Bunnyshell

Alin Dobra's journey to founding Bunnyshell began during his tenure as CTO of a Magento & Symfony development company at age 23. After learning the mantra that "the CTO should have a plan for everything," he developed a philosophy of ownership and preparation that would guide his career. Years later, while working as VP of technology at a conversion marketing startup, he faced a crisis: their AWS bill hit $15K/month as the platform scaled to 200k requests/minute. When Microsoft offered over $100K in Azure credits through their startup program, Alin saw an opportunity—but migrating infrastructure between cloud providers was a nightmare that took four months. That's when the lightbulb moment hit: no platform existed to simplify multi-cloud DevOps management. "Why reinvent the wheel over and over again?" he realized.

Alin left the marketing startup and partnered with Roxana, his DevOps engineer at the time, who became his co-founder. They adopted a "sell-it-while-you-build-it" strategy, validating the idea as they built the MVP. Rather than waiting for a perfect product, they engaged customers early and incorporated feedback continuously. The team took distribution seriously from day one, even without a dedicated marketing department. They leveraged word-of-mouth, sharing their vision with friends, ex-colleagues, and the broader IT community. Strategic partnerships with cloud giants like Microsoft and DigitalOcean became crucial trust signals—when you're managing production infrastructure, partners matter. When they launched Bunnyshell Beta, they returned to their network, giving early contacts the opportunity to test the platform and provide feedback.

Bunnyshell's early customers were marquee names: a pharma company, an eCommerce platform, and an eCommerce store. These clients were willing to trust the platform even in beta, likely because of the partnership endorsements and the founder's credibility from his prior experience. The company saw traction from the beginning, with these early clients providing invaluable feedback that shaped product development. Rather than chasing vanity metrics, the founders focused on specific use cases and the customers solving them, understanding that each piece of feedback needed to be filtered for relevance to their core mission.

What worked was patience, listening, and strategic partnerships. Alin credited word-of-mouth and conference presence as key growth levers, alongside the cloud provider partnerships that built trust. The "sell-while-you-build" approach meant they never wasted time on features nobody wanted. What didn't work: trying to build for everyone at once. Alin later reflected that they should have launched faster and been more decisive about which feedback was truly relevant. He learned that listening to every suggestion can dilute your vision—some advice kills startups because it pulls them away from their core use cases. The biggest challenge came when co-founder Roxana was hit by a car and needed months to recover, creating urgency around fundraising.

Six months after Roxana's accident, Bunnyshell closed a €750K seed round led by Early Game Ventures (March 2018, roughly 18 months after launch). By the time of this May 2020 interview, they were generating $12k/mo in recurring revenue while serving enterprise clients worldwide. The platform evolved from basic migration tooling into a comprehensive Site Reliability Robot (SRR) concept: automating sysadmin and DevOps tasks like auto-healing servers and continuous performance tuning. Alin's vision expanded from solving his own infrastructure pain to "democratizing the cloud" and building a safer, faster internet. The company was actively testing four growth strategies (two marketing, two sales) to accelerate toward product-market fit, all while honoring a commitment to provide free cloud migration to SMEs, medical organizations, and NGOs affected by the COVID-19 crisis.