Cloudyuga’s 4th year journey
In December’19, CloudYuga completed 4 years. It was just a year but packed with learnings of many years. Like any company, we were challenged with the following:-
Employee Retention
At the beginning of 2019, two of the employees left in quick succession. This might look ok but for a startup like us, it is a big deal.
Scaling
Classroom training to corporates has been our primary source of income, which definitely has a physical limitation. Also, it is always challenging for the companies to accept different trainers, once they become comfortable with someone.
One of the obvious choices to overcome the scaling challenges is to go online. We had used a training platform earlier but it did not meet our requirements. So we started building our own platform from Oct’18 and it got in good shape in mid-2019 and we are constantly improving it. Our platform helped us in many ways but we are yet to achieve the scale we aimed for.
Marketing
For the corporate training, due to our delivery quality, we always get repeat business. And given the manpower we have, we have been getting good business. We faced challenges in marketing for the open classroom batches and online self-paced training.
Customer Engagement
Though we have got many people onboarded to our platform and newsletter, we have hardly done anything to engage with on a regular basis.
Challenges are part of every company and individual. In the next blog, I’ll try to put down our thoughts to tackle the challenges I mentioned above.
From above it may sound like we only faced challenges. But that’s not the case :). We had some good accomplishments as well:-
- We made our online training platform public to deliver our training the right way. With that platform, we started offerings Self-paced training Mock CKA/CKAD exam (1 hour, 10 Hands-on questions) Quizzes
- Self-paced training
- Mock CKA/CKAD exam (1 hour, 10 Hands-on questions)
- Quizzes
- We hired 3 new full-time employees and 3 interns
- We could self-sustain without any funding. There are lots of resources and efforts required to build the training platform from scratch.
- In the year 2018, we had many overseas trainings; which helped us getting good revenues. In 2019, we could achieve ~75% of that from the domestic and online training only. Which I think is a good accomplishment.
- We added many new direct customers. Some of them are:- ABBRed HatSalesforceSynchronoss
- ABB
- Red Hat
- Salesforce
- Synchronoss
- We could sponsor two technology events in Bengaluru Kubernetes Day, India’19AWS Community Day, Bengaluru’19
- Kubernetes Day, India’19
- AWS Community Day, Bengaluru’19
- We spoke at differents meetups and conferences GDG Study JamKubernetes Community DayCNCF BoF at RootConf
- GDG Study Jam
- Kubernetes Community Day
- CNCF BoF at RootConf
- We did few webinars How to get CKAD/CKA certified? Why do Cloud and DevOps matter more now?
- How to get CKAD/CKA certified?
- Why do Cloud and DevOps matter more now?
On a personal front, I became a CNCF Ambassador and got featured in an article on India’s leading newspaper, the Times of India . I also attended the KubeCon’19 in San Diego and got the opportunity to be a track host.
We close 2019 with lots of learnings and welcome 2020 with a wish to overcome all the challenges we faced earlier, along with the new ones :).
Wish us good luck.
