Harnessing OpenStack for Effective Marketing Automation | Lauren Morley from OpenMetal

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Lauren Morley: Good. Thank you so much for having me on here.

Ernesto: It’s great to have you on. Excited to learn a little bit more about OpenMetal and I’m sure our listeners are tuning in, wondering what OpenMetal is all about. So, let’s take it up with that. Lauren, in your own words, can you tell us a little bit more?

Lauren: Yeah, definitely. At a very top level, OpenMetal is a cloud infrastructure as a service company. We purchase and maintain server hardware and our customers can just use it, which takes a lot of the typical technology expense and maintenance off of their plates. What makes OpenMetal cool is that we provide a hosted, private cloud infrastructure that is actually based on OpenStack, which is a completely open source product. OpenStack has traditionally been both the most powerful cloud system in the world and also the most complicated to get running correctly, which really limited it to being used by maybe large enterprise teams. Our team has benefited a lot from open source software and OpenStack in particular, so we wanted to make it more accessible for smaller teams and even individuals. From around 2019 onward, the team started developing ways to automate the deployment process and managed to get it down from weeks to days and then eventually to under an hour. Now, using our platform, you can just click a few buttons and deploy a usable OpenStack cloud in 45 seconds, which I think is pretty awesome.

Ernesto: It definitely is. The way you mentioned going from weeks to seconds is a great improvement. So awesome to hear that from you guys. Now that our listeners have a good understanding of your company, Lauren, what would you say is the key problem that you guys solve for your clients?

Lauren: Thinking of our main customer base, which is usually other technology companies—anyone who uses cloud infrastructure, has a lot of data to manage, or has high-performance application needs—companies that started out on public cloud and are looking at alternatives because that can get super expensive as you scale and doesn’t give a lot of businesses the flexibility and control they need. It’s good when you’re starting out, it’s really easy to get started in. As you grow, maybe you need to do some things that aren’t really offered in the public cloud and all of a sudden you’re paying a lot for the privilege as well. We basically give our clients a private cloud on completely dedicated server hardware. You get full root access and you can pretty much configure everything exactly as you want. There are no baked-in licensing fees since the platform runs on OpenStack, open source technologies, so you get better performance hardware utilization since the servers are only used by you and not shared with any other tenants. The costs are typically anywhere from 30% to even 70% lower than what companies were paying with the big public cloud. So, we’re really providing a better cloud infrastructure for most business use cases and then saving them a bunch of money at the same time.

Ernesto: That’s great to hear. You mentioned a couple of industry sectors like SaaS providers, hosting, and managed IT services. Would those be your ideal ICPs, or is there maybe another industry that you guys like to target?

Lauren: Yeah, definitely. We can serve just about anyone. It really just depends on if you have heavy data needs or big workloads. Software engineering, software development is another big one. We’ve even worked with a lot of colleges and higher education institutions who need cloud resources for teaching. A lot of people who are just learning OpenStack are using our platform since it’s super easy to pop up the production environment and all of a sudden you’re working in OpenStack.

Ernesto: Perfect. How does someone usually find out about OpenMetal? Is there a top client acquisition channel for you guys?

Lauren: We’ve only officially been a company for a couple of years, so we’re still kind of in startup mode. We’ve been really focused on improving our organic reach and trying to keep the customer acquisition costs low while still growing brand awareness. By far, our biggest acquisition channel right now is organic. We’ve built a ton of content. Our engineering team has built a lot of documentation like operators manuals, so you can go from not knowing really anything about OpenStack to learning how to operate your own cloud. That stuff gets a lot of traffic. With all that content, we try to focus on being helpful to our community and making content that answers the questions they have or solves their problems. Aside from that, we’re also a member of the Open Infra Foundation, which is the main supporting body for OpenStack. So we get a lot of referral traffic from their website. And of course, we’re also lucky to have awesome clients who refer OpenMetal, so word of mouth is always good for us too.

Ernesto: Definitely. Word of mouth is great for everyone. So, that way our listeners who are tuned in can visit you at OpenMetal.io. What role does the website play in client acquisition?

Lauren: Our website is huge. It’s our top client acquisition point, so it’s definitely a huge point of focus for our team. We’re always looking for new ways to improve it, looking at usage stats, finding out what keywords people are finding us through, trying to improve the user experience and lead funnels, and ensuring we have the info that people may be looking for. It’s an always-on, always-happening kind of thing. I don’t think our website has stayed the same for more than a day or two at a time without tweaking. We’re selling to a very technical audience, and the product is very technical, but people have different levels of experience with running a cloud, and not as many people have experience with OpenStack or open source products. So, we have to avoid the pitfall of wanting to just word-vomit onto the page and go into every single technical detail. We try to balance how much information we provide, being transparent with what we offer and do, but also not scaring people away with a massive wall of text.

Ernesto: Great. Are there any tools, tips, or methods you would recommend for website lead generation?

Lauren: It’s super important to have one or two really great offers on your website. One thing we’ve done with great success is offering free trials of the product. Individual users get three deployments a month, 8 hours each, to play around and learn the system. For businesses, we offer extended 30-day free trials, which depending on the hardware, can be worth up to $1,000 or $2,000. It’s just something that makes sense for your offer and is an insanely good deal.

Ernesto: Definitely. Well, let’s switch gears a bit, Lauren, and talk about you as a leader. What are some key tasks you focus on in your day-to-day work?

Lauren: I spend most of my days either on the website or within HubSpot. On the website, I’m generally building new content like blogs or pages, reviewing user stats, and optimizing things where I can. I help with proofing and editing new content, adding calls to action, internal links, SEO, all that fun stuff. I’m also our primary admin for HubSpot for OpenMetal, so every day I’m looking at new contacts, enriching the profile info we have for them. I do a lot of automation with different internal workflows and sequences for our sales team. I create our email drip campaigns, monthly newsletter, and build assets for our website like forms and chat flows. I keep everything organized