Making a business case for the BEAM

Thomas Depierre

softwaremaxims.com

@Di4naO

Take a pic of this slide

  • Business Model

  • The BEAM case

  • TwitterForPets

  • ACME Inc.

  • MySAAS

What is a Business Model

This is only a model

Business model

  • Who is the market
  • What you sell to them
  • How you sell to them
  • Who get the value

Business Model

Lemonade stand

  • Market: classmates
  • What: Refreshing beverage
  • How: Have a stand and tell them
  • You get the money

Business Model

The BEAM strengths

How you probably never thought of the BEAM

Scale/Distributed

  • You can use your cpu mostly efficiently
  • You can do stateful distributed stuff without needing specific skills in another tech.

BEAM Strengths

Malleability

  • It is easy to refactor and change or evolve code
  • It is relatively easy and fast to test
  • You have a strong result oriented ecosystem
  • The BEAM have your back

BEAM Strengths

Low cost

  • You do not need a lot of devs
  • You use your hardware pretty well
  • Most BEAM developers have a strong ops side

BEAM Strengths

Reliability

  • It Just Works TM
  • Not as much ops people needed
  • Good user experience

BEAM Strengths

The BEAM Case

  • Scale
  • Malleability
  • Low Cost
  • Reliability

BEAM Strengths

Making a business case for devops

Shows that the faster you can deploy from commit to production, the more positive are your business outcomes

 

This is basically revolutionary for Software to talk in these terms.

TwitterForPets

aka VC-funded Startup in the current ecosystem

TwitterForPets

TwitterForPets

  • Market: Investors
  • What: Liquidity Event
  • How: Growth mostly
  • Founders and employees get the money

TwitterForPets

The BEAM Case

  • Scale
  • Malleability
  • Low Cost
  • Reliability

TwitterForPets

Scale

  • I don't think scaling really matters for this kind of company
  • You can handle growth well
    • Tell that to investors to convince them it will happen
  • Matters a lot when your growth get stopped by your limitations, you hit a ceiling

TwitterForPets

Malleability

  • Selling Growth is usually through:
    • Product Market Fit
    • lot of pivot
  • Malleability helps there a lot

TwitterForPets

Low Cost

  • This does not matter. Do not talk about it
  • Low cost mean less value extraction from investors
  • Less employees aka less FOSS developers

TwitterForPets

Reliability

  • Space for growth
  • Easier to capture users
  • Make you feel like a winner
  • Matters a lot when your growth get stopped by your limitations

TwitterForPets

I am not sure TwitterForPets should use the BEAM

TwitterForPets

 migrate latter maybe to unlock growth

TwitterForPets

ACME Inc.

Aka Big Co TM

ACME Inc.

ACME Inc.

  • Market: The customers they already have
    • Getting new customers is expensive
  • What: What we can convince them to buy
  • How:
    • Prefer cross-sales and upsales
    • Reducing costs
    • Investing capital in new product
  • Profit is the value extracted, which goes to shareholders and the government

ACME Inc.

The BEAM Case

  • Scale
  • Malleability
  • Low Cost
  • Reliability

ACME Inc.

Scale

  • Cross-sales enabled over the whole customer database you have
  • Prototype to production fast

ACME Inc.

Malleability

  • Use it for any product
  • Can prototype and check new ideas easily
  • Add features to close sales
  • Adapt to your in-house ad hoc broken systems

ACME Inc.

Low Cost

  • Killer apps for the BEAM in this context
  • Lowering cost is how ACME Inc. makes profit
  • Small capital investment in experiment
  • Easy, fast RoI. Which finance department love
  • High positive cashflow. Which finance love too

ACME Inc.

Reliability

  • They probably have no idea what it means
  • SLA is a risk, reliable reduce risk
  • This is a competitive advantage, your competitors do not have it

ACME Inc.

ACME Inc. business case for the BEAM

  • It reduce costs
  • Product Velocity
    • It can cross-sale easily
    • It allows to explore easily new cross and up-sales opportunities
  • It is a differentiator with competitors

ACME Inc.

Go sell the BEAM to big company.

ACME Inc.

Some of them do use it but keep it a secret

MySAAS

Aka Bootstrapping

MySAAS

MySAAS

  • Market: Have to find it
    • Getting new customers is expensive
  • What: What we think they want
  • How:
    • By having super low cost
    • and only variable one that linearly or sub-linearly scale with customer
    • Positive cashflow is the goal
  • Profit is the value extracted, which goes to founders, employees and government

MySAAS

The BEAM Case

  • Scale
  • Malleability
  • Low Cost
  • Reliability

MySAAS

Scale

  • You can concentrate on sales
  • Pretty hand-off
  • Users can self-serve
  • Prototype to production fast

MySAAS

Malleability

  • Can prototype and check new ideas easily
  • Can follow the evolutions of your business itself
    • Going from nothing to a lot
    • Not having to change your stack is a lot of help

MySAAS

Low Cost

  • Killer apps for the BEAM in this context
  • High positive cashflow
  • You do not have capital to invest
  • Profit at the first customer

MySAAS

Reliability

  • Can sleep at night
  • You cannot pay ops people anyway
  • Self-service, handoff
  • You can't afford unreliability anyway

MySAAS

Probably a match made in heaven

Massive competitive advantage

MySAAS

Who am I?

  • Reduce costs
    • Mostly infra. Ask me to look at your AWS architecture and bills.
  • Optimise Product Velocity
  • I fix your/other teams mess

thank you for listening