In this bumper length episode, James is joined by Ian Gotts, CEO & Co-founder of Elements.cloud. Throughout the conversation, Ian shares invaluable insights into his journey of building a successful Salesforce ISV; from the importance of staying focused and avoiding diversions to the evolving landscape of the Salesforce ecosystem. James and Ian also explore the transformative impact of AI on the Salesforce ecosystem and how it is reshaping roles and processes.
Discover the keys to success, including the significance of picking a niche, staying agile, and the game-changing potential of AI integration.
Episode highlights include:
Throughout the conversation, Ian mentions a number of resources which we've listed below:
IMPACT - Selling Innovative Apps to Corporates
GPT - New Roles
[Short] https://elements.cloud/blog/renew-your-approach-for-2024-with-staying-relevant-in-a-post-gpt-world/
[Deeper dive] https://elements.cloud/blog/gpt-requires-salesforce-skills/
Moving to Silicon Valley
[Blog] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/silicon-valley-brits-perspective-why-you-need-here-what-ian-gotts/
[Book] https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Relocating-Silicon-Valley-Questions/dp/1907453261
If you are a Salesforce ISV founder with an interesting story to tell, we'd love to hear from you. Send us an email to podcast@unaric.com and we'll be in touch.
In this bumper length episode, James is joined by Ian Gotts, CEO & Co-founder of Elements.cloud. Throughout the conversation, Ian shares invaluable insights into his journey of building a successful Salesforce ISV; from the importance of staying focused and avoiding diversions to the evolving landscape of the Salesforce ecosystem. James and Ian also explore the transformative impact of AI on the Salesforce ecosystem and how it is reshaping roles and processes.
Discover the keys to success, including the significance of picking a niche, staying agile, and the game-changing potential of AI integration.
Episode highlights include:
Throughout the conversation, Ian mentions a number of resources which we've listed below:
IMPACT - Selling Innovative Apps to Corporates
GPT - New Roles
[Short] https://elements.cloud/blog/renew-your-approach-for-2024-with-staying-relevant-in-a-post-gpt-world/
[Deeper dive] https://elements.cloud/blog/gpt-requires-salesforce-skills/
Moving to Silicon Valley
[Blog] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/silicon-valley-brits-perspective-why-you-need-here-what-ian-gotts/
[Book] https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Relocating-Silicon-Valley-Questions/dp/1907453261
If you are a Salesforce ISV founder with an interesting story to tell, we'd love to hear from you. Send us an email to podcast@unaric.com and we'll be in touch.
James Gasteen (00:03.689)
Hello and welcome to today's Scale to Sale podcast. Today I'm joined by Ian Gotts, who's the co-founder and CEO at Elements.cloud. Ian, welcome to the show.
Ian Gotts (00:15.158)
Yeah, thank you for inviting me.
James Gasteen (00:17.105)
No, always a pleasure. To kick things off, I always like to ask a question. How did you end up in the Salesforce ecosystem?
Ian Gotts (00:24.758)
Wow, that's going to take us back. So about 2001, I was running another company, not Elements.cloud, and we needed a CRM, and Salesforce had literally just got started. We met two guys in a Regis office, who was, that was the entirety of the UK operation, and they sold us on why the cloud was going to be the future. And at that time I had a business with operations in multiple countries. So the whole idea of having a...
James Gasteen (00:27.218)
Yeah.
Ian Gotts (00:53.838)
one single view of all our customer data was really appealing. And over the course of the next X years of being a customer, we built out, I think, 300 custom objects that our CTO's view was if it's not in Salesforce, it doesn't exist. We didn't have spreadsheets. So we were the poster child for Salesforce from the very beginning.
James Gasteen (01:12.597)
Brilliant. Great stuff. And talk to us a little bit about, it sounds like you've been in the ecosystem for a while. Talk to us a little bit about the story behind the inception of elements.cloud. How did you stumble across the opportunity and the problem set?
Ian Gotts (01:25.806)
Well, so I said the previous company was called Nimbus. We had a process mapping solution aimed at highly regulated organizations. So food, farmer, oil and gas construction. That got acquired in 2011. Um, we all retired. I got the band back out of retirement. So let's do something. And we said, well, we only know how to do one thing. Let's, let's do something very similar, but, but by that time, Salesforce then had big customers, bear in mind in the early days, it didn't have very large customers and we were aiming at.
large customers, but by the time we got to 2011, 12, 13, Salesforce now had big customers. So we said, let's do the same thing all over again. Started building out a process mapping solution, which again is sort of the UPN standard. So for those of you who are business analysts out there, the UPN standard of process mapping really came out of the work we did in Nimbus from in the early 2000s. But then as we got more and more into process mapping, customers said,
Yeah, that's really good. But if you could also tell us what's in the org, so we can start to understand why, when I make a change over here, something breaks. So we've then spent the last four, five years building out a really sophisticated metadata dictionary or the dependency analysis. And so over time, we've filled out all of the functionality you need to get from an idea all the way through to handing off to the development team. So...
capture an idea, understand the requirements, map the processes, draw architecture diagrams, understand what's in the org, build user stories, make sure you understand how you scope the user stories. And that's where we stop. We hand that off to the development team. So I think relevant to the audience here, we started with a small idea, and then as we started talking to the customer, it expanded and expanded until...
really we got to what is now genuinely product market fit, as in customers go find everything's here, which is different from product marketing fit, which when you first start, you think you've got it, customers go, that's great, but actually when they start using it, it's not quite there. So I think there's a distinction between product market fit, which is everything in the product is there and customers are happy to buy it versus product marketing fit, which is where you can tell a good story, but when actually the customers start using it, they're like, well.
Ian Gotts (03:45.526)
I've got to work around that, that's not quite there. So, and that's a very long answer to a short question, but actually that's the journey from, had an idea, it got expanded talking to customers, and then we've worked hard to make sure we've had product market fit in every single area.
James Gasteen (04:01.361)
Now that's great. And I've often heard the product kind of marketing also referred to as the, you know, the founder market fit, you know, you can get founders who are great evangelizing, but the products, you know, a couple of a couple of years behind the spiel. And therefore, you know, the really the product market fit is, you know, as they kind of defined it in HubSpot is, you know, have you got a certain ICP using these features on a regular basis, right? That's when you get true product market fit not
when you've got a handful of customers turning up to events and some early adopter customers. So, I definitely like that distinction. And in terms of the Salesforce ecosystem, it sounds like Nimbus maybe wasn't on the Salesforce ecosystem. What was it around Salesforce then, and then discovering that niche? Because obviously, we started off my first business in 2011, the AppExchange had been going for about five years, but very much it was centered.
around apps, most of them free around the CRM. What was it about Salesforce, the ecosystem that really kind of led you to kind of lean in with your second business in?
Ian Gotts (05:08.062)
Well, it's interesting. The product we built actually isn't Salesforce specific. You can use it for anything. You could use it for implementing SAP HubSpot, I know, um, uh, service now, uh, work day. So we are architected it. So it doesn't sit on the platform. It sits on AWS. So we built a product which actually would solve what actually is a trillion dollar issue. Um, that sounds like a ridiculous number, but actually the numbers stack up.
The number of times that people build the wrong thing because they haven't done sufficient business analysis, the impact of doing that, whether it's in the Salesforce ecosystem or whether you're building custom code or whether you're configuring SAP, if you haven't bottomed out requirements and really understood the impact of that, of why you're making that change, you then go and spend all the energy building it and then your end users go, well, that's not what we needed. And then you have to go around the cycle again. So there's wasted cost.
You've also got all the opportunity cost you've lost because the end users needed something so that they could run their business better You haven't delivered it to them. So therefore they're still waiting That's when you look at the entirety of say IT systems is a trillion dollar issue So we're solving quite a big problem But the issue for any founder is if you're trying to solve a problem that big you're never gonna get you're never gonna finish It off. You have to narrow down and get some focus
And we said, look, we know the Salesforce ecosystem really well. Salesforce is really easy to configure. So everyone gets themselves into problems very, very quickly. So there's definitely a problem to be solved there. And there's some real pain in terms of the, not just ROI type metrics pain, but actually you see it in the way that people describe their life as an admin or a business analyst about how painful it is. Like you build something, people don't use it. You build something and everything breaks.
So we started looking at, how do we narrow down the markets so we can focus on something? And I think from a founder perspective, it's very easy to go, oh no, but we're solving a bigger problem. Yeah, I get that. But you've got to get started somewhere. And the narrower you make the scope, the easier everything becomes. Which customers to go after? So marketing becomes easier. Which events to go and exhibit at? Which products that you really want to go and improve?
Ian Gotts (07:28.53)
If it's too broad, then every customer has a slightly different requirement. Get it narrower and suddenly life becomes easier. And we had a fight in the very early days of the company because we clearly had a strong heritage of just process mapping for regulated companies. And there was a big, at the beginning it was like, well, do we go after that again? So we just go after our old market or do we go after Salesforce? And I remember in the early days, the answer was both. No, I can't do both. The website just doesn't say anything. Just says we do stuff.
The moment we said, let's double down on Salesforce, everything became easier. And actually it's not even Salesforce, because we don't do marketing cloud and we don't do commerce cloud, we do platform. So we've narrowed it down even more. So I think that's probably the most important thing in the early days, which is really focus on an area. So therefore you can get some genuine feedback and get to product market fit faster.
James Gasteen (08:25.333)
Totally agree. And I did none of those things in my first business. So that's why I'm not nodding my head furiously. I think the focus is absolutely key. I think we see a lot of your narrate with either our own companies or ones that we're bringing into the fold. And I think it is very tempting to go after because Salesforce is a very, you know, it is big in terms of their customers, they've got different verticals, different geos, and it's attractive to be too big early on. But I think I think there's that focus piece. And also, I think it plays into the messaging, Salesforce and work with a channel.
They are now inundated with other partners. So again, your message needs to land very quickly. So remember my last business, what we did quite well was to say, if you hear the word project, give us a call. We were in the PSA space, right? But again, PSA was quite confusing for some people. So we said like, if you hear the word project, let us know about it, right? If it's, we can probably fit the requirement there. If you need to close a deal, we can help out. So yeah, I think the focus bit's absolutely key.
Ian Gotts (09:21.21)
And focus on market, focus on product, focus on geo, focus on channel. But then you also say something else, which is if you hear the word project, so focus on the problem. So we've got, if people say they've got all complexity, they've got a problem with tech debt, they've got a problem with poor documentation. Those are the three things. If you hear that, then you need to come and talk to us.
And then there are some secondary issues. You're trying to do an org merger. You're doing a You've got you're implementing a new cloud or you think about AI but those are almost there's a not second they're not lower level issues, but they are We need to again focus on what are the things which if you hear these come and talk to us and you can't it can't Be listed 15. It has to be a list of two or three and again get very focused on that
And I think as a founder, you go, Oh, but there's other there's money over there, which I'm leaving on the table. You've got to because actually, you'll never get to any revenue, unless you stay focused on something. And I think that's always the problem with a founder going, Oh, but look how big the market is. Yeah, but you'll never you'll never get to it.
James Gasteen (10:31.517)
Yeah, and that's the kind of VC conundrum. You've got to pitch this big market, this big time, then you've got to then figure out how do you then, you know, pick off the bit that you can actually win in the next couple of years. Remind me again, when you set up elements, were you already in the US by then? And then what was the difference? I mean, it'd be really interesting to hear, you know, the different experiences between, you know, I'd imagine Nimbus, where you set up when you're in the UK and then setting up in the US in terms of, you know, in the US you're already in your biggest market versus I imagine Nimbus.
Ian Gotts (10:44.79)
Yes. Yeah.
James Gasteen (10:59.401)
Based out of the UK, you've got a domestic market to go after, but a lot of it would be international. What were some of the differences in the early days between setting up shop in the UK versus the US?
Ian Gotts (11:10.402)
That's an interesting question actually. Because I mean, if you're, you're sitting in the UK, you're sitting in, I know, somewhere else in Europe, then you're going, well, do we, when do we come to the US? So I think first of all, it's not about market size, because when you're small, it kind of doesn't matter. I mean, you're, even if you're sitting in the UK, how many companies need, have got, are using Salesforce, there's an enormous number of people there.
James Gasteen (11:21.19)
Hehehe
Ian Gotts (11:34.27)
And yes, ultimately is about market size, I guess. And at some point, if you're based in the UK, you've got to make a decision about when you come to the US. And I think that's a whole podcast in its own right. We wrote a book on it. But let's just think about the differences. I think the first is actually attitude. In the US, someone says, this is really exciting. We should meet. They're not being polite. They actually will get the candor out and they want to go and do something.
Whilst I think quite often in Britain, some of those are very interesting, we should have a conversation about it. They're just doing that to be polite. They kind of, they may want to or they may not. But it's a lot more explicit in the US like, yeah, let's go and do this. So that's the first thing. I think the second thing is that if you if you do a pilot in a particular area of a business, so they go, this is great, we're going to pilot in Denver, they'll then go get now we've done the pilot, we're now going to roll it out across the US or across our business.
They're not gonna go, right, we've rolled out in Denver, but now we'll roll it out, now we'll do another pilot in Boulder, and then we'll do another pilot in Colorado, and then we'll do another pilot in the next state over. And I think the, okay, yeah, we've decided on this let's get going and do it attitude, whilst I think the British is a lot more reserved, which is, yeah, we definitely, we piloted this in Birmingham, but now we'll let's do another pilot in Solihull, and then we'll do one in Wolverhampton, and then maybe if it really goes well, we'll get to Leicester. It's like, guys, it...
it worked, how do we roll this out? So I think there's a level of action and immediacy that comes out of it, which I think is really refreshing being out here.
James Gasteen (13:10.877)
Yeah, and I suppose both those items are probably linked towards a view on risk, right? You know, let's do it as opposed to, you know, let's get 15 stakeholders around a room, push it around for a few quarters, de-scope it, push it out, do it internally, come back to market in two years, by which time you've spent hundreds of thousands on internal resources to not make a decision.
Ian Gotts (13:15.243)
Yes.
Ian Gotts (13:31.37)
Yeah, so that's the first thing. I think the second one is actually related to risk, which is if you did something, it didn't work very well, maybe the company went bust and you have to start another one, that's a cross against your name if you're in the UK. It's like, oh, well, it didn't go very well. And the question is, well, how much did you lose? In the US, it's like, wow, what did you learn from that? Let's move on to the next thing. So...
You don't end up, so therefore, if you're not carrying that with you, then you're more likely to take a risk and let, well, let's go for this. Let's go and build something reasonably big, which relates to the next point, which is, I think it's easier getting funding. Now, we bootstrapped Nimbus in the UK, not out of choice. We couldn't get funding. People are like, oh, I don't think this will ever work, a very negative type attitude. So we grew it out of cash for seven, eight years. We took very little funding. But bear in mind.
It was a product being sold to enterprise customers. It was on premise, upfront deal. So you could actually fund it out of cash. And we had a little bit of consulting around it which supported it. I think now when you're building a SaaS based business, it's very difficult to build it out of cashflow. So you've got to be able to bootstrap it yourself.
James Gasteen (14:52.317)
Yeah, no, I'd agree with that. I think the development timelines and then even just, I think the biggest thing for me is the salary costs. I was talking about how one of my AEs eight years ago cost me 30,000 pounds base. Now it's 2.5x that, right? And the quotas are far apart. So all of a sudden your cost of acquisition and your head counts have gone through the roof and it becomes harder then to reinvest customer receipts into hiring. So you end up then stagnating.
Ian Gotts (15:20.114)
Or you're in an environment where people are more open to funding things and taking a risk and that's a lot more prevalent in the US than the UK. Probably less so now. I mean, obviously the whole of the VC market is really tough, but it will come back. But again, US VCs are a lot more of them than there are UK VCs. They're a lot happier taking risk. And as you said, the market's bigger. So from that perspective, the market size does matter.
because the VC is looking at a way bigger market and therefore the total addressable market, the TAM is bigger and therefore they're more prepared to invest.
James Gasteen (15:58.565)
Exactly. Just moving on to that thinking about that your kind of customers, how do you go about acquiring your first customer element? Is there a kind of a quirky story of a friend of a friend with it, you know, SEO? How do you go about acquiring that first
Ian Gotts (16:13.182)
Okay, so I think the first thing is you need to think about what the product is. If the product is innovative, as in there isn't already a market space, you're not building another PSA and you need to be a better PSA than the existing ones. You're building a whole new space and I think the marketing is very different. And I've always been sort of the left of the chasm in sort of the Jeffrey Moore terms, it's the early adopter. So again, I have...
Let's focus on that for a moment because I think most founders are building something which they feel is innovative rather than a better version of something that already exists. If you're doing that, the first customers are going to come from people you know for a couple of reasons. One is they need to take, you probably haven't built out this thing fully. Secondly, it's a space that or a problem that they didn't realize could be solved.
James Gasteen (16:50.965)
Thanks for watching.
Ian Gotts (17:01.374)
So they certainly aren't sitting there with an RFP and going, well, we've been looking for a solution, and luckily I've got some budgets. So they're also gonna have to try and rustle some budget up from somewhere. So it's going to be from your network. And I think the challenge is getting beyond that network of people who you know into people who've never heard of you who are also prepared to take a risk because they can see a product benefit. And I'd encourage, I will put it, there's a book we wrote called
Why killer products don't sell which is actually how you operate to the left of the chasm with innovative customers That was a generic product. We then wrote a sort of a book summary called impact Which actually is how to operate to the left of the chasm for technology companies So if you get at elements dot cloud slash impact or go to our downloads page, you it's a it's a book summary It's about 40 pages, but it will help you understand what it's like living to the left of the chasm selling to innovative customers You may have gathered up. I quite like
I quite like educating. So if we've done something and it's worked, we tend to either do a podcast, write a blog or write a book and try and help other people learn from what we've learned. So, um, how do I get the first customer? I think the first one is it's people, you know, I think the other really, really good place in the Salesforce ecosystem to test out ideas, get to talk to newer people or the dreaming events, there are lower costs to, uh, to sponsor. You're surrounded.
James Gasteen (18:08.661)
That's great.
Ian Gotts (18:28.314)
not by necessarily platform owners, product owners, who are the purchasers, but you're surrounded by the admins, the business developers, who are going to give you really good feedback of, well, that doesn't work, oh wow, that's amazing. And so you're actually talking to the grassroots. It's harder to make a sale from those people, but from the early days, it's a really good ground to start to understand, are you even building the right thing, what are the real requirements that people have?
So I, and we supported every single dreaming event in the early days. It's pretty challenging now. There are quite a lot, but again, we went to as many of them as possible. We were a sponsor, so we had to have a stand. And it's a fraction of the cost of trying to sponsor one of the bigger events, like a big Salesforce event or a Dreamforce or a TDX.
James Gasteen (19:15.845)
Yeah, totally. And I can imagine you're probably getting your influences there, right. So people see all dreaming events and someone says, Oh, we need a product like this, then they're going to say elements, because you know, that you build that brand awareness. I think that's a great tip. And I think it is typically people you know, and that was going to be the case in my first business, someone that I've met on one of the old party boats used to go from the Excel Center to Central London after London World Tour.
And then I got an agency to basically go and collect data on LinkedIn. And they use my profile to collect data, but accidentally stomp somebody who then said, Oh, I like your product. We're looking for that. And then call me up. So someone I'd never even known. And I think really the evolution of sales in the early days is can the founder sell to their network? Yep. That's probably the lowest friction. Can the founder set the cell to somebody he or she doesn't know. And then it's can an employee sell to somebody that's not known. That's the hardest bit because you don't have the.
the founder to get a deal across the line, make some ridiculous promises and sell it for, you know, a fraction of what it should be. So I think, yeah, that's really the kind of evolution of the customers. And thinking there a bit a little bit about kind of, you spoke a little bit about the events and dreaming. What other kind of marketing strategies have you found to be kind of most effective within the Salesforce community? Obviously you put on a big party around Dreamforce. Are there any other items that work well for you?
Ian Gotts (20:35.734)
Well, better mind this sort of left of the chasm idea, which is you're trying to app and you're trying to educate. So you need to be getting content out there because if people don't understand there's even a problem to be solved, then they're never going to come to you. So they're probably going to, oh, they're fixing the problem with spreadsheets or some app they build or a customer, something. So you need to show that there's a problem and that you're solving it. So writing articles, people like Salesforce Bayon are great because they're actually a
a great news outlet, there's, but again, LinkedIn, and I start writing articles which are not fluff pieces, it's not four paragraphs, and it with a bit of click, click baity title, it's substantive. So we've written some long blogs, I've written 11 books over time, but an ebook that really gets into the problem and actually shows that you understand the problem and that you understand how it can be solved.
because you're trying to demonstrate that even if the product isn't 100% there, you really understand the space. And therefore, you are a thought leader. And ideally, if you can, you need to get yourself on the speaking circuit. If you can actually get a presentation, a dreaming event, a holy grail obviously is getting a speaking event at Dreamforce, but those sorts of speaking slots, but you're not gonna get it talking about your product. You're gonna get those thoughts talking about the problem
be solved. And I think the interesting thing is you may even be talking about what you perceive as competitors at the same time. And you've got to be prepared to do that. And say, okay, yeah, we solved the problem. There are lots of other companies out there solving it. If you don't have that approach, you're never going to hit the speaking slots. So if you're on a stand at a dreaming event, you're talking to one, two, three, four, 10 people. If you've got an interesting topic, you can have 100 people in the room. And
Wells Falls got me talking at world tours. I was speaking at dreaming events in the early days. I think I did 95,000 miles on United one year. That's what it takes to get to enough people where they go, yeah, I've heard of elements. So in the early days, you've just gotta just keep on meeting people.
James Gasteen (22:52.357)
No, I think that's great feedback. I think yeah, the Salesforce community is a very visible and awareness building one. So if people are aware of you, and they can see you, then you're kind of still in business. If they can't see you, then it's like, oh, we saw we saw him or her at the last few dream forces, they weren't at this one, something must be wrong. If we go back to maybe kind of, you know, your overall entrepreneurial journey, what are some of those kind of unexpected hurdles you faced? And maybe what lessons did you learn as a result?
Ian Gotts (23:23.17)
I think the focus one is really important. I mean, if you remember back to GDPR and how important that was always going to be, it kind of ended up as nothing. We ended up with a little diversion where we built a GDPR app, which was actually a really good app. And actually, I became sort of the GDPR expert for a year and a bit. It kind of didn't turn into any revenue. It could have been a huge revenue spinner. We know from our history that anything with compliance associated with it normally drives
The problem is that GDPR didn't have any real teeth and nobody got fined and it didn't go anywhere. And I think that was a classic case of us going, should we divert some resources to that? And it wasn't a lot of money, but it was still three or four developers working on it for a while. And those, they could have been doing building the core product more quickly. So I think that's the first thing.
James Gasteen (24:14.405)
Yeah, the opportunity cost as well as the founder time, right? What's your time? Yeah.
Ian Gotts (24:17.394)
Oh, yeah, absolutely. It's not just cash. It's the opportunity cost, the diversion. It was marketing effort. It was a whole bunch of other things. So I think staying focused is often difficult because, again, unless you're the dictator founder that goes, right, we're going this way, and it's like you're either on the ship or you're not. There are three of us and it's more collegiate. And actually, in the early days, it's...
there are debates about, okay, what is the right market? Because when you get started, it's very difficult to put any numbers back behind it to prove it. It takes a while and you need to hold your confidence to go, okay, we are gonna go off this market and let's let it play out long enough, rather than going, oh, but there's a deal over there, we could do that, oh, there's one over there. And I think that's the first thing. The second one is I think people always believe they're further ahead in the journey than they really are.
And it's quite easy to go, well, we definitely got product marketing fit, we should now be investing or we're going to buy these sales, buy this list of people or we're going to do this marketing campaign or we're going to hire, even worse, we're going to hire these people because we're ready. And I think people often hire too early. We definitely did that in Nimbus. I think we've been a lot better in elements in terms of taking funding. We held off for as long as possible till we were really clear about the market before we took any funding.
Obviously we're in the fortune position, the three of us had just sold the business and we could put our own money in to help grow the business. But if you haven't got that money and you aren't clear on the market, can you as the founder and maybe a couple of other founders, can you go and build something? It's really easy to build things nowadays to get to a point where you've got something in market.
James Gasteen (26:05.598)
Oh yeah.
James Gasteen (26:11.237)
Yeah, no, I think in the area of that kind of focus, and then definitely the hiring too early, I think, I realized as well that on the hiring bit, it's easy to miss diagnose a problem. So you know, I had a sales problem the other days, because I was doing all the sales, but I was doing everything else. So hired sales people. But actually, what we really needed is marketing to make the sales people more effective. But by hiring or marketing, salespeople and BDRs, you think you're solving the marketing problem, but they can't because they can call out bound and they can book some meetings, but they can't.
run campaigns and really educate the whole market. It's a very expensive and manual way to do it. So I think that hiring bit is key and just understanding the kind of sequence of what you need to get right and when you bring the right people on.
Ian Gotts (26:56.426)
Yeah, I think the it's an entrepreneur, you're always optimistic. You can't you can't be an entrepreneur, not optimistic. You've got to be okay. Well, that didn't work. But actually, let's move on is the whole attitude. I mean, one of our company values is ask for forgiveness, not permission. Okay, if you do something, it didn't work. It's not going to come back and haunt you. We're not going to go, James, you know, you did that two years ago, and that didn't work, did it?
That blame culture, doesn't it? You did something, you made the best judgment based on the information you had. Maybe your judgment wasn't great and therefore will help you improve that. Or maybe actually you chose it and then the market moves away from it. But if you have your whole time going, I'm not gonna do that because if I do it, I'll get it wrong, then that slows down the momentum. So you need this attitude of, yeah, forgiveness, stop permission, let's try stuff. And...
enable the whole team, whether it's just the founders to start with, then the team grows, enable all of them to have a chance to do stuff and try stuff. And that moves forward, that really drives the level of innovation you need in a startup.
James Gasteen (28:07.145)
Totally agree. And I think also helps as that kind of, you know, what scarce resource are you optimizing for? And time is a lot more scarce than money. You know, you can always print more money, but you can't really rewind the clock back just yet. So it's kind of like, you know, if you get the whole company behind speed, and therefore you've got to break a few eggs versus optimizing for staying alive. Well, that's great. But as you said, the market moves and every year and year, you know, the growth goes down and you've got the same base of loyal customers whittling away slowly. The team starts.
fall into pieces because they want to work on more innovative things and you're not really doing anything innovative and it's kind of death by a thousand cuts versus the speed approach as well, you'll get to the good news, the bad news a lot quicker.
Ian Gotts (28:47.306)
Yes, and you talked about money. Hiring expensive salespeople before you're ready is probably the quickest way of actually spending money. You've got to give a salesperson at least three months, probably six months in an emerging market to work out whether they're working. That's a chunk of cash if you've hired someone relatively senior. So I think people do that too early. Again, we've done a good job of hiring the people with the right attitude.
with the right approach. We've got great team, great sales team, but also great customer success team, because also, again, with the SaaS product, it's not about the initial sale, it's about can they, what's the onboarding like, how are they using the product. I think we said at the very beginning of this podcast, one of the metrics is how much is the product being used. And that's about, it's not just features, but it's also about how the customer's been onboarded.
James Gasteen (29:42.069)
Exactly. And really, I think when you're selling SaaS, you're actually selling a vision of the future products. It's continually evolving, and the customer's got to kind of buy into that. But the customer's only really going to take advantage of that through CS, not through the sales rep. I think that's really true. Kind of looking back, and I think you kind of touched upon this, is there anything that you would have done differently in the early stages of elements?
Ian Gotts (30:04.842)
Um, clearly we wouldn't, wouldn't have taken the diversion into GDPR, but, um, we thought it was a good idea at the time. And it seems to me, I don't, I can't remember who made that decision. There's no one, we're not looking back at the three founders going, oh, Adrian, that was definitely your choice. I mean, there isn't, there's none of that. We're like, that's, that's in the rear view mirror. I think what's interesting is we've got, we've got a really good team. We've got an amazing technical, technical team, but I, and we're solving quite a big problem.
If I were to do this again, I'm not sure I'd build a horizontal solution. I think that there's a massive opportunity and we're growing really quickly and also AI, which we can maybe talk about in a moment, AI is actually solving for that. So Elements has got huge market opportunity. I think if you haven't got the background and therefore access to funds and so on, I think there are easier places to play than a horizontal solution. I think.
If I were myself again, with 20 years less experience, with 20 years less money behind me, I'd probably go after, think about a particular white space. Think about an industry niche that's not satisfied, because you can actually fund that off the back of consulting. So let's pick a weird area. So you think a sales source would be really good for, I don't know.
James Gasteen (31:23.389)
Yep, that's cool.
Ian Gotts (31:32.138)
for a technology company who's trying to drive loyalty solutions. So how would Salesforce support that? How would you configure Salesforce to make it really work for a tech company who's dealing with loyalty, therefore they're dealing with it's a B2C type play, but there's also the rollout is to thousands of people because it's about loyalty scheme. I guess I've just made that up, but the point is...
I'm looking at a particular problem that an industry has with a particular set of customers. Now, obviously that market needs to be big enough to satisfy what you're trying to build. But picking an industry niche which Salesforce doesn't deal with very well. Salesforce is good at... They've got a life sciences industry product, but they kind of haven't. They've got an overarching thing for life sciences. You look underneath life sciences, there are a number of different...
groups or industries even within that. How would you take their life sciences solution and then super customize it for that marketplace and then build that? So I think filling out those white spaces from an industry perspective is probably an easier entry point than trying to build what is a platform solving a big problem.
James Gasteen (32:46.425)
Yeah, totally. I think you're also going to see this kind of the splintering of the ecosystem into more kind of industry clouds. And then they're going to become their own mini ecosystems, right? So what's missing in the those most clouds financial services cloud, for example, and building an app that plugs the gap there where the TAM is too small for Salesforce, but it's very attractive as an entrepreneur, especially if they're bootstraps, I think, picking off some of those industry clouds with specific industry knowledge, I think is a good play.
Ian Gotts (33:15.966)
Yeah, so, and I think the other thing I said is, you can then start to understand the market and build the product by actually delivering consulting. So you're actually funding the growth off the back of your consulting revenue at the same time as understanding the markets, as the same time as building a customer reference. And at that point, you can then start to engage maybe the account exec and go, oh, actually, I've been working in this customer, who else have you got like that? So that is a play I think works better than the...
Right, we're gonna solve the problem of back up and restore. Okay, you've now got to build a product, fight the competition, then you've got to work out what market you're gonna sell into. There's no consulting around back up and restore. I mean, you can see the problems you have in terms of building a horizontal solution.
James Gasteen (34:03.093)
Exactly. You need more cash basically, you need more cash. It's harder to bootstrap. How do you envision thinking about the kind of future of the Salesforce ecosystem? How do you envision the kind of future of the apps? And maybe how are you thinking about that elements?
Ian Gotts (34:17.778)
Well, I think the first thing is, I mean, in the last year, GPT has launched itself into the ecosystem. I think it's actually caused everyone to go, wow, what's going to happen next? But we've got very few answers. I mean, it's going to be as big a change as say the mobile phone or the internet, but we're at the flip phone stage of the iPhone revolution. We're really at the very early stages. I mean, we're seeing...
100x, 1000x productivity improvements in terms of what we've put in terms of AI on top of elements.cloud. Because we've got the data and we can do some amazing things with it. You can automatically draw process maps. You can take a process map and automatically write user stories. It will go back into your org and tell you for that user story what changes you could make to your org because it knows about all the metadata. You're going to have a conversation about your org. So I think AI on top of some applications
is going to have a dramatic impact in terms of the productivity of some groups of people. In our world, it will be the business analysts. But I think that will happen in lots of different places in the ecosystem where people will have either a product that they've already built and they can layer AI on top of it because they have the data, or they've come up with a whole new innovative way of work using AI and they bring a product to market. I think that will change.
a number of the roles in terms of Salesforce in terms of how effective they are, their productivity. And I don't think we've really seen that play out yet. I think the consulting industry is going to be massively disrupted because AI is going to make them very effective. But if you don't have really good strong industry knowledge, you're going to be disintermediated by AI. What I mean by that is you're a consultant going, I know about Salesforce. Yeah, you kind of don't. What does that mean?
Yeah, I know about platform. What industry knowledge you have? Well, I can, I can help you implement for anything. Well, no, I can actually use GPT will actually write, draw me process maps about an industry better than you know about it. So you need to have a, you need a really good industry knowledge to be able to layer on top of that and help me use it. So, I mean, I wrote an article for Forbes just recently about how I think, um, the consulting business is going to be disrupted. You look at that and you look at.
Ian Gotts (36:39.966)
And then you narrow it down to how Salesforce consultants are going to be disrupted. You look at how admins are going to be more effective, but also disrupted by it. You look at the developer world. I think moving forward, we need to think about as an ISV, how will my customers be able to leverage AI and how will it change their ability to be a lot more effective? I think that's what the future of apps now is. You need to look through the lens of
AI not as a replacement for somebody, but actually as a really, really capable helper, but make sure it's scoped in a way where it really is a helper rather than a replacement.
James Gasteen (37:20.517)
Yeah, I think I think now, like you said, in that evolution, it's the kind of it's the co pilot phase, it's the, you know, how do we boost productivity for individuals, we're not yet at that project use cases, right? So again, internally, we're using chat for a few, a few different functions. But again, you know, could it kind of work on a project like a go to market launch? Well, no, because that's several different people, it's different functions, it's products, it's sales, it's marketing, it's messaging, getting that all right into an outcome.
is actually quite hard to do so far. Optimizing something individually, like what's my strategy plan, go and look at my competitors, it's great at some of those use cases.
Ian Gotts (37:58.614)
Yeah, we're looking at it in two ways. We're looking at it as we're calling AI integrated where we're actually, it's not a chat GBT type interface. It's actually, we're calling AI through the API, but because we've got input data, so let me give you the example. You've got a transcript of an interview and you want it to draw a process map. So that's, you're not gonna put anything into chat. There'll be a button that says.
create map from and it says, well, what content is it's a transcript from a video from an interview. It's a, it's a procedure that somebody gave you, or it's an RFP. You're a consultant and you've given an RFP from a customer which talks about the process they want to change. That could be the input and it automatically draws the process map off the back of it. So that's AI integrated. The other example would be click on a process map and say, write me the user stories for it. That's AI integrated. But we've also got the concept of co-pilots where it
you can then, a copilot is the helper. So you could have a copilot around a process diagram and say, knowing what you know about the process, knowing what you know about me, how would I improve this? Or I'm in my org, tell me, I mean, one of the things we asked the other day was, how long would it take to change all the things associated with the pick list value on stage and opportunity? And it went 96 hours. Okay, well, how did it do that? Well, it had a knowledge of,
James Gasteen (39:19.462)
Hehehe
Ian Gotts (39:23.65)
the stage field and all the dependencies associated with it. So it knew that this stage field kicked off these flows and this ancient process builder workflow and it kicked off some apex and so on. So it knew what's connected to it and also what those things were connected to. So down sort of down the spider chart of all things. It also knew from our application, the complexity of all those things, because we can calculate the complexity. And we then gave it a table of
for this type of metadata, for this level of complexity, roughly how long would it take to make a change? But that one question, it worked its way through all those dependencies, looked at the complexities, multiply it by the spreadsheet value and came back with 96 hours. And you can be cynical, go, yeah, but is it really right? Well, if it's 96 hours versus 104 hours versus 87 hours, you care.
James Gasteen (40:17.865)
because.
Ian Gotts (40:19.574)
The question is, is this gonna take three hours, a hundred hours or a thousand hours? Because typically the admin's answer for any change is it'll take three months because I have no idea how long it's gonna take. So it's a helper, it's not giving you the specific answer. Although it actually came, you can say, show me you're working and it went all, this is all the information. But the point is, it's really good at doing that analysis for you. And because you've now got a natural language interface, you can ask any question.
James Gasteen (40:29.8)
Exactly.
Ian Gotts (40:48.738)
James has got these permissions, but he has access to this object y. That would take you forever to wade through permissions, profiles, permission sets. But because we've got all the data, it comes back pretty quickly with an answer, at which point you can go, oh, that's interesting. Oh, we've now got Scott's now joining the company. I want to give him the same permissions as James. What's he got? And he gives you the list. So there are some...
Some things we're now seeing, if you've got the right data, there's some really powerful things you can now do in terms of making the business analysts more effective, making admins more effective. We're not in the world of developing code, but the co-pilot's around Apex, so the developers are more effective. Again, off the charts in terms of what we can do. So we're at the very early stages. As you say, we're not at the point where someone can go, I've got an idea, build me an app.
we're not gonna get AI to do that yet, but some of those intermediary steps is gonna help massively. I think that's the biggest change we're gonna see in the ecosystem over the next five years is how much people, organizations have lent into actually using AI in some niche areas and how much more effective they have become. And those people are going, oh, too much risk, not gonna do it.
You need to be doing things now, playing with things, understanding how to make it work, because it's moving so quickly.
James Gasteen (42:17.973)
Oh, yeah, it's terrifying. Some of the things I see on LinkedIn sometimes, oh my goodness me. But yeah, it definitely want to want to watch. And it's the kind of question I asked to kind of wrap up each of the podcast, what's one piece of advice you wish someone had given you when you were starting out in the Salesforce space?
Ian Gotts (42:37.728)
by stock.
Better my 20 years ago when we first came into this. That's a kind of flippin' answer. You can't, an ISV founder now doesn't have that opportunity. I think it's, when you're starting as a Salesforce ISV founder, I mean, I think it's, pick a niche and focus on it and be very clear. Don't try and make version one of the product too broad. Yes, there'll be a big market, but let's get focused on something and get something to market.
I was talking to someone yesterday as an advisor, and they're so terrified about picking the right solution. They won't build anything. And the problem is, no one's going to fund, you're not going to get funding off the back of a slide deck. Build something, and if it's wrong, build it faster, let's build the next thing. But you can't be sitting there agonizing over, well, maybe we could do that, we could do this, maybe we should do that. It's so easy to build something now that's...
good enough that someone can at least get an idea about what you're talking about. And then find your first evangelist who goes, yeah, I'll go on this journey with you. Because that's what you're looking for. You're looking for the evangelist who'll go, yeah, I know it's not quite there, but I trust that you will get to where I need to get to and I'll go on this journey with you.
James Gasteen (43:56.51)
Yeah, I'll take a punt.
James Gasteen (44:00.565)
Exactly. Ian, it's been great having you on the show. I think there's lots of great advice there for founders, I think especially items around kind of focus, and if possible setting up in the US and not the UK, but again, that's probably quite a hard one to do for non-US based founders. So yeah, Ian, really appreciate it. Thanks a lot.
Ian Gotts (44:18.478)
Thank you so much for inviting me.