Cloud Forecast

Cloud Forecast emerged from the pain of managing AWS costs. Tony Chan and co-founder Francois built a solution for engineering teams to forecast and understand their infrastructure spending. The company was accepted into Tiny Seed, receiving a small but meaningful investment to accelerate growth.

The founding team started with three people: Tony, Francois, and engineer Katya. They quickly hired Arturo as a senior engineer, a pivotal hire that would allow the team to scale product development. Katya made significant contributions early on, refactoring the frontend with Tailwind CSS and setting up the UI foundation that would enable faster feature development. However, about a month after the last major season recording (8 months before this conversation), Katya left for a larger company seeking more structure and growth opportunities. Though initially painful, her work provided the foundation that enabled the team to succeed.

Arturo's departure wasn't actual—instead, the team hired Fernando through Arturo's network, creating a three-person engineering team alongside Tony. The team adopted Basecamp's Shape Up methodology with six-week sprints, which gave engineers autonomy while keeping them focused. By the conversation date, the first half of 2022 was fully planned out.

Cloud Forecast's growth has been heavily driven by enterprise opportunities. The company targets engineering managers at mid-to-large companies who need approval from their teams, creating a longer sales cycle. Early growth came from direct outreach and relationship building, though the exact first customer channel wasn't detailed. The team has been intentional about pursuing annual contracts with enterprise customers, which provide reliable revenue and solid ROI.

The biggest challenge of the past eight months was revenue stagnation. Starting around $450k ARR, the company faced unexpected churn, including losing their third-largest customer. Simultaneously, several enterprise opportunities stalled due to the complexity of multi-stakeholder approval processes. Tony attributed this difficult period to context-switching between hiring and business development while watching revenue flatline—a psychologically draining experience.

Hiring for non-technical roles proved difficult. The company attempted to hire a full-time SEO and content marketer but had to part ways after 60 days due to timezone differences, chemistry issues, and the hire's lack of technical AWS knowledge. Learning from this failure, Tony shifted to hiring part-time contractors with both SEO expertise and engineering backgrounds, allowing him to handle strategy while contractors executed the writing.

What did work: the six-week sprint cadence energized the engineering team, enterprise annual deals began closing again (two large deals in the recent two months), and existing customers committed to increasing their subscription value. The company also benefited from a supportive founder community (other Tiny Seed companies) that helped Tony process the emotional toll of entrepreneurship.

Cloud Forecast is back on an upward trajectory. Recent wins include two new large enterprise annual deals—one becoming their second-largest customer, the other replacing the customer that churned. The engineering team has found a productive rhythm, with Arturo and Fernando delivering strong velocity. Tony is now focused on increasing "luck surface area" by doing things outside his comfort zone, including attending AWS re:Invent in Vegas for networking and customer meetings rather than chasing direct ROI.

The company remains mostly bootstrapped, with the ~$100k Tiny Seed investment spread across hiring and experimentation. Tony has learned that enterprise sales require patience and incremental progress, and that founder psychology—the ability to forget setbacks and keep pushing—is as critical as product or marketing.