32. Creating a niche of your own with Corey Quinn

This week we sat down with Corey Quinn, the Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group and a big celebrity at the AWS circles. Corey is well known for his sense of humor and unrelenting focus on making some good fun of the cloud providers. In our interview, we are learning a bit of Corey’s background, how The Duckbill Group got started, and how he runs the media side of his business. As usual, we did talk about bootstrapping and running consulting services while building a product. Chapters 00:00 - Introductions 04:23 - What does Corey do? 09:51 - Bootstrapping a business 12:29 - The Twitter persona 16:02 - Dealing with the growth in Twitter following 21:05 - Can snarkiness backfire? 23:54 - The state of the business today 25:11 - Psychology of cost savings and cost aversion 28:35 - The psychology of bootstrapped companies 32:43 - Getting first customers for a consultancy 36:03 - Common cost optimization patterns 37:54 - The evolution of Corey's media presence 47:05 - Making money from media 49:58 - Business-y topics 54:11 - How to start a consultancy 56:03 - Google, AWS, Azure topics 1:04:40 - Producing content with ChatGPT 1:07:31 - Book recommendation 1:11:14 - Where to find Corey Show notes Where to find Corey Screaming in the Cloud (podcast) Last week in AWS (newsletter) AWS Morning Brief (podcast) Twitter/X: @QuinnyPig Duckbill Group Books Practical Monitoring by Mike Julian Never Eat Alone by Keith Ferrazzi Other Route 53, Amazon's Premier Database Yes, I Test in Production (And So Do You) by Charity Majors Full show notes with links: https://www.metacastpodcast.com/p/032-corey-quinn Download the Metacast podcast app for free iOS: https://apps.apple.com/app/metacast/id6462012536 Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.metacast.podcast.player Get in touch Contact us: [email protected] Ilya's LinkedIn Arnab's LinkedIn