Why an AWS partner in 2018, rather than a product or something else? Now looks like a genius idea.

I already had plenty of experience within the local cloud computing market when I left my corporate job to build something of my own. Which over time led to noticing that AWS users were hugely under-served in the Baltics. That inspired me to start a local AWS partner company, then pivot it to resell instead of pure engineering services and focus on working with startups instead of big enterprise or government customers (so doing the opposite of 99% of other AWS partners). It actually ended up being partially a product company because deep below the surface we have our own tech stack built to run this unique business model.

From zero to 25M revenue - what are your biggest, most surprising learnings building Cloudvisor?

I would name 3 things, starting with the beauty of the compounding effect. Growing 50% year over year doesn't feel that dramatic, but it adds up to something massive when you manage to pull that off many years in a row. Second, being a small fish next to a big whale like AWS can be a great business. We're not the only example in the Baltics, just look at the companies operating in the Shopify ecosystem. Third, focusing on small and medium businesses can be a wonderful business strategy. There's far less competition, no winner-takes-all dynamics, and customers actually perceive and appreciate the value you deliver.

The company is remote-first and English-first. Where are customers now, and where is the team?

It started as an experiment, way before remote was cool. I simply wanted to hire from a pool 100x bigger than Lithuania. I was always sure cultural fit is more about the person than the country they grew up in and that you can build the way of working around the absence of an office. Now we're almost 60 people scattered around Europe, with an exceptionally low turnover. Later we took the same approach with customers and it worked nicely as well. Especially because we picked our audience - startups and tech companies - accordingly. Currently Cloudvisor has close to 2,000 customers from 80+ countries (UK, rest of Europe and US being the biggest chunks).

Have you ever considered going multi-cloud (Azure, GCP)? Why stay single-vendor?

Not many people know that AWS is roughly a 150B yearly revenue business that is making up more than 50% of Amazon's operating profit. They have been dominating the cloud computing business for years and in the startup segment that is even more obvious. So there's simply very little incentive to distract yourself with other options when 2/3 of your target customers already use AWS. At the same time, the world is full of companies that are mediocre at many things because they don't know how to say NO or how to stick to their priorities. If your ambition is global, I say that focusing on a niche and being world-class at it is the best strategy you can go for. Especially without a VC pushing you to become a decacorn or die trying.

Where do you see opportunities for founders? What are exciting themes to build?

I would recommend anyone going after B2B, especially small and medium businesses. You might not get that much spotlight or get to brag about spending 1M on Meta ads as in B2C, but here your product and quality still count. Churn is also much lower, so you get to keep the majority of the business you build over time with boring stuff like a strong product, good customer care and sales calls.

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