Welcome to our Ecosystem Highlight series, where you’ll meet the innovators in our vast ecosystem of startup builders from Tampa-St. Petersburg, who are actively solving some of the world’s greatest challenges. We interviewed Ken Christopher, Head of Sales at Fabrics, a company that empowers organizations to achieve cloud efficiency in Azure & AWS at scale, reducing waste and maximizing value.on costs, and drive more measurable marketing results.

What were you doing previously, and what inspired you to join, launch, or help grow your company?

I spent the early part of my career most of my career in public accounting working in the Transaction Services group at PwC. Since leaving PwC, I founded and exited 3 different companies. One of those companies, Cornerstone Licensing, was a tech enabled service company that provided compliance services in the highly regulated financial services space. It was there that we began to build the technology that is now Fabrics.

What inspired me to launch Allsource was seeing the same problem repeat over and over: businesses were sitting on valuable first-party data, but they lacked the tools to use it to consistently improve performance. Through our earlier Smart Audience work, we saw that a company’s own customer outcomes were often the strongest predictor of who their next best customer would be. That insight became the foundation for Allsource.

I launched the company to productize that capability—to give agencies and growth-focused businesses a practical platform that helps them match, enrich, analyze, and activate their own data without needing a team of data scientists. The goal is to help customers own their audiences, reduce wasted spend, and create repeatable lift in sales and marketing. – Matt Pridmore, Co-Founder of Fabrics

What pain point is your company solving? What gets you excited to go to work every day?

Today, we call it the Cloud Cost Dilemma. Businesses of all size have been moving IT operations to the Public Cloud (think Microsoft Azure and AWS). When these cloud providers became a popular way to outsource IT environments, the low barrier to entry and costs where a big driver. Very quickly, companies began to realize that you need teams of cloud specialists to efficiently operate this environment. In addition, the cost savings quickly disappeared. As each company moved more workloads into the cloud, unpredictable costs started to rise. Fabrics solve both of these problems. It allows your IT team to operate efficiently in the cloud (by standardizing policies across the environment) and helps you lower and/or maintain costs, because you only pay for what you are consuming in the cloud. Public Cloud providers, in most cases, over provision your environment for peak capacity. Peak capacity is truly seen only during prime business hours. After that, peak capacity is not needed, hence you are overpaying for almost 2/3 of each day.

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced in helping build or scale the company? How did you overcome it?

Being a boot strapped start-up, brand publicity is the biggest challenge. It took over a year to truly find the right messaging, which continues to be adjusted back on company feedback. In addition, it’s clear that traditional prospecting methods, like emails and phone calls, are not hitting. In addition, LinkedIn prospecting is being over used. We quickly switched to more personable and customized outreach programs to drive better results. Furthermore, the value proposition for Fabrics is very clear, but we had a challenge moving prospects from the demo to pilot phase. In the past 2 months, we implement a complimentary Fabrics ROI Savings Assessment, which is being leveraged by several prospects today. This allows IT and Finance teams to get an estimate on what they would save by implementing Fabrics.

Where do you see your company headed next?

As we grow the company and product, our next big milestone is to launch Fabrics for AWS, as we are only available on Microsoft Azure today. As a continuing effort, we are always looking for ways to automate workflows and processes, saving time and energy, with the ultimate goal of reducing the time to implementation.

Give us a tactical piece of advice that you’d share with someone building or growing a company.

LinkedIn marketing seems to work well when we provide more story-telling and thought leadership, moving away from just highlighting features and benefits of the product. We are also preparing to launch more video and social media awareness tools, evolving with the current buying and awareness requirements of a new generation of decision makers.

Why Florida?

Florida is one of the fastest growing economies in the country. The Tampa Bay Region has quickly become a hub for both start-up and technology companies. It is the better, growing environment for Fabrics.