What it changed
- A consultancy founded and run end to end: sales, marketing, contracts, delivery and cash flow.
- Six products for founders, from proofs of concept to an app on the App Store and an MVP that shipped.
- The business lessons Cloudless Labs was built on.
The idea
neap.co was my first business, founded with two partners: an IT consultancy for first-time founders and early-stage start-ups. The offer was to take a founder's idea to a product the lean start-up way, with customer discovery, fast iterations, and only as much software as each step needed to learn something.
What we built
Six products, for founders in six industries:
- A property marketplace for homes not yet for sale, serverless on AWS.
- A geofenced social app with face recognition, published on the App Store.
- A weather-data product for insurers, which shipped its MVP.
- Prototypes for food catering, second-hand fashion and crypto inside superannuation.
What running it taught me
Building the products was the part I knew. Running the business was the education:
- Cash flow is everything. With healthy cash flow, you can afford to build trust and experiment. With tight cash flow, you make desperate decisions. We learned it by losing about $20,000 on a client who never paid.
- Negotiation and scope. A good negotiator can get $25,000 of work for $5,000 from a hungry supplier. We were that supplier, once.
- Pick the right customer. First-time founders were the wrong market for us: their budgets were too tight and their runways too short for the lean iterations they needed. Many gave up before reaching the market.
- Marketing and sales are a job, not something that happens between projects.
- So are accounting and admin. Bookkeeping, tax, insurance, contracts, compliance: as a first-time owner, I had no idea how much of the week they would take.
- A good employee isn't automatically a good business owner. I assumed that being good at my job would make me good at business. I couldn't have been more wrong. An employee is judged on doing their part well. An owner answers for every outcome, including the ones nobody sees: the cash, the risk, the client who doesn't pay, the decision to stop. It gave me a new respect for every employer I'd had.
Why it matters to you
It's why, when you work with Cloudless Labs, you're dealing with a business owner, not only an engineer. I've managed cash flow, written contracts, chased invoices, and sat where a founder sits. I understand what a technology decision costs your business, not just what it costs to build.