Trailblazing Entrepreneurs e-book

Trailblazing Entrepreneurs How they found success 13 inspiring stories from founders who built their businesses on the Salesforce Platform.

Discover the power of building on the Salesforce Platform. Every great founder needs a great technology In these pages, 13 founders share their stories of platform to bring their innovative idea to life building businesses on the Salesforce Platform. and transform it into a successful business. The Discover where each entrepreneur’s journey foundation an application is built on and began and the challenges they faced on the path the values of the ecosystem it is embedded in, to success. define its capability to serve customers across the globe. Scale your business with the world’s #1 trusted platform as an AppExchange ISV Partner. AppExchange’s community of experts, admins, and partners enables entrepreneurs to connect with industry leaders and reach Salesforce’s global customer base.

Where did your What major challenges did What piece of advice would entrepreneurial journey with you overcome along the way? you give to aspiring founders? Salesforce begin? In the early days of Docomotion, we It was necessary to build a strong brand It cannot be done alone. You must tried to increase our footprint in Israel they could trust. One of the advantages surround yourself with good people to Oren Leshem but realized there were already more of the Salesforce Platform is that share the burden with you. It’s better if innovative SaaS solutions out there. customers are already comfortable with they are entrepreneurs and co-founders, Co-Founder & CEO, Docomotion the cloud-based CRM. Consequently, and if not, then you need a good, Docomotion is a document generation platform for Salesforce Something disruptive had to be done to this substantially reduced the time and determined, and loyal team. users that enables them to design and generate all types of cut through the noise and expand globally. investment in market education about transactional and operational business documents. Research led us to Salesforce which had document generation in the cloud. Salesforce puts founders in touch built an ecosystem I believed in and that with partners who have already built supported ISVs and their partners. on the Platform. Through the Partner Community, you can ask questions, take I pitched the idea to develop a online courses, and train employees. It document generation app based on has created a state-of-the-art platform the Salesforce infrastructure, and this that shortens the founders’ journey was then developed on Salesforce to success. If I had to go back to my AppExchange. From there, we found previous venture, I would also develop our first customer and accelerated our it with Salesforce. I found Salesforce to be a true partner speed of development. The real crunch moment was when our prototype was on the road to fulfilling my vision. It is a enthusiastically received by Salesforce partner-oriented organization as well customers. as a business accelerator.

Where did your What major challenges did What piece of advice would entrepreneurial journey with you overcome along the way? you give to aspiring founders? Salesforce begin? When I first launched Lillii RNB back in In the first couple of years of Lillii RNB Take time to plan what you’re going 2013 it was a consultancy firm. However, we had so many projects come in and to do. If you have an idea of what the Barbara Jones-Brown from working with retailers every day, we saw great revenue. Then in year three first three years will look like and a identified the pain points of managing everything seemed to fall apart; we rough strategy, that will put you in a Founder & CEO, Freeing Returns (Lillii RNB) returns and fraud for these companies faced hurdles that I stumbled through strong position. Freeing Returns is a SaaS platform that helps retailers uncover and started creating an enterprise SaaS to find my way. This was when I really the fraudsters and organized crime rings hiding in their data, product based on the need that we saw. realized how much work it takes to run Custom discovery is also important; leveraging the power of machine learning, graph-link analysis, That’s how our product Freeing Returns a business. It was a wake-up call, but I you want to make sure you have people and entity resolution. was built. learned so much in that third year. waiting when you open your doors. One of our clients was migrating When we moved onto Salesforce, we onto Salesforce and suggested we experienced the combined power of the leverage the platform. I saw the huge partnership and seamless integration of opportunity for Lillii RNB to be featured our application. Salesforce’s Commerce on the AppExchange marketplace. Cloud and core management system Things snowballed from there. We were enabled us to do things that we weren’t fast-tracked with support from the able to do before. Now we have built this It’s been amazing for us to realize the AppExchange team which really helped great application that we believe will not to take the business to a new level. It only generate more business but also full extent of what we could achieve was exciting to see how well Salesforce’s bring a whole new vertical of people into within this partnership. It’s been an vision aligned with our own; it all just the Salesforce ecosystem. fell into place, and we’ve had a great exciting, wild ride. relationship since then.

Where did your What major challenges did What piece of advice would entrepreneurial journey with you overcome along the way? you give to aspiring founders? Salesforce begin? The idea for Novidea developed from We knew that we wanted to reach a Choose the right team and partners. working with leading insurance entities global market. To become a global During the entrepreneurial journey there Roi Agababa in Israel and abroad. I was exposed to platform and work with large entities, you are many moments when you are alone, their technological spectrum and realized need strong, scalable infrastructure and and if you have partners who can work CEO & Founder, Novidea that advanced tools needed developing Salesforce provides this. with you through those times it makes Novidea is an innovative, data-driven insurance to perform tasks more accurately. The all the difference — success is teamwork. software solution that provides actionable insights market was ripe for significant disruption Salesforce has a global presence, so it That’s what brought me to working with for distributors. through technological innovation. can provide security and regulations for Salesforce. We believe we made the right all the countries in which it operates. If choice and that the collaboration worked I decided to build the venture on the we have customers in Asia Pacific, there for both parties. Salesforce Platform as it allowed us to is a local data center to service these shorten the duration of development and customers. If we need compliance that focus on business logic. The Platform’s meets the regulation of a country in infrastructure is based on the best Western Europe, the Platform provides it. industry practices, enabling us to focus Now, Novidea has offices in the US and on the more complex algorithmics in the the UK, a development center in Israel, development world. and customers in 17 countries. Partnering with Salesforce reassures Plus, the Platform is future-proof. clients; their technology is highly Salesforce is constantly upgrading its trusted. infrastructure, so innovation in areas such as security, performance, data centers, certifications, and adaptation to compliance in different countries are provided to you out of the box.

Where did your What major challenges did What piece of advice would entrepreneurial journey with you overcome along the way? you give to aspiring founders? Salesforce begin? Initially, we thought our product best The biggest challenge was deciding Take time to think about your Salesforce serviced the entertainment industry, but where to start. The team helped point business plan and how you can execute, Farah Allen new customers in the retail space found that us in the right direction for our business. add resources, and invest. their best use cases were in the e-commerce They introduced us to their technical CEO, The Labz experiences. We needed a significant team to help connect our technology The Labz is a no-code web platform designed to help businesses partnership to break into retail while also with AppExchange. And they also create interactive, immersive audience experiences. growing across other markets. connected us with the right account executive to determine how to build our My AppExchange journey began with a app for the best possible ROI outcome. glowing recommendation from another Overall, it was the speed at which entrepreneur. She told me about her they guided us that contributed to a success with the program and that the Labz successful business strategy. e-commerce digital experience solution would be perfect for Salesforce customers. I also discovered that 70% of our current and potential customers used Salesforce. Once connected, the team did a great job filling me The AppExchange team is your in on how the partnership works and technical ultimate resource. From connecting you to use cases similar to my business. I was very impressed with the processes in place for account executives to technical resources, ensuring that our partnership had the best it is up to you to ask for what you chance for success. need to move your visibility forward.

Where did your What major challenges did What piece of advice would entrepreneurial journey with you overcome along the way? you give to aspiring founders? Salesforce begin? I started a company called Propertybase It can be a struggle to carve out a place Just do it. There are always excuses for in 2008 and grew the business over the for yourself in the market with so many not taking the leap and thinking you’re Max Michael-Mayer course of 12 years on the Salesforce competing solutions. The Salesforce not ready yet. Even if it’s not perfect, just Platform. We saw tremendous growth, partner ecosystem provides access go out there and do something, then the CEO & Founder, ISVapp with over 450,000 monthly active users, to a network of entrepreneurs that is feedback will come — both positive and ISVapp is a plug and play solution for the AppExchange but during these years, I had no insight constantly growing. Being part of a negative — and you can improve. The AppAnalytics API that provides ISV and OEM partners with into the usage analytics as there was no community of like-minded individuals most important thing is to be proactive product insights to help reduce churn, increase renewals, API available. helps us cultivate innovation and is an and act quickly before someone else gets identify upsell potential, and close more deals. invaluable source of support. to your idea first. Having learned the hard way, two years ago we decided to build a plug and play app for the AppExchange AppAnalytics API. It provides Salesforce ISV partners with deep product insights and helps them get the full potential out of their applications, without having to spend extensive time building themselves. We chose to build on Salesforce because We then realized this could be a great all the generic tech and functionality was potential business opportunity and this built into the Platform and that saved us a led to the launch of ISVapp. Since then, we have seen overwhelming demand lot of time and money. from partners who haven’t had anything like this before.

Where did your What major challenges did What piece of advice would entrepreneurial journey with you overcome along the way? you give to aspiring founders? Salesforce begin? I was driving a leased car and started to Timing was the biggest challenge of all. Try to find a network of other wonder why there wasn’t an app to refer LinkedCar launched in January 2020, entrepreneurs to turn to for advice—an Mario Schraepen to whenever, and wherever, you switch three months before the pandemic. We accelerator, for example, can be a great cars, that focuses on both the driver and had just signed two big customers and source of support. Listen to people who CEO & Founder, LinkedCar the vehicle, and combines the relevant were riding a wave of enthusiasm. But have started their own businesses and LinkedCar is a customer-first mobility platform for the automotive information in one centralized place. in March, everything collapsed. No cars don’t be afraid of asking for advice. This industry, working to help companies shift to a loyalty-driven were being sold or leased during this is my third startup and I’m still asking mindset with a focus on interactivity and customer experience. We started building the app, but time and the industry had to prioritize for advice. after speaking to lease and insurance survival over innovation. companies, we discovered that if we could provide real-time vehicle For this reason, future-proofing the information such as the number of miles business is very important to us. The driven and whether the driver drove Salesforce Platform is highly flexible safely, it could transform their entire and this means there are different ways business models. So, we expanded. you can go about implementing new features. Our approach is not to wait until I chose to build on the Salesforce you hit a conflict to make a change but to The Salesforce ecosystem helps Platform because LinkedCar’s ultimate keep implementing updates that ensure focus is on functionality for our quality and help create a product that is implement LinkedCar within international customers. Salesforce enables this by useful to our customers for a long time. markets, while we continue making the covering all of the basics like security, multilingual, multi-currency, and business product the best it can be. processes and flows.

Where did your What major challenges did What piece of advice would entrepreneurial journey with you overcome along the way? you give to aspiring founders? Salesforce begin? I was working on a project in the life For Dot Compliance, having a In the end, it’s all about people; you need sciences industry and found that the ready-made set of building blocks to to know who to work with. Persevere, be Doron Sitbon traditional technology we were using target transactions, customers, and creative, and think globally. to execute it took up a huge amount of relationships, allowed us to reach an CEO & Founder, Dot Compliance time, resources, and cost millions advanced and fast solution. We also An inner desire is required to solve a Dot Compliance is a quality management software platform of dollars. identified processes from the world problem, create something new and for the life sciences industry, including off-the-shelf eQMS and of CRM that parallel how companies leave a mark, as well as self-belief and compliance modules. The extensive regulation in these industries from the world of life sciences deal a certain audacity that allows you to act means pharmaceutical and medical with different aspects of quality independently and swim against the tide. device companies are very process-driven. and regulation. I wanted to turn this mass of information into an off-the-shelf product that provided The Salesforce Platform and Health a complete response to all regulatory Cloud provide a complete solution for requirements, reducing resistance to digital healthcare organizations, including transformation. So, Dot Compliance was advanced analytical capabilities. I can born. use those building blocks to create creative solutions. The Salesforce Platform enables The Salesforce Platform catered to many of our needs. So many customer needs us to develop products, manage are universal, and the inbuilt functionality changes, and quickly release Salesforce provides saved us from building from scratch. Our customers solutions to the market. understand that it is a premium platform with advanced scalability capabilities.

Where did your What major challenges did What piece of advice would entrepreneurial journey with you overcome along the way? you give to aspiring founders? Salesforce begin? In 2018, I was working with a Salesforce In 2020, Cezium was still in its early Focus on creating great products for consulting partner specializing in Salesforce stages. However, we managed to keep customers. For Cezium, that means Christelle Leste-Miraumont Marketing Cloud when two co-founders growing through the storm. The majority concentrating on creating the best UX, and I decided to launch our own company. of our clients were retailers and, for UI, and technology capabilities possible. Founder & COO, Cezium At first, we thought of ourselves as a hybrid many months, were forced to shut down If you have a great product, no matter Cezium is a provider of SaaS solutions for Salesforce Marketing company—integrators but also software entirely. However, we decided to view this what the world throws at you, you have Cloud using next-gen gamified and AI-powered features to vendors. The idea came from clients asking as an opportunity. While our clients were something valuable in your hands. That’s automate customer journey design & deployment. us for capabilities not yet available on the unable to work, we asked if we could something you can control. Marketing Cloud Platform and realizing we build them new, innovative capabilities could add these features for users. with their support. Developing these solutions for our customers allowed us to Having to constantly innovate and create weather the storm and got us to where new solutions set Cezium off to a strong start. we are today. Then, when the pandemic hit, we began building new, innovative capabilities for our customers. From their feedback and ideas, we saw an opportunity to scale. If you have a great product, After speaking to successful ISV founders no matter what the world throws in the Salesforce ecosystem, we decided to at you, you have something productize the company and build industry- specific solutions on Marketing Cloud. In valuable in your hands. mid-2021, we became an ISV and PDO partner, and today we’re able to leverage our expertise on an even larger scale.

Where did your What major challenges did What piece of advice would entrepreneurial journey with you overcome along the way? you give to aspiring founders? Salesforce begin? I was working in the automotive supply Immediately, Salesforce AppExchange You have to deliver on your promises, industry and was tasked with creating helped us increase the visibility of without this you lose trust and cannot Andreas Geiger a global sales platform. After launching Xotigo to potential customers and drive build success. Stay close to your this successfully and speaking to other awareness and engagement. Salesforce customers and listen to them in order to CEO & Founder, Xotigo global suppliers, I saw the need to come also provides a seasonal release of 300 ensure you truly understand their needs. Xotigo is a sales management solution helping automotive industry up with a standardized solution specific new features, three times a year, and this professionals drive process excellence and digital transformation. to the automotive supply industry. This regular cadence of innovation provides meant starting from scratch. the basis for our highly skilled team to maximize the platform capability and to The solution I’d created previously was deliver the best service to our customers. built on Salesforce, and I’d been very impressed with what we’d been able to The exposure you get to internal sales achieve. The Platform is easy to use and teams is equally powerful. Beyond the provides a powerful foundation to build ongoing support they provide to help a robust software service on to drive user drive acquisitions, there are workshops adoption and customer success. and collaboration between our teams to help Xotigo stay at the forefront of There is always someone to turn to for Salesforce also offers a huge ecosystem customer needs. and the success of the company is built support. You are able to tailor your on shared trust, which is reassuring as package in a way that is effective for you enter into the partnership. I saw firsthand how effective it is to bring your solution and unique journey. together a vision, great people, the right knowledge, and a powerful platform, simultaneously.

Where did your What major challenges did What piece of advice would entrepreneurial journey with you overcome along the way? you give to aspiring founders? Salesforce begin? The homecare and healthcare market Salesforce immediately connects Be brave. Investing money during the is very niche, as well as highly-regulated partners with a developing partner to early stages of building your business can Oliver Arambatzis & Thomas Brauchle and paper-driven. We knew that to help help you develop your solution. Part feel like a risk, but the long-term pay-off companies take therapies to patients of this process involved helping us can be huge. It is important to have a Co-Founders, Yakoon in their homes, and improve the lives to integrate new solutions, such as a strategy in place and to hold onto your Yakoon provides user-friendly and flexible software solutions for of these patients, we needed to create document signing application, which self-belief in order to achieve your vision. optimizing special home care processes. something different. we found via Salesforce AppExchange. We knew Salesforce was already being The seamless integration of these used by lots of the customers we wanted out-of-the-box applications saved us to target internationally, so it made sense a vast amount of time and that was a for us to use the Platform to develop our huge source of support. The Salesforce own solution. Plus, when you build on partner applications we rely on are a big the Salesforce Platform all the technology contributor to the success of Yakoon and is already in place, which allowed us when we are successful, our partners to invest in processes that best serve succeed too. It is a win-win. customers and ensure an improved It is easy to test new applications to experience for patients. ensure they’re the right fit for what your business needs, which helps us drive experimentation and innovation.

Where did your What major challenges did What piece of advice would entrepreneurial journey with you overcome along the way? you give to aspiring founders? Salesforce begin? My partner, Guy Gadnir, and I were When building enterprise software, map passionate about building a solution for Identifying the initial set of functionalities your customer technology environment Tamar Barzuza revenue optimization through customer to develop was challenging. Our top to identify the best place for your value realization. Early on, we identified priorities were delivering significant solution to operate in. This is a new Co-founder & CTO, Journeyz Salesforce as the operating system for value to our customers with minimal age in system architecture, where the Journeyz is a revenue optimization platform for B2B revenue customer management and knew that implementation time. environment consists of different layers teams, designed to maximize recurring revenue, upsell, and our product should be natively-built. It of applications that integrate with one cross-sell opportunities with existing customers. lets us build our product optimally and The impact of building our solution on another natively or through APIs. To best utilize the Salesforce Platform and Salesforce was two-fold. First, the unique provide users with the best experience, ecosystem. power of the Salesforce Platform made it is key to identify how to architect your the development process faster and our solution into their environment. Also, our design partners preferred product capability set richer. Second, getting the insights Journeyz provides our customers’ willingness to deploy a where users already spend most of their product embedded in Salesforce was day. significantly higher. The full power of the Salesforce Platform definitely speeds up the launch process; it allowed us to come out faster with more value.

Where did your What major challenges did What piece of advice would entrepreneurial journey with you overcome along the way? you give to aspiring founders? Salesforce begin? We wanted to improve the advisor-client We had our work cut out for us trying to Look for people and partners who are journey by removing the need to move figure out how to take our success as a excited about the problems you’re Randy Cass between multiple systems and leverage stand-alone product and replicate it as trying to solve--ones that demonstrate existing data within a CRM. When it came an embedded solution in the Salesforce a real commitment to making progress. CEO, Nest Wealth to picking the ecosystem we wanted to ecosystem. The best choice we made, Starting and scaling a business is tough, Nest Wealth is a SaaS-based digital wealth management platform build on and multiply the effectiveness, in the beginning, was not to fly solo. We even at the best of times, so don’t be offering both direct-to-investor solutions and advanced business- partnering with Salesforce was the teamed up with a highly-recommended afraid to team up with those who want to-business solutions. obvious choice. PDO firm and were able to run right to see you succeed. Specifically, engage out of the gates. Our industry expertise, with other Salesforce partners on the combined with our PDO’s expertise in Partner Community to learn what works Salesforce’s products and processes and what doesn’t. made for an effective combination. Ask other Salesforce ISVs for answers to the questions you will inevitably have, and make it part of your job to use every possible resource available.

Where did your What major challenges did What piece of advice would entrepreneurial journey with you overcome along the way? you give to aspiring founders? Salesforce begin? Mike Dannenfeldt and I met in 2005 My partner once told me that when you In the beginning, your product might not when I joined his Technical Architecture start a company, you can, and will, have be perfect, but don’t wait until it is to go Mike Milburn Team at Salesforce. As we both grew our your best and worst day, often on the to market. Customer feedback should careers at Salesforce, we found a mutual same day. Our main challenges have been drive ideas and the direction of your Co-CEO, Pimly passion for customer success. The Pimly time focus and getting the product built. product. If you don’t put your product Pimly integrates the power of product experience management opportunity began in the fall of 2021 and Finding the time and skilled resources out there, you may be solving for things into your Salesforce org, enabling your sales, customer service, started in formality in the Spring of 2022. needed to get a viable product built nobody is asking nor willing to pay for. and other Salesforce users with fully configurable digital catalogs, before you have paying customers is the sell sheets, and additional eCommerce-like product experiences. proverbial chicken/egg problem. Every time a challenge happens, we revert to what we learned at Salesforce and stay as close to the customer as possible. The AppExchange team not only helps us prioritize but removes friction and inefficiency from the system. They are always there to navigate critical product AppExchange anchors our connection questions and give transparent feedback to Salesforce and inspires us to drive that helps us focus. customer success.

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