The cloud is not just a tool for the enterprise. Entrepreneurs, solo founders and small business owners can leverage it to great effect, and for less cost than they might realise. When you are starting out you will either have quite a lot of experience with the cloud or next to none at all. This list is focused on the latter, so we can explore how it's a good idea to embrace it early so you can extract the maximum value from it as your business grows.
What we will discuss will cover the fundamentals that every entrepreneur, solo founder and small business owner should be concerning themselves with
Software and technology are a cost centre for any business. Anyone who tells you that software and technology will not be a primary expense in building a successful and scalable business is lying to you. Unfortunately, this is still a pill that is hard to swallow. Advertising spend, no problem - we all understand that one - and we spend accordingly. As for software platforms and tooling that don't have any client or market facing value-add, well no-one likes throwing money away on things nobody sees now do they. This can be a core failure for businesses. It is usually the boring and the hidden things that fuel business success. Don't let your business fall into that trap.
The cloud continues to get cheaper and more capable. The cost-per-use otherwise known as resource-based pricing of the cloud is eroding what was, historically, a fixed, consistent and increasing cost to your business. As you can imagine, the larger and older the business, the harder it is to introduce change and therefore cloud software adoption can be a challenge. For new businesses, however, the problem is not resistance to change, it is the inability to see the value of investing in the right cloud setup from the start and avoiding the traps of the enterprise organisations and also from locking yourself into a product or stack that stunts your ability to pivot, adapt and grow your business over time.
Much of the capability that the cloud now offers would have have cost many months of developer hours and at least hundreds of thousands or dollars to produce in the past. Now, you can register a domain name for your company and armed with a low-limit credit or debit card have a business software platform in the cloud, with full business communication and collaboration suite in a matter of hours. This is the power of the cloud. Google, Amazon and Microsft (the three primary players at this time) have standardized the "how" and businesses provide the "what" and the "why".
With everything that is built in the cloud chargeable by usage, if you start out with the right platform, built with a small business in mind, with a design to allow growth over time, and only as needed, your software and technology costs will be proportional to your growth and success. No huge outlay, no up-front commitment, significantly reduced risk. It's never been easier to get started and to test a business idea. Think of it this way. You take a predefined budget, rent some flexible co-location office space, design and build the minimum viable platform in the cloud (more than likely a website and some storage) and begin. Or even simpler still, run it all from a laptop in your home. That's what you call a low barrier of entry with next to no risk.
A major problem with the legacy on-premise or self-managed data centre infrastructures of the past was that they were very hard to change. In most cases, large amounts of money had been spent on physical computer hardware, networking infrastructure and service contracts for hosting providers. Once the platform and network topology was built and stable, the chances of someone willing to deploy a major infrastructure refresh to take advantage of new features or technologies to provide a business advantage to the organisation was slim at best.
With the cloud, this situation has been rendered obsolete. In terms of the cloud, hardware has now become software. The new term is 'software defined networking'. Adding new hardware capabilities, or updating and reconfigring an existing topology is now achieved via the command line by your developers. Your business is not married to an infrastructure. Your business is not even married to a particular cloud provider. By building platforms using modern cloud architectures and services, organisations can deploy world class topologies in a efficient, secure and rapid way. The cost and barrier to change is also hugely reduced in terms of cost and effort.
Organisations that are resisting the move to the cloud are going to find themselves at a disadvantage. They already have legacy systems and process baggage and new entrants to their markets can equip themselves with the same capabilities as the incumbents in a fraction of the time. The danger of being eclipsed is real and lengthy and optics driven "agile and digital transformation" programs that only serve to pay lip service will not help. Real change is needed so existing organisations can protect their positions moving forward. This post is about the smaller guy however and how they can leverage the cloud as part of a "digital first" or what I like to call a "digital genesis" process.
Small businesses and solo founders tend to have very specific goals when starting out. This focus can designed and deployed very quickly in the cloud. By following the idea of the minimum viable product (MVP), coupled with a flexible and adaptable cloud architecture, your business will have the abilty to pivot and adapt over time. The one danger at this point, however, is to think you have to provision your idea for your business as you want it to be in a few years. You might be tempted to design and architect for growth and over-provision your initial deployment. The ease of change and deployment of cloud architectures means you should keep things as tight as possible and apply the MVP (minimum viable platform) at the start. We've taught clients about discipline and proper planning, and true adaptability does not come from trying to cover all your bases at the start, it comes from maintaining a tight, nimble and controlled ship so that you can change direction as easily as possible. It is much easier to add capability than to change and existing way of doing things.
Scalability is next. Can your business scale with its success? Deploying your business technology in the cloud means you can. Depending on the services and technology stack that you choose for your cloud deployment, you might get automated scalability included in your platform. Think of App Engine from Google, where it will automatically scale your apps and services up and down depending on traffic. Gone are the days of websites failing at times of peak traffic and hosting companies squeezing you for more cash to mitigate outages at high volume times, then leaving you over-provisioned and over-paying during the rest of the year. Remember, scalability is bi-directional, your platform should only be costing you based on the resources it uses at a certain time. Cloud pricing is built this way. Use more, pay more, use less, pay less. That's how it works. Get things correct and any spike in cloud cost will be offset by increased revenue from that activity.
There has been a downside to the cloud however. If you are not careful, the rush to setup a business can mean you end up just going "SaaS shopping" and outsource every part of your system to third parties. In some cases this is correct and a no-brainer. The obvious answer being email and cloud storage and collaboration suites like Gmail and Google for Business. But once you leave that realm of those core business services, things can get hairy very quick. How do you build a website, how do you manage email lists, analytics, blogging, podcasts, marketing and most importantly, business intelligence (BI) and your company data.
Your business intelligence (BI) and company data are something I've written about. Companies are spraying and losing valuable business intelligence all across the internet. Small businesses especially, should be build data stores that are centralised and controlled by themselves so they can glean the benefits for themselves, not help others instead by leaving that data on other third party services.
Examples would be email. By all means use a third party to handle the delicate task of sendin gout marketing and subscriber emails, but keep a copy of that email list on your own centralised system also. Use the 3rd party for their delivery capacities. Another would be blog posts and articles. Why leave all your writings and expertise on a third party platform that would disappear with that platform if it ceased, or worse still your content be subjected to censorship rules you have no control over? Consider hosting your own blog from your own domain, maintaining control and keeping web traffic on your site and services.
If you stop to think about it for a second, a lot of these platforms that you use for various parts of your data are run from the cloud themselves. This means that your data is in their cloud project, not yours. They build their service to cater fof the widest audience possible, as that is their business model. They learn from you as a customer. Why pay for that when you can implement the core functionality you only need on your own cloud project and be the sole beneficiary of your business data and expertise?
By building a cloud platform that is data-centric, then you can really do whatever you need to do on top. Need to use the latest Javascipt framework or view technology. Fine, rewrite and deploy your updated public website and still acces your data from a published API. Need to make some company data available outside of your internal applications. No problem, just expose a new service to access a subset of your company data. The solutions will present themselves as they are required. Just focus on keeping your business data and software under the one virtual roof and then repurpose are requried. This is business adaptability.
Building for the cloud might seem like a big deal for small business owners and sole founders. I get it, you want to get moving and that&apo;s a good thing. What you might not realise is that with just a little effort and thought about where you plan to go, you can have a very cost-effective platform with full control, flexibility and adaptability to drive that company journey.
We've helped clients do exactly this. Sit and think, build the MVP and adaptable platform for a fraction of the cost, giving an ease of operation. They then focus on the core business and with a process of continuous software and technology improvement in line with the business growth, they adapt, pivot and build capabilities just-in-time.
We’re ready when you are. Simple schedule some time below and let's discuss your business.