I already posted a similar question on an earlier thread from ReleaseHub, and maybe I'm misunderstanding the constraints, but I'm still wondering about your positioning strategy. Specifically, how will you deal with the chicken/egg problem of your customers needing a semi-mature ops pipeline in order to create the images that ReleaseHub can deploy?
It seems like your best customers would be those who don't have the technical expertise to setup automated build systems and CI pipelines. But in order to use ReleaseHub, do those customers need to ship some artifacts to you? And if they have to create those artifacts anyway, and also deploy them to prod in the meantime, isn't that like 90% of the way to having an environment per deployment? At that point, if they've managed to do that much by themselves, why would they outsource the last part?
Seems like you have two ways to approach this. (a) Add lots of bells-and-whistles post-deployment so that it's not just "the last 10%", but a full suite of marketing/demo/QA tools with each deployment. Or (b), simplify the requirements for what customers have to ship to you, so e.g. they can `git push` a repository with a `yarn.lock` and `package.json`, and you'll handle all the pre-deploy build steps as well.
The risk of (b) seems to be feature creep, in that you end up building a generic PaaS platform rather than focusing on your core differentiator of per-environment deployments. The risk of (a) might be the classic Parse.com problem – you attract a bunch of early startups as customers, but once they grow into a more profitable customer, they also outgrow your service and churn as they decide to replicate it in-house.
I'm sure you've thought about these challenges, and that the investors asked about them, so I'm just curious how you plan to approach them. You've got a clear value proposition, but positioning and differentiation will be your biggest challenges IMO. I'd be especially weary of GitLab and GitHub encroaching on this territory.
Either way, best of luck to you. The website is great and the product sounds useful!