Transcript of 151st episode of podcast Predictable Revenue

Sean O’Shaughnessey   

My company is Agile Stacks, and we sell to customers that have Kubernetes. Some of your listeners may not know what Kubernetes is, and that’s perfectly fine. 

Colin Stewart  

It’s an STD. 

Sean O’Shaughnessey   

No, it’s not. It’s a tool that originally came from Google for making applications run better on a cloud.

Colin Stewart   

Containerization?

Sean O’Shaughnessey   

It actually manages containers. 

I’m going to set you up for my perfect customer to make this easy on myself. My perfect customer is somebody who has tried Kubernetes, and they’ve done one or two implementations, but now they can’t seem to figure out how to do the fifth one or the third one. It is a vice president of development or application development. They’ve done it a little bit, but now they have to figure out how to do it for ten groups instead of the first or second group. So that’s my perfect customer to set myself up.

Colin Stewart  

Perfect. I’ll do my best to throw up some relevant objections, but I’m reaching here. 

Ring ring. Hey, this is Colin.

Sean O’Shaughnessey  

Hey Colin. How are you doing? 

Colin Stewart  

Good. How are you doing? 

Sean O’Shaughnessey  

Very, very good. 

I found your name, and I see you’re the Vice President of Application Development at your company. I hope you have a few minutes to talk to me now. Is that okay? 

Colin Stewart  

I’m just about to head into a meeting. 

Sean O’Shaughnessey  

Perfect. I won’t take much of your time. I understand from reading about your website and reading a couple presentations that you’ve done, that you’ve done a couple of implementations of Kubernetes. Do I have that right, or did I miss out on that? 

Colin Stewart 

Yep. 

Sean O’Shaughnessey  

Okay, how’s it going? Did you do your first one or two? Did those work out pretty well for you?

Colin Stewart  

Yeah, the teams are really happy. They’ve got two or three going right now. 

Sean O’Shaughnessey  

Good. How are you doing on your fifth one or your tenth one? Did your tenth team go live on it?

Colin Stewart   

No idea. It’s a mess.

Sean O’Shaughnessey   

Yeah. I talk to a lot of Vice Presidents of Application Development. What I hear repeatedly is that the first or two worked really well, because we put a lot of resources on it, and we put our best and smartest people on it. Or we created a Tiger Team to do that first one. And now we’re doing our fifth one, and we’re just hit the brick wall. Anything like that sound familiar? 

Colin Stewart  

Totally. 

Sean O’Shaughnessey  

My company is Agile Stacks. We help you manage all of the difficulties around Kubernetes. Kubernetes requires many, many applications around it to actually work. And that’s usually the challenge of getting Kubernetes to be successful. That’s usually why that third team, that fourth team, that tenth team that’s going to go live on Kubernetes is starting to struggle.

What I’d like to do is show you how we manage that Kubernetes ecosystem. How we make it easier for your team to use it. We make it easier to reproduce all the best practices that you learned on your first or second iteration and really make your processes go faster. 

Do you have 45 minutes for me to do a demo to show you how to make Kubernetes work well? You don’t have to do it now. I know you’re going to a meeting right now, but I’d love to set up a time to have a demo.

Colin Stewart  

Yeah, sounds great.

Sean O’Shaughnessey 

Okay, you are the easiest customer that I’ve talked to in weeks.

Colin Stewart  

I was trying to think of objections. I know Docker a little bit. I think it’s different. Docker is the container, and Kubernetes is organizing the containers. 

Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show. This was super awesome. If people want to get in touch with you, what’s the best way?

Sean O’Shaughnessey 

The best way to do it? I should have put a slide on this. I apologize, but the best way to get a hold of me is here on this site in the comments below or on Twitter.

Colin Stewart 

Beautiful. All right, thanks so much. 

Sean O’Shaughnessey 

Thank you very much, Colin, I look forward to talking to you again about sales. 

Colin Stewart  

For sure. I will see you all next week.

Originally transcribed by https://otter.ai and then edited for readability