Losing Client worth 1.8 Million.

I received a call from the IT Head of one of the banks, and their first question was, “Are you guys building project management?” My response was, “Not exactly, but yes, we do have it in our offering.”

Following that, we scheduled a meeting where we were presented with a new requirement. Given that we were a cloud-based SaaS, the bank wanted the solution to be on-premises. This marked one of our initial forays into enterprise sales. The first dilemma was deciding whether to offer an on-premises service.

Considerations included source code privacy, maintenance on multiple servers, and ensuring compatibility of new features with Quality Assurance on both the cloud and on-premises environments. Detaching cloud services like S3 from the source code became a priority, and we opted to use Minio, an open-source bucket service that could be hosted on the bank’s server.

However, we encountered challenges with the bank’s strict protocols. Direct access was restricted, requiring us to use Anydesk to access the bank’s device, which had permission to access the server. Additionally, we had to share connections between the frontend and backend, and there were issues with Minio and port access. Addressing these technicalities took us approximately 15 days.

The solution, in hindsight, was straightforward: containerization. However, we did not initially consider this approach and instead tackled the challenges in our own way,

Key issues during this process included:

1. Lack of prior experience with deployment environments like this, as our previous work was primarily on cloud platforms such as Azure and AWS, where we did not encounter these specific issues.
2. Absence of experienced advisors guiding the team through such complex deployments.
3. Challenges stemming from the lean model of our startup, affecting the composition and expertise within the team.

What's Next ?

Try to Re-pitch. :(