Hey there! I’m Santhiaroo, the founder of Cloudbrand, and I want to share how this whole crazy journey started.
It was around April 2024, and I was doing my usual thing – checking some files a team member had shared with a client. No big deal, right? Wrong. When I clicked on the link, I was bombarded with pop-ups trying to sell me lifetime deals and limited-time offers. I mean, come on! Is this really the first impression I want our clients to have when we share files with them? A cloud storage provider basically yelling, “Buy our stuff!”? No way.
So, I thought, “Okay, let’s try Dropbox.” But geez, talk about expensive! For my team of 30 designers (both in-house and contractors), we’re looking at $15 per user. And sure, they have some basic branding features, but they also come with a ton of stuff we don’t need. Great for some, but not for us.
Next up, Box. Again, we’re talking $15 to $25 per user for my team of 30. They have a starter plan, but it’s super limited – only 100GB of storage and a max of 10 team members. Ugh, back to square one.
Now, we already use Google Workspace for emails and admin stuff, but only a few team members have Google Workspace emails. The rest use Zoho because it’s cheaper. To get decent storage and better team control with Google, you’re looking at $18 per month per user. It was getting complicated fast. We wanted to keep ownership of the files as a company so we could access them even if someone left the team. But our budget was already stretched thin with subscriptions for Slack, Figma, Adobe for some, Deel.com, and Remote. Adding another big subscription would eat up our small profits, and Gerald, my co-founder, is a bit strict about adding new subscriptions; he hates this.
I looked everywhere but couldn’t find a solution flexible enough to give us the full white-label experience we wanted – sharing files using our agency name instead of Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, or whatever.
That’s when the lightbulb moment hit. After a few weeks of brainstorming, I came up with “Cloud” for cloud storage and “Brand” for branding. Cloudbrand was born! The .com was crazy expensive at $15,000, so I grabbed the .co, .io, and some alternatives like trycloudbrand.com and cloudbrandhq.com. (I am still looking for a way to buy it, but now I need some MRR first)
I reassigned Ben, one of our project managers, to this new project, along with two product designers. We started working on the design in June.
While we were designing, Ben started looking for a developer, especially one experienced with MVP, to help us build the app. He first reached out to this guy who’s pretty popular on X (Twitter). Thank God he never replied—we dodged a bullet there! Then, he found someone who seemed like a good match.
After some back-and-forth, Ben confirmed, assuring me that this new guy wasn’t a “joker” (which is our term for someone who talks big but turns out to be unreliable). So, a month later, my co-founder and I agreed to finance the project. The deal seemed reasonable, so we signed a contract with him.
I have to admit I felt a bit out of my depth. I know the agency business inside and out, but software development was new territory for me. However, the developer guided us through everything, recommended tech stacks, and explained the process. This was enough for me. We paid him, and he got to work.
Then came the silence. Weeks went by without much news, and I started to get worried. As an agency owner used to 1-2 day turnarounds, this was really stressful. But I kept reminding myself that good things take time, and I trusted that he knew what he was doing.
While we waited, we didn’t just sit around doing nothing. We put together a landing page and got our website online, describing what we were building and promising a launch in 3-4 months. We even created Dropbox and WeTransfer alternative landing pages and submitted them for indexing. Hey, might as well let Google start ranking us while the app was in development, right?
But a few weeks later, we got a surprise. We searched for Cloudbrand and found another landing page—an exact copy of ours—on a domain we didn’t own. I immediately suspected our developer, and sure enough, I was right! He had started building the base and included our landing page. When we saw the login page with our app name and logo, we were over the moon. It was the first time we saw Cloudbrand coming to life!
My co-founder got so excited that he started daydreaming about our future MRR. I had to laugh—the app wasn’t even ready, and he was already counting our chickens before they hatched!
Then, as we started collaborating more actively with the developer, we realized we needed to change the scope quite a bit. We had to negotiate an extension beyond our initial agreement, but thankfully, he gave us another fair deal. This allowed us to make some significant improvements to the MVP.
And here we are today—the first beta of Cloudbrand is up and running! It’s everything the big names aren’t—simple, affordable cloud storage and file sharing built specifically for digital agencies and 100% focused on collaboration between agencies and clients.
It took us 7 months from brainstorming to developing our first MVP. Some may think it should have been faster, but I’m glad we took our time to build something decent we can be proud of. Thankfully, we didn’t use boilerplate or templates. I’m confident we made the right choice.
Earlier this month, we officially registered Cloudbrand in Delaware using Stripe Atlas. We are now fully committed to making it our primary focus rather than just a side project alongside Reel Unlimited. And speaking of it, my agency, Reel Unlimited, has fully migrated to Cloudbrand. Now, we share files in our own branded cloud storage portal with our name, logo, colors, domain name, and email. No more annoying pop-ups for our clients, no more expensive subscriptions, just an experience designed for agencies like ours.
We’re live now, slowly onboarding a few teams, and we’re super excited about building something great. Save this post and wish us luck! Check back later to see if we survived (spoiler alert: I think we’re gonna crush it!).
