➡️ Summary ➡️

In this episode, Samuel Arroyo shares his journey from consultancy to becoming a product innovator with yplicity. He discusses the challenges and successes of building applications for the Salesforce AppExchange, the importance of continuous innovation, and the lessons learned along the way.

➡️ Guest ➡️

Samuel Arroyo https://www.linkedin.com/in/samuelarroyo/

yplicity https://yplicity.com/

➡️ Takeaways ➡️

Building products requires understanding customer needs and market gaps.

Continuous innovation is key to staying relevant in the tech industry.

The transition from consultancy to product development can open new opportunities.

Understanding the Salesforce ecosystem is crucial for developing successful apps.

Open source projects can build trust and community engagement.

Effective marketing is essential for product success, even with great technology.

Horizontal apps face unique challenges in finding their market fit.

Building a brand involves showcasing tangible achievements and products.

The AppExchange provides a platform for reaching a wide audience.

Networking and partnerships can enhance product visibility and adoption.

➡️ Youtube ➡️

Watch this episode on our Youtube channel

➡️ Keywords ➡️

Salesforce, AppExchange, innovation, product development

➡️ Hashtags ➡️

#appexchange #salesforce #isv #innovation

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I'm happy to be joined today by Samuel Arroyo of yplicity. Welcome Samuel to the show.

Thank you for having me.

So Samuel is a Salesforce engineer, as well as the founder and solopreneur behind ⁓ yplicity that has not one, not two, not three, but four applications live on the AppExchange right now. So I'm really happy to hear your story. Why don't you just share maybe a little bit about how yplicity came about.

Sure. So I think one of the main reasons why I studied computer science and got into ⁓ building things was to create products. I started my career in consultancy and it was always building something for a customer. And most of the times they already know what they want, usually. They have their requirements. Sometimes you have to get it out of them.

Mm-hmm.

And then you build it for them. And many times is a very short period of engagement. You build something for them and that may be the last, you know, of how they're using it. Was it the right thing? Was it built right? Is it there one year from now? ⁓ And ⁓ even at the beginning, I always wanted to build things that belong to the company or belong to us as a team. So then now we...

decide the destiny of and what goes in it and have a different kind of ownership of the things that we build. And yeah, along the years we always tried to build something, but it was difficult. From our consultancy, they don't usually think about products and if they think about products, they're thinking more like accelerators.

things that will speed up the implementation of those projects or more like the carrot at the end of the stick to sell ⁓ ours, to bill ours to the customer. So usually you don't see much product development in consultancies. And it wasn't until a few years already in the consulting world where I was frustrated because I had gone up the ranks.

Mm-hmm.

And I was a bit not as involved with building anymore. ⁓ And suddenly, I think something clicked in my head. It's like, well, if the company I'm working in ⁓ is not that interested in products, actually, there's nothing preventing me from just building it on my own. So ⁓ at the time, I was...

Hmm.

involved with security stuff. When you grow as a consultancy or as a business and you want to go for bigger fish and enterprise customers, they will start just throwing security questionnaires at you, many, many pages of questions to answer. yeah, so because I was a CTO, they just threw that ball at me, like, well, you take care of this.

Mm-hmm.

Yes, I'm familiar, unfortunately.

So suddenly started looking into getting certified with ISO 270071 and all the process. one of the things that happened there is you need to onboard people, need to offboard people, you need to have a record of all the different activities and all the equipment and the assets that you give them. And then you take back as they leave the business. And we are always quite Salesforce centric. We try to build everything in Salesforce to manage ourselves.

even the project management side of things. ⁓ And yes, you have tasks in Salesforce, but you don't have something that would be a level high, which is a checklist. So a group of tasks. So I thought, wouldn't it be great if we could have a checklist in Salesforce to help us with that? And then you could have your templates and then you can like clone those templates to create the actual checklist. So you can have templates and some dynamic things going on.

like this task should happen X days after this date and should dynamically be assigned to this person or that person. ⁓ So that was the first idea. It was a real problem that we needed help with. We could have used something else out there, I guess. Not that much on the Salesforce platform, but any other tool out there. But it was also a challenge for me. It was on one hand,

let's build something by myself. had not, I think, got to the point of building something from scratch as a package, a managed package and put it out there on the Apex scenes. hadn't gone through the whole process. So I did, I set up the company in the UK quite easily. Then I've gone through the process with Salesforce where you set up as an ISV. And then for the application, you just...

Mm-hmm.

present a business case, like this is what I want to do. And then they ask you, how are you going to monetize this? Well, who knows? It's either free. I know if it's free, I don't have to pay anything, which sounds good. But I thought, I think people will actually pay for this. ⁓ So I went and put some money in. like, let's have you pay. Then you have to pay for the security review and all of that. And also,

You

And what year was

this that you were setting up the Y checklist?

I think it was 2018 maybe. Lost count now.

Okay. Okay.

So back then, it, had they increased the pricing to a thousand, a thousand per review or is that pre prior to that?

or even...

or even maybe later than that. So it used to be...

What was it? Yeah, was a thousand dollars, was it? And for every review they changed it.

I think it used to be

$300, I want to say, for your first review, and then was $150 thereafter. And then they changed that pricing to be a one-time fee of, was it $3,000 maybe? And now it's $1,000 per review. Or no, I forget, it used to be a one-time fee, now you pay $1,000 per review.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Right, right, right.

Okay.

I'm going to build this application using lineware components. And also I learned ⁓ that way. So I built the whole thing, go through security view fairly smoothly, ⁓ and then put it out there on publish sheet. Well, I had to do all the content, all the images and stuff. Quite simply, I thought, you see all the other postings on.

or listings on AppXchain, they have demos, everything looks professional. ⁓ It's like, well, I'm just going to use Google Slides and try my best to make it look nicely. ⁓

Hey, that's great though. mean, I

think a lot of people discount how much time it takes beyond the development, right? You mentioned setting up the ISV with Salesforce and one of the first things they ask you is your business case. I think most people just think the security review process is a review of your code base and that's it. But there's a lot of other calls that happen where they're asking about, you know, how you plan to market it. They want to know more about your business.

⁓ It's quite the process. The security process itself is no joke, but there's more to it than just that too.

Yeah. And the easy way, let's say with ⁓ what they call it app exchange checkout. So that connection with Stripe, so setting up the Stripe account. I think registering for VAT. ⁓ So that was like the easy way of the customer will go to the app exchange. They can pay for it there, cancel if they want. And I don't have to get involved with invoicing and all of that thing, which later on I had to switch.

Right.

because once the contracts or the requirements from the customer in the way that they want to changes, they may not be okay with paying through Stripe. And then, yeah, at some point I had to change, I had to contact Salesforce and they said, well, you have to go into what they call it, a partner order application and then you take as a partner, you take care of.

Sure.

invoicing and payments and all of that. So it complicates things a bit but it gives you more freedom on how you want to invoice your customers.

Sure.

I know this is an important decision, a lot of ISVs have to make up front. And I think a lot of people maybe make decisions not realizing the pros and cons of each. there are two things that I've come across that I know is, ⁓ I think a lot of founders find the same thing as you, that larger enterprises don't want to purchase things using a ghost card. They don't want to have just a

a random credit card on file for the payment, they'd rather go through a standard invoicing purchase order procedure. And so I know a lot of ISVs go the same path as you, as starting out with checkout and then converting. And then another ⁓ important piece I've heard from founders is that checkout purchases ⁓ do not count toward quota retirement for Salesforce AEs, whereas ⁓

Any purchases through the app exchange through the channel order app will count as quota retirement. And what does that mean? That means ⁓ you might get a little bit more love ⁓ and support from a Salesforce AE, right? Because now you're actually helping them out and filling their quota. So those are two reasons why maybe it's worth the complexity, although checkout ⁓ and the direct integration with Stripe is also nice in the early days.

Yeah, I definitely saw them keen on me moving on to the custom China orders. But they were quite helpful and also responsive. ⁓ Yeah, and one of the things I found, I don't know why I thought that. ⁓ I think it's like this old saying, which is probably false, like you build it and they will come. They don't.

Mm-hmm.

I put the listing out there and it literally felt like I put my lemonade stand in the middle of the desert and there's no one there.

too.

Yeah, I think the first and last person that worked for was Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams. And since then, the baseball players don't come just because you make the field.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And then realizing, well, yeah, the Apex ends up in, if they search for you, they will find you and you will probably be in one of the categories. think, why techies ended up in productivity probably. ⁓ but again, one of the problems with maybe horizontal apps is that you, ⁓ you will not appear if you're looking for the actual usage of the app.

Mm-hmm.

So you can use checklists for almost everything. And the customers that use it use it for completely different reasons. And they work in different verticals, like education and consulting and many others. They wouldn't, unless they know they're looking for a checklist, they probably wouldn't find it. They wouldn't go to Apex Teams and while searching for a different solution, actually find it.

I think all the apps that I've built are horizontal. I always, I remember in consultancy, they thought because they have to move into certain verticals and sales was wanting them to say, well, you have to specialize and choose your verticals. It's much easier to build a product where you have a lot of expertise and you've probably had awesome projects and you can create those accelerators or actual product.

Mm-hmm.

But I know, I think my brain works more on the horizontal generalistic way of just solving a problem and then realizing almost anyone could ⁓ work with this. ⁓

think that

might be a product of being a technical founder because I know a lot of ⁓ Salesforce engineers like yourself that really want to build out the guts of the application so that it could be installed into any org. I think sometimes folks don't realize the efforts that are put in by ISVs to make sure that their solution is

truly agnostic in terms of the different Salesforce features ⁓ and settings that you could have enabled. There's a lot that goes on under the hood, I know that ISVs have to work with. just top of my, you mentioned ⁓ you wanted to build out using the lightning web component framework. I'm not even sure if. ⁓

All Salesforce consultants and admins and developers are aware of the Locker service, but now there's also the new Lightning web security. know there's a lot of effort to be, you don't know whether or not your subscribers are going to have the new Lightning web security turned on if they're still going to be using Locker service, right? So you need to build out your, all your Lightning web components to work in either, in either platform. And then that can bleed into ⁓ for technical founders. think that that mindset can bleed into the marketing.

Right. And then you, you, you, you, you want to build out a horizontal product, but then when it comes time to market it, there is a lot of value in targeting, ⁓ specific, ⁓ industry or vertical. Right. And, ⁓ and I think that that runs counter to, to the way a lot, a lot of technical funders are thinking in terms of the code base itself.

Yeah.

Yeah. And, um, I don't know if it was crossing the chasm, like I have all my books here. think crossing the chasm may talk about you start with a niche, like even though your solution to a problem and the problem could be quite general, but you have to start with a very specific usage or niche problem and just focus on that. Make sure that you get your customers happy with just that. then potentially you could expand.

And the problem I always saw with that is, well, I'm not, because of my background, I didn't specialize into any particular industry. So I'm not an expert in any of them. I've seen more or less what they do. ⁓ But I couldn't say, okay, I'm just going to do healthcare because you need to be an expert and understand their pain points, what sort of pain they have and how you can solve them ⁓ in a unique way. And...

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I wasn't willing to just go down that route, but I've seen other partners do it. where they have a great product and for years they tried to get everyone to buy it. And then you see how they pivot and they suddenly start talking just about a particular industry could be, ⁓ just sales teams or.

recruitment, customer service. And then because you've seen that problem with your own product, you realize what they're doing. They're trying to find that fit. Like they know they have a great product, but they're trying to find that customer base who actually believe has a specific pain. And, ⁓ even a few of them now with AI and all of that, like people, again, thinking that there's a

a bigger cake somewhere. But yeah, it's definitely one of those things that if you have a journalistic product, people will not just jump on it and throw you their money. You need to get out there and sell it. And one of the things that I could do, I know is one of the things you should be doing is, which I haven't done.

Mm-hmm.

To be honest, it just takes time. You have to build like use cases. Like how would you apply your technology to specific industries, specific problems? Because that way you don't rely on people's imagining that. You actually give them examples of how this particular company in this vertical uses the product or could use the product. And then that gives them an idea of how useful it could be. So it's one of those things that, yeah, if I had a bit more.

time and I wanted to go more serious about it, I know would probably help. And sometimes I thought like, even with AI, like you could just send it to AI and write a white paper for you. ⁓ So yeah, I think it's much easier right now to just build a product, put it out there. And the marketing is quite easy in a way, like all the materials and things.

Mm-hmm.

you still have to talk to people and yeah people again people are not ready to throw money at you regardless of how clever your solutions you think it is.

So

you've got your Y Checklist application, past security review, you've got your App Exchange listing. ⁓ It's a very horizontal product, ⁓ which you just ⁓ talked about the challenges of when it comes to marketing. So how did you go about finding your first few customers? Did they just trickle in through the App Exchange, or did you force yourself to reach out and do some outbound marketing?

To be honest, I haven't done any album marketing. I could probably force myself to do it, but ⁓ it just feels unnatural to me. It's like a bit forced. And sometimes I think, the same way that when I see on LinkedIn somebody just talking all the time about their product and you see them commenting on every post for visibility, which I understand why they're doing it, but it feels a bit too much for me sometimes to the point where it's like, look, I'm unfollowing you because...

Okay.

I'm interested in you as a professional, as a person, but it's all about the product and you're just trying to sell it. You're like, I don't want to be the person that, that kind of person. So, no, the customers, they just either found it through AppExchange or in a couple of occasions, think consultancies as they are looking at the requirements.

they have to decide, we build the solution or do we buy it? And when they were comparing solutions and they came across my checklist, they went for a demo. I found that they usually don't need that much help. At least consultancies, are quite autonomous. Like every time I get an email that certain person installed the application or a trial.

I always reach out, like, if you need any help or you would like a demo because it's not self-evident what you could be doing with the application necessarily. And I mean, you could go through the setup guide or the user guide and see what it can do, but you always worry like, do they know what the application can do? And I usually find that if one is a consultant, they're quite autonomous. can, they know what they can do with it. They, they used to just read in the docs and.

Mm-hmm.

figuring things out and they will reach out if they need anything. Yeah, so a couple of, I think a couple of customers, not more, I've gone through consultancies to the point where I did a few years back and now I've reached two partners just to let them know like these are the tools that I sell through yplicity. If you ever have these sort of problems, then you can look at these solutions.

instead of building it. But I always find it a conflict, I think, within a consultancy because they probably earn more money building the thing themselves. So why would they buy your product if they can get money just by building it themselves and probably maintenance? ⁓ So it's only the consultants who know what they should do and what they shouldn't do.

I don't know if you've seen that problem before, but yeah, because I've been in a consultancy, I'm tempted to say, yeah, well, you're selling me that, know I mean, sometimes unrealistically how long it would take me to build it. And then all the money will go to me and not to you. But most of the times they don't have the time to build it or the budget.

Sure, think there probably are some consultant firms out there that think that way. But by and large, think at the end of the day, they want the same thing as an ISV wants, which is a happy customer. that is, mean, I think part of the gig of being a consultant is presenting the options to the client and saying, we could buy something like Y Checklist or...

We could build it ourselves, but that's going to eat up, like you said, a lot of the budget. so hopefully ⁓ that reduces the conflict of interest. But it's an interesting point you bring up. you have a few partners that have pulled you into ⁓ multiple orgs at this point. So do you provide then a referral ⁓ commission to those partners?

Not at the moment. mean, yes, point to point basis, like they're not actively trying to sell my product if the circumstances arise, then they may know about it. So it's not, there's no agreement. Definitely help them to, sometimes they have requirements and the product can do 95 % and they're like, well,

they would tell me, you build this 5 %? So I just update the product for free to help them make the case.

Yeah, so we on another episode I had met with Chris Fetterspiel of Blackthorn and he had mentioned, you know, similar related partnership between ISVs and SIs and he was saying by and large, most would prefer to not take any referral commission in order to maintain their independence and impartiality in recommending solutions to their clients.

And I don't think there's necessarily an issue with taking a referral commission, as long as that's disclosed to the client, ⁓ to the end client that could be purchasing the product. But ⁓ I think most, I think your experience seems to match what Chris's was that most of the time the SIs would rather actually not even take a commission and just know that they're working with a trusted partner like yplicity that can build good products to keep the end customer happy.

Yeah.

So, okay, so you're seeing some success now with Y Checklist. When did you transition into saying, you know what we need? Another application. How did that come about?

I think that was probably the year after. think it's maybe a physiological thing where when autumn comes, I feel less motivated to do stuff. There's less daylight. I don't feel like starting a project or anything. But then when it's maybe around February, March, suddenly my brain is like, hey, you should start building something.

you

⁓ so I thought I was still, I think, in that role or in between roles, was, taking care of IT in the consultancy in a way. one of the, ⁓ I think issues culturally, ⁓ is that we had different ways of communicating internally.

So we had, obviously, chatter. So a lot of conversations in terms of what happened in chatter around records. Maybe there were a few chatter groups. Some teams were using Slack, but it wasn't the official messaging app. And sometimes nostalgia kicks in. And I used to be a forum admin.

wow, great, okay.

compared to the conversations that you can have either on chat, which is definitely around either a record or you have the main feed, which is very like Facebook, Facebook like or Twitter like, or even LinkedIn, where it's good to have conversations in the moment, but then that moment passes and then it's almost impossible to find where that conversation happened because it's just moving.

stream of conversations and it just goes into the past and that's it. ⁓ Slack is really just chats. You can have groups and stuff, but again, it's a passing conversation and you can search, but it's not as easily done. The good thing about forums is that you have a structure. You have categories. have forums, subforums. You have posts pinned to the top. You can see

you can quickly see how much engagement there is in a post by the number of comments of thumbs up. ⁓ And then it's not a matter of reinventing the wheel. Like chatter is good to talk about a particular topic. So what I did was build Y forums, which is really a way of having forums within Salesforce, either for your intranet or in an experience cloud community. ⁓ And it's just a way of structuring.

your conversations that then actually happen in chat because chatter is great. You have different threads of comments. can, uh, thumbs up comments. can upload attachments, which is great. And many of the things I think you can have polls. Um, so it's just again, a wrapper against, um, on top of existing functionality to give it a different way of looking at it. Um, and yeah, as, as people.

realize that tattoo groups are good, but not good enough to have the structure, the hierarchy of topics. Then they've used quite forums. Never for internet, which was my initial thought, because that's how I was thinking that we would use it internally in the consultancy, but always for an experienced site externally to talk to customers, help them to talk about topics in a more structured way.

Interesting. Okay. And sorry, I want to make sure I understand correctly. is, Y-Forums have a completely standalone data model then, or are you saying it's, it is leveraging the Chatter API. And so they're Chatter messages, but then there's also a different UI you've built for Y-Forums to allow you to see a more structured forum-like view of those messages that are technically Chatter messages. Is that okay?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Exactly.

there's the custom data model and UI to navigate the forum. And then when you get to post, you see like the breadcrumbs to know where you're at. You see the post, who posted it. You can navigate and then you have the chat feed, which is related to that record ⁓ where people have the conversation. And you can have moderators ⁓ and everything that you will have in a normal forum.

Mm-hmm.

That's really cool. I like that. Now this part, in this part we were talking earlier, you said this application you initially released as a free app. Is that correct?

⁓

Yeah. So after going with white checklist and realizing is not guaranteed that people will buy this. And maybe I'm the only person who is nostalgic about forums. ⁓ So I'll just put it out as free. ⁓ Like when you send your business case to Salesforce, like, yeah, this is going to be free. And then they may ask a few questions. Like, yeah, because I don't know if people will pay for this and they were fine.

So I posted it for free, you save on the ⁓ security view initially. And then once there were people interested in it, then okay, somebody is willing to pay for it. Let's move it into a paid product. So talk to Salesforce, we want to move it to a paid product with this pricing. ⁓ And yeah, that was the experience. ⁓

just to reduce the risk. Like I don't want to put more money upfront knowing that ⁓ I may not get it back.

That's really smart. I want to just ⁓ get into the weeds a little bit on that because I'm sure a lot of founders listening would be interested in maybe going this route too, so they can kind of test out the waters right before diving right in. So by initially ⁓ partnering with Salesforce and telling them this would be a free application, you still do go through security review, correct? ⁓ It's just that you, it was a free review. Okay.

And so there's that cost savings there. ⁓ And then at one point, that was up in the air if that was going to continue. So what year was this? Do you recall when?

before

they made all the changes, I don't know if that's still... I guess that... I think that was discussed and ⁓ I think that's still the case that for free apps the CQ2View is free but I haven't really... yeah I haven't tried it since then

Okay, I know that was in question, but I wasn't sure where they landed on that. ⁓

So, and then, but you still went through security review, right? So it's not like a, it's not a get out of jail free card to avoid that rigorous process. But once you're approved, you realized, so first, I guess maybe from the business side, I'd love for you to walk through like.

what were you doing to determine people would be willing to pay? mean, they've downloaded this application, they're using it for free. Basically, you just send them an email like, hey, thanks for using it. Can I charge you for it?

Yeah, what did I...

I think there was something maybe in the listing.

⁓ I don't remember now, but it was, I don't know what was it, but definitely when somebody reached out, I don't know if it was like a trial, it couldn't be a trial. Maybe it was, I don't really, I don't remember now. I think there was something in the word insane. There was like a pilot thing. So you could use it for free until we switched to paid.

Mm-hmm.

something like that. And when the customer reached out, it's like, yeah, this will be the pricing. So just be upfront. And yeah, they were happy because I didn't want to just charge per user with that one. We check this was per user. think it made sense. But with forums, I thought, look, I'm not trying to just... ⁓

Mm-hmm.

get rich with any of these apps anyway. And from an admin point of view, if you have to assign licenses and all these efforts for every single person that joins your community, it is going to be a pain. So I said, it's going to be org based. So flat fee, regardless of how many users, they already are paying per user to Salesforce for every community user. And if I, if, if they have to pay on top,

that may get them away from the idea of buying it all together. So that made it easier. yeah, the customer was happy. because it was difficult to compete because there were some very cheap options outside of Salesforce for like 100 or 100 and something per month. But yeah, if you have Salesforce and all your data is there and the context of the conversations.

Mm.

But yeah, with Y-Forums I've seen people come in and go because they will try with experience cloud, try to build a community with their customers. And again, it gives you bit of insight into that world because many times building a community depends a lot on the community manager. There's that person who is making people engaged and mentioning people so they...

come to the community, have conversations. And many times when community managers will come with their own preferred tools. So they may choose white forums and then that committee manager leaves and then somebody else comes. And after a while it's like, I'm used to this particular tool. So this migrate off of Salesforce community and into something else. ⁓ So many times I've noticed that

customers may come and go depending on who is in charge of the community. ⁓ Or sometimes the whole effort goes to waste because they don't get as much engagement from customers as they expect. So they cannot justify the cost and all of that. yeah, I'm still, there's certainly customers out there who use experience cloud. ⁓

to talk to their customers or to do transactional things with opportunities and partners and all of that, or cases. But when it comes to having conversations with them, as you will have in a forum, that's a different world.

So you were seeing good traction with it, but also a high amount of churn ⁓ sometimes due to things that were outside your control, like just moving off of Salesforce digital experiences for their community site.

Yeah,

yeah. So the customers who have turned is because they moved completely away from the experience cloud. They moved to a different platform or just there's no, they're not having a community anymore. ⁓ Whereas with white checklist is something that has to do with automation productivity. So that you bake it into your processes and flows and... ⁓

Mm-hmm.

it's easier maybe to see the value and also it's more difficult to uproot it once it's there providing value. ⁓ So you have seen different kind of behavior from customers with both apps.

Hmm. And I want to get to, I know there's also why launcher and why templates. I want to talk about those as well. But before we move on, ⁓ the, when you, when you changed your partnership for why forums from being a free application to a paid application with Salesforce, how, how difficult of a process was that? I mean, you had already gone through security review, but I'm sure they had more questions for you. Do you remember how long that took or if it raised any eyebrows on the Salesforce side?

⁓

No, they didn't. They just wanted to know, how much are you going to charge them? And because at that point I had already moved from checkout to channel order app. So they just need to create those products in my partner business org to be able to bill the customers. they were, I think they were quite chill about it. Every time I launched a product on the app exchange, they...

Mm.

They send me an email like, congratulations, do you have any customers lined up? And I'm like, no. They just want to have customers using the platform. And ⁓ so, yeah, they just want to make the whole process easy for you to sell. ⁓

Ha ha.

Sure.

Yeah. Well,

it makes sense. I I love the partner ecosystem because it's a win-win for everyone involved, right? I mean, in addition to the revenue share that Salesforce receives, it just makes their whole platform that much more useful to their customers. And so the ISVs, I think, are so important to Salesforce's ⁓ business model. ⁓

But and did they I'm curious to did they did they request retroactively you to pay for the security review fee or have you found the the loophole?

No,

I think they do, like if you have to do a review again. Yeah.

Oh, I see, I see, so.

All right, they're Ys to that game. Too bad. All right, so let's move on. I'd like to hear more about Y Launcher and Y Templates, your other two products.

Yeah. So I think at that point in my head, it's like, Hey, Samuel, are you going to build one app per year? Is that something you can keep up with? Yeah. So it was like, not per month, but every year, like, can you, can you do that when, when you have the motivation? So I don't know why this one came about. Yeah. I I had moved to different company by then and

every February and March, right?

Mm-hmm.

I just wanted to see if I could reconnect with some ex-colleagues and like, why can't we build? And I think at that point I was building something new in the company. So I had moved to a product company. And something that was always in my mind was why Salesforce hadn't provided a UI for admins.

to create Lightning page templates. So as a developer, ⁓ if anyone wanted a custom template, ⁓ they had to use ⁓ code. And in my head, just, I'd never understood why. The Lightning experience in Salesforce had been going on for years now. You have Lightning app builder to build the actual.

pages but not the template behind them. ⁓ Yeah. So I thought, could I build that? ⁓ Could I build a UI similar so it feels familiar to admins ⁓ but remove the having to create code and just create it declaratively? And at that point I was also dealing with ⁓ 100 metadata.

in the backend, so I was familiar with it. So yeah, I started working on that. And then I thought, is anyone going to pay for this? I don't think so. Because again, it's a tool that you don't use very often. You could create a template and then just uninstall the product and template's still there. So it doesn't make sense if anything would be like a one-off payment.

Hmm.

⁓ But at that point it's like, I don't care. Just give it out for free.

Because I get an email with everyone who installs it, that's definitely the one that people install it. I don't know, I guess it's because it's free. But a lot of people install it. And I don't have any instrumentation in the app, so I don't know how much they use it. But I know a lot of people are installing it and I think using it. ⁓ And then I think maybe last year, I was...

I got a book at Dreamforce on whose booth was it? I think it was Stripe. Let me see where it is. I've always been into open source and there's definitely some incredible people in the Salesforce ecosystem who build tools that are open source and a lot of, it's a way of.

Mm-hmm.

sharing love with the community. And I was involved with that in my younger years. So again, I think a bit of nostalgia. So first it was the forums and now it was my years on open source. like, I wish I could go back to that and just keep something back. I thought, sorry, I didn't talk about the book. It's called The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software.

working in public and I think it's from the Stripe Press. So they were giving it out for free. hey, ⁓ give me one. And I think a great book if you're interested in the dynamics of open source, the history, how to build in public, ⁓ the ins and outs of all that world. And I thought, well, the product is free.

Hmm.

That's great. ⁓

There's no point I guess like there's no no gain for me on keeping the actual source code hidden or secret I'm not gonna do anything with it ⁓ and No one else can so I decided to just open source it put in a repo ⁓ Put a license on it. It's like here it is if you want to use it and I think one of the Incentives was also security wise

and it's something that we've seen the past few months with connected apps in Salesforce. So because this app needs to create metadata in the org to create those Lightning page templates, you need to do a connection from the app in the org to its own org so I can use the metadata API and all of that. And for that, you need to have a connected app and the connected app because it needs access to metadata.

Mm-hmm.

has access to absolutely everything in the org. There's no way of saying, just need access to this, not the whole thing. So a few people in the comments would give white templates one star on AppExchange or complain about it saying, oh, he's asking for too many permissions. And they're like, there's nothing I can do. But if it's open source, here's the code. You can see that the app is not reaching out to any other.

Yep.

Hmm.

third party website or anything, you can see that it's only being used for this purpose. And maybe that's a way of building trust and people can use it that way if they wanted to. ⁓ And I think definitely, obviously for apps out there that are having maybe ⁓ a crisis of trust with the connection to Salesforce, obviously I'm not saying they should go open source because they have a business and ⁓ IP to protect.

But if there's nothing for you to lose and you think people will benefit, even if you're a developer, how would you even build this just out of curiosity? So, yeah, after a while, it just open sourced it. So you can either install it on the AppExchange or you can build it and install it from the repository.

that's very cool. So and you said you're seeing a lot of downloads. don't have, I guess you don't have any feature parameters built in to try and see kind of usage based over time. But that could be something you could add and see how frequently folks are leveraging it, right?

No. Yeah.

Yeah, I could see if I was thinking of improving it or knowing what else could I do with it. But with this one, there isn't that much I think that you can do with it. Everything that you can do with the code, you can do declaratively. ⁓ And it's a pity because, for example, Salesforce doesn't provide support for, I think, dynamic forms on custom.

templates and a lot of people are using dynamic forms nowadays. I don't know if they've added that, but yeah, I always felt like custom templates, there's had no love for them. There was maybe like an afterthought and no, there was never a parity with the templates and because they're built with Aura, maybe that's why like they're moving to Lightning Web Components and Aura is...

lagging behind and don't really know the way they want to go. yeah, I've always thought about the user experience, the templates that you get by default, not necessarily always the best. And if you want to structure things in different way that makes more sense for your customer, then you can use custom templates for that.

Yeah, I think I could use Apex Teams Analytics and have some instrumentation in the app. ⁓ Certainly if I was thinking of building something on top of it or improving it, then I would be doing that. ⁓ But yeah, with this one with ⁓ white templates, I'm not thinking of doing anything else with it because it's pretty much what you can do with the code, you can do declaratively.

Mm-hmm.

Well, what's cool is I know it's a free tool, so perhaps you don't see that application specifically generating much revenue. But maybe I know a lot of organizations ⁓ create lead magnets ⁓ or you more often see it the form of like a white paper and things like that. But I could see maybe you could build in some sort of ⁓ tooling to advertise some of the other Y-Policity products that are paid.

applications.

Yeah, maybe I could do a bit of that.

For instance, maybe you could throw in a pop-up about ⁓ your fourth and final application, Y Launcher. Maybe we could talk about that for a moment.

Yeah, sure. So this was, I think an app that built in between jobs. I was a bit idle. So it was like, I need to build something. ⁓ And it had, yeah, I think it had been five years, three apps or four apps, something like that. Like, okay, I need to catch up. I need to build a fourth app. But I wasn't thinking of building something. It just...

⁓ I use Mac and at some point it just click like how much I like spotlight. So when you have like, what is it command space and then comes up, you can just search. Usually it works fine. And with the new Tahoe update, they just improved quite a lot of how it works.

Mm-hmm.

But you can just type and you can search anything in the system. You can open applications. ⁓ You can do something like do like very silly calculations in there quickly. But I thought, could we build this within Salesforce? If I were a Salesforce user, maybe salesperson or even an admin, sometimes you're designing a page.

for your users as an admin. And it can get cluttered very easily, like a lot of buttons and a lot of things on the page. And sometimes the user doesn't know which button to click, where to find it. Or even the way that you navigate through the org, you need to click the app launcher search to find a tab that doesn't seem to be on the app. So sometimes it feels a bit clunky. And again, it is one of those things that

Sure.

As a user, think that why didn't Salesforce invest more? You could have the app launcher and the search merged together. And that would be almost like literally be spotlight.

Hmm.

Yeah, I love that idea.

Like the app launcher hasn't seen much change to it. Like why do you, why do we have two different things? You're searching in both, you're opening. So it's like, okay, let's see if we can build something. hacking the utility bar at the bottom and then looking at the keyboard, the keys that you're pressing, like the same way. Like if you press, what is it like?

command shift K, something like that, it will pop up. And I am very much into like the UI of things. So I wanted the whole thing to go darker. So it is prominent at the center spotlight. ⁓ So it blocks you from doing other things like you would usually do in Mac. And then thinking, well, can people search for records?

Mm-hmm.

No, that's too much. That's a lot of work that we have to go and you're literally just reinventing the wheel. So if they want to search records, go for global search. What can they do? They can open tabs, they can open apps. What else can you do? You can open screen flows. So you could open screen flow from anywhere in the application. Yeah, so...

that's nice. That's very nice.

Yeah, you want to go through screen flow for closing opportunity or something like that. So you can have flows that are global that you can open for anywhere. You can have items of flows or actions that happen only on a particular object. So if you're an account, you may have some items at your disposal that are not on opportunity. As an admin, you can configure that. What else do you have? As an admin, you may want to give your users ⁓ shortcuts.

to internet website documentation, ⁓ tutorials, whatever, your help desk, instead of having to put those on the browser as bookmarks. So they can just open Spotlight, well, Y launcher, and they will see things pinned there. They can just ⁓ move in the same way, like with the arrows. You can move up and down. You can select things. ⁓

So it's very much like that same sort of experience. ⁓ And again, it's a productivity app meant to, I think, reduce cognitive load for the user, not having to know where everything is exactly on the page. The button is the button here, is the button there. ⁓ I will just open it and search for it.

That's a great idea. And that, assume, is a paid application.

Yeah, I don't know why I actually decided that that was going to be paid. I felt more confident that people may, especially if they're Mac users, they will definitely instantly say like, yeah, that makes sense. And even for more technical people who are, they prefer using the keyboard instead of the mouse necessarily, because it's faster. It's like just having been able to move to different app or tap just with the move of.

your fingers for a second. It's just much faster. ⁓ So yeah, I went straight with pay it up. Let's see how it goes.

And when was that one released?

I think like five, six months ago. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh great, okay, so it's early days still.

Yeah, so we're recording this late September, so I guess you got a few months before you're gonna get that itch early next year to do your fifth app, right?

Yeah, I may take a break for now, focus on other things. But yeah, I think once you create one and see how easy it is, certainly if it's not your main source of income and you take it as a hobby, I mean, you could be building all these things without the AppExchange. You could just build them for yourself. If you want to distribute them, you could do so, but companies may have.

You

an issue with you not going through security review. Or if you're just planning to build things and put them for free out there or open source, you can definitely do that. ⁓ I think in my career, for example, building White Checklist opened up the opportunity for me to join a product company. It helped me to go from consultant to a product company.

And also gave me confidence to know I've gone through the process of doing all of this by myself. I know how to do it again. Yeah. So definitely anyone seeing this, like if you thought that it's just too difficult or to come for something like, not really. if you, I think it helps also build your brand out there, your...

that's fantastic. ⁓

people can see you have things to your name or to your company's name and say, yeah, I built that. Many times it's like, yeah, you were part of a team who built something, but they want to see what did you actually build? And I will, here it is. And you can install it and see how it is.

Well, I love that. I love that. for anyone listening, this seems like a good place to wrap up. So for anyone listening that would like to get in touch with you, perhaps they have a little bit more difficulty creating that first app than you did. How could listeners and viewers reach out to you or learn more about YPolicity and its different applications?

So the website is yplcd.com. They can go there and visit and see what's there. Or just on LinkedIn, if they search for me, Samuel Arroyo, ⁓ they'll probably find me.

Great, okay, well we'll link those up in the show notes as well as the book from Dreamforce last year, because that sounds like a great read. Samuel, thanks so much for coming on the show, and best of luck. We'll have to have you back when you launch your fifth app. Cheers, bye.

Thank you. Cheers.