Introducing Tetra Compute
I’m ready to move forward again.
Introducing Tetra Compute: A Managed Hosting Provider for ML Models.
AI is here to stay. The market is expanding and will expand for decades to come. Capabilities will improve. Open-source models will improve and proliferate.
Open-source models need specialized compute. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform offer hosting solutions to spin up and manage your own GPU servers.
Amazon, Microsoft and Google’s solutions are great for engineering teams who have the resources and competence to appropriately manage them. For teams without these resources there is room in the market for Managed Hosting Providers.
Managed Hosting Providers are wrappers around cloud providers and fill in the resource gaps of their customers. They provide easier to use interfaces, streamlined security, maintenance and analytics, more structured billing options, and better customer support. They are the logging industry of the Internet. Not sexy, but omnipresent and valuable. Examples: Heroku, Fly, Render, WP Engine.
Tetra Compute has three obvious revenue sources:
Platform fee. Fixed per month. Scales with features and technical support offerings.
Compute. Utility pricing. Prepaid. Sell compute tokens ahead of usage. 10-20% tax on the underlying cloud provider’s compute bill.
Services. Fixed fee. White glove technical success managers. Classes for your engineers to learn prompt engineering and architecture. Let us set up your embedding strategy with your existing data. That kind of thing. Think about the Technical Success Team as an agency partner who hosts all their business with Tetra.
The GTM here is also clear. It’s a long hallway. I can hide in plain sight. I don’t need to fight for the business of other B2B SaaS firms. Instead, I can focus on the economy of middle America. I’ll smile and dial every technical company in a X hundred mile radius of Kansas City until people pay me money to manage their GPUs. Increase X and repeat. If they won’t let me manage, I’ll offer to help them however I can and check back in regularly. That sincere intent and compounding good will open the door later. I have decades to play the game.
Why I like this idea:
AI is badass.
I can bootstrap. It’s mind-numbingly simple: AI gets better; adoption grows. More adoption; more compute. Some percent of new compute will be hosted with MHPs. I’ll be an MHP. It’s as close to running a laundromat as I can get with a business model on the Internet. We don’t have to be unique, or first, or best. We only need to provide reliable and high quality service.
Every new project in a prospect’s company is an opportunity for them to host with Tetra, even if they have resources for hosting directly on cloud providers. It isn’t all-or-nothing like the market for CRMs.
Next steps:
Customer development. Turn this idea and these assumptions into a clearly targetable ICP.
Outcome: 50 customer development interviews.
Expectation: 10-15 part-time hours per week. 3-4 months of work.
Would love your thoughts.