The power of the AppExchange

In today's episode, James Gasteen sits down with Gordon Derk, Founder and President of Accountability Solutions who recently joined the Unaric fold.

James and Gordon discuss how Gordon first arrived in the Salesforce space, the power of the AppExchange, building relationships with Salesforce Solution Engineers and why ISVs should be aligning to Salesforce industry-centric value propositions.

If you are a Salesforce ISV founder with an interesting story to tell, we'd love to hear from you. Send us an email to podcast@unaric.com and we'll be in touch.

Transcript

James Gasteen (00:01.314)
Hello and welcome to today's Sale to Scale podcast, where I'm joined by Gordon Derk, who's the founder of Accountability, better known for products such as Elton and ScanAnything. Gordon, thanks for joining us on the show today.

Gordon Derk (00:14.817)
My pleasure, James.

James Gasteen (00:16.918)
Just before we get started, it'd be great to hear a bit more about your background, and then we can delve in a little bit more into some of the questions I'd love to ask you.

Gordon Derk (00:25.164)
Sure. So I had an inventory control software company for 20 some years and sold that back in 1996. And that's actually, we were Salesforce customers at that time. And we basically built what is the basis of our product at that time, just for our internal use, just to track assets. And then started this company and really focused on the asset tracking market initially.

James Gasteen (00:54.406)
Brilliant. Yeah, I love those scratch the itch origin stories. I had the similar one in my first business where we were consultants using spreadsheets and thought there must be a better way than Excel. So yeah, that's great. Maybe talk a little bit more around like how did you identify the pain point? You know, building a product is one thing, but like understanding the pain, the financial pain, the customer pain and how you kind of identified that.

Gordon Derk (01:18.24)
Right. So like I said, we entered the market as an asset tracking product, uh, linked to Salesforce. And that was kind of our key was we want to be in that Salesforce ecosystem. Uh, one of our early customers, I think our second, our third customer was in the medical industry space and in the medical space, asset tracking includes another aspect called loan management. So there'll be loaning equipment for evaluation purposes to prospective customers.

James Gasteen (01:28.814)
Mm-hmm.

Gordon Derk (01:45.728)
linking them to the opportunity record and trying to track conversions. Like did we win because we demoed this piece of equipment or not? And of course, medical and scientific, they've got stricter regulations. So there's some compliance reporting. There's a whole bunch of other stuff. And that became the niche that we kind of focused on and the problems that we tried to solve for those customers.

James Gasteen (01:53.384)
Mm-hmm.

James Gasteen (02:05.507)
Brilliant.

James Gasteen (02:09.142)
And did you find, was that a hypothesis when you set up your business, or was that something that early customers kind of pulled you into and you discovered that niche?

Gordon Derk (02:16.932)
Absolutely, we got dragged in there. The customers were like, you're so close, but not quite there. And so we were like, okay, well, what do we need to do to get there for you? So that was really enlightening and quite exciting really, because it's a fast paced industry, the medical industry.

James Gasteen (02:20.045)
Yeah.

James Gasteen (02:34.646)
Yeah, it's often the best way when you've got you've got something the customers pulling it in and was telling you you're solving the wrong problems. Here's the right one. It's not called this call it that and guess what I'll pay for it. And then really kind of, you know, if you think about, you know, you got a bootstrap business, what were some of those initial maybe challenges, you know, of setting up a business bootstrap, but also kind of trying to navigate maybe multiple, multiple use cases, multiple potential industries.

Gordon Derk (02:42.856)
Yep. Yeah.

Gordon Derk (03:01.78)
Yeah, I mean, the balance was difficult. Salesforce was, Salesforce AEs are quite difficult to connect with. So we were having a difficult time trying to understand how do we relate with the Salesforce team going into a prospect. And then like you said, the prospects are telling us different things as well. So it was really a game of trying to balance where we saw the potential growth and where we, where we were successful already.

and trying to replicate that success and focus on the growth areas that we saw the most strengthen.

James Gasteen (03:37.262)
Mm hmm. Brilliant. I mean, it is you can spread yourself very thin with Salesforce and manage all the different teams and especially now it's kind of the industry focus and you're trying to say, okay, I need to be industry focused, I need to manage my size, need to work with my pan. And then you know, I still want to make sure I get some sleep and build a product.

Gordon Derk (03:48.822)
Right.

Gordon Derk (03:53.737)
Yeah.

James Gasteen (03:55.754)
And talk to us, how did you acquire your first customer? Was that again, kind of serendipity? Was it app exchange? Was it a part that you sell?

Gordon Derk (04:01.308)
It was after the change. So we, yeah, we, we really just built an app exchange listing and, and waited. Um, now I, I knew two other customers who were Salesforce users. They wound up not being customers, but connected with them, had them demo the product and so they installed the trial, you know, the 30 day trial that's kind of standard in the app exchange world and got some feedback on the, on the product itself and then.

kind of got reviews posted and then one builds on itself. So we've really focused on reviews for marketing. We've got just over right around 100 customers and we've got 57 reviews, all but one or five stars. So we've really focused on getting good reviews as being a key to our marketing.

James Gasteen (04:46.638)
Brilliant.

James Gasteen (04:54.958)
And in terms of like, you know, that's part of like the marketing, but in terms of other types of marketing strategies, what else have you found to be effective within Salesforce? Did you try events? Did you try, you know, co marketing with other partners? What else was successful for you in terms of acquiring customers?

Gordon Derk (05:09.268)
Yeah, AppExchange is absolutely our most successful place to go. I mean, that maintaining that listing and having the good content on the listing, high levels of reviews has been the number one success. We did attend Dreamforce as an exhibitor once. Um, because our product is kind of horizontal in nature, we found it difficult to really get a lot out of the Dreamforce event, just a lot of people and a lot of chatter, but not a lot of sales.

James Gasteen (05:13.346)
Mm-hmm.

James Gasteen (05:21.687)
Mm-hmm.

Gordon Derk (05:38.226)
Other events, no, we've not attended the smaller, like the regional, you know, world tour events we have not attended.

James Gasteen (05:44.546)
Mm hmm. Brilliant. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And then they're just talking about the app exchange, you know, I speak to a lot of founders on a daily basis. I hear different things about how it's changed recently. I what's your kind of experience as to kind of how it's changed? You've been in the ecosystem for a while, when it was maybe kind of like, you know, overflowing with leads to maybe today where there's that many apps where finding for customer attention, you know, the leads start to either dry up or the qualities change. What's your kind of experience being?

Gordon Derk (05:51.69)
Yeah.

Thanks.

Gordon Derk (05:59.029)
Yeah.

Gordon Derk (06:10.744)
Yeah, totally agree with that. The last year, year and a half, the lead funnel has really dropped off on the app exchange. And I think it's partly the search algorithm has been changed a little bit. And part of it is that there is, like you say, that flood of applications now. I think it's difficult for people to find an appropriate app. So we're monitoring keywords.

James Gasteen (06:23.532)
Yep.

Gordon Derk (06:34.78)
trying to make sure that our listing is responding to the words that our customers look for. But yeah, it's been a different ride for the last year and a half or so.

James Gasteen (06:44.254)
Yeah, no, definitely. I hear that as well. And in terms of your kind of, you know, your journey then, what are some of those unexpected hurdles during the Elton journey and kind of what lessons did you learn?

Gordon Derk (06:56.272)
Yeah, so definitely the most difficult hurdle we had was getting our largest customer on board and it was a legal hurdle. Their contracts were just unbelievable, something like I'd never seen before and I've been in the software game for 40 years. So we had to pay fairly high price in terms of legal bills just to get that contract nailed down. But they've been a great customer and we just had to kind of bite the bullet and do the work, right?

James Gasteen (07:25.79)
Yeah, no, it always makes me laugh when you're trying to sign up an enterprise customer and they give you a contract for certain terms and conditions for my product. Do you think, well, hang on a minute, I'm providing the service, not you. So why am I signing your contract? And sometimes it is kind of give and take and you can see how, you know, small bootstrap vendors either kind of maybe pass at it or drown in the admin. Uh, no, I mean, that's, that's a great story. And then looking back, is there anything that you would have done differently in the early stages of your startup, knowing what you know now, especially

Gordon Derk (07:30.647)
Yeah.

Gordon Derk (07:33.993)
Yeah.

Gordon Derk (07:37.987)
Yeah.

Gordon Derk (07:45.696)
That's right.

James Gasteen (07:55.242)
within the context of Salesforce.

Gordon Derk (07:58.408)
Yeah, you know, what I've found challenging over the time with the product is we've tried to include new features that Salesforce has added into the development organization. And sometimes those kind of shoot us in the foot, quite frankly, because, you know, even just look at automation. Salesforce went from workflow rules to process builder, and now we're on visual flow.

James Gasteen (08:10.2)
Mm-hmm.

Gordon Derk (08:22.408)
And so, you know, if we have workflow rules and process builder in our, in our managed package, that would be a problem. We'd have to be migrating those over. So that one of the things that we learned, not quite soon enough, but early enough that we've, we've prevented most of the mess is we don't have a lot of that stuff in our package. Our package is just really core code business logic. And then we let the customers customize using the automation tools.

James Gasteen (08:48.55)
Oh, brilliant. And is there anything around like some of the other founders I speak to, they often say, you know, I wish maybe I had a bit more focus to start with. How does that resonate with you in terms of either maybe picking an industry picking a segment and just saying, let's go and get 20 of the same customers before we start spreading ourselves too thin.

Gordon Derk (08:55.872)
Yeah.

Gordon Derk (09:05.676)
I totally understand what you're saying, but we kind of got dragged into that with this medical clients. We were fortunate. We got our focus given to us by one of our early clients. And then we were able to replicate that success. And so we kind of skipped that, that lack. We had, we found that market quickly and we adapted to it quickly and, and it was super successful for us.

James Gasteen (09:10.932)
Yeah.

James Gasteen (09:26.734)
Mm-hmm.

James Gasteen (09:30.286)
And then also if you think about kind of a parallel, you know, Elton, Accountability Universe, where maybe it was one with funding and VCs behind. Is there anything else that you maybe you could have done maybe quicker, faster, more of that, you know, you now think actually if I'd had, you know, certain resources earlier on or at certain points I could have done more.

Gordon Derk (09:47.38)
Yeah, absolutely. I think we could have pursued both markets equally strong. I mean, instead of focusing on the medical and loan market, equivalent loan, we could have been doing the asset tracking market as well, which we've still got asset tracking customers, but we've kind of picked them up as a result of just finding them on the app exchange. There's been no active pursuing of those particular customers. I think if we'd have had some funding, we could have actually gone after both markets.

equally well. And you don't want to scan anything, which is our other little add-on product, was another thing where customers were telling us, we want to be able to scan barcodes, but we're not tracking equipment. We just want to be able to scan the barcode and do something with. So we separated our scanning technology from the core product, added it as a component within the flow builder so that anybody can scan a barcode and do something with it within a flow.

James Gasteen (10:40.674)
nice.

Gordon Derk (10:45.165)
And again, that's just something that customers were telling us they wanted.

James Gasteen (10:45.294)
Mm-hmm.

James Gasteen (10:49.77)
Yeah. And then when you obviously got the one company, two products, two different use cases, did that present any challenges around positioning and messaging and saying, hey, we're accountability. We do everything. How did you think about that? Because I see a lot of products, including my first company, we had two products, we had our initial one, we merged with another one, then we had three combinations. And it's just trying to tell the market what you stand for in a succinct manner.

Gordon Derk (10:54.902)
Yeah.

Gordon Derk (11:04.691)
Yeah, I got it.

Absolutely. Yeah.

Gordon Derk (11:17.748)
Yeah. Tricky for sure. And we, we have, we suffered from that exact problem where, you know, we have these two different products that are contained within one product with two different sets of messaging required. All we could come up with really was to again, on the app exchange listing, have slides that addressed each of those market spaces with single product. Right now recently.

James Gasteen (11:28.174)
Mm-hmm.

Gordon Derk (11:41.645)
Salesforce is now permitting multiple listings for the same package so we can take a different approach a much better approach now

James Gasteen (11:45.963)
Yep.

James Gasteen (11:49.646)
And that means what you could almost play the industry card and say, hey, we're in the medical space. We play nicely with the health cloud. Here's all our case studies and have a very precise story.

Gordon Derk (11:55.127)
Right.

Gordon Derk (12:01.268)
Yep, yeah. And then another story for asset tracking, right? So two listings, one package, and you can have the stories well separated and targeting the market correctly.

James Gasteen (12:11.886)
Mm hmm. Brilliant. And then I mean, looking back, I mean, what would you have done maybe kind of, you know, differently? You know, now that you've got the wisdom of, you know, positioning and messaging and products and industries, especially now how you know, mature the

Gordon Derk (12:32.436)
Yeah, I think we would have done some more aggressive outbound marketing into the health and scientific spaces. I think we really could have grown there much faster. We grew mostly by word of mouth and app exchange listing capabilities. Um, but I think if I had known how valuable the market was and how well our product suited that particular requirement, we should have invested in some outbound marketing into that industry.

James Gasteen (12:37.003)
Yeah.

James Gasteen (12:48.322)
Mm-hmm.

James Gasteen (13:01.27)
Yeah, no, I see a lot where, you know, founders, especially you've got a product, you know, app exchanges working well, it's like, great, let's just take advantage of it. And then sometimes it dries up. And it's really, I think, focusing on the both those channels, because obviously, you're building up all that data around Salesforce customers, every time there's a leads installed, and you want someone's checking the demo, and then doing something with that data, right. So again, I was totally guilty of it. My first business, we were sitting on a pile of data of people who were asking for installs and raising their hand, and we just didn't do anything. So

Gordon Derk (13:19.275)
Yeah.

James Gasteen (13:29.626)
Yeah, totally agree. And I think that's one that won the scene again. And really kind of, we think kind of going forward, like how do you envision the future of kind of apps and in Salesforce, ISV apps, and, you know, how are you thinking about some of those changes, especially with the way that Salesforce has changed?

Gordon Derk (13:44.704)
Yeah, you know, I think the focus, I think as partners with Salesforce, we need to look at what they're doing, which of course is market centric, right? So they're focusing on the different clouds, financial cloud, healthcare cloud, et cetera, and I think we need to look at how we market alongside of those clouds and how to penetrate into those particular finance, you know, or various markets, right, not just finance, but healthcare, insurance, et cetera. And for us, that means specifically.

James Gasteen (14:02.722)
Mm-hmm.

Gordon Derk (14:14.572)
there's opportunities in asset tracking, traditional asset tracking. And then in other clouds, there's the loan management becomes key. And so I think we need to kind of marry our strategy of our products along with the various clouds. Like retail cloud, for example, is an excellent opportunity for scanning anything, our little utility. So I think it's just a question of taking our three products or the three focuses to products.

James Gasteen (14:33.282)
Sure, exactly.

Gordon Derk (14:42.329)
and aligning it with the clouds that Salesforce is focused on.

James Gasteen (14:46.878)
And you see opportunity with the Viva conscious uncoupling that's happening with Salesforce in terms of that space and maybe opportunity for Elton and other Salesforce and other ISVs.

Gordon Derk (14:52.652)
Yeah.

Gordon Derk (14:59.636)
Yeah, I think, I think there is an opportunity there and it's, it's interesting to watch the ecosystem go through such phenomenal growth and maturity, uh, where companies are really started, you know, just as ISVs like, like myself, and are now looking at completely different market spaces.

James Gasteen (15:19.118)
Mm hmm. Yeah, totally. And then kind of lastly, just a couple of kind of other ones like what do you what's one kind of piece of advice you wish someone had given you when you were starting out as an ISV founder or maybe another way like what piece of advice would you maybe give another founder starting out?

Gordon Derk (15:33.604)
Yeah, I mean, you know, I think it may be invalid now because of the way AppExchange works, but I, you know, my, I wish I didn't know how AppExchange was going to be the key to our success early on. I felt we were going to be able to connect with the AEs and get introduced into accounts. And the motivation 11 years ago just wasn't there from, from an AEs perspective to introduce us into an account. We're not a high revenue product.

Uh, so really what we contribute to an account is stickiness. So, you know, if they're in there using our product, the chances of them leaving the Salesforce ecosystem are decreased. Uh, but we're not doing a lot of quota retirement for the reps. So, you know, eight for us, eight connections. I thought that was the way we were going to be successful. Turns out app exchange was the way it's going to be. We were going to be successful. I'm not sure that's so true today, James. I think it might've changed.

James Gasteen (16:28.31)
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the words I hear over and over again that I think about is like license drag, which is like, how can an app help an AE sell a core Salesforce cloud and really bring that to the party? And it's really like, okay, what's that? What's that message? What's that case study that, you know, this ISV app plus the core cloud solves a much bigger problem kind of out of the box, especially without the need for a long service timeline. So it's like, right. If you buy this app plus this cloud.

Gordon Derk (16:50.923)
Yeah.

James Gasteen (16:57.686)
you're actually going to get your outcome a lot quicker than necessarily spending, you know, 12, 18 months with a global consultancy kind of maybe getting there, maybe not getting there.

Gordon Derk (17:07.48)
Right. Yeah.

James Gasteen (17:09.138)
Yeah, no, I think I think I think I think I think there is definitely some expectation calibration that potentially Salesforce need to do when it comes to founders and I mean quite a few are kind of all you know, Salesforce aren't doing this to me and I kind of think well, you know, why would they but either they either they heard something or they felt they heard something. Whereas I think there's definitely a kind of a game to be played in the ecosystem. I think for me, it's one around visibility and awareness. So it's almost a case of being

being in the right place at the right time, people being aware of you so that when someone says, asset tracking, it's Gordon. Which is a tricky thing to do because you've got to be, all places at once. But again, it's very much a visibility play, very much a marketing play, than necessarily that sales play where again, trying to man mark AEs, they'll change territory every 12 months if that. So again, making friends with AEs, you've got to try and get some runs on board very quickly whereas,

Gordon Derk (17:44.789)
Right.

Gordon Derk (17:48.737)
Yeah.

Gordon Derk (18:00.762)
something.

James Gasteen (18:06.402)
You know, the SE route made, for example, sales engineers I've seen be very successful. Um, and again, some of those community events where you've got influencers who may be, you know, MVPs who are freelance consultants working on big client accounts, who are recommending products and looking practically to solve problems. They don't have a budget, but they can bring you in and really, you know, just trying to figure out across those, those stakeholders who is going to be the most influential.

Gordon Derk (18:26.049)
Yeah.

Gordon Derk (18:33.132)
Yeah. And that makes a lot of sense to me. We've had some success with SEs, where they put us in their demo kit and they, they talk about us on a regular basis. And yeah, I mean, you're right. The influencing of, of marketing doesn't need to be the AE themselves, right?

James Gasteen (18:50.37)
Gordon, thank you very much for being on the show. If anyone wants to find out more about Elton, then check out accountabilitycorp.com or check out Elton on the app exchange.