Oatfin GTM Strategy
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My goal with this newsletter is to write weekly on Sunday to reflect and talk about the features we ship weekly, sales, marketing, fundraising, customer wins, etc. My ask is for introduction to investors and enterprise partners who are excited about the cloud and developer tools space.
I like to think of Oatfin as a container platform or a simpler, more intuitive, and developer friendly version of Kubernetes. A lot of enterprise companies have started to use Kubernetes, but a lot of companies are also reluctant to use it due to its complexity.
I’ve talked a lot about the product and what we are building. I thought I would take the next couple editions to talk about the business side, sales, marketing and how we’re approaching our go to market strategy.
The fact is selling at a startup is different from selling at a large enterprise company like Google or Amazon. My co-founder comes from a traditional sales background and recommended I try out a few sales tech stacks and so this weekend I started playing with LinkedIn Sales Navigator, HubSpot, Apollo.io, Seamless.ai and Regie.ai. These tools have their strengths and weaknesses, but I don’t think as an early stage tech startup they provide a lot of value.
As a founder, I get hundreds of cold emails from people who want to sell me stuff. These emails are usually random and nothing I’m interested in.
One of the great blogs I read is from Paul Graham: Do Things that Don’t Scale. That’s how I started and got our initial traction. The way I approached it was how do I find customers who are interested in our product? After a lot of thoughts, I converged on jobs sites like Indeed, Glassdoor and LinkedIn. I’ve found job sites as a great way great way to get inside the mind of the people with the problems. Chances are if they are hiring, they are trying to solve a problem. So far, our traction has been mostly inbound. We’ve done little sales and marketing.
First Launch in 2022
95 total users
30 paid users across 10 companies
3 enterprise customers
$98,637 in ARR
Looking at our customers, it's fascinating that it's mostly cloud solutions architects and pre-sales engineers. These people are experts in the cloud, and yet they are using our product to automate their customers' cloud infrastructure.
Right now, we’re not ready to just let the product out in the wild and so we are looking to work with enterprise customers in order to make the product better. Our goal with the enterprise is we want to partner with them just like a lot of enterprise companies are looking for innovative startups to partner with.
On that front, we’ve been doing a program with Accenture and at some point we are thinking about paid pilots with them and their enterprise customers.
Las week we pitched Morgan Stanley Inclusive Ventures Lab and one of our asks was to partner with the Morgan Stanley Technology Group. The same way we’ve been pitching MassMutual and our goal eventually would be to do paid pilots with their technology team.
Where we see we fit right now is enterprise companies that want to test out the cloud. Maybe they want to experiment with cloud spend to see which cloud provider is cheaper.
I’m working on a lot of other ideas to attract technical folks like coming up with is a daily python tips on Twitter and LinkedIn. We’re also thinking about thought leadership groups for example Forbes Technology Council and all ways to penetrate and find the technical people.
Thanks for reading!
Jay