Value Proposition & Target Customer

Value Proposition Canvas

Customer Jobs

Job	Description
Run containerized applications	Deploy and operate applications in containers reliably
Ensure uptime	Maintain high availability for business-critical services
Stay compliant	Meet GDPR, ISO27001, and industry-specific regulations
Control infrastructure costs	Predictable spending on infrastructure and operations
Scale operations	Handle growth without proportional team scaling
Maintain data sovereignty	Keep data in Germany/EU as required by regulation or policy

Customer Pains

Pain	Severity
Cannot hire Kubernetes engineers	Critical
Kubernetes is too complex for existing team	Critical
Fear of security incidents / misconfiguration	High
Vendor lock-in to hyperscalers	High
Unpredictable cloud costs	Medium
Compliance audit overhead	Medium
Slow deployment velocity	Medium

Our Pain Relievers

Pain Reliever	How
Fully managed operations	We run K8s — customer focuses on their apps
Security built in	Policies, runtime security, network isolation included
German data sovereignty	Hetzner/on-prem options, GmbH entity, German support
Infrastructure choice	No lock-in — migrate between providers
Predictable pricing	Fixed monthly per-cluster fee
Compliance-ready	SOC2/ISO27001 controls baked into platform

Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

Primary ICP: German Mittelstand

Attribute	Value
Company size	50-2,000 employees
Revenue	€10M-500M/year
Industry	Manufacturing, Logistics, FinTech, HealthTech, SaaS, eCommerce
Technical maturity	Low to medium — small IT team, no dedicated platform engineers
Current state	Running VMs or early container adoption
Decision maker	CTO, VP Engineering, IT Director, Head of Infrastructure
Budget holder	CTO or CFO
Buying trigger	Failed K8s migration, cannot hire, compliance requirement, scaling pain

Secondary ICP: Digital Agencies / Software Houses

Attribute	Value
Company size	20-200 employees
Need	Managed infrastructure for client projects
Value	Multi-cluster management, client isolation

Anti-Patterns (Not Our Customer)

Companies with mature platform engineering teams (they build internally)
Startups with < 10 employees (too small, low ACV)
Companies requiring only serverless / PaaS (no K8s need)
Companies unwilling to containerize applications

Competitive Landscape

Direct Competitors (Germany)

Competitor	Strengths	Weaknesses
SysEleven (Berlin)	Established, German, OpenStack + K8s	Expensive, complex onboarding
Plusserver (Cologne)	Large, enterprise sales	Legacy brand, slow innovation
IONOS Cloud (1&1)	Brand recognition, scale	Generic cloud, not K8s specialized
Loodse/Kubermatic	Strong tech, open source	Acquired by Kubermatic, enterprise focus

Indirect Competitors

Competitor	Why Not Ideal
AWS EKS / Azure AKS / GKE	Still requires K8s expertise, vendor lock-in, data sovereignty concerns
Managed OpenShift (Red Hat)	Expensive (€50K+/year licensing), complex
Platform.sh / Render / Railway	PaaS, not full K8s, limited flexibility

Our Differentiation

                    Simple ────────────────── Complex
                    │                              │
          Low Cost  │  ★ US (MKP)                  │
                    │                              │
                    │         SysEleven             │
                    │                              │
                    │              Plusserver        │
                    │                              │
         High Cost  │                  OpenShift    │
                    │                              │
                    Simple ────────────────── Complex

We position as: Simpler than enterprise platforms, more capable than basic managed K8s, German-native, infrastructure-agnostic.

Customer Segments & Packaging

Segment 1: Starter

1-2 clusters
Standard support
Hetzner infrastructure
Best for: Small companies starting with K8s

Segment 2: Professional

3-10 clusters
Business support
Multi-environment (dev/staging/prod)
Best for: Growing companies with multiple services

Segment 3: Enterprise

10+ clusters
Enterprise support with SLA
Multi-cloud / on-prem / air-gapped
Compliance packages
Best for: Regulated industries, large Mittelstand