SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
They Track $15m in Cloud Spend, Make $17k/mo. How they plan to scale.
16 Apr 2021
Chapter 1: What unique pricing model does the guest use for cloud services?
I have no standard pricing model. I try to get a percentage of cloud usage, kind of low digits overall. So think of it, if you're spending $100,000 a month on cloud spend, I'm going to try to get $1,000 to $2,000 of that at least.
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He's building a very cool company called Taloflow, which is a Y Combinator-backed company in cloud management. Prior to that, he was in a 3D printable and wearable and auto parts space. He was in the developer ecosystem team at Atlassian and dropped out of Claremont Mechanic College in 2014. He's Forbes Under 30 in manufacturing at 22 and Forbes Under 30 All-Star based in LA and Vancouver.
LV, you ready to take us to the top?
I am. Yes. Thank you.
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Chapter 2: How did the guest pivot their business model to focus on cloud management?
And when that cadence came into play, we started learning what kind of tooling people need in very targeted ways. And the question really became like, hey, if I built this, for you, will you pay us? And that's how we started getting customers to say yes. Love that. But yeah, definitely offered a ton of white glove service before we even got there.
And how are you pricing? What are these customers paying on average per month to use the tech?
I have no standard pricing model. I try to get a percentage of cloud usage, kind of low digits overall. So think of it, if you're spending $100,000 a month on cloud spend, I'm going to try to get $1,000 to $2,000 of that at least. But it really depends. I have revenue coming from two different sides of the market right now. I have revenue from the demand side.
I have revenue from the supply side as well. We have cloud vendors that pay us as well for buyer intent data and for data on how they can better position their product in the market as well. Interesting. Okay. And how many now customers are you serving today? Less customers, but more revenue from each. So we have eight paying customers.
Got it. So down from 11 to eight, but you've scaled up, right? Which makes sense because if their cloud spend increases and you're taking one to 2%, you sort of make more money there. So I guess, is that the plan moving forward? Less customers, higher volume prices, higher ACV?
The plan going forward is to really focus our business model on monetizing the cloud vendors. And so I expect that we're going to have a painful few years where we're going to be more focused on the flow we can get through the platform for the cloud vendors while we learn how to monetize them.
And sometimes you have to meet a threshold, similar to like G2, right, where they have to meet a threshold before they can really monetize the buyer intent data at a large enough scale. So we're just prepared for that.
Can I ask you how much sort of GMV is you're tracking through the platform in terms of cloud spend right now? Do you have enough roots into those systems to actually quantify that?
Yeah, so it's not a perfect representation of what we're doing, but we are definitely monitoring close to 15 million a month in GMV. But again, that's the caveat. It's monitoring. I can see that going through, but it's not like I'm... I'm helping people make decisions for each dollar of that. So there's a bit.
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