Founders' diary

Phew, for the past six months, we've been typing away like Bruce Almighty, and although the keyboard letters started fading, we still missed every single deadline we set for ourselves. Crazy… you would've thought in the age of AI, things would be simpler, faster, easier… but as it turns out, starting a business is a tad more complex.

Nevertheless, we couldn't be prouder of the things we managed to achieve so far! Here's exactly what we've been up to these past 6 months:

• We finished the MVP - we massively underestimated the complexity of building a PaaS, but we got it done!
• We put together an actual landing page - you can now get a tiny glimpse into what the product actually is;
• We started taking investor meetings - to bring our full vision to life, we need outside funding, and this… this is a journey on its own;
• We are now onboarding alpha customers - are you an early adopter? Get in touch!

So what's next? Well, the real challenge starts now. On the product side, we need to keep shipping in line with our vision while taking customer feedback into account. On the business side, we need to ramp up on marketing, PR, networking, and pitching.

The next 6 months will be crucial for Kumoto; that's for sure. Lots of things were new to us up until now, but from now on, almost everything is outside our comfort zone. Massive personal and professional growth awaits us, and we're excited!

As we navigate the next 6 months, our main priority will be to serve our customers as best we can. If you decide to take a chance on us in these early days, thank you in advance! We are really grateful for your trust!

We, engineers, got so caught up in building cool things that we forgot what the cloud actually is.

Today, most engineers we talk to, deploy their code to the cloud. To them, the cloud is AWS, Vercel, Azure, Google Cloud – fairy dust that breathes life into their apps. It's a no-brainer. It just works. And it does work… but in software, there's always a tradeoff.

Vercel works – until a surprise usage spike turns into a five-figure bill.

AWS can scale infinitely – you just might end up paying millions more than you need to.

The software engineering landscape keeps changing. For the new generation of engineers, the cloud is Supabase, or Lovable, or Replit… tools we don't yet know the real cost of.

And I get it. The value these services provide initially is real. They make hard things feel simple. Yet I can't help but wonder… when did we decide it is far more productive to get a certification in a proprietary service than to learn how to provision a server? When did we become far more comfortable with surprise $50k+ bills than with running ssh and apt? What happened to the appeal of bare metal?

Am I going too far back? We don't have to. Today we have Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Vultr, and many more. Why don't we choose ownership and control over our data and costs? What are we missing?

DigitalOcean is close to making $1b per year selling infrastructure. What if you could use infrastructure like this to build your own cloud? A cloud with predictable costs, data sovereignty, autoscaling, backups, and the monitoring you actually need.

What if deploying to that cloud were as easy as a conversation?

What if we made that our mission?