Ask HN: How to sell a script that will save companies $100k a month?
Now, I could do it in my company and maybe I will get a promotion for it and that's it. But to be fair, I am tired of this corpo BS I have to tolerate every week and would love to have some capital to quit it and focus on solving actually interesting problems.
I am certain that other companies also have this problem. But as it is solvable with a script, I feel like it would be really difficult to sell this solution to other companies...
So I come to you, HN, for advice. How would you make this into a business/saas/get out of corporate hell hole plan?
I was thinking maybe there is a way to make this open-source but with a cc-by-nc-sa-4.0 license to make big companies pay for this solution. But I feel like if there is no way to detect this being used, there is actually no way to enforce it...
30 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 79.6 ms ] threadMake sure this person understands the situation they’re in and whether it’s actually a problem before thinking they have some surefire business.
That said, if all it takes to fix this is a script, I’m guessing other developers/IT will or have done it on their own. It sounds a little like it’s your job to fix this and you’re simply declining to do so lol
Look at what they are doing.
It would be interesting to see a novel script though.
Try to do some preliminary research in the area to see if your script is sufficiently niche from the established players in the area of cloud optimization.
Isn’t this, like, a primary feature of AWS, etc? Why need an inhouse system for that? Or why need AWS then?
I can say a lot of negative things about AWS and the culture from having been there 3.5 years. I worked in the consulting department (Professional Services).
While we wanted the customer to bring more workloads into AWS, we were all encouraged to help save the customer money where we could. No one got brownie points for coming up with a more costly solution than necessary.
Companies won't care that you just run some scripts, in fact they won't care much how you do it at all. They just want testimonials that you've done it for other companies and then price it to match the value they get.
E.g. if it's really $100k/mo and you were viewed as a reputable consultant in this area, so long as you can prove that savings, charging $100k to do your routine is possible.
GTM would be a combination of cold outbound and content marketing. Start with your personal network, do warm outreach, and try to reach one/two degrees of separation to get potential starter clients. Give 2 to 5 starter clients a discount(or for free) in exchange for testimonials(social proof). Once you’ve completed delivery to your starter clients, leverage the testimonials for cold outbound and content marketing.
Second thought is: how are you determining how applicable these "misconfigurations" are to other companies? How do you not know this $100K in savings is due to idiosyncrasies at your company that doesn't extrapolate to others?
Also if your script just say for example picks better VM sizes you better be sure there are no outliers where the existing legacy VM size is for a particular reason, be it a reserved instance, negotiated pricing or some technical constraint. Whatever your script does I doubt you can run it as is on any client as root aws and walk away and the customer be happy.
Good luck!
AWS and GCP (I don't use Azure) show me possible over-provisioning and unused resources, and have tools to do more digging and identify savings. I have seen ads/articles about tools that claim to reduce cloud hosting costs. Where does your tool fit? Why would I trust it with access to my hosting account?
2. Create a Youtube video of how you fixed it.
3. Spread that video far and wide.
4. If you get traction consider adding an offering
Be the go to person on Youtube for infrastructure cost savings.
The enterprise is a shitty place to find recognition. Seek it elsewhere.
Sleep on it. It’s easy to get excited. Your script could be amazing or maybe it’s not. Take your time evaluating the situation.
Like others have mentioned, this is a consultant or services company opportunity. However, getting your first customer is extremely difficult, no matter how much money you promise to save them.
Think about offering your solution as a SaaS offering. It will take some elbow grease to build out. This will determine how dedicated you are to the whole thing.
The play is, like what others have said, it's your expertise and providing consulting services to others struggling with cloud spend.
hn handle @gmail.com
For those departments, once you know the process, you can submit your code - that doesn’t contain customer information - to be approved to be released as open source on AWS Samples with an MIT license.
https://github.com/aws-samples
The approval process doesn’t go through your manager. There is an entirely separate team and the turn around for approval is usually less than a week.
I was able to have access to all of the frameworks and utilities I wrote from scratch for customers after I left by going through the process. It was all above board.
It often takes refactoring an implementation after doing a lift and shift after determining whether it’s worth it.
And honestly, the way you presented your question, it doesn’t seem like you have any customer facing experience working with medium to large businesses to gauge whether your script is generally applicable to different use cases.
Your script is probably going to work 85 to 90% of the time, optimistically, 5% of the time it will do nothing, and another 5% of the time it will cause mass outages, and a massive loss of profits.
It's better to over allocate resources, let's say you run an e-commerce platform that makes about 30 million a year. Right now you're spending $10,000 per servers per month, and in a typical month you really only need to spend $7,000. But a new product just went viral and it's totally selling out. Does it feel like a good idea to lose millions of dollars to try to save a few thousand bucks ?