We will release products and grow our business exclusively through partnerships. Our business is Cloud Infrastructure and our long term plan is to become a Cloud Marketplace. However, each vertical has domain specific knowledge we lack and do not have a large team limiting our reach.
Partnerships
When I look at our failures this year it has been largely around going into a new vertical alone. If we go at a vertical alone we have to figure out the market, the marketing, and sales. It creates the onus on us to deliver and sell and learn a new industry. Even if we move horizontally within an industry we will still need to context switch as we sell from startups to governments to healthcare. This prevents us from focusing on a single vertical making our growth feel haphazard and lacking focus. We need teams single threaded focused on each vertical.
Traditionally, a company that wants to grow its business either hires people with expertise to build that business or buys a business that has those relationships. The problem with that is it becomes a capital expenditure where a failure means a total loss, partnerships allow us to make entering new verticals an operational expenditure. This reduces the cost of launching and testing something new and attacking it with people who are already knowledgeable.
Our goal long term with opsZero is to build a bazaar style marketplace servicing the needs of multiple verticals cobuilt with partners. We will become a distribution focused company with the current services becoming another “partner” within the ecosystem. Our buckets are DevOps, DataOps, IT. All our products and services should live within these three buckets. And each service we release should have a partner who is responsible for servicing it.
This changes the organizational structure of the company to be like a startup studio or incubator. While we should sell a cohesive whole to our customers, behind the scenes it can be our partners who service the end result for a particular vertical while we complement them with our value add.
Solutions
Our release methodology will change to the following:
- Figure out the service we want to create for a vertical.
- Find partners who could be good fits for coselling that product. Figure out ways we can partner with them.
- Cobranded and create an OpsZero Marketing website and shared collateral and sell with partner. Focus on distribution and support the partner with data and sales resources.
- Continuously work with partner to more effectively reach customers and service the work for the customers.
The things we can do with a partner are three fold:
- Comarketing such as content, webinar, videos or other.
- Build new products that combines our strengths.
- Emails or other joint collaboration.
Products
The question then becomes what do we do about products?
The products we build for opsZero are single purpose tools that don’t generally have UX and are built fundamentally for a technical audience. Cloudflare, for example:
- https://www.cloudflare.com/developer-platform/products/ is a non-technical website explaining the products that Cloudflare offers for a non-technical audience.
- https://workers.cloudflare.com is talking about the same but built for a technical audience.
We will do the same. The main opsZero.com website will be built as marketing for nontechnical audiences. We will build non-technical product pages if it fulfills a need otherwise we will generate self-serving product pages for technical audiences and link from the main website. This provides us with the ability to reach technical decision makers as well as non-technical ones.
These technical pages will live within their own subdomain like the Cloudflare example above. For example: dodleads.opsZero.com