Page 5 - SSD Nodes Celebrates 7-year Anniversary

Matt Connor: We offer cloud servers. I should have said this in the beginning, but we offer cloud
servers to small businesses, entrepreneurs, developers, students and you get resources in a
world-class data center, and you can do whatever you want with it. Some people have gaming

servers, some people host blogs, some people host personal development servers, and just
whatever you want, you can do it.

In the beginning, we kind of focused just on larger companies and established businesses. We
grew really slowly that way, but we were able to learn a lot from these customers, get to know
them really well. Then there was a pivot point where we went downmarket towards people that
weren't as established yet. We were offering something significantly cheaper than the
competition and ended up getting some large growth there, so that was kind of the pivot point

and the milestone right there. And then expanding with multiple locations and hiring and stuff
like that were other milestones.

Joe Dager: What's the difference between you and Amazon AWS or Google Drive, I mean, what's
the difference between the two platforms?

Matt Connor: Amazon is sort of like utility. Their billing model's completely different; they're per
second now. Their tooling is very different from what we offer. Their offer is very different from
whom we're targeting; we're targeting people who want a really cheap server somewhere and
are willing to use it to build what they want. Amazon's a very different use-case. If you need to
spin up thousands and thousands of instances within a couple seconds, that's what they're good
for. Google Drive is a different layer. They’re more just storage and an API there; it's very different
from what we offer.

Joe Dager: SSD Nodes means you have SSD servers, right?

Matt Connor: Exactly. And we were actually one of the first providers to offer SSDs at the time.
It was back when they were just announced, in 2011. They were extremely expensive, and I think
Amazon offered them in 2012-2013.

Joe Dager: Over 50% of businesses fail in the first 5 years… you went ahead and created a

business model and went against some pretty significant competition and other people that
made something similar but offered a whole host of other services. You seem pretty streamlined
in what you're offering. Why do you think that works?

Matt Connor: I think because the business model is really simple. I think that's the first problem,
people try to overcomplicate things but if you go the really simple business model—monthly,

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