From a pure branding perspective, I think there is something to this. We are building a new "cloud" at exe.dev (everything from racking machines, building a global load balancer, and new APIs onto VMs) and yet it is very hard to bring ourselves to use the word cloud. We don't really want to be associated with the experience or mindset that "cloud" implies. I certainly wish there were a better way to describe this.
The product shape we built at my company is similar to yours and we chose to market capability/value-add rather than "cloud". Didn't really work. I'm bearish on the "sandbox" myself, I just instantly think "either a more expensive vm, or a thing in a less expensive datacenter" (also, my personal experience suggests that people don't want to sandbox things, but there are things they want that need to have sandboxes).
I don't even think Cloudflare has a name for theirs, I remember hearing it called their developer platform but after checking just now, they seem to mostly just call it "products".
Devtools marketing to consumers feels pretty impossible to me. I think you either need to be absolutely massive and have existing credibility + tons of resources to throw at every possible marketing channel, or figure out how to get people to truly love your product/brand. You're basically selling trust/professional identities in most cases rather than compute or APIs.
If I were to do it again I would either pick a different vertical or put 90% of my effort into community-building, events, PR/tech-influencer stuff, and flashy demos. You only need to fall back to widely known framings like "cloud" when nobody knows about you.
crawshaw · · focus · HN ↗
weitendorf · · focus · HN ↗
I don't even think Cloudflare has a name for theirs, I remember hearing it called their developer platform but after checking just now, they seem to mostly just call it "products".
Devtools marketing to consumers feels pretty impossible to me. I think you either need to be absolutely massive and have existing credibility + tons of resources to throw at every possible marketing channel, or figure out how to get people to truly love your product/brand. You're basically selling trust/professional identities in most cases rather than compute or APIs.
If I were to do it again I would either pick a different vertical or put 90% of my effort into community-building, events, PR/tech-influencer stuff, and flashy demos. You only need to fall back to widely known framings like "cloud" when nobody knows about you.