Cloud68.co provides solopreneurs, SMEs, and organizations with reliable, safe, and ready2use digital infrastructure. They do this by using only open source solutions following a strong belief that we should have more control and privacy over our tech infrastructure.
We had an interview with one of the founders of Cloud68, Redon Skikuli, and he explained to us more in-depth what the company stands for.
How did the idea of building Cloud68.co come about?
Core team members of Cloud68.co have been promoting ethical technologies and digital freedoms at a local and regional level for many years and obviously, we knew the importance of avoiding big tech platforms when it comes to respecting our privacy. Although free open source solutions seem an obvious choice for us and many SMEs and individuals out there, it is not easy to self-host and manage digital infrastructure.
We saw the potential to offer these services and not a lot of companies have this approach. Before even launching Cloud68.co our team members were getting many questions from individuals and teams on migrating from big tech to platforms that respect digital freedoms. We did some research and found out that there were far more requests to offer digital infrastructure with open source platforms than actually teams providing such services and we started thinking of how to build the foundations for providing such services. From that point, we worked on a business plan and improved on a daily basis and here we are today.
What is your mission? What is the problem that you are giving a solution to?
Our mission is to make the use of free and open-source software as easy as possible and provide SMEs and individuals with reliable digital infrastructure. In other words, our mission is to provide reliable open-source digital infrastructure.
- Reliable - because despite being a work in progress, the needs of our subscribers will always be addressed in time and we will stay committed to giving you the best solution.
- Open source - only provide software whose code is publicly available and published with permissive licenses.
- Digital infrastructure - we won’t simply provide you with the hosting space; research, training, on-boarding, and consultancy will also be available when needed.
What is innovative about your startup?
They say data is the new oil because there are billions of dollars around that industry. For us, respecting your data and your privacy is our business model.
As a team that has spent almost a decade fighting for digital freedoms, we have a deep understanding of organizations and individuals that ask our help to provide digital infrastructure. We have decided to put ethics at every level of our operations before profits and we strongly believe that in a world of last-stage surveillance capitalism this approach is what we would consider innovative.
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What is difficult about being a startup in Albania, especially in your industry? Has it been easy or difficult to make up the team to work on the project?
Before Cloud68.co we were offering consultancy services for companies and organizations in Albania, which was a constant struggle of chasing payments, spending lots of hours at the bank, and trying to catch up with the laws that change every couple of years (can’t have a solid business plan when things change all the time) and almost every client asking for much more services that were actually in the contract due to their budget limitations. There was a feeling within the team that there are disruptions all the time from factors not related to us and obviously being a team that offers digital infrastructure you want to limit disruptions and unknown factors. We remember the day that we woke up in the morning and found our bank account blocked temporarily for reasons not related to something done wrong operationally, but due to some bureaucratic procedures.
In such an environment, it is almost impossible to operate in a reliable way for our customers/Subscribers. That was the turning point and the moment we decided to go global in terms of company location, client base, and also becoming digital nomads ourselves. It took a relatively long time and some important amount of money spent to be at the point we are currently, but we think we did the right thing because every time we talk with friends that run their tech-related businesses in the country we still hear the same issues not being solved or having very slow progress.
Due to these struggles and given that from an operational and staff perspective things work outside Albania we should consider the company to have made the first steps in Albania, but now not having many operations in the country…
How have the customers reacted to the product/service?
We spend a lot of time talking to our Subscribers and also use surveys (using Mautic by the way) to understand how they feel about our services and so far we have had really good reviews. Obviously, we take feedback very seriously when it comes to things that our Subscribers mention during our interaction with them and we’re proud to see the progress since the first days that our team started providing open-source digital infrastructure.
Some of the feedback gathered from our Subscribers can be found here.
Who is your core target audience? How are you trying to reach them?
Our core audience is small-medium teams (companies and non for profits) and individuals that care about their privacy and want to migrate their data from ‘evil tech’ and in the process find a team that does not sell their data to third parties. We also know that our audience cares about reliable tech and user support from the team that manages their infrastructure and that’s also one of the attributes of what our ‘target audience’ cares about.
We don’t think in terms of location, since one can find entities interested in moving away from the big tech conglomerates all over the globe, thankfully!
What are your future plans?
In the next couple of years we want to work on (a) improving internal operations, (b) keeping Subscriber retention at high levels by offering the same level of service, and (c) giving back as much as we can to the amazing contributors of open source projects in different ways.
We tend to think long-term and take things slow when it comes to planning for the next years to come. We plan for the next quarter, the next fiscal year, and once per year we have a team discussion about issues that are considered more macro.
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