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MVP - Year in Review

Episode 26 • 5th June 2026 • AppsemblyLine - The Salesforce ISV Podcast • Scott Covert

Scott Covert (: 00:00

Hey everyone, on this episode of Episode Line, we're doing something a little different. We've now hit our one year anniversary, so I wanted to take a step back and share the recurring themes I've noticed across all of our conversations. When you talk to many different founders and leaders in the Salesforce ISV space, certain patterns start to emerge, and I think those patterns are where the real lessons live. So the first theme that came up again and again is validate before you build.

Kristian Jørgensen of GoElephant ran surveys, conducted 20 to 30 interviews, and built ugly spreadsheet mock-ups before writing a single line of code. And his advice was that when you think you've done enough product discovery, you're only halfway there. Pavel Konan of DealScope paid domain experts on Upwork for interviews where he spent 45 minutes asking about their pain points before ever showing his product.

t he had his idea way back in: 2017

He told us that the the barriers that he imagined for himself weren't real in the end. So the key takeaway here is talk to people, validate rigorously, but don't wait forever to start either. ⁓ the second theme that came up again and again was pricing, and specifically that most ISV founders underprice. Chris Federspiel of Blackthorn put it very bluntly and said that technical founders charge relative to what it costs to build, as opposed to ⁓ what your product is worth.

And Jelle van Geuns of Cirra AI said to not be afraid to charge higher because enterprise procurement negotiations sometimes are are just performative and they need to show that they got a discount from the list price. So you need to start above your target price ⁓ and have room to come down and still make your margins. Sruly Markowitz of Fast Track Digital learned that being the cheapest on the app exchange can actually hurt your perception. ⁓

It's true that Siddharth Sehgal of 360 Degree Cloud showed that pricing low can work as an intentional land and expand strategy, but in that case the strategy was deliberate and not accidental. So the the message across the board seemed to be to know your value and price accordingly. Third, another thing that came up again and again was that content and visibility is the can be your primary growth engine.

Kuldip Hillyer of Kugamon created over 300 YouTube videos, ⁓ one for each feature of their product, and virtually eliminated all their support cases and shortened sales cycles to as little as seven days. Chuck Liddell of Valence ⁓ was once told by a mentor that he needed to be more public because no one knows no one knew who he was. He adopted a rule of never giving a talk that didn't involve Valence from some angle.

⁓ not as just a sales pitch, but just by teaching technical topics to naturally showcase the product. ⁓ when Warren Walters of Cloud Code Academy joined, he shared that he built his entire business through years of consistent YouTube and LinkedIn content. And Kathryn Castle of CandyBox found that a single Reddit post outperformed all of her LinkedIn ads. Adam Erstelle grew his customer base just by answering questions in community forums.

Often without ever even mentioning his product at all. So the common thread here is to give value first. Show up consistently, and sales will follow. Fourth was focus. And this one came up from founders who learned it the hard way, unfortunately. So Chuck Liddell said his biggest mistake was splitting his attention between consulting work and actually building valence as a product. He took on debt to cover payroll, burned through it.

And realized after the fact that he really should have just picked one thing from the start and focused solely on that. Sruly Markowitz described ⁓ that there's constant tension where a fifty thousand dollar consulting project ⁓ always feels more urgent than a thousand dollar SaaS customer. ⁓ Jordan Fleming of smrtPhone ⁓ on the flip side made focus his superpower and was able to build to eight figures while working as little as five hours a day and refusing to spread himself too thin.

So the lesson here is that divided attention is the most common root cause of stalled progress. Fifth, partnerships and creative go-to-market strategies. Jordan Fleming entered the Salesforce ecosystem through an OEM partner that was able to hand him 150 paying customers on day one. So he was able to learn the ecosystem with real revenue before even launching his own managed package.

Ross Layton of Beaufort 12 runs an anti-PDO model where his team builds and maintains Salesforce integrations for brands like Dropbox and MailChimp without charging them anything and instead earning revenue from end user subscriptions for the managed packages themselves being distributed via the AppExchange. Heather Mason of ISV Accelerators flagged that Salesforce's shift from ACV to AOV compensation means.

OEM partners are suddenly more valuable for co-selling with Salesforce AEs. And Paul Battisson of Groundwork Apps invested time fixing a prospect's unrelated flow issue just to build goodwill. So there's no single playbook here, but the pattern is clear that the most creative partnership ⁓ approaches often outperform the traditional ones. Sixth, community. Andre Van Kampen of ISV Form showed how powerful peer-to-peer knowledge sharing can be.

⁓ at one of his roundtables, half the room of experienced ISV partners didn't even know that the App Exchange had a built-in lead gen form. So apparently we're all reinventing the wheel in isolation, and these small intimate gatherings where founders share what's actually working behind the scenes can be incredibly valuable. Peter Ganza, the App Exchange whisperer, has built a career around helping ISVs with the knowledge gaps that they didn't even know they had.

Finally, the AI and platform evolution was another theme that kept coming up on AppsemblyLine. Andy Heath of Kick Technology chose to disrupt his own decade-old product as opposed to sprinkling AI features on top of it. His line has stuck with me. He said, if someone's going to disrupt you, it might as well be you. Warren Walters warned that professionals who can't verify what AI produces will be pushed aside.

And drew the analogy that we still teach arithmetic in our schools, even though we have calculators. ⁓ Vuk predicted Salesforce will release an Agent Force implementation tool to compete with its own SI partners. And our MVP episodes covered major shifts like the App Exchange being renamed and rebranded to the AgentExchange, or enabled agent actions letting existing ISV Apex Logic plug into Agent Force.

And Salesforce multi-framework enabling native React apps. The platform is changing fast, and ISVs that adapt early will have a significant advantage. So those are the seven themes. Validate before you build, price for value, create content consistently, stay focused, get creative with partnerships, invest in community, and stay ahead of platform changes. These threads ran through nearly all the episodes from the past year.

I want to thank every guest who's come on the show and shared so openly. And to you for listening. If any of this sparked an idea, please don't wait. As Adam Zuckerman told us, the barriers you're imagining probably aren't real. So thanks for a great year of AppsemblyLine. Cheers and happy building.