We now support Google Compute Engine and Cloud Storage prices!

It has been an exceptionally exciting day as Google just announced details of their Compute Engine service at the Google I/O Conference. Our team has been hard at work since the annoucement and we're happy to say that we now support the Google Compute Engine and Cloud Storage prices.

You can sign-in as a guest user through PlanForCloud.com and get cost forecasts for deployments on Google Compute Engine. We'll be blogging more about this later on, but for now, it's time for us to get some sleep as it's 2:30am UK time!

Building a startup - what would make a startup office cool?

Imagine you are a tech startup. You launched your first version a few months ago and have got off to a great start. You are in a fast growing market, offering a great service and everything is looking up - towards the cloud :)

It's time to expand the team. You have just moved into an office and have a white canvas in front of you.

The cloud just got cheaper: AWS, Microsoft Azure and Rackspace lower prices

There's been quite a lot of change in the prices of public clouds over the last few months. First, AWS and Microsoft Azure both lowered their prices (in fact, AWS did it twice). More recently Rackspace lowered the price of their CloudFiles storage service by 33% and added support for SQL Server 2012.

Two weeks ago, Microsoft announced Windows Azure 2.0, which added new prices into their mix; RightScale wrote a nice blog post about it. Basically, Microsoft added a VM role to their Azure platform with support for Windows, Linux and Windows+SQL Server images (each with its own prices for various types of servers). They also switched to providing two types of storage (Geographically Redundant and Locally Redundant), each with a tiered pricing scheme AND they lowered the storage transaction costs from $0.01 per 10,000 transactions to $0.01 per 100,000 transactions. If that wasn't enough, they also introduced a tiered pricing scheme for data-transfer-out costs AND added two new clouds (East US and West US).

So no wonder that there's been a lot of press about the costs of using public clouds. If you want a good summary, read Charles Babcock's 3-part article in Information Week, which also explains why cloud pricing comparisons are so hard (part 1, part 2, part 3).

We think that this is just the beginning and there is still a lot more activity to come in this area; Amazon CTO Werner Vogels hinted that AWS are going to lower their prices again. So it's obvious that the old-school way of using Excel spreadsheets to forecast your costs is not going to be good enough. You're going to end-up wasting lots of time keeping track of what changed, and how the pricing schemes are calculated between different cloud providers. That's why we created PlanForCloud; you simply describe what resources you need (servers, storage, databases etc.) and we'll run your system through our simulation engine to create a 3-year cost report for you. You can log in as a guest user through PlanForCloud.com and try PlanForCloud right now (it's free).

-- Ali

P.S. If you're already a PlanForCloud user, you don't have to do anything as we automatically update your cost reports. All you have to do is sign in and checkout your new cost reports!

Our YC Interview: A Scottish Startup's Perspective

If you're a Scottish startup and want to apply for YC, 

you have to learn to be very optimistic ... or just bullshit.

We (PlanForCloud.com) recently applied for YCombinator and managed to get to the interview stage, so we went all the way from Scotland to Silicon Valley for the famous 10-min interview. Worldwide, there were around 3,000 applicants and only 10% were interviewed. We pushed hard but didn't get into YCombinator, however, we learned an important lesson that I'd like to share (if you've been through the process or are a YC startup, we would love to get your views on this too).

If you read the YC pages about the application, Paul Graham and co. seem to emphasise the importance of the team, and I think that is important, but only to get you to the interview stage. Our team, made-up of myself, my brother Hassan, and our adviser Prof. Ian Sommerville was rock solid. And there was no question of commitment, I was going to stop my PhD, and Hassan had already quit his job at Accenture. However, I think when you get to the YC interview stage, the final decision is heavily influenced by your figures, i.e. how much money can you make?

Now, being Scottish, we don't tend to speak about money that much, so we were surprised to see YC Alumni ask about our figures straight away in conversations. This was somewhat overwhelming for us as it gave us the impression that, in Silicon Valley, startups are all about the money.

We didn't start PlanForCloud for the money; we started it because we figured there was a problem that we could solve, and we could experience what it's like to do a startup. Even in our YC application form, we didn't mention any figures, we just described the ways in which we might make money in the future. We practiced that when asked about figures, we would reply with "that's where we need help from YC". When a few YC Alumi asked us about our figures the day before our interview, we sat down and made some assumptions and came-up with some numbers, and ditched our practiced answer.

Once we saw the total figure that we were going to tell our YC interviewers, we looked at each other and started laughing - there is no way that we can make that much, right? I mean, if you watch Dragons' Den in the UK, a poor entrepreneur usually walks into the den and says he might make a measly half-a-million pounds a year. The Dragons then tell him that his figures are bullshit, and there is no way that he can make that much money.

So our lesson learned is that, if you're a Scottish startup and want to apply for YC, work out some numbers, and multiply them by 10, then walk into the interview and confidently say that you can make that much. Because in the Valley, the numbers are huge compared to what we're used to in Scotland, and you have to learn to be very optimistic ... or just bullshit.

Overall, we encourage every startup to apply for YCombinator. Sit down with your co-founders and go through your application form word for word and question everything (if you are on your own, find someone to question you). Even if you don't get in, the process of filling-in their application makes you really think about the important questions. I'd suggest that you use the YC application form to really understand your startup before writing a business plan, or if you have one, then use it to question your business plan. If you do get to the interview stage, then don't think about the expenses for a second - just book your hotels and flights and go. Going through the interview process makes you feel like you can answer any question that you'll ever be asked about your startup, plus you will get to meet some very cool and incredibly smart people there.

On a final note, I'd be happy to review/help any Scottish startup that is thinking of applying for YC, just email me at alikhajeh1@gmail.com. BTW, we're also looking for people to join our team.

[edit] After some comments, we should clarify: We went into the interview with a solid business case. We had calculated our revenues based on the bottom-up approach in which we looked at our revenue streams and our two months of data and projected figures forward. These figures were not pessimistic or optimistic, however what we are trying to convey is that once we got these figures, although they were calculated based on facts, we fell back into the Scottish mindset and thought of them as too high. Once we were turned away for not having high enough numbers, you can imagine our reaction.

-- Ali

From Scotland to Silicon Valley for a 10 minute interview

It was around 12am (UK time), and after a full day working on PlanForCloud, I decided to get some sleep. I had barely got into bed when I got a call from Ali: "We're in!". The story had just taken a new turn.

Ali and Hassan - Co-Founders of PlanForCloud.com - California

Back to the beginning

We launched PlanForCloud.com in February 2012. Our target market you ask? 

Every tech startup and every company who wants to use the cloud for their infrastructure (if that's you, you will love the next paragraph).

What do we offer them? 
You start small and grow, but as you grow on the cloud, how much will it cost you? In PlanForCloud, you model your system and your growth, we take the latest prices from cloud providers and run your system through a simulation. We produce a detailed cost report to show you exactly where your costs are going and how much it will cost you each month for three years. And the best thing you ask? It's completely free - log in as guest to try it!

With a very promising launch, we applied for YCombinator. Spending over a week to perfect the answer to every question we could think of was finally rewarded with a 'see you in California' email. From around 3,000 applications worldwide, we were selected in the top 10% to go to Silicon Valley for an interview. Our preparation for the 26 hour door-to-door trip and of course, the famous 10 minute interview had started.

A big proportion of our startup budget was going into this two week trip, so we crammed as many meetings and feedback sessions as we could into it. We want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who met us and gave us feedback, specially:
Paul Graham, Trevor Blackwell and Robert Morris (our YCombinator interviewers)
James Staten and Dave Bartoletti (Forrester research): Awesome tweet
Raj Chohan (Founder of AppScale)
Paul Shapiro (Founder of Blueprint)
Sebastian Stadil (Founder of Scalr)
Ryan Lackey (Co-Founder of Cryptoseal)
And to top it all off, the cloud gurus at RightScale.

Well, we pushed hard but didn't get into YCombinator. Ali has written another post about our experience that might be useful for other YC hopefuls. Look forward to some exciting new things from PlanForCloud in the next couple of months. BTW, we are also looking for people to join our team.

-- Hassan

The YCombinator hall