Cloud Elements Co-Founder and CEO Mark Geene sat down with us at Galvanize to talk about the company and how they're helping businesses develop apps more quickly for less.
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Cloud Elements helps companiess build cloud apps faster by leveraging reusable/pre-built integrations(elements) that reduce the time to integrate cloud services into applications.
How did Cloud Elements come to be?
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We had built another company called ChannelInsight. They’re now $20M in revenue, with 100+ employees. We built that by integrating all of these services together, and thought “wow, that's a lot of work.” The reality is that it just takes too much time to build all of these things - like how people pay or setting up the email, that sort of thing - and put all of these services together in one app. What we saw there was an opportunity to help other companies do this faster - we could help them save time, save money, and get to market faster. You waste a lot of time doing the "plumbing" of your app, rather than designing the service. So it was really out of a practitioner’s view that we got here.
The way you biild apps for the cloud, it becomes about gluing all of these services together. By taking these elements and putting them together, it really minimizes the amount of custom code that you have to use.
Our vision is really to let developers do fun things like building the custom unique product that you’re building, instead of spending a lot of time integrating these same services (email or payment, etc.) over and over. You can waste tons of time doing logging, monitoring, maintenance of these services. But if you use them from the cloud, we do that for you. We vet and find the best services out there for you.
What has been the timeline for launching the company?
Last summer we were working on the idea and testing it in the marketplce. We then closed our first customer in October. We’re launching the product as a SaaS service in June; we have a great partnership with Sendgrid and Twilio. There will be a unified API to access both of those services, and our customers will get our analytics and monitoring for each of those. We'll release the beta in June, and from there the plan is to add more elements and integration every two weeks.
How big is the company? Are you expecting to grow this year?
We are currently at almost 20 people, and the company is entirely self-funded. Really, we’ve just gotten started. From last year we grew a ton, and we’re continuing to grow rapidly. We started the year with 4 people; now we have 20.
What have the major milestones been for Cloud Elements so far?
Then this spring, we presented at VCIR (Venture Capital in the Rockies) and the Wall Street Journal, VentureBeat, BusinessInsider – they all really latched on and saw this as a big problem that we’re solving. The feedback from the marketplace has been good. There are a half-dozen cloud based services, and it’s proliferating. There are all of these things available – and with us pulling them all together, it makes it so much easier to build apps.
What lessons have you learned?
We’re big believers in the lean startup approach – everything is iterating in a small series of experiments. We thought the biggest value would be the time saved in integrating – but it turns out that the companies we've been working with are even more interested in the monitoring and analytics that we offer. We consolidate it all in one place for everything that you use. That was a big aspect for us, and there's really a big opportunity there.
By integrating with a single API we can create new use cases. For example, we’ve got our messaging API which is integrating with a document API that does Box, Dropbox, etc. So you can take those documents and attach them directly to SendGrid emails. We started seeing that there’s a lot of opportunity to add value with enhanced use cases.
Why did you decide to startup in Denver?
There’s such a great infrastructure here now. When you’re starting out you want a lot of part-time people - a CFO, marketing help, legal assistance, investor advice – and those things are available here. There’s such a great vibrant community of infrastructure and services to support startups. It’s a great place to be given those things – you can be very cost-effective leveraging those PT services.
What advice would you give to newer companies and founders?
Get a good set of advisors early on. I think just having good people you can bounce ideas off of, and get feedback from early on – that’s invaluable. Your first idea is probably wrong – you have to be willing to be wrong and understand that.
Another thing is that a lot of startups don’t spend enough time on the initial phases – designing for scale and capabilities is important. Don’t just start building right away. Do your homework and planning.
What resources would you suggest to other startups?
I love reading Brad Feld’s blog, his posts are really some of the best in the industry. I'm a big believer in the whole lean startup ecosystem that’s out there. There are just lots of different blogs and people who just embrace that – not just the book but the ecosystem around it.
Anything else you want the community to know about you or Cloud Elements?
We’re just excited to help out. One of the things we look at is giving back to the community however we can. We run a number of meetups – they’re not around selling our product – but providing thought leadership. We want to make sure that we help with the success of the startups here – it helps all of us. It draws the people and the capital. We’re all involved with mentoring other companies and other entrepreneurs, and giving our time to help build this community.
Learn more about Cloud Elements in their company profile, via their website, you can follow them on Facebook or Twitter @CloudElements1.
This week we also visited Inspirato and Wayin. Read past weeks' profiles and learn more about Built In Denver's Startup Tour series here.
