AWS Me Softly: The Comprehensive Recap of Our SaaS Scaling Struggle in the Past Year

This May Happen to Anyone

Scaling? Oh, scaling. Just hearing the word makes tech entrepreneurs want to curl up in a corner with a stress ball. Picture this: you’re chilling on a peaceful sailing trip, sunglasses on, sipping a mojito, when BAM! Out of nowhere, a storm crashes your party. That’s scaling for you. No one’s safe. Even the most zen, ultra-prepared CEOs end up wrestling with unexpected challenges. It’s like trying to train a wild beast while riding a hoverboard. Good times, right?

Just to Remind You — What is Liqvid?

Before we dive into our tale of trials and tribulations, let me remind you what Liqvid is all about. We’re a digital signage SaaS platform focused on business and marketers. Based on an Android platform and hardware, Liqvid allows business users to connect screens within a couple of minutes and manage content on these screens remotely from the cloud. Sounds smooth, right? Well, hold on to your hats, because the journey was anything but.

Digital Signage screens in fitness clubs entertaining athletes

The Polished Press Release

Here’s a snippet from our PR team’s latest masterpiece, sitting proudly on our website:

“Key Facts and Highlights from Liqvid.io’s Annual Report for 2023
Liqvid.io, a leading provider of digital signage solutions, has finalized its annual management report for the 2023 fiscal year, released on April 15. The report unveils significant achievements, notably the company has welcomed over 2000 new business users to its cutting-edge digital signage platform, spanning across 41 countries, with a predominant presence in retail, public, HORECA, and fitness industries. Bolstered by significant enhancements in enterprise functionality, VAPT security measures, and overall platform stability, Liqvid.io solidifies its position as one of the industry leaders and the preferred choice to start digital signage projects with. As the company looks ahead to this current year, we extend our best wishes for continued success and anticipate reaching new heights that will be highlighted in our upcoming annual report for 2024.”

Unexpected Reality

All of the above facts are true, of course. But as the CEO, I can’t help but add a touch of brutal reality to this neatly packaged success story. Our PR team did a fantastic job, but behind those polished words lie the battles we fought daily. Think of it as the difference between a fairy tale and the raw, uncut footage of a survival reality show.

Beyond the Press Release

Indeed, we have expanded, not just to 41, but over 50 countries. We’ve gained another 1,000 active freemium B2B users and more than 400 paid corporate accounts. We connected tens of thousands of TVs, and now we have around 50,000 media files sitting in our cloud, being distributed across all networks. Some of these files are larger than 1GB! With all this growth, our focus shifted entirely to infrastructure and software network engineering. These aspects became crucial to our financial results and sanity.

Lessons Learned (Why Don’t They Teach This in CEO School?)

• Predicting the Future is Hard 😆: If someone tells you that you should have foreseen every issue as the CEO, don’t believe them. Having more control over your CTO and setting strategic milestones sounds great in theory, but real life is messier.
• The Myth of the Magic Pill 💊: If someone promises you a magic pill or magician to fix all your problems without significant involvement from your dev team, run the other way. Expect complete uncertainty in terms of deadlines and total costs.
• Sentry and AWS Alerts ⚠️: This is terra incognita for most companies. You need to study these together with your team. Create dashboards, translate them into human language, and alert your own staff first. Alerts aren’t just for the IT staff.
• Support Team Limits 🤖: Don’t think your client support team can handle unlimited conversations across all your regions. Hiring more support engineers isn’t always the answer.
• External Opinions Matter 👬: Your tech team needs external opinions on complex tasks. Finding and allocating proper consultants to your CTO is your job as the CEO. CTOs can be stubborn, especially when things are booming.

Informational screens in convenience stores

The Results

• Revenue Allocation: We had to divert 30% of our revenues straight into infrastructure and related staffing. Yep, we literally threw money at the problem to patch up our infrastructure gaps. While this isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, it’s a crucial reminder to keep some cash in reserves. Trust me, you don’t want to scramble for funds when the tech gods demand their due. Eventually, we did manage to decrease expenditure significantly, but it took time and a lot of trial and error.
• Understanding Capacity: After five months of intense work, we finally grasped our current infrastructure capacity. This practical insight didn’t come from fancy Excel modeling but from getting our hands dirty. Much of our dev team had to pause feature development and dive into infrastructure tasks. External teams were largely unhelpful, but hiring a new senior engineer made a significant difference. We also gained a clear understanding of our future capacity for the next year, which allowed us to forecast and plan effectively. And yes, we happily stopped the money shower.
• AWS and Sentry Alerts: We examined all alerts and created an internal alerting system to inform our business units first. Now, they understand what these alerts mean for our clients.
• Communication with Partners: We were open with our reselling partners and distributors, clearly communicating our struggles and the current scope of our work. They were grateful and gave us full support.
• AI-Powered Support: We embedded an AI-powered support bot trained on our help articles database. It efficiently answers 70% of queries, allowing human support engineers to focus on analysis and collaboration with the dev, testing, and product teams.

I understand this might sound like Captain Obvious speaking, but for those currently navigating the scaling storm, I hope this serves as a useful second opinion. Feel free to contact me at as(at)liqvid.io for more detailed answers or opinions. And remember, don’t let AWS take over your revenues!