Recap

In our last episode I’ve introduced you to our Idea of building a docker hosting service. Now I will talk about how we plan on niching down in order to step into the crowded hosting market.

From Zero to Startup – The series

We are two passionate developers from Germany on a journey to building our own profitable SaaS startup from scratch. In this series I will share everything we learn along the way, from coming up with the idea, coding a prototype, getting our first users and scaling to infinity. We are starting from absolutely nothing but our coding skills. We will not rely on any external funding. We are Lukas Mauser and Jonas Scholz and this is Zero to Startup.

How We Plan to Enter the Crowded Hosting Market

The hosting market is highly competitive. There are dozens of companies offering all kinds of different hosting solutions.

But on the other hand the market is huge, meaning there are lots of little cracks and niches to fit into.

Often times, these cracks are small enough for big companies to ignore them and big enough for small companies to get a foothold in the market.

Since I worked as a self employed web developer for the last 5 years, I have a pretty clear vision of what a great hosting provider would need to offer to service my type of business well.

So all of the niching down is based on the premise that there are other web development agencies and freelancers operating their company in a similar way that I do.

Let me explain you a little bit more about my development business. I worked with clients of all shapes and sizes from big international corporations to small and medium sized businesses.

Bigger clients usually have dedicated staff or even full departments to handle their hosting. If a new and unknown player offers them a product, they will ask for ISO certificates, references and hand over a long list of requirements. It requires a ton of upfront investment to fullfill all of that and is basically not possible for a bootstrapped early stage startup.

Smaller clients on the other hand are often happy if you take over the hosting responsibility completely and stick around for support inquiries. If their app is running with decent reliability and performance they won't ask to many questions.

With our platform Sliplane we want to focus on the latter. So our initial idea to niching down looks something like this:

We want to become the best option for freelancers and web development agencies that offer hosting plans for small and medium sized clients.

This is the first draft. But we still need to verify, that the niche is big enough and we are able to provide a significantly better service for that niche than our competitors can.

Next episode I will talk about how we plan to service this niche and what key requirements will direct our MVP in order to set us apart from other competitors.

Summary

The hosting industry is very competitive. In order to step foot in it, we plan on targeting freelancers and web development agencies that offer hosting solutions for small and medium sized businesses. Next up: How do we plan on serving this niche better than existing solutions?

ℹ️ Additional notes

Check out the product on https://sliplane.io.

Feel free to comment or get in touch with us to talk about any topics you are interested in or questions you have about the project in general.

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