Case study. Cloud Cruz is a fictional company and every number is synthetic. The program design, the systems and the decisions are my work.Fictional company, synthetic data, my real work.

Tony GilharryTalk to Tony

Case studyBlueprint02

02 Customer profile

Cloud Cruz is built first for mid-market software companies that must ship AI inside their own product this year. Partners follow the customer, so this profile decides which partners Cloud Cruz recruits. (Decision 14)

All of this is synthetic. Cloud Cruz and its customers are invented.

Primary customer
Who B2B software companies, roughly 200 to 2,000 employees
Where The United States, the Americas and English-speaking companies, to start (decision 67)
What they're doing Shipping AI features and agents inside their own product
Buyer CTO or VP Engineering
Trigger A "ship AI this year" mandate from the board or CEO
Plan they buy Premium ($12K to $50K ACV), growing into Enterprise ($50K+)
Partners pulled in Builder and Specialist partners to build it; ISVs whose products they already run

How you recognize them (the markers a partner development rep or a partner can spot):

  • They already sell a product with paying customers, and AI is now on the roadmap, not in a lab.
  • Their product data lives in several places (an app database, a warehouse, a few SaaS tools) and nobody owns joining it.
  • Their data and ML team is small, often a handful of people, so the work outruns the team.
  • They care about time to ship more than about building infrastructure themselves.

Secondary customer
Who Enterprise data teams (5,000+ employees)
Buyer Chief Data Officer or Head of Data
Trigger Consolidating data platforms and putting agents on company data
Plan Enterprise, annual or multi-year
How Cloud Cruz reaches them Through Scale and Anchor partners (consultancies and holding-company data units) and cloud marketplaces, not a large direct sales force

Not a fit (yet)

  • Pre-product startups: no customers, no data, no mandate. Self-serve is enough.
  • Teams set on building their own platform: they want parts, not a platform.

Naming who isn't a fit saves partners time: they stop chasing deals that won't go live.

Why this matters for partners

Customer marker Partner who serves it Segment
Needs hands to ship AI fast Boutique AI studios and consultancies Builder
Needs data work done right Independent digital and data agencies Specialist
Runs software that could embed Cloud Cruz ISVs on the Technology path Technology
Enterprise data platform decision Consultancy digital arms, holding-company data units Scale, Anchor

The customer's time and money are the test: a partner is worth recruiting when it gets this customer live faster and cheaper than they could alone. That is also what the north star counts: customers live through partners. (Decision 57)

Pricing plans

Plan Price Sales motion Implementation package
Self-serve Under $12K a year Card on file No
Premium $12K to $50K ACV Annual No
Enterprise $50K+ ACV Sales-led, annual or multi-year Yes, by deal size (decisions 45, 61)

(Decision 60)