Like most tiny tech companies, Cloudron has very poor marketing. Here's a suggestion that I hope you find helpful. Selfishly, I want to see Cloudron succeed because I like what you guys have to offer.

Instead of, "Contact us for Enterprise and Priority Support plans (starting from 720 USD per year)" I suggest you offer hourly, prepaid phone call/video call support as follows,

"We offer scheduled phone call/video call technical support in English for X US dollars per hour. To schedule a support session you must first prepay for at least one hour of technical support. That is, we require you to pay us a retainer.

After we have received your payment, we will send you an email with a link to our webpage where you can schedule phone call/video call technical support sessions.

For each session, we charge per minute, with a fifteen minute minimum. For example, if you were to speak with one of our technical support representatives for 8 minutes, we would deduct 15 minutes from the retainer you had paid us; whereas, if you were to video chat with one of our technical support representatives for 42 minutes, we would deduct 42 minutes from the retainer you had paid us.

For example, you might choose to pay us 5X for 5 hours of scheduled phone call/video call technical support in English. In such a case, once those 5 hours were exhausted, you would need to prepay for at least one more hour of scheduled phone call/video call technical support in English if you wanted to receive more scheduled phone call/video call technical support in English from us.

We record all phone call/video call technical support sessions so that we can review them to assure you receive excellent service as well as to resolve any disputes about, for example, support quality or billing. In other words, if you claim, 'I got terrible technical support' or 'I only spoke with a technical support representative for 26 minutes, yet I was billed for 55 minutes' we would, of course, review the recording we had made. We would also provide you with a link (which you could download for up to 365 days) of the audio or video recording we had made."

A huge marketing problem that Cloudron faces is this: most companies are going to be extremely reluctant to go with Cloudron unless they can get phone call/video call technical support. But many of those companies probably aren't going to want to pay $720 because they are worried that Cloudron won't offer good phone call/video call technical support in English and because they have no idea how much of that support they will need.

Hourly prepaid makes it much, much, much easier for a manager at a company to say, "Well, we can test out Cloudron's phone call/video call technical support in English for one hour for $ X to see if we like it."

Obviously some companies will require "on demand" technical support, but Cloudron probably is too small to offer that sort of technical support at this time. Therefore, at least to get started, it's probably better for Cloudron to require customers to schedule phone call/video call technical support in advance.

In the long run, many customers probably won't accept only being able to avail themselves of scheduled phone call/video call technical support; rather, they will require phone call/video call technical support "RIGHT NOW because we are having an E-M-E-R-G-E-N-C-Y!" (I suppose you might charge double or even triple for that sort of technical support). Furthermore, other customers might require support in their native language (such as French or Japanese) Sure. Eventually Cloudron might need to offer "right now" support in various languages. And yeah, Cloudron might charge different prices for tier 1, tier 2, and tier 3 level technical support. But remember, "The perfect is the enemy of the good." Offering scheduled technical support in English is good; it's not perfect.

Now I will be intentionally harsh, because, well, in my experience most nerds tend to be arrogant and ignorant when it comes to taking advice about how to properly run a business.

"Pay us $720 now for support we will give you in the future, because, c'mon we're really good guys who you can trust" is, well, ummmm, errrr, wellllll... terrible marketing. When nerds run companies, they often come up with inane lines like, "Contact us for Enterprise and Priority Support plans (starting from 720 USD per year)" That's an excellent way to significantly thwart Cloudron's ability to grow and thrive. In other words, bad marketing has stunted Cloudron's growth. Yeah, this last paragraph was harsh. I know. I wanted to increase the chance that my message was received "loud and clear."

And yeah, there's a very good reason that most successful companies are not run by nerds. They tend to myopically become obsessed with technology (such as engineering) and poorly perform crucial tasks such as marketing, employee recruiting, and employee retention.

Generally (but not always), serving customers properly as well as attracting and retaining excellent employees, is usually much, much, much more difficult than solving, for example, the engineering problems a company faces. But nerds like to solve technical problems; therefore, that's what they tend to do. As the adage explains, "When you are a hammer, every problem looks like a nail."

It seems to me that, at least for now, Cloudron doesn't need to add any new "bells and whistles" (technology such as more apps!). Instead, Cloudron needs to figure out how to properly market itself as a trusted and reliable technology partner so that it is viewed by potential customers as being worthy of working with.

When IBM purchased Red Hat for approximately $34 billion in 2019, they weren't primarily purchasing Red Hat's technology (intellectual property). Of course they weren't. IBM was primarily interested in purchasing Red Hat's customers, employees, and Red Hat's reputation as being a trusted and reliable technology partner.

Become like Red Hat. Become a trusted and reliable technology partner.

Cloudron makes it easy to run web apps like WordPress, Nextcloud, GitLab on your server. Find out more or install now.

Cloudron Forum

yeku