If I knew then what I know now...

In today's episode, James Gasteen sits down with his fellow Unaric Co-Founder, Neil Crawford.

James and Neil discuss Neil's journey into the Salesforce ecosystem, building a product in collaboration with your customers, the challenges of building a horizontal product and, in the early days, why it's important to prioritise existing relationships over chasing new opportunities.

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.

Transcript

James Gasteen (00:01.214)
Hi everyone, today I'm joined by Neil Crawford, one of my co-founders at Unaric, who previously was in the Salesforce space as founder of Distribution Engine. So before we hop into some of the questions, Neil, it'd be great to give us a little bit of a potted background as to your experience in Salesforce space. I believe you were probably even earlier than myself, so maybe give us a few words and then we can hop into some of the questions.

Neil (00:25.91)
Great, thanks James. Sure, yeah, so I have been around in the ecosystem too long probably, but since around 2010, I think, I've come from a technical background. I was working at various places, including the likes of IBM, where I was doing enterprise Java projects. And as I was doing these very long running projects that were taking sometimes multiple years to go live.

A friend of mine started working for Salesforce and she was kind of knocking out a release every week, going to different client sites around the world and releasing new functionality to businesses. So I saw that happening and thought this looks like the future. So yeah, so I jumped into the Salesforce ecosystem as a freelancer initially, working at various places, including the likes of Tequila, building apps for other people, and then met my co-founder, another Neil.

and we decided to launch an app together.

James Gasteen (01:28.202)
Brilliant. And can you give us a bit more background as to like, you know, the idea behind the app? I mean, everyone's got a story about, you know, the app. Was it scratching the itch, for example? You know, it'd be great to hear about how you kind of came across the problem.

Neil (01:41.662)
Yeah. So firstly, myself and Neil just decided that we would like to try writing a product. So we began from that point of view saying, you know, wouldn't it be great to. Leave the world of consulting and go into the world of products. So that was our kind of initial point. Um, and then from there, Neil had already been playing around a little bit and he'd looked on the Salesforce ideas exchange, which is where people list out all their various pain points.

James Gasteen (01:57.374)
Mm-hmm. Cool.

Neil (02:11.574)
Um, and he'd looked at a couple of things, but one of them, um, had come through from a guy, I think it was ING direct, the bank had kind of highlighted a problem around case management and people were cherry picking cases. So Neil built a little prototype for him, um, about how he might solve that. By the time he'd built that, the guy had disappeared and he couldn't get hold of him again. But the idea was, was sound. Um,

So we decided to take that idea and explore it a bit further and start building out from there. And we knew a couple of people who had the same problem. So we really worked with them to build out the requirements and build out the functionality.

James Gasteen (02:56.894)
Brilliant. So then how did you go about acquiring your first customer? Was it kind of app exchange? Was it like network they've been talking about? I mean, there's a big community vibe around Salesforce. So it'd be great to hear a bit more about the first few customers.

Neil (03:08.666)
Yeah, I think, you know, the Salesforce community is, is very unique. And it was kind of surprising when I first got into that, just how tight knit it was, and it still is, but it was very tiny in the other day. So as we'd gone around, you know, we come from a consulting background, doing all kinds of freelancing. So, um, we already knew a couple of people who were having that pain point. Um, and particularly people in the U S were very open just to telling us what they wanted, there was no sort of guardedness that you sometimes get in Europe.

James Gasteen (03:35.022)
Mm.

Neil (03:38.006)
Um, so they just gave us exactly a big shopping list of everything they wanted. Um, and we went ahead and built it for them on the understanding that it would become a product and that they would, they would pay for it. So they were really happy. So they were effectively getting free consulting, um, and a product developed to their specific needs. Um, and we were lucky that those requirements were very transferable, that they were in a, in a very typical spot in sales operations. So.

James Gasteen (03:51.594)
Berlin.

Neil (04:08.126)
So that's how we got the first couple. And then beyond that, the app exchange was very effective and Dreamforce was also very effective in those early years. We've got, you get a little exhibitor stand. I can't remember how much it cost now. It's quite expensive, maybe $20,000 or something for this pretty skinny little stand that me and Neil stood outside of. But that was pretty effective. People would just wander by and have a chat.

Our initial marketing was a little vague. It just said, work less, do more. But even that kind of ridiculous slogan was enough to get people just to wander by and say, well, what do you do? And we had lots of conversations there and picked up customers and took it from there.

James Gasteen (04:41.892)
Hehehe

James Gasteen (04:51.949)
Hmm.

James Gasteen (04:56.362)
Brilliant. And like you know, I understand that you know, your first company was bootstrapped, but like mine in the early days, like, what were some of those kind of initial challenges you faced being bootstrapped? And how did you overcome them?

Neil (05:06.802)
Yeah, I think various challenges on the technical side, Salesforce wasn't quite as reliable as it is today. So particularly with the kind of like distribution and just quite heavy on processing and having jobs running. So things would just stop running at times and customers wouldn't really care if it was a Salesforce issue, all they know is that it doesn't work. So we had to

work quite hard to get the reliability that we needed and to look after customers whenever there were problems. So, there were technical challenges to overcome. On the business side, kind of a few false starts at different times. You know, we were initially encouraged to really try and work with the Salesforce AEs and the sales teams of Salesforce. And for it, I think it varies by product, but for that particular product, it wasn't really the right channel. So we wasted quite a bit of time.

James Gasteen (05:39.644)
Yeah.

Neil (06:03.666)
I'm trying to get Salesforce to sell our product basically, and it just wasn't appropriate. It was more appropriate for people that already had Salesforce and they've gone a bit further along and then hit some pain points. So yeah, we spent a bit of time kind of in that dead end, but I guess to try it.

James Gasteen (06:25.626)
Yeah, okay, brilliant. And then in terms of you talked upon there about, you know, using the app exchange using also Dreamforce, what other kind of marketing strategies did you find were kind of most effective within the Salesforce community to kind of initially drive awareness and then leads?

Neil (06:42.898)
Yeah. Um, in the early days of the, when the app exchange marketing program was first introduced, it was very effective. Um, they did an email digest. They did a homepage promotion where you get your app on the page of the Salesforce app exchange. Um, at one point they even put people on the login page of, of Salesforce itself, which, you know, was amazing. Um, so that would create a flurry of leads each time.

James Gasteen (07:05.352)
I remember.

Neil (07:10.846)
So that was very effective. I think over time, as it's got more crowded, that's less and less the case, but at that point it was pretty effective. And I think the other thing is word of mouth and referrals, which is an enduring thing of, you know, any piece of technology or any business probably, that just to execute well, just you get repeat business, which is a great thing. Like I remember one early dream force as we were scratching around.

James Gasteen (07:28.798)
Mm-hmm.

Neil (07:39.202)
you know, waving flies in front of people at lunchtime and just trying all these kind of random things. A wise old owl just kind of spoke to us and said, we're just talking to him. And he said, you know, what have you got at the moment? Well, we're like, well, we've got one customer. He's like, okay, well, just look after that one customer. Do a great job there. Don't worry about all the other stuff. It was good advice. You know, it was that customer in the end actually introduced and closed the deal.

on our behalf for another customer. So he was right. We really looked after them, did a great job. They were really happy, became friendly, and then just, you know, stood at Dreamforce booth, they were chatting with us. Some other quite big company came over to chat and they just took them away, had a coffee with them, talked about their experience and came back and said, yeah, that deal's closed. So brilliant. And we even had customers appearing on our booth from time to time, because we didn't have enough people to man the booth, so we'd sometimes get customers.

James Gasteen (08:10.643)
Brilliant.

James Gasteen (08:29.386)
Fantastic.

Neil (08:37.186)
do it, which prospects love. They're like, oh, look, even this customer's love it so much that they're happy to stand on the booth and do booth duty. So that's what we're looking for, if you will.

James Gasteen (08:44.827)
Yeah, that's a great tip.

And then also, your first product was kind of broadly horizontal. Like, obviously there's a challenge there that it could be all things to all people. How did you maybe hone down on certain, either ICPs or certain kind of specific use cases so you weren't just marketing to the entire internet?

Neil (09:05.826)
Yeah, I think that is more challenging for horizontal apps. So it ended up reflecting the nature of the Salesforce customer base. So high on tech. And then it as, as it moved along a bit, financial services came in there, some insurance, um, sometimes education, and especially in the U S education is quite a kind of high volume business. Um, so it was hard to pinpoint a specific vertical and say, this is very specific for this, um,

vertical and because of our technical background we didn't have much marketing experience anyway so I think that was an area where we were inexperienced so probably never really cracked that nut and it kind of remained somewhat horizontal.

James Gasteen (09:48.838)
Yeah. Okay, brilliant. And now if you think about some of the kind of like, you know, the pearls of wisdom, what were some of the kind of unexpected hurdles during your journey and kind of what lessons did you learn through them?

Neil (09:59.17)
Yeah, I suppose everyone's found a journey, it's always gonna have different challenges, there's probably themes in there, but I think unexpected things, recruitment was more difficult than I thought it would be. I don't know, I hadn't really thought about it at all, but trying to get the right people with the right skillset, with the right sort of culture, with the right...

James Gasteen (10:04.798)
Hehehe

James Gasteen (10:18.014)
Hmm.

Neil (10:29.15)
motivations in the right part of the world for the right salary. Um, it's quite difficult to get right to build a team is, is pretty challenging and have them gel with each other and that they work well with you. Um, so I think particularly as a technical founder, the idea of building a team, um, it's definitely, you know, it just requires experience. I'm not sure there's any shortcut to that to sort of learn.

James Gasteen (10:36.7)
Mm.

Neil (10:53.206)
what sorts of people are out there. And it varies by phase as well, that in the early stages, you need more generalists, and then later on you need more specialists. So that part, we had a few false starts around recruiting the right sorts of people. So that was a kind of education. And then I think even as a founder, you kind of learn a lot about yourself as well. You don't always know if you've gone from a...

doing a particular role, whether it's technical or anything else. And then you go into this founder role where you're kind of doing everything. I'd never done sales before. Um, you kind of learn what you're going to enjoy or what you find difficult. Learn a lot about yourself and what parts you might want to do and what parts you might want to try and get somebody else to help with.

James Gasteen (11:39.558)
Yeah, totally. I mean, I think I think the hiring thing is also very tricky. And I think, you know, our first business, I think we were remote, probably before COVID kicked in. So I had developers in Poland and customers in the US. And that was always quite tricky then to kind of manage it, because there were probably certain members of the team who you put in front of customers, certain members of the team where that you probably couldn't. And it was just kind of managing that interaction and time zones, which was, I think, you know, quite, quite tricky.

Neil (11:51.124)
Yeah.

Neil (11:59.981)
Yeah.

Neil (12:07.127)
Yeah.

James Gasteen (12:07.234)
especially as you're building a team and you've got contractors, consultants, full timers, founders, and just trying to manage those types of dynamics as well as the kind of the cultural ones. So yeah, I mean, yeah, it is tricky. I don't think anyone gets it right. And I think especially if, you know, a lot of folks I know who started their own business didn't really have any management experience. So they've kind of walked into this and they're kind of learning by doing, which is often the best way. But you know, you do break a few eggs there.

Neil (12:27.382)
Yeah.

Neil (12:31.565)
Yes.

Neil (12:35.979)
Yeah.

James Gasteen (12:36.026)
I suppose that, you know, thinking back towards the early days, now that you've kind of gone through the journey, like what would you maybe have done different differently in the early stages of your startup?

Neil (12:46.938)
I mean, it's always, it's always, you know, hindsight is easy to kind of look back and say what you do differently. I think if I knew then what I knew now, which is obviously possible, but I think I would try and go more quickly and try and hire more quickly and try and hire the right people. If I had more awareness about

James Gasteen (12:52.19)
Hehehe

James Gasteen (13:08.957)
Mm-hmm.

Neil (13:14.146)
my skillset versus what a business would need. I think I would have brought in a more commercial person earlier, which we did try to do. It's hard to find the right people, especially when you're not experiencing that area, you kind of have this vague idea of what a salesy person might look like. I think in the very early days, I thought anybody wearing a shiny suit must be really good at sales. And then as I went on, I realized that's not what a good salesperson looks like. Good salesperson is just tenacious and diligent.

James Gasteen (13:20.787)
Mm-hmm.

James Gasteen (13:27.655)
Yeah.

Neil (13:43.366)
They're actually quite detail focused, it's not this sort of second-done car salesman charisma stuff, it's just the perseverance to get things done. But yeah, I think to have a commercial person would have been really, really helpful and maybe to go a little faster.

James Gasteen (13:59.006)
Mm-hmm.

James Gasteen (14:03.014)
Yeah, I think on the sales side, I think it's tricky because customers will buy from founders the early stages that does kind of charisma, the enthusiasm, the passion, you know, doing what it takes to get over the line. It's quite hard to hire for because again, you're then they're not going to be the founder, they're not going to have maybe that relationship with the customer where you've bought them drinks at Dreamforce. So that is a tricky bit to try and then hire employees who then will never be founders and the customers probably see them as you know, employees.

Neil (14:09.4)
Yeah.

Neil (14:29.707)
Yeah.

Yeah.

James Gasteen (14:32.942)
and will probably treat them slightly differently. So yeah, that's totally tricky. And then if you think about like, if you think about the future, like thinking around the, how do you envision the future of Salesforce apps? And how do you see that kind of panning out? I think probably when we started out, there's probably in the hundreds, there's now around kind of 4,000 apps. Like what's your view of the future of Salesforce App Exchange and the ISP program?

Neil (14:50.634)
Mm-hmm.

Neil (14:59.038)
Yep. I think they'll continue to get more and more apps. So I think that, that process will, will keep going. Um, I think, you know, marketing is going to get more important. I think, you know, we talked a bit about verticalization. I think as things get more crowded, the apps need to get more targeted. So understanding who this application is for and get as tight as you can to that group of people. So I think it's just that maturity.

James Gasteen (15:14.301)
Mm-hmm.

Neil (15:28.542)
leads to specialization. And then overall, I think the landscape of technology will move along as well. AI is everywhere. And it's still in that kind of hype phase where people are just putting it in for the sake of putting it in, but that's not to say there's not, there's not value there. But I think it's just a general theme of the, like the current situation is that

James Gasteen (15:30.898)
Mm-hmm.

Neil (15:57.19)
humans are kind of adapting to the needs of technology. So humans are learning how to use a piece of software and they're learning what to click when and working around issues. But more and more the technology is going to need to adapt to meet the needs of the human. So the human just talk to it and ask what they want without having necessarily to learn it. So that user experience I think will keep getting better and better. So the technology is much easier to use and

James Gasteen (16:03.197)
Mm-hmm.

James Gasteen (16:21.47)
Mm-hmm.

Neil (16:25.01)
So apps will just need less and less friction. So to install it really quickly and it just starts working, it sets itself up almost, you can talk to it. And it's not gonna get there on day one. It doesn't mean jamming in AI for the sake of it is gonna get people there, but there are now technologies available that are moving us closer to that goal. So I think that will just keep happening.

James Gasteen (16:46.762)
Do you think maybe that's an ask for Salesforce to kind of iron out some of the idiosyncrasies of the platform in terms of maybe usability, UX, UI?

Neil (16:57.418)
Yeah, I think it's, you know, it's partly Salesforce and then there's opportunities for partners as well to, to help Salesforce, like Salesforce has come so far so quickly. Um, you know, it's been an amazing kind of thing to see. But at least gaps, which, you know, provide opportunities for partners. So I think for partners to be true partners to Salesforce and help them bridge them with these gaps, whether it's usability or performance or whatever the other gaps are, um, for partners to be generally.

actually helping push Salesforce forward, I think is the kind of right way to go.

James Gasteen (17:31.322)
Yep. Brilliant. And then kind of lastly, Neil, just to kind of wrap up, what's this? What's one piece of advice you wish someone had given you when you were just starting out as a Salesforce ISV founder? And fortunately, you can't reuse the example you gave us earlier along about looking after your one customer.

Neil (17:48.191)
I mean, we did try and take various pieces of advice early on. It's hard to pick and choose the right advice is one pain point early on. But I think if I had to go back and give myself some advice, I think it would probably be around the importance of marketing and the importance.

James Gasteen (18:04.173)
Hehehe

James Gasteen (18:13.33)
Mmm.

Neil (18:14.174)
of really tightening up who you're serving. I think there's a temptation as a technical founder to try and help everyone to feel like, oh, this person's got a problem, I can help them with that, this person, which does help to grow. And it's very counterintuitive to say, no, I'm just gonna pick this sliver of people and I'm only gonna help these people and I'm not gonna help these people. It feels very counterintuitive, but that's what's needed in order to scale. So...

to try and get that message home to early and Neil would be my time traveling advice.

James Gasteen (18:51.658)
Yeah, well, I suppose you and I both came from like a professional services world where the product is infinitely malleable. I was in strategy, you're in technology. I think that the trick there is, like you said, is to be able to say no to things. And I'm sure there's probably, as Don has said, the tighter the product market fit, the better the retention rates will be, the better the profitability, the cheaper the acquisition costs. And I remember in the early days, we were kind of saying yes, and you know, to all sorts of requirements and kind of building it out, building a POC to win a deal. And then you think, oh, now I've got to maintain that.

Neil (18:55.318)
Hmm. Yep.

Neil (19:16.385)
Yeah.

James Gasteen (19:21.382)
only one customer wants it. And it is tricky. And I think maybe the bit behind that is, you know, some of the things that you talk about sometimes is just really focusing and having like, okay, what is that really small, you know, bit of feature functionality that can get started that everybody wants and then start to build as opposed to, you know, I think in my first business, we launched with a pretty comprehensive feature set that we then kind of whittled down and then started to kind of build up again. And I think through having a broader feature set sometimes.

Neil (19:23.188)
Yeah.

James Gasteen (19:49.562)
it does lend itself to saying yes a bit too much.

Neil (19:52.818)
Yeah and it's part of the nature of bootstrapping as well because you need the revenue to keep going so you're slightly forced into that situation. I think if you were taking funding it's easier to be narrower but yeah.

James Gasteen (19:57.586)
Yep.

James Gasteen (20:06.014)
Exactly. Great stuff. Well look Neil, it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you for your time and yeah look forward to connecting again in the future.

Neil (20:09.847)
Thank you.

Neil (20:13.302)
Perfect. Cheers James.

James Gasteen (20:15.114)
Cheers.

Neil (20:25.143)
Okay.

James Gasteen (20:25.235)
Okay.

Neil (20:46.123)
Yeah.

James Gasteen (20:48.998)
Okay, what should we just record it now? And maybe say, look, you and I are talking to the fans every single day, you're talking to them maybe on a product perspective. What are some of the things you're hearing?

Neil (20:58.669)
Yeah.

Neil (21:03.803)
No, because I think I talked about them before, so I think I might just throw in a bit of a Unoric pitch in there while I'm at it.

James Gasteen (21:11.312)
Okay.

James Gasteen (21:17.066)
Mm hmm. So Neil, a bit like myself, you and I talking to, you know, ISV founders on a pretty regular basis, it'd be great to hear a little bit more about like, you know, what you're hearing from them, what they're talking about, what their challenges are, especially maybe with that more kind of product engineering lens on that you've got.

Neil (21:37.503)
Yeah, so we've talked to a whole bunch of founders now, which has been great. I think there's various types of challenges, but for the earlier stage ones, there's a bunch of people that have built really nice products, or they're very early on, or they just nearly completed their products. And for them, it's all about that initial traction. How are they going to find those first few customers, and how are they gonna start building out this as a business rather than just a product?

So for them, it's just getting started and it's a little harder for those guys now because it is more crowded. So it's a little harder than for them to get attention, but they're just going to have to hustle and find those first few customers on LinkedIn or wherever it is. Um, I think for others that are a bit further along, they, they do have various challenges and I think for me, I sort of bucket them all under resource constraints. Most of them know what they need to do. Whether it's

James Gasteen (22:05.278)
Mm-hmm.

James Gasteen (22:32.639)
Mm-hmm.

Neil (22:33.418)
marketing or whether it's more partnerships or working with Salesforce or nurturing the SIs. They've got a wish list of things they would like to do, but they just don't have the manpower to do it. So that's pretty common. And that's part of the reason really why we're building Unaric now is to help those kinds of founders have those resources so that we can build those in a shared way that a whole bunch of people can.

work together and have those, the capacity to do those things, whether it is marketing or partner enablement or whatever else it might be. But it's just hard as a bootstrapped company. There's no way you can do everything. And some of those things just do a lot of legwork to do them well.

James Gasteen (23:16.254)
Mm-hmm.

James Gasteen (23:19.662)
Yeah, I think one of the things I see sometimes is that there's app exchange may have been very successful for founders for a number of years and then through the number of apps hitting the app exchange plus some of the changes to the algorithm and the paid programs, all of a sudden the leads coming through, either the quality has gone down, the numbers have gone down or both and therefore it's like, okay, well, what do we do now to generate demand because we've never really...

Neil (23:25.214)
Mm-mm. Yep.

Neil (23:32.984)
Yeah.

Neil (23:42.925)
Yeah.

James Gasteen (23:42.942)
how to capture demand, right? Like how do we capture and generate demand now that, you know, we're moving away from the app exchange being 100% of lead volume to being 50%. Like how do we fill it up? And I think that's definitely the kind of like the old shit moment when it's kind of like, you know, we've got to find a new way to generate demand. And then, you know, sometimes I've seen founders think about other types, but again, it's less scalable, you know, events. Events can be great, but again, they take a lot of planning and it's...

Neil (23:52.284)
Yeah.

James Gasteen (24:11.802)
a bit hit or miss. So, you know, I remember my first business, we had a boost at Dreamforce and we got a three, three fold ROI in 2016. In 2017, we didn't, you know, and it was like, what was the difference there? Was it the fact that in 2016, we're opposite Microsoft, pure serendipity in 2017, we weren't. You know, you kind of have one data point, you double down on it. And then sometimes you don't get the same results.

Neil (24:34.546)
Yep, I totally agree. And as an aside, my first ever dream force before we got a booth, myself and Neil had flyers printed out and we went to the breakfast thing. We decided the breakfast was where we were gonna generate leads so we sat around this breakfast table. But one morning we got there a little bit late but there was just a bunch of people sat at the breakfast table. We started handing out these flyers, giving the pitch for what the product did. And then finally we got around to asking the questions of what did they do.

And it turned out they were the cleaning crew for Dreamforce. This is like 20 minutes after the pitch. So, yeah, you learn things. Yeah, exactly.

James Gasteen (25:08.032)
Hahahaha

James Gasteen (25:14.974)
Brilliant, you gotta know your audience.

Neil (25:26.73)
That is all good.

James Gasteen (25:27.474)
that's good have some comedy moments

James Gasteen (25:36.903)
Mm-hmm.

James Gasteen (25:47.248)
Yeah.

Neil (25:53.974)
pros. Smash kit.

James Gasteen (25:55.838)
Brilliant. What did I felt? And maybe I mean, I know Neil, we know each other. So I felt it might be worth I might go through some questions because sometimes a little bit duplicative, you know, people's background is a bit like kind of question.