11 Years SaaS - A Reflection on QuotaGuard's Journey
Approximate time to read: 9 min
Hard to believe it’s been 11 years that the QuotaGuard service has been alive and kicking.
Michael Frew
August 02, 2024
Hard to believe it’s been 11 years that the QuotaGuard service has been alive and kicking.
Technology companies that survive over 10 years are rare. Especially ones that are self-funded with no outside investment.
My oldest image of our Pricing page
As a small business owner/operator, one of my most rewarding experiences is showing how small, self-funded companies can thrive - profitably - and survive longer than most VC-funded companies that get all the press, all the money, and all the support they could ever need.
If you’re self-funded, or bootstrapped, trust me…it is possible to run a business better than the most well funded competitors from Silicon Valley.
Highlights
The dangerous 1-3 year growth/scalability period most small businesses go through.
Smaller businesses should do one thing well, and only do that one thing.
My biggest reward is not the money, but the conversation.
Who Else Made This Journey With Us?
There are only three other businesses that survived since day 1 with QuotaGuard. They also deserve a mention:
Heroku - Our birthplace and favorite platform still after all these years.
Dead Mans Snitch - Saved thousands of customers hours and hours of downtime.
TarSnap - Solid, reliable, just an excellent service.
Although Heroku has a different financial story, hats off 🎩 to Dead Man’s Snitch and TarSnap for their own profitability and long term success.
What Made The Journey Interesting?
The pivot points in my mind usually rotate around one major product development and reducing the stability incidents of the past. (I’ve written about what it’s like to be the owner of the business that’s going through a critical outage or incident__)
Quick Timeline
2013: QuotaGuard was originally started by Tim Williams, now CTO of Zivio, QuotaGuard grew quickly to 1,000 customers and $10k in MRR in just 18 months.
2014: Introduced QG Static for Static IP’s on IBM, Heroku, and directly available.
2015: Tim opted to focus on a different venture and sold the business via FE International, an online Software/SaaS business broker. (More on that here__, if you want to read about the acquisition.)
2018: $83,333/mo MRR 🥂 (iykyk)
2019: Introduced QG Shield end-to-end secure service.
2023: Happy Decade Birthday, celebrating 10 years in business.
2024: Eclipsed $10M in total revenue since day 1.
Periodic Incidents, Reaching Stability, & Managing Growth
When I started working on Quotaguard, the business was leaning into its increasing growth and starting to show signs of struggling with its ability to scale at will, yet stay fully online.
As mentioned, QuotaGuard was a routine, boot-strapped start up. That means features and capabilities were the priority; scaleability and stability came a distant second, at least for the first few years. The software entrepreneurs mindset being: if the product isn’t successful in the first place, why would we focus on these more mature issues right from the start?
As anyone has operated a business that’s adding hundreds and hundreds of customers, scalability becomes a dragging problem across dozens of aspects of the business (not just technically, but financially, operationally, etc…)
This 1-3 year period of a tech business is one of the more difficult periods as an owner. There are a lot of outages, a lot of 2am “emergency” alerts, and a lot of questions about “What did I get myself into?”
Many architectural decisions made in the beginning - long before we know if the business will be successful - ended up impacting the company’s ability to grow in the future without encountering significant breaking points (and corresponding availability incidents) requiring serious product redesigns.
Once QuotaGuard hit a quarter million dollars in revenue, it was time to start implementing new scalability features like the dual load-balancer concept, dedicated proxy offerings, and the implementation of multiple health checks that triggered corresponding automatic proxy healing processes.
The goal was to regain our long term stability, offer customers the option of dedicated resources, and provide greater reliability, customization, and security across dozens and dozens of stand alone proxies.
After the technical solutions, we had to do a lot of soft-skill customer outreach to make sure our larger customers moved over to dedicated resources, so they could stop being impacted by shared resource issues, like “noisy neighbors”.
The payoff - once it is all re-architected years in the future - is your customers are finally on a stable, solid, and reliable solution.
I no longer have to wake up each morning with anxiety that something is down. I could finally focus on what makes business fun in the first place, building out new features, helping customers solve their own particular use-cases, and enjoying the benefits of being an owner / operator of a successful company.
Now, reflecting back years later, Quotaguard has reached a point where incidents are incredibly rare, the last significant one occurring in 2019, over 5 years ago, if my notes are correct.
Product Development
I’ve always felt that most smaller businesses should do one thing well, and only do that one thing.
I’m not a proponent of horizontal service creep that begins to muddle your focus on your core offering. (likely a post I’ll write out in the future)
Therefore, in my time as an owner, we’ve only invented one new service to go along with our original Static IP solution, QuotaGuard Shield.
In 2019, Heroku approached us about the market need for a HIPAA compliant static IP solution. At the time, neither QuotaGuard or our competitors offered a truely end-to-end secure solution.
We found that all the static IP services on the global market had a critical vulnerability between their endpoints and their apps, where an attacker could learn a little bit of information about the traffic endpoints, their ports, and that discoverable knowledge would not be compliant with HIPAA regulations.
For the next year, we worked on how to secure our customer communication 100% on their journey from endpoint to endpoint.
In 2019, we launched QG Shield, the only product available globally that actually is HIPAA compliant and secure all data across the transaction stream.
(More technical details on what makes Shield the only end-to-end secure Static IP solution can be found here__, if interested)
There was always going to be a cannibalization aspect to launching a more secure option, however within just a few months, the QG Shield solution had turned into its own 6-figure business. 👇👇👇
QG Shield growth was pretty immediate…
Today, in July 2024, QG Shield could be its own stand alone company worth over 7 figures just by itself.
Not a bad add-on service, if you ask me.
What Do I Get Out Of All Of This?
Sure, financial stability, pride of ownership, the usual. But honestly, Quotaguard hits a bit different for me.
I’ve found that my biggest reward is talking to our customers, as they are primarily mid-level and senior engineers and developers across the world.
When I started my professional career in 1998 as an engineer in an artificial intelligence R&D laboratory, I was naive enough to jump for promotions to any management positions as soon as they were offered.
What I didn’t realize was those promotions meant that I ended up watching my colleagues do the one thing that I actually enjoyed doing; writing code, building MVP’s and applications, and having fun building the things that make IT so fun.
Fast forward 20 years later, software is so different now that I couldn’t even do a “Hello World” program without an hour of googling. So I can’t really “go back” now at this age.
So for me, someone that loves technology, but doesn’t have a realistic way to go back to development…the ability to own a business where I can directly communicate with other engineers and developers, brings up on nostalgic reward that I can’t match anywhere else other than in my own companies (Gigalixir,_ _PutsReq, & PutsBox allow this special enjoyment too.)
Even though I can’t code any more, I can still speak conceptually about customer use cases and, at this age, that’s as good as it gets.
Thank You Customers Past and Future
Obviously any post about an anniversary isn’t possible without the customer base that makes this possible.
But more importantly, I wouldn’t experience even a tenth as much joy with QuotaGuard if it wasn’t for the interactions I have with our customers each week.
Thank you everyone that has spent time working with me and my team over the last 11 years. I love you for it!
Finally…Thank You to the Team
Of course, nothing is possible alone. I have a tremendous team behind me that are so much better at each of their specialties than I ever could or would have been in the past.
As most of them really don’t like the spotlight, I’ll just say “you know who you are, thank you.”
As always, in closing, Happy Coding and reach out any time if you think I can help you with your QuotaGuard setup, or with your career itself.
Thank you all,
Michael
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