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Hi, I'm one of the authors of the post. As an engineer, I've always wondered what Salesforce was. It seemed like a clunky, expensive piece of legacy software th

by dvdhsu 7y ago

Hi, I'm one of the authors of the post. As an engineer, I've always wondered what Salesforce was. It seemed like a clunky, expensive piece of legacy software that the "business people" always used. Since starting a SaaS company myself (Retool; https://tryretool.com https://tryretool.com), I now understand a lot more, hah. Salesforce, basically, is the source of truth for your customer, for the business-side of things (sales, marketing, operations, etc.). So the stuff we would typically store in our databases (company name, users, how much they pay us, etc.) is stored inside of Salesforce. And Salesforce gives you a bunch of views that a typical company would need — views to update the close date of a contract, the value of a contract, to take notes on a call, etc. The cool thing about Salesforce is how customizable it is — you can change the database models (e.g. "add a column to the `Leads` table"), as well as change the front-ends themselves (e.g. "I want to display this data in this view"). I've previously used a lot of SaaS (e.g. Slack, Intercom, etc.) and it's always frustrating because I can't customize the views (e.g. in Slack, maybe I want to add a button to mute + clear all the notifications for this channel). Salesforce lets you customize all that, which, frankly, is really cool. To some extent, Salesforce is like a new way of programming. Instead of writing code, you let non-technical people change models and UIs (and to some extent, controllers). Happy to answer any questions! If you all think the essay could be improved in any way, LMK too :) (Edit: added blurb about SFDC being a new way of programming, in response to a comment downstream.)

yomansat 7y ago
Retool is a great idea! Really love the concept and well done for spotting the common repetitive part of generating internal tools!
jiveturkey 7y ago
You didn't stress the most important part well enough: > But when you bolt on other apps and 3rd-party APIs, it gets close to programming without code: a new way to build software. SFDC is worth $100B not because it's a CRM. It's worth that much because it's a CRM platform. The "what it does" is not nearly as important as the ecosystem/platform aspect of it. "What it does" has no moat. Platforms have a moat. That's the value of SFDC in a nutshell. You could help highlight this by drawing attention to it earlier, and also by boldfacing the sentence just before my quote where you say "platform".
reallydontask 7y ago
Just skimmed your article but you showed a screenshot of Dynamics 365 as a CRM system and then went on to talk about Salesforce as much more than just CRM. Pretty much anything that Salesforce does, Dynamics 365 does too, so perhaps not the best screenshot of a bread and butter CRM system.
- pathartl 7y ago
  Yes, Dynamics has definitely grown from just CRM capabilities since Microsoft bought the product all those years ago.
  - basch 7y ago
    Salesforce is more akin to Microsoft, and they each have a CRM product. Not all Salesforce products map to Dynamics, some map closer to Visual Studio, Linkedin, Azure, Office 365, PowerBI, PowerApps etc.
- cols 7y ago
  I've gotta push back politely here. If you are comparing marketing matrices between D365 and SFDC, then yes, on the surface D365 does "pretty much anything that Salesforce does". But you are missing one big factor: D365 costs half as much and there is a big fat reason for that. The D365 platform is very immature and feels like an afterthought at best. I had the displeasure of running a D365 setup in a small government agency that took about a year to get off the ground. It was a living nightmare and I would never recommend D365 under any circumstance because of that experience. I'm tempted to say you would be better off using a free or homegrown CRM than choosing Dynamics. A few lowlights (Disclosure: we were in the government cloud which is notoriously far behind the commercial cloud): * Had to hire a PFE to set up the Exchange integration. This should be turnkey if you are in the same company's stack, IMO. Instead it took thousands of dollars and days of work by the PFE, our centralized Exchange admins, and myself. * Little things like hiding the freaking nav bar cards are literally disallowed in Dynamics. * The Dynamics 365 App for Outlook is a dumpster fire that didn't work at least half the time. Search queries returning no results, no useful error messages, and an overall appalling UX. It single-handedly killed adoption. * I spent many hours trying to figure out how to send timed emails. That's because you have to use the advanced logic tools which are a nightmare. I was able to spin up the same timed email in SFDC in a matter of minutes. I truly wish this was an exaggeration but it's not. * D365 documentation is utter garbage when compared to the SFDC Trailhead. The only option for getting off the ground for our technical staff was to pay for training through one of MS's sketchy vendors. It was overpriced (about $3k) and not at all great. * The only way to programmatically interface with D365 APIs is through using the ancient SOAP API or their REST endpoint with OData syntax only. * Oh BTW, if you were hoping for a modern development workflow, think again. You are going to be stuck manually uploading files into Dynamics for things like editing the internal interfaces of Dynamics. Oh and you have to register every single function against every single trigger, manually through a GUI. * Their customer facing website options are a joke. I can create a fully fledged web app with complete control over the HTML/CSS/JS using the SFDC community, this is definitely not the case with Dynamics. You are limited to the point of only being able to choose layout templates with Dynamics. The last time I checked, you couldn't create your own. * The development workflow with Dynamics is a joke. With SFDC I get a passable command line tool, multiple VS Code extensions, an easy deployment path, local development with Lightning Web Components, and many other developer tools. Good luck finding any of that with Dynamics. The above probably could have been shortened to say the following: SFDC is dedicated to CRM while Dynamics is another in a long line of MS products and it feels like it. I know there are problems with the SF platform, I feel them daily, but I don't think comparing the two is fair to D365.
josteink 7y ago
So... you’ve just discovered what every CRM on the planet does and have done for the last 3 decades. As someone working with CRM software (although not Salesforce), I’ll just say you’re welcome.
- dang 7y ago
  If you continue to break the site guidelines, we're going to have to ban you. We've had to ask you this many times already. I don't want to ban you, so would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and using the site as intended?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
negamax 7y ago
Their motto from the beginning has been "No Software!". So you are spot on about new way of programming part. Business idea is to have less in house software people for business goals. Lots of $$ (all $$)
kyllo 7y ago
How would you compare/contrast Retool with Microsoft PowerApps? https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/ https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/ (Microsoft employee here, but I don't actively use or work on the PowerApps product myself)
chenster 7y ago
Isn't Retool in the same boat as the Salesforce?
flukus 7y ago
> To some extent, Salesforce is like a new way of programming. Instead of writing code, you let non-technical people change models and UIs (and to some extent, controllers). That's the theory, in practice companies end up paying through the nose for an army of salesforce consultants, same as with every other "zero code" platform.
- equalunique 7y ago
  cough SharePoint cough
brianpgordon 7y ago
> It seemed like a clunky, expensive piece of legacy software that the "business people" always used. You weren't wrong!
- triplee 7y ago
  Yeah, that's a "Why not both?" situation right there. It does do important stuff for the business folks, and made it way easier for them in a really cool (at the time) way. They've gotten bigger via tons of acquisitions and of course when you're an early adopter to an area, it also makes it harder to move when the next new thing comes up. So yeah, it's clunky and legacy, parts of it slowly getting better, but also not going away quickly either because those who invested in it invested too much to pivot this soon. See also things like Hadoop or anything from IBM or Oracle.
wruza 7y ago
When I scroll your site on mobile, it keeps jumping because the height of “Build an app ...” block at the top changes every few seconds (Safari, iPhone SE).

by dvdhsu 7y ago

yomansat 7y ago

Retool is a great idea! Really love the concept and well done for spotting the common repetitive part of generating internal tools!

jiveturkey 7y ago

You didn't stress the most important part well enough: > But when you bolt on other apps and 3rd-party APIs, it gets close to programming without code: a new way to build software. SFDC is worth $100B not because it's a CRM. It's worth that much because it's a CRM platform. The "what it does" is not nearly as important as the ecosystem/platform aspect of it. "What it does" has no moat. Platforms have a moat. That's the value of SFDC in a nutshell. You could help highlight this by drawing attention to it earlier, and also by boldfacing the sentence just before my quote where you say "platform".

reallydontask 7y ago

Just skimmed your article but you showed a screenshot of Dynamics 365 as a CRM system and then went on to talk about Salesforce as much more than just CRM. Pretty much anything that Salesforce does, Dynamics 365 does too, so perhaps not the best screenshot of a bread and butter CRM system.

pathartl 7y ago
Yes, Dynamics has definitely grown from just CRM capabilities since Microsoft bought the product all those years ago.
- basch 7y ago
  Salesforce is more akin to Microsoft, and they each have a CRM product. Not all Salesforce products map to Dynamics, some map closer to Visual Studio, Linkedin, Azure, Office 365, PowerBI, PowerApps etc.
cols 7y ago
I've gotta push back politely here. If you are comparing marketing matrices between D365 and SFDC, then yes, on the surface D365 does "pretty much anything that Salesforce does". But you are missing one big factor: D365 costs half as much and there is a big fat reason for that. The D365 platform is very immature and feels like an afterthought at best. I had the displeasure of running a D365 setup in a small government agency that took about a year to get off the ground. It was a living nightmare and I would never recommend D365 under any circumstance because of that experience. I'm tempted to say you would be better off using a free or homegrown CRM than choosing Dynamics. A few lowlights (Disclosure: we were in the government cloud which is notoriously far behind the commercial cloud): * Had to hire a PFE to set up the Exchange integration. This should be turnkey if you are in the same company's stack, IMO. Instead it took thousands of dollars and days of work by the PFE, our centralized Exchange admins, and myself. * Little things like hiding the freaking nav bar cards are literally disallowed in Dynamics. * The Dynamics 365 App for Outlook is a dumpster fire that didn't work at least half the time. Search queries returning no results, no useful error messages, and an overall appalling UX. It single-handedly killed adoption. * I spent many hours trying to figure out how to send timed emails. That's because you have to use the advanced logic tools which are a nightmare. I was able to spin up the same timed email in SFDC in a matter of minutes. I truly wish this was an exaggeration but it's not. * D365 documentation is utter garbage when compared to the SFDC Trailhead. The only option for getting off the ground for our technical staff was to pay for training through one of MS's sketchy vendors. It was overpriced (about $3k) and not at all great. * The only way to programmatically interface with D365 APIs is through using the ancient SOAP API or their REST endpoint with OData syntax only. * Oh BTW, if you were hoping for a modern development workflow, think again. You are going to be stuck manually uploading files into Dynamics for things like editing the internal interfaces of Dynamics. Oh and you have to register every single function against every single trigger, manually through a GUI. * Their customer facing website options are a joke. I can create a fully fledged web app with complete control over the HTML/CSS/JS using the SFDC community, this is definitely not the case with Dynamics. You are limited to the point of only being able to choose layout templates with Dynamics. The last time I checked, you couldn't create your own. * The development workflow with Dynamics is a joke. With SFDC I get a passable command line tool, multiple VS Code extensions, an easy deployment path, local development with Lightning Web Components, and many other developer tools. Good luck finding any of that with Dynamics. The above probably could have been shortened to say the following: SFDC is dedicated to CRM while Dynamics is another in a long line of MS products and it feels like it. I know there are problems with the SF platform, I feel them daily, but I don't think comparing the two is fair to D365.

josteink 7y ago

So... you’ve just discovered what every CRM on the planet does and have done for the last 3 decades. As someone working with CRM software (although not Salesforce), I’ll just say you’re welcome.

dang 7y ago
If you continue to break the site guidelines, we're going to have to ban you. We've had to ask you this many times already. I don't want to ban you, so would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and using the site as intended?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

negamax 7y ago

Their motto from the beginning has been "No Software!". So you are spot on about new way of programming part. Business idea is to have less in house software people for business goals. Lots of $$ (all $$)

kyllo 7y ago

How would you compare/contrast Retool with Microsoft PowerApps? https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/ https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/ (Microsoft employee here, but I don't actively use or work on the PowerApps product myself)

chenster 7y ago

Isn't Retool in the same boat as the Salesforce?

flukus 7y ago

> To some extent, Salesforce is like a new way of programming. Instead of writing code, you let non-technical people change models and UIs (and to some extent, controllers). That's the theory, in practice companies end up paying through the nose for an army of salesforce consultants, same as with every other "zero code" platform.

equalunique 7y ago
cough SharePoint cough

brianpgordon 7y ago

> It seemed like a clunky, expensive piece of legacy software that the "business people" always used. You weren't wrong!

triplee 7y ago
Yeah, that's a "Why not both?" situation right there. It does do important stuff for the business folks, and made it way easier for them in a really cool (at the time) way. They've gotten bigger via tons of acquisitions and of course when you're an early adopter to an area, it also makes it harder to move when the next new thing comes up. So yeah, it's clunky and legacy, parts of it slowly getting better, but also not going away quickly either because those who invested in it invested too much to pivot this soon. See also things like Hadoop or anything from IBM or Oracle.

wruza 7y ago

When I scroll your site on mobile, it keeps jumping because the height of “Build an app ...” block at the top changes every few seconds (Safari, iPhone SE).