How to start a Salesforce ISV company (Trails podcast episode #2 with Evgenii Pavlov)

Episode Two: ​​Evgenii Pavlov, founder of flair.hr

This podcast episode is all about starting a Salesforce ISV company. Evgenii Pavlov, who founded a successful Salesforce ISV organization, details how a few small acts made a big difference within the HR and Salesforce space.

Introduce yourself, and tell us a little bit about your company - flair.hr?

I’m based in Munich, and flair.hr is a native package for Salesforce. We offer HR and recruiting features in a complete, all-in-one solution. From candidates to employees, the whole employee journey is available on the AppExchange.

How did you get started with Salesforce?

Before starting flair.hr, I didn't know much about Salesforce. I knew that it is a great CRM and quite popular, but I didn't know that it provides many platform features or that you can build many apps.

Friends who were doing Salesforce consultancy told me that it is possible to build tools on top of Salesforce. And this is when I was interested in how this works.

During the first couple of months of starting flair.hr, I learned even more about Salesforce.

So, you already had an idea for flair.when you learned about Salesforce, you picked it as the platform to build flair.hr on?

Yeah, we had an idea to build an HR and recruiting solution, and Salesforce was one of the options. After talking to people and examining the advantages, we decided to go with Salesforce.

What is your experience building a product on the Salesforce platform

flair.hr is not a typical case for Salesforce because our team comes from a web development background. So, we all had experience building sales products. Usually, Salesforce apps are for consultancies and Salesforce developers.

It’s quite similar to building a mobile app, as you need to package them. However, everything is streamlined regarding our partnership with Salesforce, and all the information is available.

Also, from the technical side, you have Trailblazers who use Trailhead to learn more about building on Salesforce.  

In 2019, it took two to three months to create a product. This was when we decided to create a recruiting app. We then created our first package for the AppExchange.

Apps on the AppExchange have to be high quality and accurate. Our first version was available at the beginning of July 2019. At the same time, we submitted our business plans and other documents, which one of our managers assisted with.

In August of 2019, we submitted our package for Salesforce’s security review – it took six to eight weeks for us to get the confirmation from Salesforce that we passed.

The process was pretty straightforward, and we encountered very few issues. But what helped us a lot is that we didn't create a huge package initially (it was a small one), and we did the work to ensure our package would be of high quality in Salesforce's eyes.

One of the benefits and pros of being an ISV partner is that you are listed on the Salesforce AppExchange. How has this affected your go-to-market and leads?

It is different for other companies building PDF generation or accounting systems. But it has been a huge benefit for us for flair.hr.

You are on a popular platform, and if someone is looking for a Salesforce org, they can already find us. The AppExchange also provides additional features to promote your app, such as sponsoring your listing, doing additional search results, and creating advertisements.

You can also use the Salesforce AppExchange Marketing Programme (AMP). Salesforce can help people who sell the platform and want to open the door to ISV solutions, like flair.hr.

As flair.hr is a packaged solution, it is not just about sales and service. It caters to insurance, HR, and financial services. This is more attractive to end customers when you have bundled features.

In fact, Sales Cloud is now in second place in terms of popularity in the U.S. market. What is more popular is Service Cloud. So, you already see that there is a shift for more packaged solutions.

In your experience, running flair.hr, what are some lessons you would like to share?

You have to look at your app from technical and GTM perspectives. On Salesforce, you should be ‘friends’ with them. So, you need to attend Salesforce events to help you build your app and be aware of all the new features Salesforce has.

Building an app on Salesforce can present many technical challenges. If you want to build an app, you sometimes need to think twice before you release it, as it isn't easy to duplicate some metadata inside your package.

Our process is to review things before we release them. We try to develop a better approach each time.

Building “stuff that works” on Salesforce is extremely fast, but neglecting a diligent ALM can make it extremely difficult to build a sustainable product that scales with the customer base and their growing data (such as executing governor limits).

Harald Mayer

Co-Founder of Hutte
Hutte

Source: Hutte

What’s next for flair.hr in terms of product development, company growth, and go-to-market?

We have a huge backlog, and we are moving to have more enterprise features. This will be great news for companies with more than 1K employees. They can better manage their employees, conduct forecasting, and execute financial planning.

This will likely happen towards the end of this year or next year.

We are also introducing collaboration features for other companies, like video sharing, especially for asynchronous and hybrid teams.

Being on Salesforce does help, as you can connect your different solutions and build different reports.

Are you motivated to start and grow your Salesforce ISV company?

Thank you for tuning into this episode of Hutte’s Trails Podcast, where we explored:

• How to start a Salesforce ISV
• The benefits of having exposure from the AppExchange
• What lessons should you be mindful of before embarking on becoming an ISV?