From a service company to a product company

the story behind amazee.io

Amazee Labs

• Drupal Agency
• 3 Offices (CH, US, SA)
• ~ 30 people
• started 2009

2009

Need of servers in CH

• Two dedicated servers
• No configuration management
• No monitoring, default configs
• Only 1 operations person - me

2010

Pro7 - Flash Forward

• High Availability needed
• AWS
  • No UI, only CLI
• We survived! 
  • a bit unhappy with AWS

2011

I'm getting up too much at 2am

• Managed Servers
  • Hosting Company in CH
• Slightly configurable by us
• I still got up
  • Issues too Drupal related

2012-2013

This is working well

• More and more clients
  • 3rd party Devs got access as well
• The Voice of Switzerland
  • 8'000 requests per second
• Hired 2nd operations person
• Learned how to run a cluster

2014

We need more control

• Issues got bigger and we got up every time
• PHP 5.4 -> PHP 5.6 ?
• Servers in the US ?
• Servers in CapeTown ?
• I can haz root ?

Begin 2015

a Phoenix

• Full refactoring with Puppet
• Support company but all configurable by us
• Servers in US, SA, CH, DE
• Automated Deployments
• Automated Drush Site Aliases
• Security Focused
• Nginx, PHP5.6/7.0, Varnish, Let's encrypt]
• Local Development with Vagrant

Mid 2015

This could be something great

• Better documentation
• First on-premises
• "Hey, how do you host?"
   
• First Businessmodel
• Presented to Group Holding Board
• Decision to try

End 2015

This is going good!

• Trials with 2 clients went well
• Still a lot to improve
• Board: Separate books for 2016
   
• Hired CEO and 3rd Operations

Begin 2016

We don't have enough time

• Marketing, Sales Strategy
• Budgets
• More documentation
• New processes for multiple clients
• Local Docker environment

May 2016

3, 2, 1, go!

• Launched 1. May 2016

2016

I need more soylent

• DrupalCon NOLA
• DrupalCon Dublin
• DrupalCamps

2017+

We don't stop improving

• Fully Dockerized production hosting
• Node.js, mongodb, elasticsearch
• Custom Docker Images
• CLI, UI

4 People

• 1x CEO
  • ​Sales, Marketing, Finance, Account
• ​1x CTO
  • ​Architecture, Development, Sales, Operations
• ​2x DevOps
  • ​Sales, Operations, Development

24/7

• 24/7 support with partners

More help

• Freelancers

Fully remote

• Portland US
• Austin US
• Zurich CH
   
• or where ever we are
   
• 9h time difference

Learnings

Sales process

• vastly different as a service company
• more investment into a new client possible

saying no

• is very hard
• stay focused on your product
• be careful of unmaintable stuff

Liquidity / Budgets

• much different
• higher base costs
  • Servers, Services, etc.
• same income during holidays

Partners

• very important
• focus on what you can do best
• check them, they can hurt you!

MVP everything

• monthly billing
• bigger customisations
• marketing

Support

• Support is key
• Being human is key
• Be honest is key

Investors

• No external investors
• No pressure
• Focus on client happiness
  • not on investor happiness

Company Separation

• For us the only way
• Helps focusing
• Gives ownership