[gramakri]

I don't identify myself as a social entrepreneur but we built Cloudron around 2014 for personal reasons. When Google Reader shut down, we realized the importance of self-hosting and data ownership. Initially, we started writing our own apps but mid-way recognized that there is already a plethora of self-hostable (especially opensource) software out there. It's just that those apps are really hard to deploy. So, we now make a smart server platform that you can install on any cloud server or home server and you can easily install and maintain those apps.

Over time, we had to make many decisions around outside investment, salaries and target audience. We make choices based on whether it has social impact and whether our day to day work solves problems that we personally care about and for other privacy minded people like us. For example, we did not pursue outside investment (despite offers) and decided to retain 100% ownership of the company. We felt taking funding will make us focus on large enterprises and the product will take a different direction (k8s anyone?), quite far from any social impact. Investors, who we met, seemed to care more about 100x growth than our cause and some even laughed at the idea - "who wants to selfhost email?".

Same for salaries, we took a heavy pay cut for the initial 2-3 years just to to get product going along (and so many pivots). What kept us going is that we felt there is a social aspect to the product and if we don't do this nobody will. With a bit of luck, today we are profitable and can pay ourselves decent salary now (fwiw, I am based in bay area).

Just wanted to share our story, I don't know if it's relevant to what you are asking :) Ultimately, we want normal people and businesses to self-host and have complete control over their data (I wish we had the resources to make a hardware appliance that sits alongside the router). I understand I am not curing cancer or solving world hunger, but I want to do my bit moving the privacy needle :) !

[searchableguy]

I have used cloudrun before when I didn't have much technical knowledge.

It is awesome. You might also be interested in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24171800

[htnsao]

Cloudron is awesome, thanks!