Get a View of Transactions That Helps You Meet Your Marketplace Goals
Executive Summary
A Cloud Guru keeps growing at an exponential pace, but they didn’t have the time or resources to dedicate towards piecing together all of the threads relating to their AWS Marketplace transactions. In combination with Tackle’s encyclopedic knowledge of the Cloud Marketplace, Tackle’s Platform allowed A Cloud Guru to meet and surpass their desired goals of increasing speed to close, accuracy of transactions, and overall legibility of transactions on the AWS Marketplace.
Key Highlights
A Single Dashboard
Stitched together all of ACG's marketplace data into one simple dashboard view
Accelerated Transactions
Increased speed to close, accuracy and overall legibility of AWS Marketplace transactions
A Marketplace Playbook
Tackle's customer success team helped navigate AWS, from best practices to reporting data
An Innovation Success Story: Out-of-the-box Entrepreneurship
strong>Step 1: Think of a great idea.
Step 2: Share the idea with others.
Step 3: Grow the idea.
Step 4: Experience success.
This is the roadmap of entrepreneurship that seems simple in theory, yet its execution remains only a dream to the vast majority.
In an era of globalization driven by the advancement of technology and an up-and-coming generation of professionals looking for meaning in everything they do, you would be hard-pressed to find a person who hasn’t thought about bringing their entrepreneurial dream to fruition. The founders of A Cloud Guru, Ryan and Sam Kroonenburg, turned that thought into reality; what started with humble beginnings has led to success far beyond what they had imagined in the formative days of their business.
>A Clod Guru is one of the world’s first serverless startups. What companies had historically spent years building using traditional server-based architectures, Ryan and Sam built in less than 30 days. By leveraging the power of constant community feedback, A Cloud Guru scaled to become the company it is today—a state-of-the-art learning management platform that enables content to efficiently scale to nearly a million students in over 181 countries. By providing a comprehensive, up-to-date library of cloud education offerings, certification courses, skills assessments, hands-on labs, weekly technology-news updates by industry experts, and management dashboards that track student progress, A Cloud Guru enables both businesses and individuals to stay current, stay relevant, and deliver results with cloud computing. The content is developed by in-house cloud engineers and powered by serverless functions to match the demands of customers worldwide while making educational materials that once seemed impossible to produce and obtain, available to the masses. By doing so, A Cloud Guru has become an inspiration for innovators and represents out-of-the-box entrepreneurship that many aspire to emulate.
Throughout the process, the Tackle team was much more proactive than we were… The team was overly communicative about what action items each group owned, [and the process and maintenance since has been] pretty seamless.
VP of Finance, A Cloud Guru
Working Smarter, Not Harder
A Cloud Guru’s growth was rapid and unanticipated. In less than eight months from its inception, the online school had acquired over 280,000 students. Needless to say, the company’s mission of “providing education at the price of a movie ticket” caught on quickly. Today, the company has over 800K customers in 181 countries and has a social media following that extends beyond 70K YouTube followers and 23K Twitter followers. As these customers and followers continued to grow in numbers and demographics, the larger Cloud Guru team realized that the growth could mark a sink or swim point for the company. In order to overcome the extreme pressures of this demand, the team made a conscious decision to hyper-focus on the thing that brought them success in the first place: on the product and its development.
With such great growth came great responsibility to make decisions in the best interest of the company and its customers. Hyper-focusing on the learning management platform helped the A Cloud Guru team to continue to meet and exceed customer product expectations, but a large gap quickly manifested with the need for a well-rounded go-to-market and reporting strategy. Corporate and individual clients alike were looking to purchase A Cloud Guru services in a way that was as convenient and streamlined as the product itself. As businesses moved procurement towards the AWS marketplace, pre-allocated AWS spends came along for the ride. A Cloud Guru needed to tap into this but did not have the capacity to dedicate resources and effort towards it while remaining focused on developing their core product. In order to be responsible to their business, their mission, and their customers, A Cloud Guru turned to Tackle.io to help them manage their Marketplace business.
In turning to Tackle, A Cloud Guru integrated their already available AWS Marketplace offering with Tackle’s Downstream reporting and integration platform. Downstream stitches together all of the separate streams of marketplace data related to sales, disbursements, contracts, and customers into a simple, easy-to-use dashboard. In combination with Tackle’s encyclopedic knowledge of the cloud marketplace, Tackle’s Downstream portal allowed A Cloud Guru to meet and surpass their desired goals of increasing speed to close, accuracy of transactions, and overall legibility of transactions on the AWS Marketplace.
“Throughout the process, the Tackle team was much more proactive than we were… The team was overly communicative about what action items each group owned, [and the process and maintenance since has been] pretty seamless.”
- Kevin Mellor, VP of Finance for A Cloud Guru
Practicing What We Preach
A Cloud Guru helps to empower people worldwide to be masters of their own success, and they’re the market leader today by being an example of living by that coda. Their partnership with Tackle.io allows them to take full ownership of their presence on the marketplace, and in doing so, enabling A Cloud Guru to truthfully practice what they preach.
When A Cloud Guru launched on the AWS Marketplace in April 2018, they experienced a substantial spike in revenue, generating 30 new deals through the AWS Marketplace. This is just the beginning. The reporting and guide services provided by Tackle provided actionable proof that their traction in this channel is growing in leaps and bounds, particularly through the use of private offers. The increased revenue predictability that comes from Downstream has left A Cloud Guru “confidently assured [in their position in the marketplace],” according to Mellor, allowing the ACG team to focus on their core business while Tackle takes care of the rest.
Through their partnership with Tackle, A Cloud Guru can practice what they preach to their hundreds of thousands of customers all over the world: Stay on Top. Stay Relevant. Deliver and Monitor Results.
Buy A Cloud Guru on AWS
About A Cloud Guru
Founded in 2015 by brothers Sam and Ryan Kroonenburg, A Cloud Guru (ACG) began as a single cloud certification course and has grown into the leader in cloud learning. We’ve helped over two million novices, gurus, and everyone in between advance their career in the cloud, prepare for certification exams and progress through learning paths to become gurus in digital and cloud innovation. Now, with the acquisition of Linux Academy in 2019, we’ve combined the current strengths and benefits of both companies to create a new and improved A Cloud Guru platform for modern tech skills. With a robust Learn-by-Doing experience, we’ve developed the most effective, hands-on, and comprehensive skills development platform for cloud learning in the world! And we’re only getting started!
