➡️ Summary ➡️

In this episode, Paul Battisson, CEO of Groundwork Apps, shares insights on building simple, scalable messaging solutions within the Salesforce ecosystem. He discusses the origins of Messaging Made Easy, security considerations for third-party integrations, and strategies for startups entering the Salesforce space.

➡️ Guest ➡️

Paul Battisson https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulbattisson/

Groundwork Apps https://www.groundworkapps.com/

➡️ Takeaways ➡️

Building simple and scalable messaging solutions

Security considerations for third-party API integrations

Strategies for SaaS startups in the Salesforce ecosystem

➡️ Youtube ➡️

Watch this episode on our Youtube channel

➡️ Keywords ➡️

Loyalty, Honesty, Salesforce, SaaS, Messaging Made Easy, Groundwork Apps, API integration, security review, startup advice, ISV, automation, partnership

➡️ Hashtags ➡️

#salesforce #isv #appexchange #loyalty

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So I'm happy today to be joined by Paul Battison Groundwork Apps. Welcome to the show, Paul.

Hi, Scott. Thank you for having me. Really excited to be here.

Yeah, it's gonna be a fun conversation. So Paul and I were just chatting and he has been in the ecosystem for a while and has touched a lot of really cool projects, including Financial Force before they became Certinia He was at Maven's, which many developers and architects listening will recall the famous Maven's Mate He's also an author at Salesforce Ben, but more recently and why he's joined the show is he's CEO of Groundwork Apps as well as Stone Bear.

So tell us about Groundwork Apps. The application is Messaging Made Easy Maybe you could share what problems it solves and who it's made for.

Yeah, sure. So, so Groundwork Apps is an ISV I launched a couple of years back. I had just been made redundant or technically I was part of a board where the company was winding up and so I ended up making myself redundant, I suppose would be the technical terms. But yeah, and I was sat ⁓ on my honeymoon and was thinking, what do I want to do? So made redundant on my honeymoon, but I was being made redundant.

was like great, job to go back to. What do I do with myself? And so yeah, I founded Groundwork Apps and our kind of view of the world is, yeah, I've done a lot of consulting work over the past 15, 16 odd years with Salesforce and Salesforce is now quite an expensive thing to set up. Even a quick start in inverted commas is still 5,000, $10,000, sometimes even more than that.

Mm-hmm.

I was working on one project in my last company where the customer was told that, you know, they weren't going to get to use the app. They weren't going to get to use Salesforce for about six months and pay a quarter of a million dollars to get part of it set up. And to me, that just feels wrong. And so kind of the driving force behind everything that Groundwork Apps builds, so both our messaging Made Easy product and some of the other products we've got in the pipeline is that an admin

with good enough level of experience, they've logged in, messed around with setup and have some basic understanding, should be able to get up and running with the app in under an hour. So Messaging Made Easy is the app we have out at the moment. It is a SMS, WhatsApp, and Viber messaging app. And yeah, once you have your API credentials for all, so we have a messaging ⁓ partner platform we use called Messente which is similar to Twilio or any of the other kind of messaging.

Wow

platforms out there, are sent to EU based and have a real focus on like deliverability metrics. They're used by a lot of financial services and logistics for how good they are at that. Once you have your API credentials and have your phone number sorted out and gone through those checks, you can install our app and be sending a message within five minutes. I have a demo video on LinkedIn, sorry, on YouTube, which shows sending an SMS in five minutes and...

I actually had to pad the video out because it was, you know, it was one of those rare days when you clicked the install link and it was quick on a, yeah, I must've been running on a special Salesforce instance that one day, but normally that's what takes like the greatest amount of time is, you know, you, you, go to an install package link. It takes a few minutes just to get that running, but yeah, that's the focus with everything we do is quick and easy for the customers. that, so that you get real value from it. Cause

Haha

I think that's so important and is a real missing area at the moment.

Nice. Yeah, I love that. I love making it simple for anyone. It's become more more important, too. I feel like AI, which we'll get into later, is empowering everyone, regardless of experience level, to be more productive and get more done quickly. So I'm sure any app that can be set up so quickly like...

⁓ messaging made easy is a strong win. So another thing you touched on is what makes the setup so simple as folks are putting in their own API keys to the Messente platform, ⁓ which I would imagine greatly simplifies pricing on your end because now you don't have to worry about ⁓ usage-based billing and sending out ⁓ invoices based on how many messages each of your customers are sending, right?

Yeah, again, I, ⁓ have you ever heard that Bill Gates quote about wanting to find lazy programmers because they'll be the ones that do it best? ⁓ yeah, there's, and yeah, yeah, it's, it's one of those, it's probably an apocryphal quote, but, know, ⁓ I want to focus on again, delivering, delivering value to people and doing things that, ⁓ can help people do more on Salesforce and

I haven't but I like it.

me sitting and having to work out invoicing and billing is not what I feel is probably the best use of anyone's time. Where's the value add in it? And, you know, know you were mentioning about coming onto AI in a minute, I also, I think there are certain, certain applications and certain things that don't make sense for a per user license as well. You know, for the messaging app, my view is, you know, most of the messages you're to be sending are automated anyway. So they'll be coming from

Mm.

something like a flow or an Apex API that we've got or something like that. You will be sending a few back and forth, but it doesn't really matter to me if you're sending a hundred thousand messages or one, you know, obviously I want you sending more cause it's a bit stickier as a platform, but so I go down the site wide licensing route because to me that scales infinitely. You know, I get you set up. It's much cheaper than you building your own integration out. You get the support, you get the updates.

Mm.

but I don't care how many users on there. I'd rather see using it happily. And it also means that working with Messente, you can get the best deal for you. So we have a couple of customers, there's a prospect, in fact, I'm talking to at the moment who are a huge organization, like absolute giant company. But they're not just using, they're looking at using the Salesforce app, but they're using Messente for other applications and other parts of their stack. And so...

Mm-hmm.

they can have a conversation with them to get the best rate for them and best deal for them. And I'm not sat there like trying to cream a penny off of every message that sends or something of working out usage billings and things like that. To me, to me, that's not, not following that mission of value and kind of ROI. It's here's your price. It's predictable. You know what's going on. And it also makes it easier again, from a negotiation perspective is that I have a price, I have a full price. You know, if

If someone wants to sign up for a five year contract, I can do them something on that. If they don't and they want to sign up for one year, can, have to, have another price, the base price for them, but it's repeatable and consistent for them. They don't have to sit there and think, Oh, I'm adding five more people. And, and you know, truth be told, if as we're seeing more AI and more agents do more work, if, if seat counts are going down, then it kind of also insulates against that problem.

Mm-hmm.

Yes, true. That makes sense. ⁓ I'm curious. So it's more more common to hear about ISVs ⁓ building integrations to third party platforms ⁓ without getting too into the weeds. One area that a lot of founders get anxiety about is going through the security review. And I do know that ⁓ when your application, your Salesforce application ⁓ is touching a third party API,

Mm hmm.

generally you provide access to your server ⁓ or an endpoint on your server as well as obviously they're reviewing the managed package code. But in your case, you're tapping a server outside of your control, right? The Messente platform. And I'm curious if you could maybe share a little bit more about what security view is like. they just, you when you're dealing with a big partner like Messente, are they just basically given

Mm-hmm.

the go ahead from the Salesforce security review team or do you need to get Messente involved in the process?

So yeah, I mean, ⁓ it's funny because I can actually tell you from a couple of different perspectives, I used to help out on some other ISV apps that also had integrations to things like the UK's tax group, HMRC. But for any of these big entities, Salesforce has a pre-approved list. So if you are hosted or running on their pre-approved list, you're OK.

Hmm.

So there are certain, so I think like Google API, so like the Google Maps API, Salesforce have vetted that, they're okay with that. You don't have to worry about that. Assuming you're not on the approved list, you then need to submit some documentation, not to go too much into the weeds, but it's basically you hit the end points and check that they're okay. If you're a nice partner like myself and you have a good relationship,

Gotcha.

The best practice I would recommend is to reach out to the partner, have a conversation, say, I'd like, know, cause you should have had that conversation upfront anyway about you helping them by building an app for their platform that integrates with them, builds them a new marketplace. ⁓ and so, yeah, I had that conversation with Missenta, like, look, you know, I need to run some of these security checks. They were like, okay, great. They put me in contact with their security team who were like, we've run these ones already. Here's some results. You can run these other ones. Let us know when you're doing it.

You know, and you effectively run it through a proxy server and it hits the endpoints and checks a few things. And then you submit that in. You know, if you're a vendor of a big enough size that you're thinking of having a Salesforce integration or similar, you're going to have got most of these things covered there. You know, standard kind of web security setup. They're good to do. I I'm sort of, I mentioned we've got some other products in the pipeline, but

One of them, I know this is a Salesforce focused on us, but one of them is taking the same idea for other CRMs. And that is building our own kind of middle platform that allows us to integrate with HubSpot or Zoho or others as needed. But that I will be still running some of these tests on because I still need that security and compliance in the back of my mind anyway. So yeah, you run some tests, you get some answers. It's not onerous, it's not pen testing, it's not anything like that.

Haha

What sales also really looking for as far as I understand is in your code, are you following generic good security practices? you're not, you know, you're not storing API keys in plain text in a field. You know, you're, if you're doing basic or you might be using, um, now external client app or you've got these ways of managing it and holding onto it, or you're using OAuth or whatever it needs to be. But then for the end points, it's just some standard checks. So they really just care that, you know, there is a good level of security on that.

Hmm.

I would suggest that reach out to the partner, make sure you're having a good discussion with them, and do it, approach it in a partnership manner, not as in a, Salesforce need to test you. It's, hey, for us to get through this, we need to run these checks. I'm sure you're covered by them, but I want to share the results of them with you so you can use them in case there are any things that need looking up.

Sure, that's helpful. Thanks for sharing that. So I'm also curious how you came up with the idea for Messaging Made Easy. So I know you've got a long history of working on the platform and consulting, like you mentioned. And you specifically brought up how something that's inspired you is making setup and implementation as quick as possible. ⁓ So how did you pick this?

Yeah.

problem ⁓ as the first one you're going to tackle and what sounds like eventually will be a suite of apps from groundwork apps.

Yeah. So there's a couple of things really is a, I'd battled against using different SMS providers and tools like that over the years. And yeah, there are, there are a bunch of apps out there on the platform that are great. I would, yeah, anyone who has got 90 % of the Salesforce apps that are released by, by companies and have gone through security, great apps and you know,

I know if you sat down me and the team that run any of the other apps, we would all sit there and hopefully all be friendly chap saying, you know, people and say, look, this is good about this one. This is good about this one. is good about this one. Um, the reason I chose to do it is I thought it was a bit of an open space and still I, you know, the messaging market is still massively underserved in the world. You know, I think there's less than chatting to one of the Mascenta team the other week. And we were saying that under 5 % of companies are still using any mobile messaging, um, which is

Hmm.

you know, given that we've all got one of these that we're wandering around with all the time is really quite dramatically low. So that there's, there's that side of things. I did think that, you know, I can build some of this interesting and unique and fits my kind of vision of having that, you know, simplicity, quick to set up and quick to run. And it also ties in nicely to A, some other plans for other apps I've got, but B, just some cool stuff I think you can do with it.

Yes.

um, around value ads. So, um, one of the things I'm really interested in is, kind of the right channel at the right time. Um, you know, I think that people have got to realize that, um, when you are sending out a marketing message, it's the right person, the right channel at the right time and with the right content. And every channel has its pros and cons. Email, um, you know, is fantastic. I know you have Ross from, um,

Mm.

both at 12 on here the other day. MailChimp, their MailChimp app is great. I'm a user of that app. It works brilliantly. But your open rate on any email is probably going to top out 60-ish percent if you've got a good email. Maybe more, maybe less. It depends on the size of your listening things. Messaging, 90-plus percent. I think for SMS messages, I remember a stat there was 98 % of SMS messages.

Opened an action within the first 30 minutes Like that is you know, I mean Scott if you hold up your hands for me and just do that and just do that Have you got an Apple watch on? See I was gonna do that and show you like I was like it's one of the things I like to do when people say to me well why why? Messy why SMS in particular still it's that well if you hold up your hands and do that I've got a smart watch on and although I'm on do not disturb at the moment so the only person that could

Wow. I don't. I'm sorry.

Yeah.

ring me as my wife, as I make sure I always answer those phone calls. You know, any message I get buzzes through on here. And whilst we can have a big discussion around how awful that is for my distractibility and mental health, it's, it's good that yeah. And, so, yeah, there's all these kinds of things that are in there. I think that there's a really good kind of view you can do about analyzing that data where it comes from and connecting with people. yeah. And I think it's also.

Sure.

⁓ huh. .

The other thing is it's a, to me, a nice problem that solves across the platform. You know, there's service, there's sales, there's marketing, there's pure platform use cases. You know, I've, I've built some crazy systems in my time for like, I built a system that managed, ⁓ managed samples in fridges in laboratories. And that's, yeah, a really weird system to build on Salesforce. Still something could use ⁓ SMS messages though, because

Hmm.

You can have it so that when your sample is in the fridge for you, it pings you a text message or a WhatsApp message. ⁓ you know, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. There's,

Or the fridge is getting too warm, get an alert, right? Something like that.

all these different things that goes out there. And so it's a nice cross-platform one because I do like working with the different products Salesforce has.

That's very cool. ⁓ Well, I appreciate the exercise, even though I think holding up my hands really just made me look like a dinosaur. all right, so that makes sense. You mentioned earlier that a few times now that there's there's kind of a long-term play with messaging made easy and it's going to blend into other apps. I don't know if those are still.

Yeah, well, yeah, mean like, Scottisaurus,

Still under wraps or could you go into a little more detail or give us a sneak preview of what's coming down the pipe from groundwork?

Yeah. So, so part of it, as I mentioned is, is kind of the broader idea of a platform where, ⁓ you know, we know that the CRM market is constantly having new CRMs come in and be fragmented. So having that so that we can integrate with other CRMs. then, you know, I think that people forget the CRMs are a life cycle. know, Salesforce is fantastic. I love Salesforce. Is it the best CRM for your two person startup? Possibly not. You know, I've got a, I've got a friend who runs a HubSpot agency.

Yeah.

And he and I have had long, very boring discussions over a couple of drinks about which CRM and why. But yeah, but it depends on the scale and scope of what you're doing and how you are. And so I want to be a partner that can help you as you move through those journeys, not just kind of here at one point. I've got an application that I'm working on with both at 12, in fact, around scoring. We have actually released some notes about that a while ago. It's currently going through.

great.

⁓ beta testing and we should be ready to kind of have pre-release soon. And that's focused on data scoring and kind of helping you understand your data on the platform and having an action framework behind it so that it might be that you come up with a custom way of scoring and that can help you understand whether they don't, not just the kind of simple checkbox rate, simple pick list rating of cold, warm and hot, but you know.

based upon what data you have, how complete the record is, what interactions they've had. And then you could fire an email off through Mailchimp. You could send a text message to say, here's a special offer for you, and so on and so forth. And then there's another product that is a bit more early stage that I can't really share too much on at the moment, but is focused on helping you build applications quickly, again, to kind of lower that cycle down. But yeah, and then...

Yeah, I'm a big believer in kind of automating as much as you can. Yeah, I've my entire career going to companies and saying, this problem you have, how do we take the steps out and, you know, how do remove the humans and the friction and the spreadsheets as much as possible and make it quick and easy? And kind of, I want to try and do that with problems I have, you know, and automate them throughout my business. And so that's kind of part of where my focus has always been.

Very cool. ⁓ sure.

I'm just going turn my lights on real quick because it's getting dark.

Sorry about that.

No problem. So I want to talk a little bit too about ⁓ your partnership ⁓ and the pros and cons of ⁓ being joined at the hip to a platform like Messente So ⁓ obviously, you have a trusted partner. They've got all the infrastructure for sending out these messages. ⁓ But I'm curious if there's ever been any downsides like

Okay.

Maybe someone is a Twilio shop and they don't really want to sign up for two platforms. I mean, has there ever been an issue where you've considered ⁓ partnering with another vendor, not just another platform besides Messente?

So I have got a customer that or prospect that I'm working through at the moment with Miss Entei who sent me an email in the background after our first call like we like the Salesforce product. We've already got a messaging provider. Is there a chance you could integrate with that instead? And I said, thanks, but no, we're a sent a partner and do that. And, you know, I think that I think that you always have an option to do that.

I personally wouldn't. In my mind that, know, Missentea have been a good partner to me when I was starting the app up and getting going. So I want to be a good partner to them on the way back. think that, you know, I think a lot of people have forgotten that partnerships in business are still partnerships and that you have to have respect and trust and things going backwards and forwards. And that's, that's really important to me. I, you know, there are, there are.

Mm-hmm.

downsides in that, you know, they support the channels they support. Occasionally I will talk to them about, have you thought about this channel? And they might go, no, we're not really interested. And they'll say to me, have you thought about this? And it's something that I'm not as interested in. You know, there's a dialogue there. But in general, I think the benefit of having one partner that you work with is that you can have a trust, you can know what's going on, you can get set up. And you know, you have a bit of a voice at the table. You know, I talked to their product management, their CTO, you know, their team.

And we have a good communication there. So I have a voice in their product and from what we're seeing from their side is it's good to have another visible way of showing their product and how easy it is to integrate and work with. but yeah, I think if you were doing, I think if you were to start from the ground up, imagining that you're going to work with all these different providers, you could probably do it. think that there's a level of technical

layering that then becomes difficult. ⁓ The way that Messente accepts an SMS message will be different to the way Twilio did, which will be different to the way AN other system does it. And you're trying to partner with someone for expertise as well. mean, the reason that we, as ISVs, partner with Salesforce is they have produced a very good platform. Joe, are there kinks in it? Yeah.

If we change this podcast now, Scott, to list out the things we want to change about Salesforce, we could be here for what? Four hours? Yeah. There's a bunch of things that we all know we want to tweak and do, but at the end of the day, Salesforce is a very robust platform that scales. It's easy to build your apps on there. You know, I can tell you having looked at other CRMs for building apps on there, Salesforce gives you so much that you just forget about like, you know,

I can build my app on the platform as a native app. I'm not having to run a server anywhere or do any of other stuff. ⁓ but you know, you, choose your partners because of that, you want to have a good partnership. I think that that's, that's kind of always been key to me is, is yeah, you could do it, but the technical costs might be high, ⁓ for one thing, but I just think having a good, strong partner and a good, strong partnership makes it useful. And, you know, I would hope that if someone went to the center and said, Hey, I'd like to build a Salesforce app. go.

we actually have one already so have a chat with Paul or you know they would come to me maybe say hey it becomes a conversation then rather than just a you know if you're if you're not if you're not being loyal or helpful to them they don't have to be loyal or helpful to you

Exactly. was going to say, love that. ⁓ Staying loyal breeds loyalty. So it sounds like a true partnership. So that's great. ⁓ So I want to talk about, too, the fact that messaging made easy is very powerful in that ⁓ it comes across, at least, as a very horizontal solution. We talked about even using it to get temperature checks on samples in a lab refrigerator.

Exactly. ⁓

you

Mm-hmm.

⁓ Obviously there's use cases of more sales and marketing, but ⁓ the point is a number of different companies could use this. A number of different industries could use this. And I noted on on Groundwork Apps website, how you have specific use cases broken down by industry type. And I'm wondering if you could just touch on how you've approached marketing and messaging, because something I've talked about with guests on the podcast before is how

when you can ⁓ serve so many different ⁓ customer profiles, it can be more difficult to nail messaging with any particular ⁓ persona.

Yeah, I think the approach I've always taken is what's truth be told, it's similar to the approach I took in consulting. You know, I am still probably strongly a consultant at heart. And, you know, as a consultant, you get thrown into talk to all sorts of different companies. It might be that, you know,

Say you work on four projects a year, perhaps you might start the first project and it'd be you're working with a financial services company. The second one might be a nonprofit. The third one might be a life sciences company. And the fourth one might be, I don't know, might be a package goods company. And those are four different, very different things.

Salesforce is still saying the same, like, you know, that's the key underlying it. They're still going to be using accounts and contacts or personal accounts, still going to be, you know, using flows, still using Apex. And it's where you decide your positioning yourself as. And I, kind of think that with the app, with messaging made easy, it's trying to position. I'm trying to position it as that kind of core infrastructure piece of an app. Like, again, once you're set up with messaging.

Outside of the service use case, most of your messages are automated. You're not going to be, you know, I don't believe people are going into the app every day and going, I need to look at my message templates or, know, no, no one's doing that. And if they are there, you know, they probably need to go and find something better to do with their time. So I think first of all, it's considering it like that. And then it's talking the language of the customers when you're going to talk to the customers. And so the way I've approached the production of content and the way in which we market is.

First of all, talk about the application generically because there are a big cadre of admins, developers, consultants out there in the ecosystem that still make a lot of difference and can help drive revenue, drive sales, and things like that. Because as a consultant, can tell you, once I'd worked with an application, I found it really easy to use for a problem. Every time I came up against that problem, I'd use that same application. Why would you relearn something else?

Mm-hmm.

And then the set, then kind of once you've taken that is then thinking, okay, build those use cases out to talk the language of the customer. And so you're really kind of coming up with two different sets of marketing content. One of which is kind of broader platform level, you know, admin developer, you know, consultant content. And then there's another piece where you are focused on those customers and it's talking about what, know, I'm really lucky that I have worked.

with Salesforce for such a long time that other than like tobacco and arms, I think I've dealt with everyone, you know? So, you know, I can come up with use cases because I've done a lot of work and a lot of different use cases. And so having that conversation, talking that way is really important. If I was starting off from new and scratch and I didn't have that, I think about what I knew. You know, I spent, I spent five years when I was at Mavens doing only healthcare and life sciences.

There was a period where I went into Salesforce's offices to tell some of their new life science AEs, some of the regulations, how they worked, how to deal with them, et cetera, because we were recognized as experts on that. so, you know, look at what you know, look at what you understand it and focus on that first. And that'll really help you come up with that content and then just build it out as you, as you kind of get more comfortable with different use cases, different areas, but

But I think if you're, if you're at that infrastructure level, for whatever phrase of an app, then you have the ability to talk to admins and developers and consultants. And, you know, we're problem solvers. We're all really good at looking at the abstract solution and the abstract problem, bringing them together.

Hmm, very cool. Well, and so I'm also curious ⁓ when it comes to ⁓ scaling, you know, we've talked about partnerships with your kind of internal stack, obviously partnership with Salesforce. ⁓ I'm curious if when it comes to scaling out your go to market, ⁓ if you are selling and ⁓ working with

Mm-hmm.

admins ⁓ and the sales would be Salesforce subscribers directly or you talked about in your consulting days, you found a solution that worked, you'd keep going back to it. So are you partnering with SIs or are you actively seeking out ⁓ SI partnerships ⁓ to bring messaging made easy to as many orgs as possible or are you staying focused on doing all the selling yourself?

So it's, I suppose 50-50 is the honest answer at the moment. with the, with SI partners, there are a couple of SI partners that we've worked with and implemented with, and they now bring me into some deals. Yeah, they've used the tool, they know how it works. I keep them updated and I've got a close relationship with them. So, know, so that if they have a problem, they know they can ping me and get an answer on it.

I do still try and seek out new SIs. It's something that, you know, I do, I try and do sort of every six months. And it's, weird to say that, but the reasoning being is that A, the SI world changes quite a lot during every six months and B, I think it's always good for me to go out and try and engage with new people. You know, there are different models for doing it. Some companies I've worked with have very much a referral model and pieces like that. I don't.

Hmm.

I try and the app speak for itself. And you have my app price, you know how my app is and how it sets up. It's easy to set up. That's the bonus for the S.I. partners. They can take it in, be confident with it. And I don't want the consulting work. That's for them to do and have and set up. So I think there is a big piece around partnering with S.I.s there that can be very helpful.

I like to do sales myself. ⁓ you know, I used to run, I was formerly the C a chief operating officer for an organization. So I was doing sales and marketing as well as a bit of delivery. ⁓ and nobody can talk about a product like a founder can, know, ⁓ yeah, if I, if I sat you down and said, Scott, show me your product, you will show it to me better than anyone else. ⁓ and you know, that doesn't scale always, you know, Joe, when you're a

Hmm.

In the nicest sense to Mark Benioff, I don't think he'd give me the best Salesforce demo anymore. Like, you know, it's too big a product for him, but at the level, you know, the size and scope of where you're, where you're really an involved founder, you can do that. ⁓ and also again, I'm, I, I lean back on my consulting background a lot. I'm, I'm able to go into an org, hear the problem, understand that, you know, sales is just consulting. That's all it is. you, you, if you're doing a sales pitch, the first thing you always start off with is.

Sure.

So tell me about you, tell me about your org, tell me about the problem, tell me what you're trying to use this app for. And you've got to be bold enough that if, know, don't try and fit your app into their problem, try and make sure your app solves it. And if it doesn't be bold enough and honest enough to say, actually, we're not the right fit for you. You know, and I think that there's a lot of founders that are very afraid to say no upfront and you can say,

The number of times on a call where we are building and innovating as we go and I say, we don't do that, we don't do that, we don't do that. Here are the reasons we don't do that for some instances, because some instances, it is something that I don't really want to add into the app or shouldn't do. But in general, if you're open with going to say, we don't do that, but we have it on the roadmap, we don't do this, why would you want to do this and help me understand it? And it builds that conversation up and you can have sometimes where you say, no, we're not the right fit for you. Here is another fit.

always be willing to help out and give an option. yeah, it's I think as doing that consulting level sales is something I'm good at, I like doing and I think founders give the best demos of their products. So at the moment, it's the best way for me to be able to do it.

I love the advice to be honest ⁓ and loyal to customers,

Yeah, I mean, it's like I've...

Again, I've, I've always taken the approach. There was a customer I was dealing with the other day where they were, yeah, I'm sure you've had this, this problem. And I'm sure that for any of the ISV managers, founders, whatever listening, ⁓ you go into someone says something is wrong with your app and you go in and you look at the problem and it's nothing to do with your app at all. Someone is like, I had one the other day where someone was using a flow.

They'd made mistakes in the flow. Like it wasn't getting anywhere near sending a text message. was failing at step number one out of 20 and I was step number 21. So I had two options then I could sit there and say, look, here, look, I've pointed to the problem. You need to go away and have a chat and figure that out yourself. Or I could spend an hour and go through and fix it with them. And I spent the hour and fixed it with them and they were happy when they could see messages sending.

and I got to have a chat with them, build up a bit of rapport, that's invaluable. Like, you you can't put a price on that sort of stuff. And if they don't choose the product, they don't choose the product. I've lost an hour, right? Yes, it's a pain, but like, you know, they will remember me, they will remember that and they'll come back.

sure. Wait, and this was a prospect. This wasn't even a customer? Wow.

Not even a customer that they were, I'd given

them, I'd asked them, I'd let them have a demo of the product because they wanted to go away and test it for a bit. And I was like, fine. You know, they, they, they're in a regulated industry, so they need to do some testing of it and things like that. I know that they've got other, they've got other apps they are testing because I can, you know, when they went in there, I could see them. I'm not stupid. Yeah. know that names of these apps, but I can, it was, they reached out to me about that flow. I fixed it for them and helped them understand flow better.

Haha

You know, if they don't choose me, that's fine, but I can sleep all night knowing that I've tried to help them out. it's, you've got to, you've got to set the boundary somewhere. I'm not going to, if it was a three hour call, I'm not going to do that. Um, and if they, they came back later on with another error that was similar, said, this is like that error we had. Do you remember how we fixed that? And they went off and did it. But you know what it's, I would rather do the right thing. Um, and kind of try and build that rapport up because people remember it and come back to you. know, I.

I still have people that I worked with as consultant years ago who will message me. There's one company that I worked with who are about two miles up the road from me and do like package goods. things that they literally sell on a website and box out. And I helped them set up Salesforce years ago. And occasionally they'll give me a phone call like, can we just pick your brains to half an hour?

I'll let them pick my brains and I have a little catch up with them and you know People that I've known for years now and I'll help them out Tell them the shortest simplest answer for them to get what they need You know, they had one the other week where someone was trying to sell them a product I was like you don't need that you need to do this go and check these two check boxes and it worked but like, you know They're then like, you know, I don't charge them for that, you know Next time I see them, they'll buy me lunch. But if I ever need a reference guess who I can go to

Hmm.

Yeah.

It's

a, a lot of businesses still human. know we can talk about how AI is taking over the world all we want, but you know, lot of businesses still very human. ⁓ and Joe, in the same way that like, you know, if, you met, you emailed me the other day, Scott about something we were chatting about with an issue with some set up for a back. We won't go into the details, but you, but like, you know, you messaged me about it. I sent you the thing, like, do I took me 10 minutes to find out.

Yes, that's true.

That problem's been fixed now, so I was actually meaning to tell you about that at some point. like, you know, what did it, I could have, I mean, I could have ignored the email and did a paid about it, but why would I? Like it's 10 minutes and I can help you out. Why wouldn't I?

Haha

Well, yeah, I appreciate it. I'm sure this company you had help set up Salesforce really appreciates it. You're right that, you know, focusing on every interaction being transactional has ⁓ a lot of downside consequences in the long run. And instead just being helpful and not really necessarily always thinking about ROI really, really helps out in long run. Yeah.

Yeah, think about value, value rather than ROI. Like, you know,

that's, that's the key thing is you need to deliver value to people and make them, you know, I was saying a little bit about like how demoing, you demoing as a founder is always the best. It's when I'm, when I'm demoing my app, seeing someone receive a text message on their phone that they have typed into a screen is so simply stupid, but everyone, oh, it's come through.

There it is.

Yeah, exactly. And, know, if you can add a bit of fun around it, if you add a bit of flavor, then great. like, you know, that human interaction there and delivering, showing that value is the key part. And that's what, that's what makes people like you and stay with you. And, know, that's it really.

Yeah, 100%. All right, this is going to be a tough segue now, going from such a human topic to shift over to the exact opposite and talk about AI. Let's bring in the

robots to the discussion here. ⁓ You mentioned already how your application can be used in a very automated way once things are set up. And it definitely does seem like the kind of thing that would lend itself well to

Mm-hmm.

an agentic use case and

Mm-hmm.

Agent Force or AI being the driver of some of these messages. I'm curious, have you started building out integrations with Agent Force or is that a specific agent exchange app?

Not yet. So we're working on integrating into the agent exchange at the moment. Yeah, it should work great for agents. Every time I see someone do a demo about how wonderful OpenClaw or Clawbot or whatever they're calling it now.

Mm-hmm.

is and like, look, just uses WhatsApp and it's going backwards and forwards and messaging me. It's like, great. There are a lot of things like that that it can do and be useful. That's fantastic. So yeah, I think, I think I've been trying to

I don't want say I've been trying to hold off. I have been trying to hold off a little bit about getting it integrated with agent force because I think there was a period last year where Salesforce were finding their feet a little bit with what they were doing with it. ⁓ I feel a little bit like that's stabilized a bit more now ⁓ and the Salesforce have really strongly gone down this hybrid approach of things. yeah, so I'm, yeah, I'm.

Sure.

I've been doing technology long enough that I know that you don't just jump on the brand new thing straight away. yeah, hell, I'd be working with Salesforce long enough that know that what a new product is announced, you've got to give it 12 months before you decide whether it's going to be around long enough. ⁓ yeah. I mean, how many products did you build on NFT cloud? Yeah. ⁓ So. So that's it. I, ⁓ I, I do think there's a lot of value from those agentic solutions and I, yeah, I do have plans to go on there, but yeah, it's a.

Yeah. Well, you, you, yeah.

You've got to give it a little bit of time to, especially from a product perspective, I think. Like, you know, as a developer, going and learning and playing with things is really important and it's great fun. As a product developer, you and I both know that it's really, really easy to remove things from a managed package once you've added them in there. There's no long lasting terrible repercussions whatsoever that will live with you until the end of days.

You

I think

you have to be aware of that as you're doing it. also, kind of test it, feel it out. Don't add something in that you wouldn't understand on how to use yourself.

Sure, make sense. Well, we should wrap up, but before we do, I'm just curious, someone who you've seen the ecosystem go through a number of changes. You've seen a lot of paradigm shifts just in software development in general, right? So from on-prem to cloud, now we're seeing this big push to AI. I'm curious if you have any advice for someone who's just stepping into the Salesforce ecosystem ⁓ as a first time ISV founder.

⁓ maybe not quite as seasoned as yourself, any advice to them.

The

Bits of advice are take your time. you know, it's you want to get a product out there, you want to get people using it you want to get feedback, but think about what you're doing and why. You know, you don't want to just release something because it's like those things we just mentioned about long tail decisions. know, when I was, we mentioned I worked at Financial Force. Financial Force's accounting namespace is still C2G for the original name of the product before they rebranded twice times ago.

Mm-hmm.

You know, so when you make these decisions,

you

they will live you with you. So take your time. Do try and partner with people and reach out to people for advice. You know, the ecosystem is very friendly. ⁓ yeah, I'm happy to, you know, if someone, someone's building a product and says, Hey, I just want to pick someone's brains for 20 minutes about, is this a good idea? And yeah, am I doing this right? Do so, you know, there used to be a lot more technical enablement I felt from Salesforce. And some of that isn't necessarily there.

In the human aspect anymore, you know, ⁓ talk to, so reach out to all the founders, you know, Scott has a great podcast, I gather that has a list of people with ISVs on there that you could, that, you know, all of us, I, yeah, I imagine most of the people on there would be very happy to talk, give advice and help. ⁓ and you know, those would be probably the two biggest things is to, is to really, really

you Haha.

think and plan, plan your steps out there because, ⁓

you You

I always talk about there being two types of problems. There are real problems and then there are good problems. A real problem is the app's gone down, it's not working. I've got a data leak. ⁓ I'm not GDPR compliant. Oops, I've leaked API keys. no, I've just deleted my customer's data. Those are all real problems. Those are the ones you want to focus on. Good problems

are...

I'm sending out invoices manually and I've suddenly got 20,000 customers and I now need to do 20,000 invoices. That is a terrible position for you to be in to have to do 20,000 invoices, but let's be clear, having 20,000 customers is a good problem to have. That's a, you hire someone to do that. Right. Yeah. So focus on the good problems and the bad, focus on the real problems and not the good problems. Don't try and scale too early. Don't try and, you know,

Don't, ⁓ Donald nooth famously said that premature optimization is the root of all evil. know, focus on getting a really solid app built that you would use and you like, and then go out to customers before you worried about have I integrated my banking system to this thing and got order management nailed down. Like, know, your first 10, 15 customers are going to be white glove on boarding anyway, cause you need that. So you'll find things out as you go.

Yeah.

That's very good advice. Not always easy to follow, ⁓ but very, very good advice to not to just focus ⁓ on the real problems and not the good problems. love that. Well, Paul, ⁓ since like you said, we're ⁓ we like to have folks that are honest and loyal like yourself on the show that are willing to provide value if people do want to reach out to pick that brain of yours. What would be the best way for them to get in touch with you or ⁓ or Groundwork Apps in general?

no. Exactly.

So yeah, visit the Groundwork Apps website. We have a contact us form. You can.

ping through that and mention that you want to chat to me and it'll come through to me. And on LinkedIn, there is thankfully only one of me in the Salesforce ecosystem. Battison is quite a unique surname. So you can find me on there. I'm pretty easy to find out and about if you need me. Drop me a message on LinkedIn or through the contact us form there. And yeah, look forward to hearing from people and speaking to people.

Awesome. Well, Paul, thank you so much for joining. Best of luck ⁓ to the Groundwork Apps team. ⁓ And looking forward to hearing more updates about the other suite of apps that are going to be joining Messaging Made Easy soon.

Thank you, it's been really good, really happy to be here and thanks for having me

Cheers. Bye.