Our Story

We host UniFi Controllers in the cloud.

That’s what we do at UniHosted. It didn’t ring a bell at first, and I don’t judge you when it's the same for you.

But once we learned more, we jumped right in full gears to build it.

Allow me to explain how this idea came together and why we decided to build this.

Table of Contents

• Why we started UniHosted
• Insert Dries
• How we started building together
• Why we thought this was a good idea
• Final Thoughts

Why we started UniHosted

UniHosted has three founders. Dries (engineer), Adriaan (engineer) & and myself/Iron (the rest).

Let's start at the start.

Adriaan and I already have a company together called Simple Analytics. We’re working full-time on building the best Google Analytics alternative. And we’re doing this from our little office in the city center of Amsterdam.

We have been leasing our office since the beginning of 2023. It's quite a spacious place, and since we are only with the two of us, we decided to create a few extra desks for "Indie hackers"/solo developers that are building cool shit.

I have been tweeting about this for a while and a few months ago I received a DM from Rosco. He told me he is working on a crypto project, lives in Amsterdam, and that he was looking for a place.

I told him that he was welcome to join us for a day of co-working to see if we were a fit. That same day, we offered him a desk. He also had a friend who wanted to join the office.

Insert Dries

That friend is Dries. And Dries is a talented engineer who was working on a Wi-Fi project that involved hosting UniFi controllers. However, like a real developer, he likes building incredible stuff, but going to market is a different story. For him, the Wi-Fi project was something for fun, a passion that he loved working on. Not a business (yet).

How we started building together

Adriaan has worked on Simple Analytics for over four years. It has surpassed our biggest expectations and is a joy to work on, most of the time. However, building stuff from scratch was something we hadn’t done in a long while.

We wanted to build something from scratch again. This is something we love and gives us energy. Adriaan would build it and I would launch it.

In our discussions, Dries (Wi-Fi guy) overheard our plans and plainly said: “Jow boys, I think I have something cool.”

It's a program that deploys UniFi Controllers and it's fully automated!

It didn't ring a bell at first, but once Adriaan looked at the code Dries had written, we were hooked!

Why we thought this was a good idea

When Dries showed pitched us the idea, I've been trying to find its flaws for two weeks. Conclusion: I couldn't find any. I couldn’t find a reasonable argument not to give it a go. On the contrary, the more I tried to burn it down, the more I was sucked into it.

"9 out of 10 startups fail” - LinkedIn VC Guru.

Yes, I know startups are hard, but I believe there is a reasonable framework to increase the chances of success if your new venture ticks a few boxes:

• Is it B2B? ✅
• Is there already competition in the space that is doing well? ✅
• Can you create at least one angle to outperform the competition? ✅
• Are there some SEO opportunities for long-term growth? ✅

Apart from my framework: Team ✅

• Dries is a skilled engineer who has been working on this for over two years.
• Adriaan is a skilled founder who knows how to build and grow a business by himself.

= Lets fucking go 🚀

Final Thoughts

Launching something new is always exciting! We've been working our ass of the last couple of weeks to get UniHosted in the air.

We locked ourselves up in a cabin in the woods to pull it off and we did it!

We're excited to start UniHosted and we'll keep you posted on the progress we make.

Cheers from the boys!

Iron