Case Study: Think Big Partners saves $200K and extends startups' runway 20–50% with Microsoft Azure

Startups Gain 20 to 50 Percent More "Runway" with Cloud Services Platform

Think Big Partners, a Kansas City–based startup accelerator, created PitchCastr to match entrepreneurs with investors but faced the usual startup challenges: connecting founders and funders efficiently, minimizing infrastructure costs, and getting to market quickly without managing on-premises servers. They needed a scalable, easy-to-manage platform that would let them focus on product and mentorship rather than operations.

They built PitchCastr and their internal systems on Microsoft Azure and enrolled in BizSpark Plus, using Azure-hosted databases, video hosting, business logic, VMs, and Mobile Services. The move avoided roughly $200,000 in first-year costs, cut time-to-market by about 20% (a mobile app went from development to production in 36 hours vs. two weeks), reduced technical support time, and helped stretch startup runway by an estimated 20–50%.

Think Big Partners

Herb Sih

Managing Partner