Hi I'm Terence from Adviceforce, LLC

Introductions
#1

Hello All! I’m Terence and I am bootstrapping my company Adviceforce, LLC. The company currently focuses on building apps on the Salesforce.com platform. Our first app Enhanced Attachment was published on Salesforce’s AppExchange recently. I’ve been developing on the platform for over 4 years now in various companies and have held roles like salesforce administator, developer, and technical architect. I developed the app on my own time (many of which while listening to the podcast :slight_smile:)

I’m looking forward exchanging thoughts and advice with my fellow bootstrappers and would be interested in knowing if anyone here is in the process or thinking about developing an app on the Salesforce platform as well. Would be interested in discussing your experiences.

2 Likes
#2

Interesting - how do you find the Saleforce platform and AppExchange from your view. Do they make it easy to be a successful business doing 3rd party apps?

I would imagine similar opportunities / challenges to SharePoint - but Microsoft have really cocked up the story for 3rd party apps over the last 3 years or so and its not looking like they have started to up their game yet.

#3

From a development perspective it is quite easy to set up partner development environments where you can start building apps on their platform. These are free of charge.

Their partner community website has extensive documentation and groups where you can ask fellow partners or Salesforce employees questions about the process of publishing an app. I’m a considered a AppExchange checkout partner (payments for the app go through SF and Stripe) which means most items self service with limited interactions with an account rep. The AppExhange itself provides insight into who has viewed a demo video or who has installed your app for a trial from the listing page so it has been helpful to have lead information and start reaching out to people who has expressed interest in the app.