uh, to a bit of SEO. Um, yeah. And I think, uh, that's going to be one part. You have one customer right now, or do you have multiple?
Oh, I've got five at this point. Oh, five. All at 25 bucks a month? Yeah. That's 125 bucks a month, man. That's good stuff. How big does it take you to quit your full-time job?
I don't think I'm quite there yet. The thing with the product is you're basically renting out cloud computers that are pretty powerful and pretty expensive. The cost side is pretty high for me. Yeah. Creating my daytime job, that would be... What's it cost you, one per month? That depends on usage. I mean, I'm using Amazon Web Services for most of my stuff, and then you pay per use, essentially.
So, yeah, one of the things I'm trying to figure out with the beta right now is how are people using the product, and then I can get a better understanding of what my costs are going to be once I scale up. Yeah, so that's really hard to answer at this point. And you've bootstrapped to today, correct?
Yeah, yeah, that's correct. Anyone else on the team besides you? No, just me. Just you? Okay, we love that. And so what are the plans? I mean, you mentioned some of the SEO plays, you mentioned some other things. I mean, where are you spending the most time in terms of driving growth?
As I said, like driving growth, it's not really my focus at this point, you know, I've got my first users.
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