What it changed
- Founded in 2019, 7 years of client work, and counting.
- 100% of our clients have hired us again.
- Two practices under one roof, engineering and learning design, plus products of our own.
Why a third business
After neap.co and FairplayTech, I knew what I wanted: a business that serves clients who can afford to do things properly, built around the person who does the work, with no layers in between. Cloudless Labs was founded in Sydney in 2019 to be exactly that.
What it is
A small consultancy, on purpose. Executives talk directly to the person who will engineer their system: me for cloud, data and AI, Lin Wong for e-learning. We take a business vision to a specification, an architecture and a running system, and we stay to run it. Alongside client work, we build products of our own, HappySkills, switch-profile and BobNinja, and The Stack, our public, opinionated record of what we build with.
What running it takes
Everything the first two businesses taught, done properly this time: healthy cash flow, so we can choose the right clients and invest in trust; paid, bounded discovery before anything big; clear scopes and fair prices; and marketing and sales treated as part of the job. It also means behaving like an executive, not just an engineer: understanding a client's P&L, their board, their risks and their timelines.
The mindset it takes
The biggest lesson of three businesses isn't technical: it's the difference between an employee's mindset and an owner's. An employee can stay focused on their craft, and a wrong call costs a bad week. An owner lives with every consequence, and a wrong call can cost the business.
Running one means keeping emotions in check, not pretending they aren't there. Not taking on a bad client because cash is tight. Not holding on to a project out of pride. Not avoiding a hard conversation because it's uncomfortable. The decision has to be the right one for the business, made calmly, especially when it doesn't feel calm. I'm still working on that mindset every day.
It's also what lets me sit with an executive and understand that their technology question is really a business decision, with their money and their name on it.
Why it matters to you
Every client has hired us back. That's not because we're the cheapest or the biggest. It's because the person who understood their business is the person who built the system, and nothing was lost in between. How we work explains the rest.