YC application W15

What is your company going to make?

The GitHub of infrastructure.

devo.ps lets you build and automate your own servers on any cloud and deploy your apps on it.

Want to add a new server on AWS or Digital Ocean? Write a few lines to describe what you need, save and voila. Need to automatically deploy your app when you push to GitHub, or backup you DB every hour? Same deal.

Please enter the url of a 1 minute unlisted (not private) YouTube video introducing the founders. (Instructions.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecg6Yd7wEgc

Please tell us about an interesting project, preferably outside of class or work, that two or more of you created together. Include urls if possible.

SweepBoard (http://sweepboard.com) is a project management tool for GitHub, allowing you to manage your issue queues as kanban boards (not unlike Trello) and get performance metrics (cycle time, workload distribution...).

How long have the founders known one another and how did you meet? Have any of the founders not met in person?

• Vincent and Ronan met 9 years ago leading respectively Ops and Development at a publishing group. We've been close friends ever since and worked together at Wiredcraft (Ronan's consultancy) for 3 years before going full-time on devo.ps.

• Juha joined us full-time roughly a year ago at Wiredcraft and is now working full-time on devo.ps.

How far along are you?

• We soft launched, signing up about 500 users in the past 5 weeks with 0 marketing (we haven't yet contacted the 2000+ folks who signed up for our beta). We're polishing/debugging/adjusting things based on feedback.

• We're adding our first 5 clients this week (we still don't have online payment, we're billing them "manually").

• We're publicly launching on October 21st (hopefully with online payment by then).

If you've already started working on it, how long have you been working and how many lines of code (if applicable) have you written?

1 year as a side project, 10+ months seriously, ~30K LOC

If you've applied previously with the same idea, how much progress have you made since the last time you applied? Anything change?

We (soft) launched, signed up users that we've never met before and started billing some of them. We're gearing up for a public launch, focusing on user feedback and getting more people through the doors.

Which of the following best describes your progress?

Public beta.

What is your monthly growth rate?

This is our first month, no point of reference yet.

Why did you pick this idea to work on? Do you have domain expertise in this area? How do you know people need what you're making?

The three of us have been building software for a decade now, from prototypes for scrappy startups to election software for government and high scale infrastructure for Apple.

Dealing with servers was systematically a PITA. Everybody, from freelancers "rockstars" to teams at Fortune 500 feel the pain of building and managing infrastructure.

We've used tools (Chef, Ansible, SaltStack) and platforms (dotCloud, Heroku, AWS OpsWorks) with varying levels of success. The former requires dedicated experts, the latter means outsourcing your ops with a painful aftermath (exponentially increasing costs, technical limitations, lock-in...).

We want to build better tools for people who build things. We want to make dealing with servers sexy.

See http://devo.ps/blog/managing-infrastructure-is-effin-hard/

What's new about what you're making? What substitutes do people resort to because it doesn't exist yet (or they don't know about it)?

Three options:

• PaaS; give up on Ops and outsource it to a third party with all kind of restrictions and hefty costs.

• Ops Tools; like Chef or Ansible. For this you need a professional who knows what he's doing. It's hard to find and you may not be able to afford it.

• DIY; we met a lot of teams (including YC companies) who chose to Google their way through it: "Ubuntu Linode install Redis"... That's unsustainable at best, and more often than not risky.

We're approaching things in a very different way:

• Flexibility: use your own servers on any cloud (Digital Ocean, AWS, Rackspace, Linode, etc). You can do anything a sysadmin could do (install any technology, SSH in, etc).

• Collaboration: on devo.ps, you manage your servers like you would your code on GitHub. Collaborators can see who do what, when and where. You work as a team to manage your infrastructure.

• Price: we're a lot more competitive than any PaaS as soon as you're running more than a tiny demo app on a free tier.

• Low-barriers to entry: we keep things approachable for developers. You can build and automate your whole infrastructure with a bit of YAML and Git magic.

See http://devo.ps/blog/dealing-with-servers-still-suck/

Who are your competitors, and who might become competitors? Who do you fear most?

Heroku is definitely the more popular choice among developers at this stage. Even if we're not a PaaS, they own a huge chunk of the attention.

Cloud66 is more directly competing with what we do (but very limited in what technologies and architectures they support).

We may later on face competition from tools like Chef, Ansible, Puppet or SaltStack once we focus on a more Ops type of crowd (for now we're focusing on developers).

What do you understand about your business that other companies in it just don't get?

It's not that developers want to completely forget about servers (PaaS/NoOps approach), it's just that they lack the know-how to build production infrastructures (and probably don't care about it as much as code).

Our users love being able to use any technology they want without necessarily knowing how to install and manage it. They love being able to SSH in a box that's giving them a hard time and figure out what's happening.

The real value we bring lies in removing the boilerplate and necessary knowledge to administrate servers.

How do or will you make money? How much could you make?

Subscription-based (very similar to GitHub):

• Free tier for a single server, then paying tiers based on the number of servers.

• Enterprise version that runs on premises.

The opportunity is huge: billions.

There are still no clear winner in this space. Heroku and the likes are what came closest to answering this need, but we can do much better and spread it much farther than this.

We want to own infrastructure management, not unlike GitHub with code.

See http://devo.ps/pricing/

How will you get users? If your idea is the type that faces a chicken-and-egg problem in the sense that it won't be attractive to users till it has a lot of users (e.g. a marketplace, a dating site, an ad network), how will you overcome that?

So far we've "manually" on-boarded users and relied on word of mouth.

A few other things:

• We've been experimenting successfully with writing tutorials ("How to deploy your Meteor app on Digital Ocean" for example), and are working on a ebook/"blog post series" teaching developers survival skills to deal with servers .

• Some well known Open Source contributors are helping us getting the word out there (aka word of mouth from "the cool kids").

• Getting some partnerships done with Digital Ocean and Rackspace to get our tool promoted.

• Multiple other things; cross-newsletter marketing, good old SEO, ...

Are any of the founders covered by noncompetes or intellectual property agreements that overlap with your project? If so, please explain.

No.

Was any of your code written by someone who is not one of your founders? If so, describe how can you legally use it.

We're using a lot of Open Source, but none of it has a restrictive license (like aGPL). We own all of the IP which will be transferred to the company once incorporated.

If you had any other ideas you considered applying with, please list them. One may be something we've been waiting for. Often when we fund people it's to do something they list here and not in the main application.

• SweepBoard (http://sweepboard.com) is a project management tool for GitHub, allowing you to manage your issue queues as kanban boards (not unlike Trello) and get key metrics (cycle time, workload distribution...). It has a few hundreds active users.

• Chato.ps (http://chato.ps, crude proof of concept) is a bot-as-a-service. You can create and customize a chat bot, integrating with 3rd party services (Heroku, GitHub, New Relic, Stripe... and of course devo.ps).

Please tell us something surprising or amusing that one of you has discovered.

Not that amusing.

After spending a few years working with gradually higher profile international development organizations (the United Nations, The World Bank, USAID), the sheer uselessness and inefficiency of most of it drove me away (which is kind of why I started working on devo.ps).

I was genuinely shocked to realize most people working in this field don't care about the mission statement of their organization and that it's pretty much a business like any other (ala Dilbert).