Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from the Czech Republic: Runecast CEO Stan Markov (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me more about how things evolved now that you have some money and have a team together. How are things going in 2018 and 2019?

Stan Markov: We started to hire the first few people. At some point, we also had to fire some. For someone who hasn’t gone through that, it was challenging. I would say that we still had to prove ourselves that we spent the money in the proper way to reach the breakeven point.

We even had nervous periods where we were burning cash but revenue was not picking up fast enough. That was around the second half of 2018. Towards the end of 2018, we went back on track. There was a six month period where we were getting nervous. Are we doing the right things to become a well-oiled engine?

Sramana Mitra: In 2018, are you’re still purely working with the VMWare ecosystem?

Stan Markov: Yes. The first time we started to introduce anything other than VMWare was at the end of 2019 where we added support for AWS.

Sramana Mitra: What is the go-to-market strategy in 2018? All leads are coming out of VMWare events?

Stan Markov: The warmest leads. Going back to the community, there were some influential bloggers. When you do something interesting and novel, from time to time they cover you in blog articles. This has certainly helped a lot. Sometimes when we have an article from a very popular blogger, we get a lot of free trial registrations. Some of those convert into customers. A couple of times, we were covered by popular IT magazines. That has brought in a good number of leads.

Sramana Mitra: Then in 2019, you are still in the VMWare ecosystem. What prompted the decision to start doing AWS?

Stan Markov: From the inception of Runecast, we were thinking that we’ll start with VMWare but we’ll expand. It was the right time. Also, the enterprise and mid-market had embraced cloud more in production than before. Previously, it was scattered. Microsoft started pressing on the market as well.

We realized that it’s the right time now. Many of them decided to have a hybrid cloud situation. They have an on-premise environment with VMWare. Then they have some AWS or Azure. It made a lot of sense to continue solving the customer problems no matter what flavor of infrastructure they have.

Sramana Mitra: As you go into AWS and Azure, both have very good marketplaces. Talk about how you leveraged the AWS ecosystem and the Azure ecosystem.

Stan Markov: Some of the registrations come from there. I got this advice very early on. They are not so much a source for lead generation but for demand fulfillment. If you enable your product or service to be consumed through the AWS marketplace using AWS credits, that makes it easy for customers to subscribe. In their organizations, they might have pre-purchased some AWS credits.

I would say that only now are we introducing integration with the bidding of AWS. We’d been on the marketplace. Only now are we introducing this integration which will allow us to offer our customers to use credits. We are yet to reap the benefits of being on the AWS and Azure marketplaces.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from the Czech Republic: Runecast CEO Stan Markov
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