Background

Colearn is an EdTech startup catering to the Indonesian market with a vision to bring Indonesia within the Top 50 percentile in the world in PISA rankings.
The company is in the early stages and has yet to achieve a Product Market Fit. This leaves a company quite vulnerable to market forces. In 2022 we saw the onset of a global recession and the company had to move from growth to consolidation phase.

Cost efficiency was the top priority across the board. The engineering team contributed its bit to the initiative by maintaining a delicate balance between cost, reliability, performance, and growth. Technical and non-technical means were adopted to relentlessly maintain the balance while achieving the objective.

Within a year, the company was able to bring down the cloud infrastructure cost by around 40%.

Flow of the Talk

Arouse Curiosity

Cost graph over a period of time.

Context and Objective

Market conditions, company’s state, and need for the cost-cutting initiative.

Early initiatives

Explain the first set of steps. What worked, what didn’t work.

Learnings

Learnings from drawbacks of the first phase of cost efficiency. Why was it not enough?

Visible Results

Explain the visible results. What did we do differently this time?

Learnings

Explain drawbacks - opportunity cost, DX.
Explain upsides - Metric-driven approach, a better understanding of the costs, disciplined and regular monitoring of systems.

Takeaways

Strategies, thought processes, and opportunities that others can learn from our approach and possibly implement to achieve their goals.

Content

Draft Document: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1puQqsE0vs016RR0Oo_Kj_I9RDDSi77uBrVRgzI1oUT4/edit?usp=sharing

Draft Presentation: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1K_e_Rpl0tSQiVM7WzSigJSSgYiFtAdZkzRbK6u1phUM/edit?usp=sharing