Growth Marketing for Infrastructure as a Service | Sash Ghosh from OpenMetal

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In today’s episode of the Pathmonk Presents podcast, I’ve got an interesting guest here with me today. I’m with Sash and she’s heading over from the folks over at Openmetal. If you head over to Openmetal.io, you will learn more about how they provide private cloud as a service and bare metal as a service. We really want to deep dive into what this is all about, how people are using it, and also how Sash is thinking about growth for the company. So welcome to the show.

Sash Ghosh: Hi Lukas, hi everyone, I’m Sash. I head growth and partnerships at Openmetal, and I’m delighted to be here with Pathmonk today.

Lukas: Awesome. We really appreciate that. So, give people an overview. What is Openmetal all about, in your own words?

Sash: Sure. So Openmetal at its core is an infrastructure-as-a-service platform. Now, in a technical context, infrastructure-as-a-service provides virtualized physical computing resources over the internet. It essentially offers compute, storage, and networking resources on demand on a pay-as-you-go service, effectively outsourcing the management of physical servers, data center space, and network equipment. Now, usually, this type of service is associated with the large public cloud providers. What Openmetal has done in this space is that we have built an infrastructure-as-a-service platform that fuses the best features of a public cloud, like on-demand delivery, the pay-as-you-go model, and transparent pricing. But on our platform, you can deploy a full private cloud in under 45 seconds.

Now Lukas, if you look at the history of public cloud, even a couple of years ago, before Openmetal came onto the market, it could take weeks, even months, to work with a private cloud provider to set up a private cloud that meets your requirements and specifications. It was resource-intensive in both cost and time, and prohibitive for most small and medium businesses to even consider. With our platform, the time to get a private cloud has been reduced to seconds. You can go to our website right now, Lukas, at Openmetal.io, select the base private cloud that you would like to build on, and once the hardware has been allocated to you, your private cloud is deployed and available within seconds.

You have to understand that this private cloud is basically a real set of hardware sitting in one of our data centers that is now your own cloud. Compared to the public cloud, where you might be sharing resources with other customers, this is your own set of hardware, so you have exclusive access to it with the full security and privacy that comes with a private cloud, but it’s immediately available to you. And Lukas, you still don’t have the hassle of managing the hardware or networking underneath it, because that is still taken care of by Openmetal. So we’ve innovated in the space to make this type of private cloud easily available to businesses of all sizes.

Now a couple more things I’d like to quickly add are, the second thing outside of this particular innovation that we have done is one of the conscious choices we made is that we built this platform on open-source technology. One of our core missions is to make really large-scale enterprise open-source systems easily accessible to everyone. For this private cloud platform, we specifically chose OpenStack and Ceph, which provide a lot of advantages to our customers. But to wrap up this question, Openmetal is an open-source-based infrastructure-as-a-service platform that has fused together the best of public cloud, private cloud, and bare metal to bring cost and operational benefits to businesses of all sizes. It’s even in our name—Open is for open-source technology, and metal stands for the bare metal servers that form the underlying infrastructure.

Lukas: A clear overview of what you guys are all about. Now tell me a little bit about growth—what are the channels that you guys are leveraging?

Sash: So I’d probably answer it in two parts. First, the type of customers that we serve and why that is relevant to the question you’ve asked. So for us, it’s interesting. We are a two-year-old startup, though we were incubated under a 25+ year-old hosting company called Inmotion Hosting, and I’ve personally been on this journey for about eleven years. So we bring all our infrastructure experience and market knowledge to the startup. But from a marketing perspective, we really had to reevaluate and answer the ICP question, right? What’s your ideal customer profile? Who will benefit the most from your platform and services? And only then could we really go into how we could grow in this market.

What we have found, which we kind of expected, is that we’re not really targeting a particular company or industry, or that we don’t serve just a particular company or industry, but it’s a set of specific pain points. One of the big pain points I can give as an example is cloud-native SaaS companies. When they start up, they usually go with public cloud providers like AWS or GCP, but fast-forward a couple of years, they’ve consumed their credits and are paying massive bills with unpredictable costs. That’s where Openmetal can step in and save them money and offer more operational control.

In terms of acquisition channels, we are experimenting with several, but we have three core pillars that bring in most of our audience: inbound marketing with a focus on content and SEO, the OpenStack community, and partnerships with other open-source providers.

Lukas: Awesome. What role does the website play in your eyes?

Sash: The website is the keystone that holds all our marketing efforts together, especially as inbound marketing is a core pillar for us. We provide educational content, transparent pricing, and easy access to free trials of our private cloud, which is quite revolutionary in this space.

Lukas: Very cool. Makes sense. How do you see inbound growth in that industry in general?

Sash: It’s a learning process. Right now, a lot of our enterprise clients engage through our website, but many still require a white-glove sales process. So, while inbound marketing is key, we see a blend of sales-led and inbound strategies working best.

Lukas: Very good. As we are slowly getting to the end of the episode, I have some rapid-fire questions for you. Are you ready?

Sash: Sure.

Lukas: What is the last book that you read?

Sash: Deep Work by Cal Newport.

Lukas: What’s the one single thing that your company is focused on the most at the moment?

Sash: Bringing bare metal cloud to customers as easily as private cloud.

Lukas: If you had a magic wand, what’s the one single thing you would fix for your role as a marketer?

Sash: Getting our service to the right person at the right time.

Lukas: And if today was your first day in any marketing role, what’s one piece of advice you’d give yourself?

Sash: Everything is an experiment. Don’t overanalyze. Learn quickly and move forward.

Lukas: Very cool, Sash. We really appreciate that you joined us today on the Pathmonk Presents podcast. I’ll give you the last word—what’s the one thing people should remember about Openmetal?

Sash: Openmetal is an alternative cloud platform that combines the best of public cloud, private cloud, and bare metal, all built on open-source technology. Try us out at Openmetal.io.

Lukas: Thanks for being a guest on Pathmonk Presents.

Sash: Absolutely. It was a pleasure, Lukas.