Batuhan Esirger is the Co-Founder of Raff Technologies, a cloud infrastructure company focused on making cloud services simpler and more accessible for developers, startups, and businesses.
With a background in engineering and technology entrepreneurship, Batuhan works across business development, product strategy, and customer experience. At Raff Technologies, he focuses on building a cloud platform that removes unnecessary complexity from infrastructure management, offering services including Linux and Windows virtual machines, managed Kubernetes, databases, and cloud storage.
His approach to business is centered on simplicity, transparency, and practical solutions. He believes that powerful technology should be easy to understand, deploy, and manage without requiring extensive infrastructure expertise.
Working closely with Raff’s engineering team, Batuhan helps shape the company’s direction, develop strategic partnerships, and bring reliable cloud infrastructure to businesses looking for straightforward alternatives to traditional cloud platforms.
Company: Raff Technologies
We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
Batuhan Esirger: Thanks for having me. I’m Batuhan, co-founder of Raff Technologies. I started my career in engineering, although these days I’m more involved in the business and product side of things.
The idea behind Raff came from wanting to build our own cloud infrastructure platform. We believed cloud infrastructure would be one of the most important industries in the coming years, and we wanted to be part of that growth.
But it wasn’t just about entering a growing market. When we looked at existing cloud providers, we saw things we thought could be done better, particularly around complexity, pricing, and customer support.
So we decided to build something ourselves.
Today, Raff provides cloud servers, Kubernetes, managed databases, storage, and other infrastructure services. We’re still a small team, and I work closely with our engineering team on both the product and the business.
We’re not trying to reinvent cloud computing. We’re trying to build a reliable platform that makes sense for the people actually using it.
What was the moment you realized that complexity was holding your company back, and how did that shift your approach to product, operations, or strategy?
Batuhan Esirger: I wouldn’t say there was one dramatic moment. It was something I started noticing as we were building Raff.
When you’re developing your own cloud infrastructure, you’re dealing with a lot of technical complexity every day. And because you’re so familiar with it, it’s easy to forget that your customers don’t necessarily want to deal with all of that.
I started looking at things from a different perspective. Someone who needs a virtual machine shouldn’t have to think like an infrastructure engineer just to get started.
It also made me realize that complexity was slowing us down internally. Every unnecessary step meant more things to explain, more questions for our support team, and more work for our developers.
So we started paying more attention to what was actually necessary. Not every feature needs ten settings, and not every technical decision needs to be passed on to the customer.
That changed how I think about our product. Sometimes making something better means adding less, not more.
Can you share one specific example of something you simplified (a product feature, process, pricing model, or customer experience) that delivered outsized results?
Batuhan Esirger: One good example is our customer support.
Today, a lot of cloud providers rely heavily on AI chatbots and ticket systems. I understand why they do it, especially at scale, but we wanted to take a different approach.
At Raff, our customers can speak directly with real engineers through live chat, 24/7.
For business customers, I think this makes a huge difference. When something goes wrong with their infrastructure, they don’t want to spend hours explaining the same problem to different people or waiting for a ticket to move forward. They just want to talk to someone who understands the issue.
It’s a relatively simple idea, but it’s become one of our biggest advantages in the B2B market.
We still believe in automation, of course. But I don’t think every part of a business needs to be automated, especially when customers need real technical help.
How do you systematically identify and eliminate complexity across the organization without oversimplifying in ways that hurt quality or value?
Batuhan Esirger: I think the first thing is accepting that some complexity is necessary, especially in cloud infrastructure. You can’t simplify everything, and honestly, you shouldn’t try to.
What matters is where that complexity sits.
Our engineering team needs to deal with difficult infrastructure problems. Our customers shouldn’t have to deal with those same problems just to use the service.
We’re a small team, so we’re quite close to our customers. I pay attention to the questions people keep asking, the things they struggle with, and the parts of our product that need too much explanation.
When something keeps coming up, it’s usually worth looking at.
But we’re also careful about not removing flexibility just to make the interface look cleaner. Experienced developers still need control over their infrastructure.
I think the balance is making common tasks simple while keeping the more advanced options available when they’re needed.
That’s really how I look at it. Simplicity shouldn’t come at the expense of capability or reliability.
What’s the biggest resistance you’ve faced when pushing for radical simplicity, and how did you overcome it?
Batuhan Esirger: I’d say the biggest challenge is that making things simple for customers often means making things harder for ourselves.
Cloud infrastructure is complicated by nature. It’s easy to pass that complexity on to the customer, give them more settings to figure out, send them to documentation, or ask them to open a support ticket.
But that’s not really what we wanted to build.
For example, offering 24/7 access to real engineers through live chat takes more effort than relying entirely on chatbots and ticket systems. Especially when you’re a small team, you have to think carefully about how to make that sustainable.
We’ve tried to approach simplicity from the customer’s perspective rather than just our own operational convenience.
Of course, we haven’t figured everything out. We’re still improving things as we grow. But I’ve learned that if you want to make life easier for your customers, sometimes you have to be willing to take on more of the difficult work yourself.
For other CEOs who struggle with feature bloat, process overload, or confusing customer journeys, what’s the most important principle or first step you would recommend they take?
Batuhan Esirger: My advice would be to spend more time understanding what your customers actually need, rather than assuming you already know.
I think it’s easy to get carried away with building new features, especially in technology. You look at your competitors, see what they’re offering, and naturally want to offer everything they do.
But customers don’t always care about having the longest feature list.
In our industry, I’ve seen how much pricing, reliability, and access to proper support matter. You can have a technically excellent product, but if it’s too expensive, confusing to use, or difficult to get help with, people will look elsewhere.
So I’d start with the customer journey. Find the one step that creates the most frustration and try to improve it.
And don’t confuse simplicity with removing useful functionality. Sometimes your customers need advanced features. The goal should be to make those features easier to use, not take them away.
I think that’s a much better starting point than trying to redesign everything at once.
