Hey, thanks for asking! I used those Facebook and Google ad credits you always get when you sign-up for something, ran two postcard campaigns sent directly to HOA presidents, paid to rank higher on Capterra, hired an SEO firm for 2 years, was in a Valpak insert, and ran an ad in The Chicago Cooperator for 6 months. The Capterra campaign was by far the best ROI, but still too expensive to make sense in the long term.
My assumption would be the best marketing, given you are a team of 1, would be demand capture campaigns. And it seems that your Capterra results bear that out.
But, your SEO agency would probably have focused on high intent keywords for demand capture, and presumably that didn’t work so well.
Anyway, seems like an interesting marketing challenge targeting a niche market that frankly I don’t know much about.
I wonder if you could target HOA management agencies rather than the association presidents. I know that many HOAs are managed externally at least from an operational perspective. That said, I know so little about the market…
This is great, thank you! I had to look up "demand capture campaigns" and that makes a lot of sense. Yes, I totally agree that property managers can be a source of growth. I'm very lucky to have a property manager user out of Michigan helping guide me with what she would need from a property management perspective. Their needs are just different enough that it will require some serious dev work and I'm "so very tired", haha. Everyone wants the equivalent of QuickBooks built-in to the software. I need something to bring back my enthusiasm from years ago.
First major section of the post is "What this means for Aptible Customers" but the tl;dr is that nothing major changes about how customers use Aptible, though we expect to accelerate our roadmap!
Happy to answer any other questions you have hjhart
This is a shame, but it's good the team will continue on at Harness.
Does anyone have the full story here? Or has anyone actually used the product?
According to Crunchbase Transposit raised >$50M. LinkedIn shows that the team seemed to have stayed moderately lean. I'm curious how it got to this point.
I help run another PaaS, and I’m very curious about your production evaluation criteria. Would you be willing to share?
For context, our PaaS has been focused on running reliable and scalable production workloads for about a decade. We don’t really do hobbyist use cases, sadly. But instead we prioritize actual businesses with production use cases.
If you share your evaluation criteria, I would love to test Aptible against it. I can share the results with you if you’d find it interesting, but frankly I just want the results for my team and me. I’d be so grateful, and happy to return the favor in any way I can. If you prefer, you can email me at henry AT aptible.com
If so, what do you perceive as the gaps between Dokku and Platform.sh? I ask as an employee of a PaaS (not Platform.sh). So I'm curious for discovery and learning.
I tried it once and concluded it wasn't good enough but I don't remember the specific gaps. Now that I browse the docs it actually looks quite powerful, so I guess I will have to take another look.
Other contenders are CapRover and Coolify that I just recently got to know here.
I guess it would make more sense to contribute to one of these projects than start a new project.
I work at Aptible. We've been around for about 10 years, have about 300 customers, all companies that prioritize reliability, scalability, and security. Many are late stage startups/recently minted unicorns....but nobody has really heard of us.
If you want I can hook you up with an extended trial, beyond what's offered on the website. I'd love your feedback. We aren't open source, though we have considered it. Maybe your feedback can help push us over the edge. My email is henry AT aptible.com.
Same offer goes to anyone here. Feedback would be really valuable to me personally.
Like others have said there are a number of Heroku alternatives out there that are more or less viable to meet your requirements, which I've gathered to be:
- Serving >100k users
- Helping you to achieve SOC 2
In my capacity as one of the leaders at a Heroku alternative PaaS, I've studied the PaaS market a bit to understand the space and available alternatives to Heroku. Here's what I've found about some of the most popular:
- Fly is managing its own infrastructure allowing it to be extremely competitive on cost. But on the flip side, its heavy focus on infrastructure is missing the “managed” options that make PaaS so valuable, such as a true Managed Database offering. This IMO makes it less of a viable alternative to Heroku.
- Render is offering a more truly “managed” alternative, and is innovating on cost as well. But it’s early and is still missing some table stakes reliability features that you'd probably expect from a Heroku alternative.
- Railway has a blockbuster FTUX, I love deploying and using PostgreSQL databases in the UI without even signing up. Coincidentally probably how it got to its count of 250k developers. But it’s own docs caution that it’s not exactly production ready, especially its databases.
- Platform.sh has grown really well by focusing on enterprise marketing teams and their use cases. I think this is a great niche for them and has paid off well. In their capacity of working with enterprises I'm sure they could handle SOC 2, etc.
- Aptible has run critical web apps and APIs dealing with sensitive data for hundreds of companies and has helped a few go public or get to billion dollar acquisitions. I am certainly biased, but Aptible seems to be the only non-Heroku PaaS focused on product/engineering teams that has repeatedly handled true "production" requirements, like your larger user base (many of our customers fit this description) and SOC 2 (most of our customers use our security & compliance dashboard for this). But that comes at a cost: Aptible is typically more expensive than the others, perhaps save for Platform.sh.
Disclaimer: I'm one of the leaders at Aptible, which in my (admittedly biased) view is the best positioned alternative to Heroku for product/engineering teams that have any sort of scale or production use case.
(Render CEO) Other than Postgres PITR and HA which are both in active development, are there other 'table stakes reliability features' on your list for Render?
Aptible makes people-centered security products that help SaaS developer teams build security into their architecture and their organization's culture.
* Enclave is a container orchestration platform built for developers that automates security best practices and controls needed for deploying and scaling Dockerized apps in regulated industries.
* Gridiron is like the missing QuickBooks for security management. It helps developers design and run security management programs that meet and exceed requirements like HIPAA, SOC 2, and ISO 27001. Customers use it to build trust with their own customers and partners, and prepare for certifications.
Important skills we are looking for include: EmberJS, DevOps/Site Reliability, Security & Compliance (HIPAA, HITRUST, ISO 27001, SOC 2, PCI-DSS, GDPR, etc.) expertise, SaaS Operations/Generalists, and more.
We would love to talk with anyone who is interested in Internet security and has one or more of the competencies listed above. Specific roles that we are looking for today:
1. Senior Site Reliability Engineer
2. Senior Software Engineer
3. Support Engineer
4. Growth Ops (Sales Ops / Marketing Ops)
Reasons to work at Aptible:
* Small team, (relatively) large customer base filled with innovators in challenging industries (namely healthtech and fintech)
* Fully remote
* Our products have dramatic impact on important aspects of our customer's business (specifically: the safety and security of their customers' data)
I'm in the same boat as you. But to play devil's advocate for a moment: it's clear that equity based comp is a better deal for the founders/principals than it is for the employees, especially later (post C and beyond) employees whose equity compensation is but a rounding error in the options pool.
Accessible educational content could help level the uneven negotiation plane that is later stage startup/employee compensation decisions. I don't know if this is the video that could reach the masses, but it's a good start... or, attempt, at least. Maybe?
