Shifting My Focus To Predictable Revenues With A Web Hosting And Maintenance Business

Cyril Vanneste

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Published: November 22nd, 2023

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Cyril Vanneste

Founder, DareToCloud

$200

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

DareToCloud

DareToCloud.com

from Brussels

started May 2019

$200

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools recommends to grow your business!

platform

WooCommerce tool-icon

Canva

MailChimp

web hosting tool-icon

GoDaddy

reviews

Trustpilot

social media

Facebook

Instagram

accounting tool-icon

Google Sheets

payments

Paypal

Stripe

analytics

Google Analytics

blog

WordPress

design

Canva

freelance

Fiverr

freelance.com

crm

Hubspot

software deals

AppSumo

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Hi! I am Cyril, born in Belgium and raised in the South of France (better weather!). I studied in a business school in France, and at the North Carolina State University, where I learned in the US how to mix the best of European creativity and a US entrepreneurship mindset.

I started buying/selling websites on the side and to diversify my income and to keep the relationship with the buyers, I created a web hosting and maintenance service company called DareToCloud.

From 0, I learned how to make websites with YouTube, found some cool tools online to automate and simplify tasks, and I currently make an average of 200 USD per month with website brokerage and my recurring income via the services. Just the beginning!

What's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?

When I was 16 I created a nonprofit: Rock4You. As a young guitarist, I always struggled to find relevant tools and mentorship to reach the recording studio stage. My concept was born: I created a record label where I was able to help other musicians go there and help them get funding and contacts to be able to record albums.

With this nonprofit, I tasted how it is to have a bank account and spending, income, and spending in one or two manage budgets and even hired some interns that would work on the marketing (including friends who needed an internship to fish their studies).

This nonprofit was for a legal base to create and develop several websites Including a marketplace where during Covid, 2 friends and I created a platform called Le Petit Entrepreneur. With this site, my organization supported Made in France creators to help them sell online in these difficult times. The platform enabled sellers to manage inventory and sales, offer personalized quotes to their customers, and much more. We sold the website for 3,000 EUR to fund the not-for-profit and continue with other cool projects.

The ‘aha’ moment really came when I was working on this project and realized that the true magic is when you can have predictable revenues. With that, you can bootstrap any project much more easily: you know that you have an 80% chance to have a few hundred euros in 3 months to start another project and STILL improve the current website you work on! (I say 80% because there is always a churn rate)... As I was using a hosting platform and needed one for my projects, I decided to resell hosting services to my existing clients.. And myself!

Take us through the process of building the first version of your product.

During the Covid period, I was finishing my studies in financial markets at the Solvay Business School in Brussels. With a bit more time on my hands (as not having to commute), I was buying and selling websites via platforms like flippa.com.

I liked the concept of buying something existing and learning from it. I bought a blog, and sold it later, after increasing the advertisement revenue. To this day in total, I think I bought/made then sold about 20 websites.

After COVID-19, I sold with my friends the website called Le Petit Entrepreneur and I wanted to focus more on this buying and selling side hustle that I was doing. At the same time, a famous cloud provider in France had one of his datacenters burned and lost a website I worked on! Good, I had a backup.

Advice: Build backups, kids.

Anyway, that’s when I thought I should have my web hosting platform. To host my projects but also to make some money after selling websites. The great thing is that my clients, projects, and future services (billing system, emails..) would be now centralized in one website, offering several services. I can now host a project, sell it, easily transfer the ownership (just give the account to the new owner), and even cross-sell new services.

To create the first version of the website, before launching the business, I watched many online videos and tutorials and found a service called WHMCS that enables you to create your web hosting services but I lacked technical knowledge. The solution I found? Buy something existing of course!

So I bought an existing business with a few clients on it, and the seller helped me a lot to understand the challenges of a web hosting service. I got in touch by visiting the platform Flippa.com where it was easy to securely communicate with the seller. Before buying, I tried to understand the technical aspect of how I could easily onboard a new website for a client (usually my ‘small’ clients do not know how to technically take care of that).

Describe the process of launching the business.

I bootstrapped the sales and marketing efforts with the best success being simply to propose to my website clients to be hosted on the platform. I worked on the SEO to target specific needs for specific people, for example, the blog/e-commerce owners, and I tried a ‘local first’ approach by trying to be visible in the Brussels area here in Belgium.

In terms of hosting itself, I learned a lot from the first seller I talked to earlier, and then checked a LOT of YouTube videos and forums about WHMCS, and other reseller options, and even checked on microaquire.com what successful businesses were built on (what marketing strategy they have, what technology stack..).

Commercial Video of the first version

When I was building the second version of the website, I hired a person in central Asia who provided his reseller account, but one day he decided to completely block me and my clients! 1 year of hard work dangerously close to collapse. I fixed the dispute (he threatened to delete all my client accounts if I did not put a 5-star review on his Fiverr profile!) so I left a good review and then transferred all websites to a new better, safer reseller solution, closing the relationship with him for good.

I found the reseller service from Godaddy and I have to say, with a 24/7 technical support system included, I do not have to worry about any technical questions from clients and I can focus on growing the business. The good thing with the GoDaddy option is that When a new customer creates an account on my reseller storefront, I get access plus the option to purchase and manage products on their behalf.

Among my offerings, I propose Domain Names, Web Hosting, Business-Grade Email, and a Website Builder for DIY creators, all.SSL Certificates my clients would need, bigger Server offerings, and of course Managed WordPress services.

The front-end (Wordpress) of the website

The GoDaddy Reseller- managed interface accessible via shop.daretocloud

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

Creating websites is the easiest route to get new clients and contacts and upsell them with services such as my WordPress Maintenance Services. Sales is a ‘people’ business. The best way to attract customers is to take care of the few you have and get recommended directly.

In my 9-5 job, I saw the added value of having a predictable, recurring revenue income stream and this is clearly what I'm seeking with this side hustle: productizing my services. I am launching a WordPress maintenance service starting at just 99 euros per month where I take care of my client’s websites, offering 24/7 website edits, Ongoing security, Weekly updates, and Website backups. My most advanced plans also include Speed, SEO optimization, and dedicated consulting.

This has pros and cons: As soon as they land on my website, prospects are understanding what they pay and what they get. On the other hand, flexibility is not always easy to provide and sometimes requires the creation of a separate agreement with clients. I think at first of course I would manually ‘select’ deals that could help me grow, but with time I would be turning down business that lies outside of the scope I have defined with productized service.

Recently, I hired a team of SEO experts who have been doing a great job at cleaning the website metadata, image speed, and more. I am thinking I should include those services in my offering and propose SEO services (testing a landing page right now).

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

Today, I focus on two strategies: one short-term and one long-term.

The long-term one is I just need to focus on my SEO by creating content that is worth reading and sharing and that will hopefully bring more sales. I do not want to invest too much money, but it's always a trade-off between my time spent understanding SEO and doing OK work, or hiring an expert who will be much more efficient than me. I want to hire someone but I first need some revenues and this is where my short-term strategy comes up.
As a short-term strategy, I want to continue creating turnkey websites and selling them, and my next step would be to offer website creation packages: for example, a busy entrepreneur who launched his new business needs a website. By booking a time in my calendar (all automatic of course!), for €200 he/she connects with me on Zoom, and we create a website using DareToCloud services!

I think that short-term revenues have the sole objective of funding long-term plans to further develop my online presence.

Regarding operations, I am in business with several WordPress maintenance reselling companies who can provide me with a team of experts as soon as I have a new client. By being a pure client-facing business, I can better control my message and focus on growth.

Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

A very important thing that I learned is that you should test before launching, test a tool or a provider as a client yourself before setting your solution. When I was able to test my hosting service because I had my website to understand better how the support service works, and how to find the features and interface user-friendly it was just by testing it myself. A mistake I made was to prefer cheap options, then take the time to test them and learn from those tests.

Also, looking at the competition is one of the most useful things, and the best time spent as you understand their marketing strategy and what pain points they solve for their customers of course, for SEO reasons, this is the best way to rank next to them, and eventually beat them. By noting down and learning about this competition (both local and international), I learned a lot on how to position my product, and what to add as features.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

I love ‘free and then pay’ tools that follow your business's growth. You do not need an expensive tool suite to start getting your first clients. The platforms I use are Apollo for emails, Hubspot for the CRM and forms, and a nice STRIPE check-out link for the service orders. All other services are sold via the GoDaddy Reseller program. If I need a quick fix or data scraping help I usually go to Flippa.com.

What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?

I don't like reading but I love product newsletters like 10Words, PitchWall, BetaList… I recommend subscribing to their newsletters and exploring the tools that sound appealing to you! Also, sometimes, great tool tools are great in marketing, and they can give you ideas for your product!

Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?

Draft your idea, focus on the problem not the solution (what / Why do you do this company), and create a simple landing page using a CRM (to collect and trace data) that will explain your offering and start advertising it to ‘test’ it into the market.

The fun thing is: that I am giving this advice while I am first building ‘cool new features’ or adding services to my offering without knowing if anyone would be interested! I had the chance to participate in a contest during my studies in North Carolina and won a 5,000 USD prize with JUST 10 slides and a good pitch. I spent hours on the pitch, not the solution.

NC State University's annual start-up competition in 2018