opsZero should only have a handful of products that we should focus our energy on and optimize for our customers. We are a services company so these are services products:
Everything else we do should fall under these buckets. We should also split up some of the products into their own separate entities such as OMYAC. opsZero is a services business not a self-service product business. We turn the self-service into separate businesses that can be bought independently.
I’ve been trying to figure out what MakeProspect is as it pertains to opsZero. It is useful, but is not a part of opsZero. MakeProspect is a hobby. I was initially under the impression it would be a simple spreadsheet that I would sell but I don’t think that makes much sense. It would be much more useful as a content site.
One of the main problems that I have is everything should be easy for me, but this may not be easy for the customer. Sending an email containing job posts as an Excel is easy for me but not super useful for the customer.
In that regard I am changing the model of Studio a bit. I think the ideal model for MakeProspect and other Studio projects is to use WordPress for almost all the heavy lifting. I am good at the ideation stage but once it is up and running I’d like to spin it out as fast as possible. I do not want to necessarily work on these projects for the long term.
In that regard a hand off of the project should be straightforward:
A Studio template should contain the following:
Why do it this way? With $50/year WordPress ends up being exceedingly cost effective for launching and promoting a new site. By using microservices it is vastly easy to add what we need to automate the site. If we need more power we can add the bigger subscription. WordPress and a Google Sheet also makes selling super simple to sell. We can hire someone and give them both and tell them to run with it.
YerraCo treats and manages capital and looks at all investments internal and external from a financial view. Our goal is to follow in the footsteps of Koch Industries who take opportunities bets on new investments. We treat our ventures and investments as bets based on data and treat each entity we have from the perspective of private equity.
The company then is in the act of derisking investments as much as possible to optimize for returns.
To accomplish this our activities include:
With this we invest in the following:
As I look at our current Solutions on our website with DevOps, AI+DataOps, Cost Optimization, Modernization, and Compliance & Security it makes me wonder what we are pitching. It seems like we are trying to do too many things and I think a potential customer would also be confused. Each of those things is different with a Venn diagram that connects loosely.
I think we need a clear, crisp pitch. We do Kubernetes, Microservices and Compliance. I think this will make sales vastly easier to do and will allow us to be better known with our partners. We are already doing the pitch so we are not adding anything new and are really just bringing our strengths.
Some reasons I think we should simplify to these three:
This is why I think Kubernetes, Microservices, Compliance should be our pitch.
I generally hate having to deal with interfaces and think that if I build an API then others should be able to use it with their existing tools. I have come to the realization that not doing this and focusing on consumer focused offerings is an absolute waste of time for me. It is just not our core competency and something I should not spend a lot of time around.
I want to sell an API not something that I have to build a UX around. Building a single API is better than creating a dozen bad products. We are looking to create offerings that are consistent and add value to our ecosystem and consumer apps are not a good use case for us.
However, by building API focused products we can encourage others to build on top and create content around how to do so.
Currently, System6 has a single customer model that links to all the products. This customer model is tied to the Lead in Close CRM. Unfortunately, I’ve found this centralized Customer object a bit difficult to scale past services. We may have 100s of customers for a product but only a couple dozen for services.
To alleviate this problem each product will have its own customer and will be loosely tied to the Close CRM Lead. This results in each product being built as a silo with its own PnL.
An additional benefit of this is we are becoming “microservices” in that each app in Django acts as a microservice with very small scope to make it easy to test and maintain.
While we can do Azure and GCP we are much slower at accomplishing tasks on those Clouds versus AWS. So we should deprecate GCP and Azure for the services we provide for opsZero and only provide them insofar as we do migrations from GCP and Azure to AWS.
Azure and GCP have completely different models for how they handle IAM which is 90% of the difficult of managing the Cloud. Even if we can get the resources up in a repeatable manner using Terraform, the access control has been the most difficult to maintain. While one can say AWS IAM is also complex, we have experience with how it works so can debug it much easier than Azure or GCP.
Division of energy. Trying to make AWS work well and integrating our products to work with AWS well is a better ROI than trying to build for Azure and GCP. Or if we do provide resources within those Clouds we should run resources in them as opsZero and provide an API for customers to use. By focusing on AWS we can reduce costs and deliver faster. This should be like how Southwest only uses 737s. It brings down the cost to hire, and increases delivery velocity.
Migrations to AWS are okay. We should be okay with migrating companies to AWS from Azure and GCP. We just treat those Clouds as legacy and do the migrations.
We will get deeper into AWS and will not build tooling for Azure or GCP.
As I start collecting information on energy markets it seems more and more that we are going to run into an energy shortage starting in 2025.
In all likelihood this means we are in a long term decline in oil and the real outcome we should hope for is energy efficiency being the name of the game. This means any opportunity to cut energy usage will be the primary driver, as that will be the limiting factor.
A Studio product can be any number of variations of the base datasets that we sell. The reason for this is that a piece of data can be sold to multiple people and each person can have their own separate requirements.
So having one to one mapping of opsZero product to Studio product doesn’t make sense. We need a one to many relationship that ensures that we can build multiple brands.
I’ve always wanted to get to a point where I could run a business on my phone. Where I’d enter some stuff and bam a new product with a domain I could launch. It is something I’ve been really excited about for a long time, but I wanted to do it cheaply with a mostly hosted solution.
I finally found a solution that allows me to use Cloudflare Workers + WordPress.com to write pages on my phone and create entirely new businesses quickly. I am elated as I get the simplicity of creating pages with WordPress, pay for it once, and don’t have to manage multiple sites.
For example, this site abhiyerra.com is hosted on a WordPress.com site but using Cloudflare for routing from yerra.co/api/abhiyerra. Each page in WordPress converts to a different webapps. Some things such as the blog are shared.
So what is the purpose of doing this?
opsZero provides Cloud Infrastructure for businesses. This is a big project working across industries and is focused on IT and Engineering. However, there are massive amounts of problems across industries that can use Cloud Technology to improve their efficiency which aren’t being addressed because the total addressable market is capped at a couple thousands of dollars a month.
These are projects that can be built with simple Python scripts, hosted using Google or Microsoft, paid with using Gumroad, and are made for consumers. None of these projects should take more than a few hours to build and launch.
The idea behind these projects is not so much make a bunch of money, but to learn about selling to different industries using small apps. Can I build to solve a bunch of small problems quickly?