#2 How digger started. 🚀
How we identified the problem we are solving, and how we're currently going about it!
Hola!
Hope you all had a fun week! We had a super packed week at Digger. For this week’s edition of AWS Untangled -
1. Igor talks about how we got into Entrepreneur First and what we did after!
2. I (Mohamed) talk about our weekly AWS tip for startups.
Let’s dive right in! 😃
How Digger Started 👇
One could say we started Digger at the worst possible time - summer of 2020. We think actually it was the best possible time because the noise in the startup world got quieter for a while and only high-conviction ideas could make people leave their cozy jobs.
Funny enough, without even meeting each other we had almost identical idea about the problem we wanted to solve. We met at an accelerator in London called Entrepreneur First. Technically it’s a two-part program - first is an incubator / co-founder matching platform, and second is an accelerator, a bit like YC. We did both.
Prior to EF Mohamed, my co-founder and CTO, was building infrastructure for Amazon Prime Video. Believe it or not, Amazon internally doesn’t have some magical next-gen tooling that’d make infrastructure pains go away. So like in every other big company using AWS, Mohamed had to spend significant chunk of his time on AWS maintenance.
That matches my experience at Palantir. We went as far as creating an internal platform-as-a-service that gave developers a nice UI to deploy their apps into the company’s AWS account. This platform was built and maintained by a sizeable Platform team, but that was totally worth it because at least developers were no longer blocked by DevOps, they could self-serve.
When we met at EF we started talking about the problems we’d like to get solved - and we were thinking almost the exact same thing! AWS is hard; there needs to be a product that’d make it simple for developers. What are the odds!
So in early September 2020 Mohamed and I teamed up to build Digger. We have built our initial prototype in 3 days; then we spent a few weeks talking to potential customers; then we for some reason started exploring incident response and other SRE use cases. That was useful but then we realised that it’s no longer about AWS. So in about 2 months we went full circle back to our initial prototype and launched it. Check out our video from demo day at EF! 👇
What happened next is covered here!
Our weekly AWS tip for startups 💻
My AWS tip for today is to always enable billing alerts for your account. AWS makes it very easy to create resources in a few clicks. But since there’s so many regions and dashboards, it is also very easy to forget about something running in your account. This will definitely bite you back when you get the next charged on your credit card at the end of the month!
Speaking from experience, I was very displeased when I discovered that I had been charged a few thousand dollars on one of my older AWS accounts due to an EC2 windows instance that I had forgotten about!
Billing alarms can be created in a few clicks and you can set them according to your previous spend or your current budget. Once you are notified about an alarm you can then take action early and see if there are any offending resources, then terminate something if you forgot about it.
Feel free to book free AWS office hours with the Digger team! We would be more than happy to help fellow startups!
What we shipped this week 🚢
Digger Templates - If you liked AWS Bootstrap, a successful Product Hunt launch of ours, you’ll love this! Pre-built templates are now a part of Digger UI! It basically takes 3 steps now to have a full-stack app running on AWS. Just connect your AWS Account, choose a template, and Deploy!
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