Lyrid 2022: A Cloud-Driven Step Towards Innovation

This year was certainly a whirlwind for all of us here at Lyrid. 

We have redefined our sales operations and processes, laid the foundations for our marketing efforts, and made strides in developing our product market fit. Our team has grown immensely and our product has evolved to better meet the needs of our free and paid users alike.

And all of this has just happened in the past few months.

Here is a wrap up of Lyrid’s 2022.

An Ever-Changing Product

Over the past few months, our engineering team has been evolving our existing product, providing you better ways to bring your groundbreaking technology to the masses.

App deployment updates include a fully integrated GitHub integration, deployments to a specific region shared cluster, specific dedicated cluster, and distributed region, and DNS and domain attaching. 

Our update database now includes single instance deployment, with free plan users getting access to PostgreSQL and MinIO databases and object storage. Other updates include personal and business account switching. 

In our 2.0 app, clusters will be able to buy machine clusters dynamically from Lyrid UI, onboard their own machines, and then manage clusters. 

Future implementations we are currently working on include role-based access management and dedicated database instances with more database support. With the holiday season coming to an end, we decided to wrap all these updates into one convenient present for you, click here to read our full 2.0 app updates!

‍A New Approach to An Age-Old Practice

Marketing and sales are imperative to the success of any company, especially a startup. 

To start, we have completely revamped our website. Getting people to our website was the natural byproduct of our marketing; providing a pleasant web experience and encouraging visitors to explore our full site was the problem that our revamp addressed. To read more about our dramatic redesign, visit https://www.lyrid.io/post/lyrid-unveils-new-website-and-revamped-cloud-agnostic-solutions 

Since the beginning of 2022, we’ve ramped up our efforts on social media and included community engagement into the mix. In addition, our production of informational blogs and social posts increased significantly, covering topics such as developer resumes, to Kubernetes basics. 2022 also became the year of email marketing for Lyrid, with emails becoming a mainstay in our outreach. Each piece of copy also goes through a rigorous SEO process, ensuring that our content can stay competitive in this growing cloud landscape.

In the summer of this year, webinars have joined our marketing mix. Our webinars are aimed at reaching and informing audiences outside of our current ones, with social, email, and personal outreach methods being our main drivers of promotion. From our Kubernetes webinar alone, we were able to garner 100+ valuable contacts, creating brand enthusiasts from a webinar and a cold invite.

The biggest change to our marketing and sales efforts is our use of customer journeys. 

Our outbound marketing efforts had the purpose of bringing people to our brand. But like every interaction, marketing should be a two-way street. In the later half of this year, we decided to update our email production process and focus on bringing our brand to the people by creating specific customer journeys for curated prospects who, we believe, will find value in our services and products. This process required a total restructuring of how we approach emails and sales efforts, calling for constant research of various industries and the expansion of our sales team. While effort is admittedly still a work in progress, since implementation, we have been able to secure more sales and get the ball not only rolling, but accelerating. 

Our 2022 sales and marketing efforts have set the groundwork for a promising 2023.

There Is No “I” In Team

You’ve heard the saying, “There’s no “I” in ‘team’” at some point in your life, right? 

At Lyrid, we took extensive efforts to expand our team, ranging from our internal hiring to innovative partnerships. Here is a look into our careful cultivation of the Lyrid team for 2022:

All around the globe, there’s someone looking to innovate, to bring about change. This year alone, we nearly doubled our team (from 19 to 31), carefully choosing these innovators to bring change on a global scale ranging from a variety of expertises.

We have found tremendous success this year with our client partners, especially with the creation of our 1-Click Solution Marketplace. From end-user partners like Yukbid to data-center partners like the Bekasi Regency, along with so many other powerhouses, we were able to make huge waves by providing them the tools necessary to streamline their engineering and deployment processes. Our invaluable relationships with these partners have also exposed us to different industries and new customer bases, allowing us to break into groups that have never heard of us before and even giving us the opportunity to partner with other data centers.

In November, we had the extraordinary opportunity to partner with P3ID and Twain Working Group for their TWAIN Direct Developers Day event! While we’re no strangers to P3ID or Twain Working Group (we’ve been working together since 2021!) Visioneer is a company that we had the opportunity to interact with at this event, with talks of working together being in the process. TWAIN Direct Developers Day 2022 was the first of its kind on many levels: the first attempt to build a cloud community of this scale, the first of many Developer Days, and so on.

To round off this section, we’d like to highlight our partnership with Biznet Gio. Biznet Gio is Indonesia’s largest ISP and was looking to integrate a more cloud-centric approach to Indonesia. Aimed at creating and growing Indonesia’s first cloud ecosystem, our partnership involved Lyrid services and solutions being used to build Biznet’s cloud services, all while delivering these technologies and services to consumers in Indonesia.

To learn more about our partnership with Biznet Gio, read our blog.

A Step in the Right Direction

Our CEO, Handoyo Sutanto, once said, “Our mission is to make technology and resources readily available around the world so that anyone can build”. Our work aims to bring technology that is not only readily available and easy to use, but also cost efficient. But how can we make and provide something groundbreaking that doesn’t break the bank?

In 2022, we have found our stride. 

We had the element of convenience, but the problem of making our solution the most cost efficient still lingered - how do we offer the best solution possible at a fraction of the cost? Data centers was the answer. By offering machines that weren’t readily available in public clouds, data centers acted as the perfect conduit to deliver our services- providing scalability and cost-efficiency in the mix. 

We had initially tested this model in our partnership with Biznet Gio. In exchange for our services, Biznet would sell our products while pushing their customers to us. Why this partnership is so important to us is because it provides an indication of our move in the right direction.

By partnering with Biznet, we will be able to enter markets that are primed for cloud growth, allowing us to target specific regional vendors and meet their specific needs. Think Silicon Valley or even Seattle; these regions are expanding and quickly becoming the hub for technology, and we’re in the middle creating communities and cloud-centric mindsets to further this growth.

Because cloud services are so abundant, differentiation is important. Our partnership with Biznet has proved that you can get a unique, sustainable solution, without having to break the bank. 

By the end of Q3 and beginning of Q4, we found ourselves in a unique situation: the beginning of what seems to be an oncoming recession. For most people at this time, saving money is of the utmost importance; cheaper alternatives are everything. Our sales efforts went on overdrive, and, because of our partnership with Biznet Gio, we are able to create a unique value proposition that has only matured with the development of our product. For many, the current market conditions would spell certain doom, however, it created the perfect opportunity for us.

This event created the momentum necessary for our deal flywheel to grow; after our Biznet partnership, we found that partnerships and deals moving forward became easier to close- especially with the financial situation that the looming recession had. Our value proposition and solution differentiation resonated even more in countries that are expanding their technological reach, with the trajectory of these regions showing huge adoption of next-gen processes in the future. Coupled with our revised sales efforts previously mentioned, our data center hypothesis proved to be a success, giving us the confidence to expand to markets eager for more cloud solutions that are outside of our current reach.

In summary, our product market fit is a working hypothesis - although this has brought us success and is a revenue-generating model for us, we would like to take the time to explore other options and opportunities as a means of diversification. Profitability needs expansion, and we’re in the unique position to expand endlessly and create a more agile business model.

‍A Year in Review, A Year in Anticipation

As 2023 rears its optimistic head, we would like to highlight the leaps of faith that Lyrid will be taking.

Expansion is exciting, especially when it comes to a brand new market. In 2023, Lyrid is planning to expand to Latin America and Africa, with some steps toward this outreach being taken as you read this. Expansion towards a new market also requires expansion of internal personnel; fortunately, we’re in the financial position to hire new members to join the Lyrid team and aid in this process. Our end goal is for Lyrid to become a global powerhouse, although Rome wasn’t built in a day, our upcoming initiatives and calculated trajectory for 2023 are certainly worth waiting for!

Innovation requires flexibility. In terms of our sales and marketing efforts, we plan to double down on our current data center and sales strategies. This doesn’t mean we’re stopping all other forms of revenue generation, though. Improving the quality of our newsletter emails, social media posts, and blogs will also become a top priority for Lyrid.

By establishing and bolstering our efforts and foundations in 2022, we’re setting up our upward trajectory for immense growth and profitability in 2023!

Closing Remarks‍

To our investors, partners, clients and customers, and users, thank you for supporting us on our journey so far! We’re bullish on Lyrid in 2023, and hope that everyone can be a part of our journey to make groundbreaking technology more accessible around the world.

Our innovation process and product process are always changing, we’re appreciative of everyone that has supported us so far.

Happy New Year!